Bedfellow

by Jeremy C. Shipp

  “Hey,” Uncle Marv says, his head turned to the side, facing her. “I know I said I wanted to be alone and all, but I’m really up shit’s creek in here. Sorry. Crap’s creek. Could you scratch my back for a while? That’s all I need, really. I’d do it myself, but I can barely move my arms. This whole miracle thing took a lot out of me this time around.”

  Kennedy takes a step forward. “What about the fire?”

  “Oh, that? It won’t hurt you. You won’t even feel it.”

  Slowly, Kennedy brings a finger close to one of the undulating flames. Like Uncle Marv said, she doesn’t feel any heat whatsoever.

  Uncle Marv clears some phlegm from his throat and says, “If you could hurry, that would be great. I think I might be dying here.”

  Kennedy wants to hurry, but her body won’t cooperate. In slow motion, she plunges her trembling hands into the flames. The brightness of the fire hurts her eyes, so she turns her head to the side. She runs her fingers across his back as if she’s casually rubbing at an itch. His skin feels slimy and smooth.

  “Use your nails,” her uncle says, his voice cracking.

  “I bit off all my nails,” Kennedy says.

  “Well, do the best you can.”

  Kennedy presses a little harder, and his skin bends to her touch. She feels as if she’s digging her fingers into a slightly deflated, wet balloon.

  “Keep going,” he says. “I think we’re almost there.”

  Kennedy continues scratching away, more vigorously than before, and finally his back bursts. The popping sound startles her into jumping backward. She wants to ask her uncle if he’s all right, but her voice refuses to come out. Before she can speak, her uncle’s mystical flames fade away, revealing the pallid, mangled skin of his back.

  “Oh, shit,” Uncle Marv says, weakly. “Oh, shit.”

  When she glances at her uncle’s face, she can see only a smear of color where his face should be.

  “Oh, shit,” he says again.

  “I’ll get my mom,” Kennedy says.

  “No, wait. Don’t open the door. We need to keep them contained in here. You’d better lock the door so that no one opens it from the outside.”

  Kennedy doesn’t understand what any of that means, but she locks the door anyway. Ruining a miracle is the last thing in the world she wants to do. The teenager takes a deep breath and turns back around. Uncle Marv’s still lying on the rug, his face turned away from her now. After a few moments, the tattered flesh of his back quivers. Kennedy hopes that his skin is in the process of re-forming itself and healing, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at all, because a small creature wriggles out of the carnage. Only, he’s not a creature at all, is he? He looks like a tiny, bald version of Uncle Marv. He crawls on all fours in her direction, opening and closing his mouth silently, coated with translucent slime. Kennedy backs away until her back is pressed against the door.

  At this point, another tiny uncle squirms his way out of Uncle Marvin’s shredded skin, and then another. The first Lilliputian slides off of Uncle Marvin and then makes a run for it. He stumbles a few times but swiftly makes his way under the bed.

  “I know this is a lot to ask,” Uncle Marv says. “But could you help me catch these guys? I need them all in one place, as close together as possible. Put them in a drawer, I guess.”

  Kennedy simultaneously wants to escape into the hallway and hold one of the tiny people in her hands to verify if they’re real. In the end, she takes a deep breath and creeps forward. She grabs at one of the little guys who just tumbled onto the rug, but he slips from her fingers like a wet bar of soap. She thinks of the net she and Tomas use to catch frogs on the haunted trail, but that’s in Tomas’s closet. After surveying the room, she grabs a pillow from off the bed and removes the pillowcase. She easily slips the case over a Marvin who’s still attempting to wrestle himself free from the tangle of back skin. Then, trapped in the fabric, he releases a high-pitched shriek. The other tiny Marvins in the room join him in a discordant chorus. After a few seconds, they pause for breath at the same time, and then they scream again.

  “Goddammit, you guys,” Uncle Marv says. He attempts to push himself up off the floor, but his elbows buckle and he collapses to the rug. On the second try, he manages to sit up. His face still looks hazy, like before, but she can tell that he’s frowning.

