Bedfellow

by Jeremy C. Shipp

  A commercial for constipation medicine interrupts the YouTube video of the fireplace. Imani doesn’t turn around to look, but she can only assume that a talking piece of shit is the one shouting, “I’m melting. What a world. What a world.”

  Imani feels compelled to pour herself a drink of her own, but she doesn’t.

  “Oh,” she says. “I should get the children. They’re still in the bathroom.” Immediately, she feels like a monster for leaving them there for so long.

  On her way up the stairs, the crackling of the fireplace once again sounds like a murmuring of sharp, urgent consonants. “Ks ksh tss,” the voices say. In the hall, she realizes that she’s still gripping the small aluminum bat. Right as she’s about to toss the toy onto her son’s bedroom floor, she changes her mind. Instead, she places the weapon under her bed, on her side, next to her little porcelain box of worthless treasures. Imani laughs at herself for being such a panicky fool, but she’s still frightened. She’s not frightened of Marvin, of course. She’s afraid of the man in her imagination who still might be out there, squatting in the dark, waiting to push open the living room window so that he can crawl inside.

  Tomas

  Luckily for Tomas, he managed to grab a handful of pens before his mother dragged him into the bathroom and said, in a terrified voice, that everything would be fine. Now, while waiting for his sister to finish her drawing, he organizes his pens into a rainbow of sorts. Auburn, tangerine, chartreuse, citron, emerald, ube, lilac, imperial purple.

  Tomas understands that there are men in the world who wear masks and rob houses, but what Tomas doesn’t understand is why one of these men would break into a home like theirs. Why steal from children when you can go after guys like Prince John or Voldemort? The boy can only assume that the thief broke into their house by mistake, never suspecting that he was interrupting a family’s Fun Friday.

  “Okay, done,” his sister says, and hands him the notepad.

  Tomas studies the drawing for a few moments. “What is this guy?”

  “Tyrannosaurus samurai.”

  “His head looks like a duck head.”

  “Well, he’s a tyrannosaurus. See, he’s got short little arms. He can’t swing the sword very well, but he manages to squish your goat.”

  Tomas nods approvingly. While the dinosaur makes quick work of the ninja duck and the surrounding farm animals, the boy ponders his next move. He could of course send out an F-16 Fighting Falcon, but to be honest, he’s tired of drawing machines. These days, he’s more interested in natural-looking killing machines, like crab dragons or moss men who vomit poisonous mushrooms.

  Back on the farm, the T. rex awkwardly sheaths his katana and then bursts through a white picket fence into the open countryside. The boy decides to send forth a half-barn half-vampire hybrid to deal with the creature, but there’s a knock at the door before he can even grab a pen.

  “It’s me,” his mom says, her voice muffled through the door. “Everyone’s safe. Everything’s fine.”

  Kennedy’s already out the door by the time Tomas finishes collecting his makeshift rainbow.

  “The man from the restaurant is here,” his mom says. “You should come down and thank him.”

  Of course, when his mom says that he should do something, what she means is that he will. She stands by the door, watching him with eyes of burnt umber.

  Downstairs, Tomas slips on a wet spot on the floor, but he manages to keep himself upright.

  “Be careful, sweetie,” his mom says.

  “Ah, here’s the man of the hour,” his father says, raising his glass. Tomas isn’t sure what he means by this, but the boy smiles a little nonetheless.

  His mom says, “Tomas wanted to thank you for what you did.”

  The stranger crouches in the corner, studying their bookshelf of Blu-rays. Tomas doesn’t understand why the man is wearing his dad’s pelican shirt, but a moment later, he realizes that the tiny pelicans on the shirt are actually white blobs.

  “Thank you,” Tomas says.

  “No prob.” The stranger turns around, holding a copy of Return to Oz. “Hey, have you seen this one?”

  “Only a little,” the boy says. The truth is that while he can easily face his own creations, Tomas can’t handle every creature he comes across. He cried when he saw the Wheelers, and his mom said he didn’t have to watch the rest of the movie.

  “How is it compared to Wizard of Oz?” the stranger says.

  “It’s scarier,” the boy says.

  “Hmm.” The man returns the Blu-ray to the shelf and continues his search.

