Bedfellow

by Jeremy C. Shipp

  Taking a deep breath, Imani stands and feels steady on her feet, thankfully.

  “Feeling better?” Marvin says, scribbling on his yellow pad.

  “Much.”

  “Good good good.”

  As she puts away Marvin’s clean clothes, she sees the man’s reflection in the streaky mirror above the dresser. Was she supposed to clean the mirror before Marvin arrived, or was Hendrick? In the reflection, Marvin sniffs at the air and wrinkles his nose.

  When she turns to face the real Marvin, he says, “I finished writing up those measurements for that project I told you about. The clothes don’t need to be perfectly tailored or anything, so don’t worry too much. You sure you don’t mind helping me out?”

  “Of course not,” Imani says.

  “Kennedy gave us some old doll clothes and such to work with.” He points to the kaleidoscopic mound of fabric with the broken point of his pencil. She wonders for a moment if he has an oversized sharpener that could re-form the point, or if he has to use a knife.

  Marvin hands her the whole legal pad and says, “Once I can get out of bed easier, we should watch Dead Alive. It’s funny. You would like it.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Imani says.

  He tries again to swirl the pencil in his fingers and the eraser ends up hitting him on the side of his head. “Agh.”

  Instead of going straight to her bedroom with the miniature clothes, she decides to check with Kennedy first and make sure she’s okay with all of this. After all, this doesn’t sound like Kennedy at all. The last time they had a yard sale, her daughter cried at the mere suggestion that she get rid of a few dolls and penguins.

  “Yeah, Uncle Marvin can use those,” Kennedy says, without even a tremor in her voice. “They’re not important ones.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Mom, I said yeah.”

  At least somewhat satisfied, Imani heads back into the hallway and suddenly remembers that Marvin despises the smell of cinnamon. That’s why he was wrinkling his nose before. She carefully uses her big toe to switch off the plug-in air freshener. They’ll need to change over to a different scent while Marvin’s staying here. Do they make Gatorade-scented air fresheners? She smiles at the thought.

  In the bedroom, she finds Hendrick curled up on his side, snoring in that gentle way that makes him sound as if he’s wheezing. Ordinarily, her husband sleeps on his stomach with his arm under the pillow, so he looks unnatural and childlike in this position. An earbud still dangles from one ear. On the iPad screen, a woman in red smashes a glass bottle on a gravestone.

  “No,” he whispers, in a frail voice that doesn’t sound like his own. He rolls over and faces the other way. “The heads.”

  On her sewing table, Imani dumps out the tattered plastic bag that Marvin supplied her. She sorts the doll clothes into heaps of dresses, tops, pants, and accessories. She studies Marvin’s legal pad, and the handwriting appears quivery and disproportioned, probably because of his recent surgery. He is on heavy painkillers, after all.

  “How long was I asleep?” Hendrick says, his catchphrase whenever he wakes up from a nap.

  “Not long,” Imani says.

  She could turn around and ask if he wants to watch one of their shows on Netflix, but she doesn’t want to hear another halfhearted “Yeah, sure.” Instead, she begins dismembering the doll clothes with her seam ripper and her titanium micro-tip scissors. Gradually, everything comes to pieces. For a while, she thinks about their first house, where Kennedy would use all her strength to yank open the bottom freezer drawer of their fridge. Then she would bury as many dolls as possible in the massive ice tray. “They’re so cold,” she would say. “They’re shivering.”

  In time, Imani begins reconstructing the clothes based on Marvin’s specifications. He hasn’t supplied her with sewing patterns in any sense, but she does the best she can, using his overall concepts and measurements. Hours pass as she cuts and sews and embroiders teensy sections of felt. The longer she works, the more unrecognizable the doll clothes become.

  Only when she pricks her finger with an embroidery needle does she notice her forehead aching, an invisible hand pressing hard against her skull from within. For a moment, she worries she might be getting sick, but then again, she’s felt perfectly healthy all day. She’s probably fine.

