by Shock Totem
“They’re perfect creatures, really,” she said, looking back toward the deck. “Each child is a copy of its mother.”
“Did any get you?” He shook her, hated himself for it, but the panic was still close.
“Our baby should be perfect.”
“She will be. She already is, honey. Come inside.” He guided her up the deck steps. She remained pliant, like someone in shock, while he washed her and tucked her into bed.
He understood she was under a lot of pressure. They had struggled to get pregnant. But just as adoption had entered the vocabulary of their marriage, Lily had kindled. Her first two trimesters had been a smooth joy. Lily had a glow that drew smiles from strangers.
Before long she’d become a scholar of expectant motherhood, immersing herself with an intensity that might have seemed frightening to Nolan with any lesser ambition. She meditated. The house filled with organic cookbooks, Ashtanga yoga videos. Processed foods were verboten along with anything that dared to have gluten. Classical and ambient music drifted like clouds. Nolan cracked New Age and granola jokes.
But then she’d turned inward, distant and airy. She spoke of purity and perfection and didn’t like being touched as often. Nolan knew that her mother had a daughter before Lily, a sad thing who’d died of SIDS in her crib. He couldn’t get Lily to talk about it.
He waited until her breaths lengthened into what would eventually be her light whistling snores, then laid a hand on the globe of her belly. Elaine kicked his palm, eager to meet her papa. “A few more days, pumpkin,” he whispered, and kissed his wife’s hair.
He stood in the middle of the living room. Pärt’s Stabat Mater mourned from the entertainment center. It had been on repeat these last few days, straining the house with its slow, lovely ache. There was a violence to it. Voices lamenting the sorrows of Mary, according to the CD’s liner notes. And what more famous mother could there be, he asked himself, and shook the thought away.
Outside the light slipped into dusk. Nolan bent and with a flashlight swept the underside of the deck. The nest was the size of a small plate. A carpet of wasps shifted over it, sluggish with night. How could this happen? He was vigilant with the house, hiring an exterminator in the warm months.
He brushed at himself with a shudder. His skin crawled with phantom prickles.
• • •
He came home the next day and searched the house for Lily, finally finding her in the basement’s farthest corner, among cobwebs and the reek of urine. The doors of her mother’s china cabinet were open and she stood gazing into it, naked, her pale hair fanning across her shoulders. Small black shapes flitted through the gloom. A wasp passed in front of him and he shrieked, slapping at his face.
“Lily, get away from there,” he said, ashamed at the harsh tremble in his voice. The EpiPen had been in his back pocket all day but still he was frozen in place, unable to step near his wife. His mind funneled back to his sixth summer, a week in the hospital after digging near a yellow jacket nest. Thirty years and he still felt shaped by that day. He remembered how the ground had exhaled them in a great humming breath. There hadn’t even been time to stand up.
“Come and rescue me,” she called across to him. Her voice carried a lilt. “They really are perfect little things. Fearless.”
But he couldn’t. Another wasp droned past his ear. He fled upstairs and stuffed a towel under the basement door, shaking and cursing himself.
• • •
She went into labor two days early, soaking the mattress as dawn streaked the bedroom curtains. An overnight bag had been in the car since last week, and in two minutes he had her dressed and outside.
Wasps were everywhere. Saucers, bowls, coffee mugs sat on the steps and the porch railing, covered with the insects and smears of honey that caught the strengthening light.
“Why would you do this?” he whispered.
She didn’t answer. Nolan stood rooted in his fear through several of her contractions. The EpiPen was miles away in the bedroom. Spots swarmed in his vision. Lily groaned in pain. He bit his tongue and lifted her and tried not to fall down the steps.
A wasp landed on the back of his neck. He forced himself forward. By the time he reached the car it had flown away.
• • •
He could never have imagined a more beautiful thing than Elaine. Seven pounds, five ounces of wailing health, a bundle of heaven in his wife’s arms. Lily wouldn’t quite look at the baby, but she was smiling. If the smile was hesitant, it was because the labor had worn her out, that was all. Nolan took that smile and held it, almost like a second infant. He looked down at what they had made and felt himself fill with light.