  Tomas stands silent, staring at the back of the man’s shirt, unsure as to whether he’s expected to say more. He glances at his mom, but she’s busy whispering in his dad’s ear. His dad looks half-asleep on the couch, with his glass tucked between his legs.

  While staring at the stranger, Tomas notices a smudge in his vision. He attempts to wipe at his glasses with his T-shirt, but this doesn’t help. Maybe he needs to run his glasses under the faucet.

  “I made you yours,” Kennedy says, appearing beside him with a hot fudge sundae in each hand.

  The boy studies his bowl, to make sure the ice cream to whipped cream ratio is correct. Yes, his whipped cream reigns supreme.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  His sister disappears up the stairs, as if washed away by some invisible river. Sometimes, Tomas wishes he could be more like his sister and leave any room with such ease.

  “Is there any more of that?” the stranger says, motioning at the sundae with a DVD copy of Big Trouble in Little China. The case slips out of his hand and he says, “Agh.”

  Tomas stares into his bowl, as if searching for the answer. “I don’t know,” he says. “You could look in the freezer.”

  “That’s not mint chocolate chip, is it?”

  “No.”

  While the man retrieves the dropped DVD, Tomas sidesteps in the direction of the stairs. His mother doesn’t tell him to stop. His father’s eyes are closed, his fingers interlaced over his belly. The man doesn’t ask any more questions about the ice cream, so Tomas manages to escape upstairs without any problems. A muffled version of David Bowie’s gnome song leaks out of his sister’s closed door. For a moment, Tomas considers joining his sister. She would let him sit on her bed and eat his ice cream. She would show him YouTube videos of a dancing baby or a dog and an elephant who are best friends.

  In the end, Tomas decides on the peace and quiet of his own tidy sanctuary. On Fun Friday, not only can he eat a whipped cream sundae in his Mechagodzilla pajamas, but he can stay up until ten p.m. Unfortunately, a cloud of fatigue is already diffusing throughout his arms and legs. It’s only a matter of minutes before the fog will spread up into his eyes.

  With little time to spare, Tomas wriggles half of his body under his bed so that he can reach his drawing journal. Mrs. Z gave him the journal last year, on the last day of school. She told him the rules of the journal. She also said that if he ever filled up the journal, he could come back to her classroom, and she would give him another. He remembers the tiny cerulean smiley faces painted on her fingernails that day.

  Tomas’s first instinct is to capture a quiet moment in the bathroom, his mom staring at a black blot of spider on the wall, his sister gnawing at the top button of her flannel shirt. At the time, Tomas didn’t feel particularly frightened of the robber in the house. He trusted that his father could throw the man out the front door, if necessary. He didn’t understand why his mom and sister seemed so nervous.

  The boy’s pen lowers slightly but hovers a millimeter above the paper. He finds himself suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of obligation to the man in the restaurant. The man did save his life, didn’t he? Doesn’t he deserve at least one page of Tomas’s memories?

  The boy gazes into the bright, white paper, and he sends his consciousness back through time, into Thomas’s Bar & Grill. He has no particular fondness for the Fun Guy Burger and Crazy Fries he always o
rders; he likes that his mother never fails to say, “Let’s go to your restaurant, Tomas.” He likes the fake, flickering candles on the table, and he likes the artificial oak tree in the center of the restaurant, decorated with fairy lights and a hodgepodge of dangling ornaments. Tomas can remember when Kennedy would walk with him around the tree before the food arrived, and they would find their favorite ornaments: the banjo-playing flamingo and the glittery pinecone and the ugly pineapple man. Now Kennedy won’t walk around the tree anymore.

  Tomas remembers the moments before the chunk of hamburger clung inside his throat, too afraid to drop down into his stomach. He doesn’t blame the hamburger, really. He wouldn’t want to be digested in a pool of acid either. Before Tomas started choking, his sister carefully balanced another butter packet on her tower of condiments. His dad accidentally said “fucking Brendan” instead of “freaking Brendan,” and his mom’s eyes widened into little UFOs. “Hendrick Lund,” she said.

  When Tomas began choking, he sat very still with his palms flat on the paper tablecloth. He studied his father’s rosy, smirking face.