  Tomas

  Tomas turns to Google Images because he doesn’t recognize half the objects Uncle Marvin scribbled on this piece of yellow notebook paper. On the bullet list, there’s a potbelly stove, a dress form, an industrial sewing machine table, a curved garment rack. The boy doesn’t understand why his uncle would ask him to contribute to one of his projects, but he jumps at the opportunity nevertheless.

  “Don’t worry about making everything perfect,” Uncle Marvin told him, minutes ago. “And feel free to put your own stamp on things. I can work with whatever you give me.”

  Tomas doesn’t know what Uncle Marvin means by stamp, but he spends a good minute or two staring at potbelly stoves on his computer screen, allowing the images to burrow deep inside his mind. Once he feels satisfied with the transference, he sits cross-legged on his giant squid rug and gets to work. He uses his most special pens, with color names like coquelicot and fulvous and sorrel.

  Despite holding his breath as much as possible for good luck, Tomas can’t get the potbelly stove quite right. In one drawing, the stove looks too melancholy. In another, he seems like there’s not a spark of life in him at all. The boy can feel the tears climbing up the inside of his face, trying to jump out. He takes a deep breath. Sometimes, when he’s feeling especially frustrated at his drawings, he takes himself back in time to when he visited his uncle’s apartment for the first time. He can’t remember everything from when he was three or four, but he can recall every moment of this outing.

  Tomas recollects a papier-mâché T. rex standing beside an empty coat stand, wearing a mustard turtleneck and crimson sneakers. Taxidermied birds hung from the living room ceiling on strings, a few of them swaying gently in the current of the air conditioning. Christmas lights wrapped around the legs of the coffee table like robotic snakes. And bright watercolor paintings covered an entire wall. Paintings of goblins dressed in burlap sacks and a duck playing an electric guitar and a translucent creature with rose-colored dots for eyes.

  “We can leave if you want to,” his mother kept saying, squeezing his hand a little too hard.

  Uncle Marvin led them over to the dining room, where he stood on a chair so that he could see. On the table stood a pint-sized park, frozen in time. Zombie babies made from painted clay shrieked with delight on a teeter-totter. The duck from the painting in the living room careened down a spiraling slide while playing his electric guitar with his bill. Bordering the duck pond grew a toothpick oak tree. Children scrambled up the bare branches as sea serpents rose from the muddy waters of the lily pond and stretched toward the children with open mouths.

  “It’s just pretend,” his mother said, holding his hand as he balanced on the creaking chair. Tomas knew that Uncle Marvin created all this, and he wasn’t afraid. That day, his father didn’t have to lean close to his ear and tell him to stop crying.

  At one point during the visit, Tomas wandered off into the kitchen with his sister, where he found a cerulean marker balanced upright on the floor, right in front of the dishwasher. On the nearest linoleum tile, Tomas quickly drew his own T. rex wearing a cerulean turtleneck and cerulean sneakers.

  “Dad!” Kennedy yelled, tossing the marker far away as if it were a grenade ready to explode. “Tomas drew on the ground!”

  “Shit,” their dad said as soon as he spotted the drawing. “Shit, I hope that wasn’t permanent. I’m sorry, Marvin. We’ll clean this up.”

  “Nah, leave it,” Uncle Marvin said, crouching down next to the drawing. “I like it.”

  Tomas didn’t say anything to that. He was too frightened his father would yell some more, but the boy remembers wanting to draw on the walls and th
en shrink himself down to the size of the zombie babies so he could play in the monster park. He wanted to build a giant castle of toothpicks that touched the ceiling, with cat-faced dragons and lumpy demons climbing the walls.

  Those feelings churning inside the three-year-old Tomas smash through the memory, somehow, flowing into the Tomas of now like a time-traveling stream of emotion. Tomas can hear his uncle’s voice, clear as a magic crystal. “I like it,” he said. Tomas’s tears give up on trying to get out, and a cheerful potbelly stove emerges from his fingers instead.

  While cutting out the drawing, the boy wonders where exactly his artwork will fit in Uncle Marvin’s world. Maybe the children in the oak tree will escape at last and find themselves in a creepy attic full of dress forms and sewing tables. Maybe Tomas is furnishing an upside-down house for upside-down people on the ceiling.