As a gesture to Lily—that Elaine would have a brave father—he killed the wasps on his own rather than call the exterminator. He wrapped himself in winter clothes and scoured every nook and cranny. It took a couple of bug bombs and six cans of spray, but soon the house was ready for his family.
He slept little that first night with Elaine home. The baby fussed between them in the bed, and Lily turned away from her, facing the corner of the room. Nolan cooed to Elaine, whispering that Mama was just tuckered out from bringing her into the world.
It was worth every yawn the next day. The office was a sort of prison and his parole didn’t come through until after six. It seemed he caught every red light on the way home.
“How are my two girls doing?” he said the moment he stepped through the door. Lily sat in his recliner beneath a blanket. The Stabat Mater was just ending, fading within the speakers.
“Nothing’s perfect enough the first time.” She looked at him and something in her face made him step back. “You understand.”
“Where’s Elaine?” His throat dried up. “What did you do?”
“The next one will be just right. It’s not your fault you gave her your weakness.”
She pulled down a corner of the blanket. Nolan saw an arm, shiny and red and swollen. A wasp wandered up over the wrist and disappeared within the tiny fingers.
Michael Wehunt’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such publications as Cemetery Dance, Shadows & Tall Trees, and One Buck Horror, among others. This is his second story to appear in Shock Totem. He spends his time in the lost city of Atlanta. Please visit him at www.michaelwehunt.com.
DEPRESSO THE CLOWN
by John Skipp
It’s a rancid corn dog breakfast again. She slides it under the door, on the unwashed plastic tray. The note on the tray says GOOD MORNING, FREAK! Otherwise, I’d have no way of knowing.
There are no windows in this basement. No light but the jittering fluorescents overhead. Forever on. Forever just out of reach. Like the door. The walls. The many sharp and painful objects.
All the other things they’ve kept hidden from the world.
I awake on the cold concrete, face as far from the drain as the chains will allow. And my face is ablaze with smoldering pain, like a million tiny insect stings. I swat at it with my padded hands, but that only makes it worse.
I try to say something, but I no longer can.
I hear her laugh, as she heads back up the stairs. And that sound, more than anything, brings the burning tears again. There is no surgery short of death that can keep my soul from sobbing.
“Aw, poor baby,” she says. “Now THAT’S funny!”
Then I’m alone with my sorrow, my corn dog, and pain.
• • •
I wish I could remember the date exactly. The twenty-somethingth of August of this year. It was hot, I can tell you that. So hot my makeup was running. I was on break between shows, catching a quick smoke out back, when this guy came walking up and said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said back, not really looking, scoping out the less-than-half-empty parking lot. Not a whole lot of people that day. Business had been in the crapper for years, was not getting any better.
“You get high?” he said, and that got my attention. I’d been nursing my last gram of Sour Cheese Deis
el for over a week. Rob kept saying he’d score for sure in the next town, but it just kept not happening. And we were days out from medico-legal Michigan.
“You’re talkin’ weed, right?” I said.
“I’m talkin’ whatever you want.” He grinned, showing godawful teeth. He had the scrawny scarecrow look of a third-string high school basketball player who found crack and then woke up ten years later, still wearing the same t-shirt.
Any fear that he might be an undercover cop vanished right there. Just another local loser, working us like we worked them.
“Well, hell,” I said, “I could use a quick toke.”
He proffered a skinny-ass joint from his pocket. “Van’s right over there, if that’s cool.”
I looked, saw several parked within a hundred yards. “That’s cool. Appreciate it.”
And off we went.
It’s weird, how clearly I remember that final trek across the dirt and gravel. How loud everything sounded. How alert my senses felt. It was like I was stoned already, walking beside him, the sun angled in just such a way that his tall man shadow draped over me. Like his smile was suddenly my umbrella. I remember thinking that, and being mildly amused.