  “I’ll get them,” Kennedy says, dumping the trapped Marvin into a drawer. Thanks to all the screaming, she has an easy time finding the little Marvins in all their hiding places. When she reaches for one of them, he dashes between her legs and attempts to scale the curtains. She traps him right after he falls onto his back.

  Kennedy jumps when someone knocks at the door.

  “Marv!” her mother says, and pounds at the door again. “Open the door!”

  Uncle Marv rubs his forehead for a while, and then the knocking stops. Her mother doesn’t say another word out there.

  “Don’t worry,” her uncle says. “We’ll explain everything to her after we’re done in here. For now, we need to get all of them together before I pass out. And we really don’t want them to stay like this for very long. They might get hungry.”

  Kennedy nods, even though she doesn’t understand in the least. One at a time, she collects the Marvins and empties them into the drawer. They still won’t stop screeching.

  “Okay, I think that’s all of them,” her uncle says, finally. He’s still sitting on the rug, barely moving, his face little more than a pale smudge above his neck. “Could you bag them all up and bring them over to me? I don’t think I can walk yet.”

  In order to transfer the little men into the pillowcase, she has to pull open the drawer, pluck one out, and close the drawer again quickly before the others can climb over the edge. The Marvins kick and squirm in her hand, but she manages not to lose any.

  Once she hands over the writhing sack to her uncle, he says, “Thanks, kid. You really saved my butt.” Then he holds the pillowcase right in front of his face. Kennedy half expects some fire to erupt from his eyes, but he only sits there, frozen.

  After a few seconds, the tiny people stop screaming, and Uncle Marv slumps over on his side. Only, he’s not Uncle Marv anymore. He’s something white and gray, like the moon, with a lipless slit for a mouth.

  When he opens his eyes, he says, “Oh, shit.” A moment later, his face glimmers and then he looks like his regular self again. “That wasn’t . . . I didn’t mean to scare you like that. I’m sorry.”

  “I wasn’t scared,” Kennedy says. Of course, she’s lying, and her hands are shaking, but she doesn’t want her uncle to feel bad. “Why did you look like that? Was it part of the miracle?”

  “Yeah,” he says, looking down at his hands. “Just an aspect of my soul manifesting itself. It’s hard to explain.”

  “You looked really cool.”

  Marvin meets her eyes for a moment and laughs a little through his nose. “Well, I’d better rest before my brain implodes.” He swings the limp pillowcase back and forth in front of him. “Before you go, could you dump these guys back in the drawer?”

  “Yeah.” Instead of pouring the small Marvins out of the sack, she slowly boosts them out one at a time. Their limbs droop at strange angles, as if they’re all double-jointed. She lines them up carefully on a folded pair of sweatpants. She stares at them for a while, and she can see their small chests rising and falling as they sleep. Suddenly, a twenty-foot wave of drowsiness hits her. She yawns.

  When she turns to Uncle Marv to say goodnight, she finds him curled up on the rug with his eyes closed, and his Klingon T-shirt back on.

  “Do you want me to help you up on the bed?” she says.

  “Nah,” he says. “I’m good.”

  While she bends back the fingers of her left hand, she considers asking him one more time if he needs help getting into the bed. In the end, though, she leaves without another word, and closes the door behind.

  In her own bed, she can feel the darkness of sleep
closing in on her almost immediately. During those final moments of consciousness, she replays the miracle a few times in her head. At the appointed time, the tiny Marvins materialized on the rug, in a burst of pale pink fire. They stood, side by side by side, all eight of them. They smiled at her and waved before nodding off to sleep. And Marvin told Kennedy to rest up as well, because tomorrow was a big day. Tomorrow was the beginning of her new life.

  MONDAY

  Imani

  Imani sets her weekday alarm for 6:00 A.M., but Marv wakes her up at an even ungodlier hour, saying, “Hey, guys. Guys. I have something to give you.”

  Hendrick rolls to his other side and says, “Shut the fuck up, Marv.”

  “Okay, well, I’ll give your miracle to someone else, then.”

  With that, her husband groans and sits up, his eyes barely open.

