by John Everson
And who paid attention to muffled screams in the depth of night on Halloween?
* * *
They found his clothes eventually, underneath an old gnarled elm behind an empty pumpkin field. They were lying on bare earth; nearby a knife was stabbed crookedly in the dirt. As the farmer led police to the spot to search for further clues of the missing boy, he spied a huge orange pumpkin peeking through the weeds at the bottom of the hill. He shook his head at having missed such a prize pumpkin the week before.
It would have brought a good price.
Inside that "prize" gourd, a white-slimed shape contorted at the sound of voices. Kneading hands of pumpkin hair kept him in near-constant orgasm, and handful by handful, deposited orange-slick, newly formed white seeds into pockets on his flesh.
"We will fertilize hundreds of seeds together," she whispered, in words only he could hear.
A Lack of Signs
There was no sign in the window. No hours posted on the door. Only the beckoning chill of the pink neon tube that ringed the shuttered window and the cool iceberg blue of its brother that outlined the door.
Jan had passed the shop for weeks in her car, glancing to the north side of the street as the dead grass of the parkway skimmed by, a Banana Republic blur of bludgeoned earth tone colors, wondering what was inside. The neon always seemed lit, but there was rarely a car in the lot. Now and then, she would drive by and notice people entering the tattoo parlor to the east of the unmarked shop, but there was never any sign of coming or going in the other half of the decaying strip mall. Just the call of the neon. A call promising... what?
It had been a long day, and she was tired, but Jan didn't feel much like going home, not yet. There, she would only have to face the lonely chore of microwaving something to eat, while watching whatever mindless sitcom was on to kill the hours and fill the void of quiet until sleep rescued her briefly before shitting her out into another day. Tonight, would the studio audience exaggerate its excitement over an episode about the neighbor's boy cheating in grammar school and the kooky hijinks as his friends seek to save him from both his teacher and moral bankruptcy? Or would they take on an even more serious subject in a "very special episode" about drug or alcohol abuse (still with the requisite lighthearted leavening)?
As she pulled away from the light at Glen Ellyn Road, she decided that now was as good a time as any. She was tired of being curious. Slapping on her turn signal, Jan crossed lanes and pulled into the parking lot of the nameless store. She sat still for a moment, staring at the blank, white-coated cinderblock exterior, then finally shut off the engine.
The store revealed no more clues as to its specialty from up close than it did from the road. There was clearly a light on inside, showing through the white shutters. And the neon glowed brightly. But cold. Neon never evoked warmth. She could see the building itself was in some disrepair, chunks of mortar missing from between blocks, peels of dirty white paint lifting from the windows and gutters and revealing slashes of black building bone beneath. The parking lot only held two cars besides her own: a rusting Chevy Impala, and a beaten up black hotrod... she thought it was a Mustang.
Jeremy would have known for sure.
There was a bell that jingled to announce her as the door shut the outside quick as a guillotine. She knew immediately she had made a mistake. The room was painted a bright chalky white, and carpeted in a neutral beige; it had as much color and life as her apartment. It was like stepping into an eggshell that held no embryo.
The room was empty.
A lone bulb hung from the ceiling to light the room, which ended in a hallway that led away into shadow. Jan took all this in and shook her head at her own foolishness. There was no sign here because there was no business here. At least not yet. Someone was probably redressing the space, and just taking awhile to do it. Maybe there had been carpentry and plumbing work, in addition to the fresh paint and carpet. Maybe the new renters had run out of funds, and had had to postpone the opening of their new store, whatever it was to be. In any event, it did not appear to be a proprietorship of anything right now.
Jan turned to leave, just as a voice reached out from the hallway.
"Can I help you?"
She peered back over her shoulder, keeping two fingers on the handle of the glass door.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't realize you weren't open yet."
"We're open," the voice answered, and Jan saw a face swim out through the darkness. He was an aged man, face warted and wrinkled like an old toad. But his eyes were gemstone blue and gleamed in the light from the unshielded bulb.
"What exactly is it that you're looking for?" he said softly, his voice as soothing as his eyes were bright.
"I... I don't know," Jan said. She turned to the door and pushed, jangling the bell again. "I'll come back another time, when you have your displays set up."
"Come back soon," the old man answered as she slipped back out to the parking lot. "Come back when you know what you want."
* * *
Jan's heart was still beating hard when she pulled into the potholed lot of her apartment complex a couple miles from the strange store. Something about the place, something about its cool interior, its wrinkled proprietor, its... emptiness, had bothered her. Scared her, really.
It was inexplicable, this fear, and yet, there it was. When she'd stepped inside the store, she'd immediately felt a disorientation, a slipping... and then an urge to run.
"What must he have thought of me?" she mused, shaking her head as she keyed open the apartment door. "Foolish woman, doesn't know what she wants..."
Jan set her things down on the small, white-tiled kitchen table, and took a breath. She had what she wanted. Her place, her stuff, her freedom. She nodded at the matted posters so recently framed and hung. Street scenes of her favorite cities: Chicago's Michigan Avenue at night; New York's Times Square at noon. The streets were filled with people, people in white pants and dark coats and electric pink midriffs and heads boasting warring baseball caps (Cubs, White Sox, Orioles) a quiet game of chicken by sports franchises. The people walked across the sterile white of her walls, offering a glimpse of energy, of living.