  “Tomas?” his mom said. “Something’s wrong with him. Tomas, say something.”

  By the time his father stood up, Tomas already felt his body rising up and up off his chair. An arm wrapped around his stomach and squeezed, like the tentacle of an angry octopus. As he hovered in the air, the restaurant swirled around him and the fairy lights on the oak tree blurred into shooting stars. The hamburger piece flew out of him, landing next to his sister’s unused knife.

  His mother held him then, and when he looked at her, the edges of her face quivered. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.” Tomas faced the stranger, and the line of the man’s mouth became jagged like the seismograph he saw on his last field trip. The stars on the man’s shirt twinkled as if they were real.

  Back in his room again, Tomas feels his heart slamming against his chest, again and again. A hot tear burns his right eye. I should . . . he thinks, but the thought crumbles into nothingness.

  Before he can formulate a plan of action, the boy finds himself in the hallway, heading for his parents’ room. He can still see his mother’s face in the restaurant, her skin rippling, her eyes twisted like silly putty. Inside, he screams, Go away! Go away!

  Before the boy can reach his parents’ bedroom, he notices that the guest room door is wide open, and he hears someone on the TV say, “No one laughs at a master of Quack Fu.” Tomas doesn’t understand why anyone would be watching TV in there. His grandparents only visit during Christmas.

  Tomas strolls forward and glances as casually as possible into the guest room. Through smudged glasses and a weepy right eye, Tomas sees a man standing alone by the TV. This isn’t his grandfather. Without leaning over, the man stretches a pale arm to pick a bottle off the floor. The man turns and stares at Tomas with pupils that are little more than amaranth-colored pinpricks. When the man opens his mouth, Tomas screams.

  “Oh, hey, kid,” the man says. “Scream scream to you, too.”

  After wiping the tears from his eyes, Tomas sees the man from the restaurant standing by the TV, holding a plastic grocery bag. He pulls a Gatorade out of the bag and adds the drink to a line of bottles on the windowsill. Now his hazel eyes appear perfectly boring.

  “I’m going to see my mom,” the boy says, because he’s not sure what else he can say.

  “Cool,” the man says, pulling another Gatorade from his tattered bag. A miniscule waterfall of bright green liquid spills onto the floor from the bottom of the bottle. Tomas feels a mild urge to tell the man that the hardwood is only two years old, like his dad always says, but he keeps his mouth shut.

  “Ah, here’s the culprit,” the man continues. He lifts the bottle to his lips and drinks from the lesion in the plastic, as if he’s sucking poison from a rattlesnake bite. His Adam’s apple dances up and down.

  While the man is busy, Tomas takes this opportunity to sidestep in the direction of his parents’ room. For some reason, unknown even to Tomas himself, he’s always held a deep-seated belief that holding your breath can spawn an invisible bubble around your body. You aren’t invulnerable within the bubble, of course. But you are luckier. You can sometimes walk through the hallways at school without so much as a flick to your shoulder. With all this in mind, Tomas holds his breath now.

  “Hey,” the man says, rupturing the bubble with a small, jagged word. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like that kid from Flight of the Navigator? Not so much your hair, but the shape of your face. Your nose, I guess. Did you know that kid ended up robbing a bank? Not in the movie, I mean. Real life. Would it be weird if I called you David, like the character?”

  “That’s not my name,” Tomas says.

  “Okay, well.” The man tosses the empty Gatorade bottle onto the floor. “You seem a little on edge, what with that screaming fit of yours earlier. I mean, I get it. There’s a new guy staying in your house and you don’t know him from Adam, whoever the fuck Adam is. Agh, sorry for cursing.” He taps an index finger against his forehead. “So, uh, your mom told me you like to draw. I knew a woman once who painted cats as clowns. It really helped her relax. Maybe you could draw for a while and try to chill out a little bit.”

  Finally, Tomas manages to break free from the restaurant man’s gaze and stumble away from his line of sight. More than anything, he wants to tell his parents about his mother’s gnarled eyes in the restaurant. He wants to tell them about the man’s body. But his father will only tell him to calm down. He’ll say, “This house is a no-drama zone.” He’ll say, “Come back when you’re ready to tell the truth.”