  So, at four thirty in the fucking morning, Marv leads the whole family downstairs for their cryptic gifts, like a parent escorting his children to the tree on Christmas morning. In the living room, Marvin turns to them, smiling a little. He rubs at the area between his eyes with a pinky. “So, uh, I know what you’re going to think about all this, and I get it. All I ask is that you give these guys a chance. They exist to help you and to keep you safe and to transform your lives in substantial ways. Just, you know, keep that in mind.”

  Imani has no clue what her brother-in-law’s talking about, but she follows him into the kitchen. The instant she spots the so-called miracles, her whole body tenses. Sitting cross-legged on the dinner table, two of the small Marvs wave and three of them say “Hey” simultaneously. They’re wearing the little clothes Imani finished up the night before.

  “What the fuck is this?” Hendrick says.

  Marv walks over and picks one of the tiny men up. “Like I said, they’re here to help us. They’re manifestations of spiritual energies and arcane truths. It’s hard to explain.” Marv goes on rambling, talking about the family’s potential for transformative growth, but Imani turns her attention to her son. He’s sniffling now, at her side. She takes his hand and leads him into the living room. He continues sniffling, staring at his bare feet. He doesn’t let go of her hand.

  “You don’t have to look at them,” Imani says. “I’ll make Uncle Marv send them away. I’m going to get your sister and then I’ll be right back.”

  He nods.

  Back in the kitchen, Imani says to Kennedy, “Put that thing down and go to your room. Take your brother with you. Tell him I’ll be right there.”

  “I don’t want to go,” her daughter says, holding the monstrosity close to her face.

  “Kennedy, now.”

  Her daughter sighs, and carefully sets the thing on her penguin parade place mat. A moment later, the miniature man vomits clear liquid. “Sorry,” the creature says, in a small, cartoonish voice.

  “They get a little motion-sick,” Marv says. “Once we get some ginger into them, they should be all right.”

  After Kennedy stalks off, Imani says, “Honey, I need you upstairs.”

  Hendrick grunts a little in response, and Marv says, “Take all the time you need to talk this over. It’s a big step, I know.” He grins a little, and the small Marvins on the table smile with him.

  Imani finds her children in Kennedy’s room, watching some meowing cat video on the girl’s phone. Tomas snorts with laughter.

  “Are you guys all right?” Imani says.

  Without looking up at her, they both say, “Yeah.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right back. I need to talk with your dad.”

  Imani rushes through the hall and finds her husband lying on top of the covers with his eyes closed.

  “Hendrick,” she says.

  “Huh?” He sits up and rubs his face.

  “I don’t want those things in my house.”

  “They’re not things,” Hendrick says, scratching at the underside of his nose. “They’re beings of spiritual energy or whatever Marv said.”

  “I don’t give a fuck what they are.” Imani straightens one of the picture frames on the wall. “They scare Tomas, and they scare me, too. You’re really going to sit there and tell me they don’t freak you the fuck out?”

  Hendrick shrugs. “They look like Marv. And they’re four inches tall. They’re not exactly intimidating.”

  Imani sighs. Whenever they’re dealing with a Marv situation, Hendrick always takes his side. “Hendrick. Do you really want these things around our kids?”

  “Marv says the little guys can keep Kennedy and Tomas safe. These are divine beings, Im. They’re like angels.”

  “They are not fucking angels.” Imani moves over to the bookshelf and she decides that she wants to transfer the red books to the top shelf. When she was a kid, she used to organize her books and magazines by color.

  She can hear the creaking of the floor as Hendrick climbs off the bed and approaches her. “I know they’re weird,” he says. “But when have Marv’s miracles ever hurt us in any way? When has Marv ever steered us wrong with his advice or his spiritual insights?” He stands beside her now, yawning. “These manifestations or whatever they are, Marv says they can help us in ways we can’t even imagine. But you don’t even want to try, because you don’t trust anybody. Not even Marv, who healed our kids and saved my life and brought the two of us together. You think we’re all your mom out to get you.”