The wall of her entryway was still bare, and she stared a moment at it, wondering what she could find to fill it. Maybe a scene from Boston. Or San Francisco.
Jan's life these days was all about filling space. Ever since Jeremy left and took with him all of the furniture close to her heart. Not to mention her favorite blue ottoman. And the stereo system (his since college). And the DVD player (you never watch movies). She had signed the lease on this apartment the day after his brutal announcement (you just don't move me anymore, I'm sorry) and arrived the following weekend with a carload of clothes, dishes and old cassette tapes. And the posters she'd packed into peeling tubes when she'd first moved in with Jeremy the year before. He didn't like the city. "Too many people," he said.
"You wanna move to Idaho and be a hermit?" she'd asked once.
"Yeah, why not?" he'd said. "At least the dumbshit-per-square-inch capita is way down. And you can always get fresh potatoes." He'd laughed, and gone back to running down computer-simulated pedestrians with the help of his joystick and an IBM Pentium. Eventually, he'd run her down as well. With words, if not Detroit steel or Microsoft pixels. And eventually, he'd gotten his just rewards.
Jan pulled a frozen carton of Swedish meatballs from the freezer and popped open the microwave door with a button. Five minutes. Enough to change and sort the mail, she thought as the machine began to hum behind her.
But when she crossed the living room and saw the white, empty wall of the entryway again, she stopped. A trembling began in the calves of her legs and shivered its way through her thighs, groin and belly to lodge like a spear in the center of her chest. Jan wheezed, drew back a halting, pained breath, and without warning, began to sob. She didn't hear the microwave's dinging reminders five minutes later from her fetal crouch on the perfect, unstained carpet.<
br />
* * *
"...or the loss margin on the Tablet software, right?"
Jan blinked, and looked up at Evie, her workmate who'd apparently been leaning, palms flat on her desk for the past couple minutes, going on about sales reports and who knew what else.
"Jan?"
"I'm sorry," she said. "I lost you there for a minute. What about Tablet?"
She'd been thinking about her living room, and the way everything was so sterile, even with her old street scene posters. Thinking about what she could fill the white space with. She couldn't paint, it wasn't hers to paint. But maybe an Oriental floor rug, one of those with intricate twisting patterns of filigree and rich royal color. Something to follow for hours with the eye as the evenings ticked by...
Evie asked her question again, and managed in the asking, to assign Jan with another job to do before day's end (do you think you could help me and...). And then she was gone, probably to kill the afternoon talking with her boyfriend on the phone, and Jan was left with more work and a question.
"Would a blue rug work better in that space, or a burgundy?"
On the drive home, Jan considered where she might go to find her rug. Somehow this had become her project for the week. She really couldn't afford one of those beautiful wall-to-wall pieces, but maybe for lack of any other pursuit, it had become the foremost thought on her mind. She had to price them now, though she feared that the tags would break her heart. She had to watch every penny now that she was on her own. On the other hand, Jeremy wasn't here anymore to say no...
Jeremy.
Her eyes welled up at the very thought of his name, and Jan suddenly couldn't see in the rush of traffic. Her chest was already trembling in sobs, and she pulled over into the first parking lot she came to. Shutting off the car, she buried her face in her hands and rested her forehead on the steering wheel. It had been a few days since she'd had an attack like this, and she cursed herself silently for it as her lips murmured his name over and over again, and the tears flowed through the spaces between her fingers and wet the wheel with her sorrow.
"I want a family," he'd said.
"We could adopt," she'd begged.
"I want my own family," he'd answered, and was gone.
Jan dried her eyes with a tissue from the glove box and shook the thoughts away. That was past. Jeremy was past. Right now, her life was hers to do with as she chose.
And she chose to find an Oriental rug.
Sniffling a bit, she peered through the windshield to see where exactly it was she'd pulled into to park. In front of her, the cool glow of red and blue neon shimmered and flickered. There was no sign in the shuttered window, but she knew immediately where she'd ended up.
The little shop that wasn't quite open. Or at least, hadn't been the last time she'd pulled in. She wondered what they'd ended up carrying. Or if they had opened yet at all. She coughed once, blew again, checked her makeup in the rearview mirror and took a deep breath. She was there, nobody was waiting for her at home... why not?
She opened the car door and stepped out into the humid June evening. She used to love walking on that kind of night with...
Jan bit her lip and focused on the idea of a vibrant, warm floor rug accenting the flat color of her apartment's walls. The moment passed.