  Instead of knocking, Tomas runs his hands over the squares of molding on his parents’ ivory door. Their murky voices sound a world away. Tomas heads back the way he came, and this time he keeps his eyes focused forward. When he passes the guest room, he imagines the man’s long, snaking arms reaching for his neck. Tomas holds his breath.

  Hendrick

  His wife doesn’t so much pace the room as ping-pong from wall to wall, straightening a perfectly straight lampshade, reorganizing the army of LED candles on her bedside table.

  “The man’s house is being fumigated,” Hendrick says, lying flat on their velvet quilt. He knows he should take off his oxfords, but that would likely cause him to fall asleep instantly. “Instead of watching him drive off drunk to get a motel room in the middle of the night, I thought this would be the polite thing.”

  In truth, Hendrick’s more than a little buzzed himself, and he can’t quite recall the precise moment he invited Marvin to stay the night. Nevertheless, the offer was made, and he’s not about to backstep now.

  “He could have called an Uber,” Imani says, searching through her sock-and-underwear drawer.

  “You’re right, but the guy saved our son’s life. I thought we could do him a favor.” Hendrick sits up and turns himself so that his feet hover over the edge of the bed. “Honestly, though, this isn’t about the guy. This is about you freaking out again. You project your mom onto every new person you meet, so you never want to give them a chance. At least admit to yourself that that’s true.”

  “Thanks, babe,” Imani says, to a section of empty wall. “I love it when you throw my childhood in my face like that. Real classy.”

  “I’m not throwing anything.” He lies on his back a little too fast, and the ceiling swirls above him. “The point . . . the point is that you’re not the best judge of character. You think everyone’s a secret cannibal. You don’t even want the kids to go to sleepovers.”

  The sound of shattering glass pervades Hendrick’s consciousness.

  “Fuck,” Imani says. “That was an accident. I’m not throwing things. I broke my little porcelain peanut guy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He sits up and watches her pick up pieces of the smiling peanut using two fingers.

  “I’m all for judging Marvin fairly,” she says. “But we don’t know him. I get inviting him ov
er for a drink, but you should talk with me first before you ask a stranger to stay the night.”

  “But he’s not exactly a stranger, is he? We talked with him for who knows how long at the restaurant. He told us his whole damn life story. You said you liked the guy.”

  Imani stays frozen for a moment and then rubs her face with both hands. She leaves a trail of blood from her forehead to her chin.

  “You’re bleeding,” Hendrick says.

  His wife studies her hands. “Fuck.”

  When she returns from the bathroom with a poop-emoji Band-Aid on her finger, she says, “Marvin does seem like a good person, and yeah, we had a nice long conversation about his hippie parents and his Chihuahuas. Even so, we don’t really know him.” She sighs. “But I suppose it’s too late to kick him out now. I’m going to check on the kids.”

  Hendrick lies back with his oxfords on, because he still wants to visit the basement tonight. He enjoys creeping through the darkness while the rest of his world sleeps, and pulling the false bricks from the basement wall. Despite all his best efforts, Hendrick falls asleep on the gunmetal velvet. In the dream that follows, the basement fills with murky water and a pale serpent wraps around his face, painlessly. He asks Imani to take a picture but she won’t turn around. She says he can take his own damn picture. She says he’s as good as dead.

  Kennedy

  Traditionally, Kennedy spends her Fun Fridays watching videos where a family of squirrel monkeys rides on a capybara, or a Canadian woman bakes a tiny chocolate cake for her hamster’s birthday, or anything in that vein. However, her plans change when she’s drenched in a wave of realization that she hates her room. She absolutely despises this place, and the truth of the matter is that she’s felt this way for a very long time.

  For about half an hour, Kennedy sits at her hand-painted rainbow desk, drawing plans for a room-wide redesign. In one plan, her collection of stuffed penguins dangles from the ceiling on strings. Twinkle lights coil up the legs of her scrapbooking table. And posters of Hogwarts and Wonder Woman and David Bowie form a madcap collage on the opposite wall. As soon as she finishes a plan, she crumples the paper and tosses it into the open mouth of her Totoro wastepaper basket. Each permutation is worse than the last.