  He continues drawing objects until he decides to curl up on the rug and rest his eyes. Then he’s up again a moment later. Crows wrestle with one another above his head, dropping blood and iridescent feathers on the floor.

  “This hardwood is only two years old,” Tomas says. He picks up feather after feather, but there doesn’t seem to be any end to them.

  Dinosaur heads force themselves through cracks in the walls, and the boy realizes this probably isn’t his room after all. Scorching tears trickle down his cheeks while he stares at the creature in the painting with bloody droplets for eyes. The dinosaur heads mouth words with their human lips, but Tomas doesn’t understand what they’re trying to say. His biggest problem though is that no matter where he turns his body, his face swivels toward the painting as if pulled by a magnet.

  The creature presses his face against the painting until the glass shatters onto the floor. This is yet another mess someone will have to clean up later. The creature pushes his face through the frame, and suddenly Tomas is watching from above, roosting in the rafters with all the crows.

  “Poor guy,” Tomas says, watching as the creature wraps his limbs around and around. The boy below opens his mouth but says nothing at all.

  Hendrick

  Sometimes, like on nights such as tonight, Hendrick worries that his system is too perilous, too fraught with unnecessary danger. Buddy, you’re a fool, he thinks to himself, in a voice that sounds a little too much like his father for his taste. When all’s said and done, though, Hendrick doesn’t want to change his system. He wants to stage-whisper “Banana!” a few times while lying on the gunmetal velvet, to see if his wife will stir. She doesn’t. Then he wants to creep down the stairs, avoiding that spot on the second-to-last step that creaks. Using his phone in flashlight mode, he wants to descend into the glacial basement, where he can remove the false bricks from the far wall.

  He reaches deep into the gaping maw in the wall, and he imagines the basement biting down and gnawing off his arm. He smiles, even though he doesn’t find the thought humorous in the least. He pulls his stack of hundreds from the hole, still thick enough to quicken his pulse.

  “Zip - a - dee - doo - dah,” he says. He feels himself blushing a moment later. He thought he purged his grandmother’s weird expressions from his vocabulary long ago.

  No matter; he sits on the plastic storage box in the middle of the floor and places his phone beside him, the beam of light pointed at the menagerie of spiders on the ceiling. He runs his thumb down the stack of bills, again and again. Sometimes, on nights like tonight, he wonders what he would do if the basement door opened and Imani’s silhouette stood immobile in the doorway above. “Sweetie,” he would say. “There’s something I need to show you.” What else could he say?

  The red rubber band he took from work breaks apart while he attempts to slide it off the hundreds. He tosses the rubber band on the floor, and then thinks better of it. But the instant he pockets the trash, he feels stupid for doing so. What could Imani possibly say? “I found this rubber band in the basement. Is there something you need to tell me, babe?”

  Hiccupping suddenly, Hendrick transfers a few bills into his waiting wallet. He never knows quite how much to add, and every time he sits down here, the amount changes. Tonight, his hand won’t seem to stop. He reminds himself that he can’t go too crazy with this. Imani would notice a bulging wallet. She notices everything. Finally, his hand stops and he sits there for a while, with his stash in one hand and his wallet in the other. He looks up at the labyrinth of webs above, but he can’t spot a single spider. Maybe they’re afraid of the light. Hendrick stands from the box.

  And then, like a nightmare, the basement door opens, and the silhouette that appears isn’t Imani at all. What Hendrick sees is an emaciated-looking shadow with a bulbous head. Arms like ropes squirm at the shadow’s sides.

  “Boo,” the dark figure grumbles, and the door closes.

  Hendrick hiccups again, dropping his money on the floor. The impact doesn’t make any sound whatsoever. With his phone in hand, he searches the entire basement for any bill that might have escaped him. His heart still won’t calm down, and he chastises his brain for the strange imaginings about the man in the doorway. Why does he do this to himself so often? This can’t be good for his blood pressure.

  Satisfied that he hasn’t left any hundreds behind, Hendrick attempts to tie up the stack with the broken rubber band from his pocket. He only manages to snap the band into more pieces. In the end, he seals up the stack unbound. There isn’t any danger to leaving them loose, is there? The bills won’t sprout out between the false bricks like some invasive vine.