But was I scared? Not even a little. I just wished I was wearing different shoes, different clothes, wasn’t dressed for work. Didn’t want any grief when I got back. Didn’t need any busybody shit. When I looked around and saw nobody, my only thought was, “Oh, thank God.”
We passed a van, came up on another, its bashed-in front grill pointed toward us. This got my hopes up, but we walked alongside it without stopping or slowing. The next van was a good fifty yards away. I started to get concerned.
“I’m back on in fifteen minutes, just to be clear,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” he said, just as we reached the back of the van.
I heard him stop, a split-second before I did.
And there she was, beside the open back door.
I took in the bleached blond hair, bulging halter top, cut-off jeans at hot-pants length. Saw the dimpled legs and beer-bloat midriff, almost rivaling her boobs. Saw the garish trailer tramp makeup, red lips so huge and crudely drawn they looked clownish themselves. Saw her crappy tattoos.
But mostly what I noted was her terror, at the sight of me. The high-beam crazy of her eyes.
“Omigod! Omigod! HIT HIM, JERRY!” she screamed.
This he did. From behind.
That was my last glimpse of sky.
• • •
I ain’t afraid of you...
The world came back to me, black and cold, throbbing with pain and something worse underneath. I felt it before I felt the floor, heard the faint clink of metal so close to my ears. I felt it in my bones, like they’d been first to awaken.
You can’t scare me no more...
That feeling was doom.
It was in me before my eyes flickered open, saw the harsh strobing light and squeezed shut again. It was soaked into my bones before I could smell the dankness, taste the concrete and dust on my tongue.
“Ever since I was little,” droned the little girl voice, coming in clearer as my senses caught up, “I been petrified of you. Like I couldn’t even move, I felt so frickin’ helpless and scared...”
I groaned and stirred, felt the tug and the weight, the clamps tight around my wrists.
“I would wake up from nightmares, and you would be there. Still there. Like the dream coughed you up, left you hangin’ up over my bed. Lookin’ down. Lookin’ down at me and laughin’.”
“Oh, no, no,” I croaked, more reflex than intention.
“But them days are over. Ain’t gonna be like that no more.”
I opened my eyes, saw the shackles on my polka-dot sleeves. Saw the shiny red ridge of the squeezable ball on the tip of my nose.
And it all came horribly clear.
“Oh, no, no, no,” I said, rising up with a clatter. Rising up only as high as my knees before the chains went taut and yanked me back. I looked around. Saw the chains. Saw the bars of my cage.
Saw the girl recoil, as I faced her at last.
“I AIN’T AFRAID OF YOU!” she shrieked in her little girl squeak, though she had to be thirty at least.
“No, no, no!” I yelled back. “C’mon! You gotta be kiddin’! I mean, what the fuck did I do?”
“Oh, you know what you did!”
“I didn’t do anything, lady! I ride a fucking unicycle! I get hit in the face with pies! I give out balloons to kids! Not monster balloons! Just regular ones!”
“Jerry?” she screeched, gaze flailing everywhere but me.
“Honest to God, I make less than you make if you work at Wal-Mart! I have no power over anyone! My life is total shit!”
“Jerry!” In a panic now.
“I mean, Christ! I was probably just out of high school when you saw Stephen King’s ‘It’, or whatever the fuck happened! But lemme tell you something: CIRCUS CLOWNS ARE JUST PEOPLE! We just wanna make you laugh! It’s a job, fercrissake!”
I heard footsteps thunder down the stairs, like two bowling balls racing each other. For one measly moment, I entertained hope. Maybe cops. A nice S.W.A.T. team or three.
“JERRY”
“I’m comin’, baby!” called the voice I feared most.
And that was that. So much for hope. I caught my reflection on the shackle on my wrist, saw the white face and red lips, my own warped and desperate eyes.
“Dude!” I hollered. “PLEASE! Come on! It’s just me! We were gonna get high!”
I brought my sleeve up, wiped the makeup from one cheek. It came off in a greasepaint smear.