She pulled the door open and stepped inside, and again the frame snapped shut with a crack and a jingle of bells. For a moment, just the briefest second, she felt disoriented and the edge of her vision seemed to swim with white and mauve and burgundy and blue. Jan grasped at the doorframe but then everything seemed to still, the colors slipping like sand into solid swaths of black and deep sienna, powder blue and royal purple. The store felt much smaller than it had on her first visit, because now it was full. Bursting, really. All of the walls were hidden behind hangings of ornate tapestries, perhaps from India. They had tassels and the dyes seemed particularly deep and rich in hue - and just mottled enough that it made her certain these were not mass produced factory products, but handcrafted by artisans. On the floor, lined all about the shop, were baskets and urns, most of them woven in a tight knot of straw-like wicker, and varnished in varying shades of henna, oak and pale sand. A cash register hid between a melange of pottery and bronzed vases atop a small display case where ornamental statues of elephants and rhinos and even a giraffe stalked within. There were beads hiding the hallway to the back recesses of the shop, and tall stands that reached nearly to the ceiling spaced evenly throughout the room. The stands were layered ten and twenty deep in just what Jan had been looking for: Oriental carpets.
"So, you've decided what you want, have you?"
The voice came from behind the beads, which parted then, and the old man passed through, a smile wide and bright wrinkling his cheeks.
"This is perfect," Jan said, swiveling from side to side to take at the old man's stock. "I just decided today to find myself an Oriental rug. And these..." she pointed at a predominantly red rug embroidered with greens and blues and golds, "...are beautiful. You really should put up a sign, though. I would never have known this was here except..."
The old man's chill eyes twinkled, and he simply nodded.
She frowned then, and stepped over to lift first one rug, and then the next, trying to un-surreptitiously find a price tag. The old man didn't move, just stood in the doorway before the beads.
"What do the prices on these range?" she finally asked.
He shrugged. "They are reasonable. We can discuss. But first," he nodded to the displays, "look. Look for your heart's desire."
With that, he vanished back from where he'd come, leaving Jan alone in the room filled with carpets. She ran her hands over the velvety fabric, admiring twists and twirls of satiny purple spiced with tangerine, and mauve mated with silver. They were all nice, she thought, turning up one pattern after the next, but always looking for the next, and the next, and one that might be just a little better. More perfect. More her.
And then, in the back of the store, just to the right of a clay pot hoarding a spray of fake flowers, she found it. A white tasseled rug with deep, rich blue runs, veined with burgundy streams and silver accents. Some of the twines doubled back on themselves like paisley paramecia, and others followed twisting threads deeper and deeper into the pattern until they were lost, like creeks run down to their muddy, grass-choked end.
"Yesss," Jan murmured, and jumped when a voice answered her.
"That'd be the one, eh?"
He was standing right behind her. She hadn't heard him approach. With all the carpet hanging throughout the room, sound had a funny way of traveling - or not traveling - there.
"Yes," she said, nodding exuberantly but then slowing her chin, slowing her enthusiasm, thinking of the rent that would be due soon, the rent that still didn't feel comfortably familiar. She still worried that she wouldn't have enough in the bank to cover it, though so far she always had.
"How much?" she asked finally, and the shopkeeper laughed.
"I can tell that this is the one for you, and I want to make sure you have it," he said. "In a regular store, this would go for five or six hundred."
Jan could feel the blood drain from her face and her stomach twist.
"But I certainly didn't pay that much for it, and I know that you probably can't either. So let's find a solution that benefits us both. You get the rug you want, and I clear some space in my store and put some change in the drawer. How does ninety-nine sound?"
Jan couldn't stop her lips from rising. It was more than she should spend, but she knew it was a great deal for a rug of this size, and quality.
"I'll take it," she said.
The old man nodded, as if he'd expected nothing different, and lifted the rug from its hooks.
She'd worry about how she was going to pay for it later.
* * *
Jan shimmied the coffee table back and forth across the center of the Oriental rug. No matter how she positioned it, she couldn't seem to get it quite right. Fin
ally, she hit on lining up the edge of the table with the square turn of one of the burgundy patterns, and gave up. It didn't work centered, and now it was off-center. But it would have to do. Wiping the greasy sweat from her brow with the back of her palm, she collapsed into the comforting cushions of her sofa and stared at the floor.
She traced the curling threads of color with her eyes, following them into the weave like secret trails. She thought of the time she and Jeremy had hiked in the North Woods, and how he'd lost her when she wasn't looking. He'd stepped off the trail to pee, but after several minutes passed, she followed him into the twisted brush and branches to see what was taking him so long. When she didn't find him, she'd returned to the trail to wait, but once there, began to worry that she'd strayed too far from where he'd left her. She'd turned all the way around - 360 degrees - three and four and five times, peered into the quiet dense brush that closed in the narrow dirt trail, and called out his name, first softly, and then with increasing urgency. What if a bear had come up behind him while he was wetting down a tree trunk, and taken off his head with a claw? It could have happened so fast he wouldn't have had time to cry out, and she wouldn't have heard-
"Boo!" Jeremy yelled, leaping out from behind her. He'd doubled back and then waited a bit to pull his stunt.
Jan gasped, grabbed her chest and fell to her knees with the shock, and he apologized, pulling her to her feet and hugging her tightly.
"I thought something had happened!" she cried. "A bear or you fell and broke your leg or-"
"No, baby, no... I just wanted to make you jump. I'm sorry. Didn't mean to freak you out that much."
His words and hugs had turned to kisses and caresses and they'd made love in the bushes at the side of the trail. For a couple weeks after, she'd fantasized that the tryst had made her pregnant, until the bleeding began like clockwork...