  “This isn’t about that,” Imani says, searching for another red spine. “When I look at those little monsters, I—” Before she can finish her thought, her legs buckle with pain and the hardwood floor slams against her face. Darkness closes in at the edge of her vision, like storm clouds rolling swiftly across a bright blue sky. For a moment, she can see Marv’s white sneakers in the doorway.

  The shadows that overtake her re-form into a flurry of leaves that brush against her consciousness. She recognizes the ancient oaks and the arroyo willow trees and the bracken ferns. She spots a pair of red-winged blackbirds glaring at one another on top of two broad-leaved cattails. An enormous catfish thrusts its head out of the quiet pond, hoping for a piece of bread meant for the ducks. No one’s supposed to feed the ducks here, but people do anyway. She can see Tomas crumpled on the dirt, gushing too much blood from his leg. “Marvin,” Imani says. “Do something. Please.” Marv kneels then and rubs at his temples with his index fingers. A fire ignites in front of him, the color of pale pink manzanita flowers. Eight small men walk out of the flames and place their hands on Tomas’s leg, and the wound begins to close. When they’re finished, they wave at her and return to the fire again. “Thank you,” Imani says, and she hopes they can hear her, wherever they are.

  Then she’s standing on half-dead grass in front of the Dairy Queen. The man in the puffy neon-orange jacket says, “If you just look at my face a little bit, you’ll see that you know me. The sort of dreams I’ve been experiencing aren’t the one-sided kind. You’ve dreamed of me, too, and my helpers. If you look at me and you don’t recognize me at all, I’ll go away right now.”

  Imani stares at his face so that he’ll leave her the hell alone, but she does recognize him after all. She’s seen him hundreds of times, in castles and wastelands and magical forests. When she’s about to fall, he reaches out to catch her hand. When she’s tied up, the little helpers appear and bite through the rope. When she’s feeling like shit, the small men sing together in chorus and make her smile.

  Now she’s back on the haunted trail, and Marv points a pinky at the bobcat skulking a few yards away. “Don’t worry,” Marv says. “He won’t hurt us.” And as she watches the small creature staring into a ground squirrel hole, her body relaxes a little. She opens her mouth to speak, but the vibrant colors of the chaparral rush past her and she’s in Marv’s room again. Her brother-in-law says, “They’re celestial beings, like angels.” And at the dinner table, he says, “I can’t summon them for very long yet, but one day I’ll be strong enough to bring them here permanently.” And next to the hamburger-headed man with the sp
atula and the butcher knife, Hendrick says, “The helpers saved my life once, back in San Diego.” “What happened?” she says, but her voice sounds very far way. The thrift shop swirls around her, forming streaks of light across her vision. People speak to her from every direction. At first, she can discern a few individual words. Divine. Steadfast. Safe. The cacophony of voices intensifies until the sounds bleed together into a steady, incomprehensible murmuring. She wants to cover her ears, but she doesn’t seem to have any hands.

  When Imani opens her eyes again, she’s lying on the floor in her bedroom, next to the bookcase. She stands and finds her husband asleep on the bed. She feels a nebulous urge to wake him up, but the alarm hasn’t even gone off yet.

  She finds her children awake already in Kennedy’s room, watching videos on the girl’s phone. They look up at her, with eager looks on their faces.

  “Uncle Marv is ready for us now,” Imani says.

  It feels like Christmas morning as she leads the two of them downstairs. She can tell they’re excited, because neither of them say a word all the way to the dining table.

  Marv’s waiting for them, with the little helpers sitting cross-legged on their place mats.

  “Remember what Uncle Marv said,” Imani says. “They’re celestial beings, but they’re not invincible on this plane of existence. You have to be careful with them.”

  “We know, Mom,” Kennedy says.

  As her children pick up their helpers, Imani feels a few pangs of fear, but that’s only natural. Marv told her she would feel somewhat apprehensive in the presence of the helpers, in the beginning. But beyond her worries lies a profound sense of relief. Almost every day, she feels like a con artist in this house, pretending that she knows what she’s doing, pulling off only two-bit impersonations of mothers she’s seen on TV. Maybe now, with celestial beings involved, she won’t accidentally ruin her children. Maybe now she can finally relax.