“See? This is not my face!”
“JERRY!”
“I’m just a guy! We probably like the same movies! Look!” I rubbed my other cheek pink, popped the ball off my nose.
Jerry hit the cage door running.
Then he came in, and cut out my tongue.
• • •
I cry all the time now. It’s pretty much what I do. Cry and whimper, scream and moan. I spend most of my time in the fetal position, while my mind races and my body quakes.
I think about all the things I never did. All the places I never went, and never will. All the girls I never kissed. All the jokes I never made. All the weed I never smoked. On and on and on and on.
Sometimes, I helplessly fantasize about about my missing person report. Imagine someone’s looking for me. That’s the cruelest one of all. I was a transient before I joined the circus. Guys like me come and go, from job to job. One day we show up and audition. A little juggling, a couple pratfalls, and we’re on the team. From there, we hang in for as long as it’s good, often vanish just as quickly as we came.
I’m not saying they didn’t notice me gone, and maybe even miss me a little. I’m just sayin’ odds are good that nobody thought, “Someone kidnapped our clown in the parking lot,” and put out an APB.
Thinking these thoughts just drives the doom in deeper.
The only close-to-good thoughts are of death, or revenge.
Every day, she comes down and faces her demon. The fact that I’m not one was always way beside the point. It’s a matter of pride for her. To see me so weak makes her feel strong.
I’m her totem. Her placebo. Her triumph of the will. I’m the surrogate for everyone that ever wronged her, every Evil Clown movie she ever saw. I’m the reason for her baby-voiced arrested development. The source of all her soul’s scar tissue.
And she is making me pay for it all.
That’s where Jerry comes in.
The first thing he did after cutting out my tongue was to sew that rubber ball back on the end of my nose. “Nuh-uh-uh,” he said, grinning, as the needle dug in. “You don’t get off that easy.”
Then he carefully affixed these massively-padded Mickey Mouse gloves to my wrists with fishing wire, careful not to pop a vein. So that my fingers were buried inside those four cartoon fingers, unable to pry the stitching loose, Fight back. Or tear
my own throat out, as the case may be.
She has me all day, to drop in on at will, in between whatever snacks, sex toys, and reality TV she wiles away the rest on. Insofar as I can tell, she never leaves the damn house.
But at night, Jerry comes home. And I am his project.
Every night, after work, he drags me back to the chair.
Every night, he tattoos a little more of my face.
He could have done it all at once, but he’s taking his time. This is clearly his favorite part of the day. Just the white took two months. He spent three weeks on the lips. Now he’s rouging my cheeks. And I know the eyes are next.
Fuck if I don’t spend every second in that chair just wanting to kill him, over and over. Him and his stupid girlfriend. I wrap the chains around their necks. I stick the needles in their eyes. I taunt, torment, and torture them. Eye for eye. Nose for nose. Limb for limb. Cell by cell.
Meanwhile, I shit down a drain in the concrete floor that is my bed and only home. He cut a trap door in my clown suit, left my raw ass exposed. Every so often, they hose us down. I shiver for days, reek of mildew and sweat. I itch and I ache. And it goes on forever.
So forgive me if I’m fucking depressed.
I look at the corn dog. Only parts of it are green. I sadly thank God I can no longer taste. The last meal I had was cotton candy and gravel, topped with popcorn so stale it broke the last of my teeth.
I think to myself, should I eat that thing? There’s a part of me that dearly wants to die. Move on. Be free. Reincarnate as a bug, dog, or tree. If there’s nothing beyond, just black on black, that’s still gotta be way the hell better than this.
I have long given up on Heaven.
But part of me stubbornly wants to live. Knows that something miraculous could happen. A lapse of security. An emotional breakthrough. Revelation. Opportunity. You just never know.
Philosophically speaking, in my dreamiest dreams, I’d love to think I could someday help them see the light. Exorcise this idiotic clown demon. Cut through their psychosis. Transubstantiate the fear. Steer a path toward healing redemption.