  On his way up the stairs, Hendrick hiccups so violently that he drops his phone. The device tumbles and all his light dissolves in an instant. A rivulet of perspiration runs down his back as he backtracks carefully down the stairs. For some reason, he feels more comfortable walking backward instead of turning around. Once he reaches the bottom, he searches the icy cement floor on all fours, and he remembers his own childhood dog locked alone in a dark garage as punishment for urinating on a wool, hand-knotted rug. He can’t find the phone anywhere. Of course his brain betrays him once again, and he pictures the rawboned silhouette staring at him from above. In his mind, he sees the creature hunched forward, slinking down the stairs, its arms squirming at its sides.

  He snickers at himself. He’s as bad as Tomas. The boy cries without a night-light.

  Crawling forward a little farther, Hendrick makes a bizarre yelping sound he’s never heard before, because a tiny object pierces his palm. With his other hand, he pulls what feels like a goathead thorn out of his skin. Then he drags himself in what he hopes is the direction of the storage box, because he wants to place the goathead on top. He doesn’t want to get stabbed by the thing again. As he moves now, he feels pinpricks of pain moving from the left side of his head to the right. He can’t be getting sick. He never gets sick.

  Finally, his right hand brushes against what he assumes is his phone. He’s right. He of course wanted to use the flashlight to guide his way upstairs, but the screen won’t turn on anymore. He should have expected as much from that tumble. Sighing, he pockets the phone and checks to make sure that his wallet’s still in his back pocket. Incomprehensibly, his eyes seem to be adjusting to the dark, because he can see a shadowy, amorphous version of the stairs to his right. But how can that be? This place is always pitch black at this time of night. Heading up the stairs, he notices there’s a sliver of jaundiced light coming from under the door. Someone’s up there. Someone’s awake.

  Hendrick ascends the stairs, squeezing the handrail as tightly as possible, and for a few seconds his pain becomes a shower of glass shards sprinkling on the top of his brain. A psychedelic laser show dances in front of his eyes. And then the sensation fizzles to nothing.

  The pain and colors disturb him, but he’ll have to deal with that later. For now, he reaches out and his hand pauses an inch from the doorknob. More cold sweat dribbles down his back. “Sweetie,” he’ll say. “There’s something I need to show you.” What else can he do?

  Hendrick cro
sses the threshold, and Imani’s not standing on the other side with her arms crossed over her chest. Instead, he finds his brother facing the far wall, with what looks like a backpack under his robe. Hendrick stands there in silence for a while, staring.

  “Marv,” he says, finally.

  His brother turns around, and waves at him with a permanent marker in his hand.

  “What are you doing out of bed?” Hendrick says, his voice cracking in the middle of the sentence.

  “I’m drawing on all these photos,” his brother says. “I can only manage shitty little stick figures, but fine art isn’t everything, right? These stick guys are only starting points. Little taps on the mind to say, hey, there’s something here.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You’re sounding a bit loud. Do you want to wake up the kids? Imani?” Marv sniffs at the tip of the marker and wrinkles his nose.

  Stepping closer to the wall, Hendrick sees now that Marv has in fact drawn stick figures on their family photos. His brother’s always been eccentric, painting portraits of caterpillars with dog faces and shit like that, but this is next-level bizarre.

  “Man, why would you do this?” Hendrick says.

  Marvin laughs through his nose, in that annoying way of his. “You’re seriously going to act all incredulous about my nighttime activities while you get your rocks off hiding from your wife, crawling around an empty room in the middle of the night? Don’t you think that’s a little on the pathetic side?”

  When Hendrick hiccups this time, his back tenses to the point of pain. An amalgam of shame and anger and fear heats up his forehead and the back of his neck. He wants to rush forward and shake his brother by the shoulders, but he doesn’t. They’re not five years old anymore.

  Marvin sighs. “Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t lash out at you like this. You’re one of my people. My back’s just killing me and my psyche’s shattering and you’re an easy target.”