Miscreated

by Dia Reeves

  Jimi shook his head.

  “If this girl thinks you’re a jerk, convince her otherwise. Let her see the real you. Let her see gifts. Lots of gifts.”

  “I’m partial to money myself,” said Giselle. “Or chocolates. Quality chocolate, not that Nestlé crap.”

  César grabbed Giselle from behind. Kissed her exposed neck while she giggled. “That’s not the only thing you’re partial to.” Fortunately he remembered that Jimi was still in the doorway. “Er…” He let go of his wife. “Why don’t you go get Honey from the attic?”

  “Please, Jimi?” Giselle clasped her hands to her bosom. “Can Janis have your bee?”

  “Of course Georgina can have it. What’s a grown boy going on eighteen want with a stuffed toy?”

  César shut the door in Jimi’s face.

  Jimi stood in the hallway a moment longer, head lowered. Then went to his room and switched on the stereo. Chopin’s “Raindrops” seeped from the speakers while he stalked from one end of his room to the other, as though he couldn’t open the window and fly away anytime he wanted.

  Instead of escaping, he dragged the art supply box from beneath his desk. Removed some balsa wood, some heavy-duty black paracord. Since the desk was covered with green thorns and sticky with sap from the project he hadn’t finished, he arranged his supplies on the floor and whittled at least two hundred bees from the balsa wood, and then knotted them into a net made of the paracord, a net that took up all the floor space by the time he was done.

  Jimi grabbed the net, his jacket, his bike and left the house.

  It was dark and cool, a half-moon waxing above the treeline upsquare. A nice night for a long bike ride. Because Honey wasn’t in the attic like his dad thought. Honey was trapped in their old house on Luciérnaga. He rode up the walkway of the ranch house, brick and yellow in daylight, a violet lump at night, at least to Jimi’s eyes.

  He went to the front door and opened it. Porterenes weren’t big on locking up. Or they were like César who made a big production out of locking the doors and windows at night, but left the house key under the doormat for anyone to snatch up and use. When the biggest threat was getting eaten by a monster, things like cat burglary became less than trivial. Jimi wasn’t a monster, no matter what his classmates thought, which is why the charms on the door didn’t fry him as soon as he crossed the threshold.

  Jimi crept through the house. Caught a moth fluttering in the hall. Crunched it between his teeth and didn’t even feel weird about it, mostly because the moth didn’t taste bad. Just creamy and crunchy.

  The hall was lit by a nightlight in the bathroom. In this light, he found the door of his old bedroom and the wooden sign hanging from it, stickered with daisies and decorated with swirly letters: Callie’s Room.

  A kid was in a small ruffled bed, a little girl. A nightlight in here too, like candlelight. Opposite her was a mural Jimi had drawn long ago. He’d used markers and charcoal to create a cave half hidden within lush green foliage. Like something a bear would hibernate in, except this cave had a light at the end of it. Twining among the greenery were tiny pictures. Tinier words. Hastily scribbled in charcoal, barely visible in the dim—

  Light flooded the room.

  The little girl stood by her bed, a firm, easy grip on a baseball bat. She came at Jimi with it, not in the least frightened. Cranky though, like any kid who’d been awoken from sleep too soon and ready to take out her frustration on someone. Jimi, for instance.

  “Callie.”

  She paused, as if surprised he knew her name. She was small and stocky. Brown hair in braids, feety pajamas.

  Bat studded with nails.

  “Callie, I’m Jimi and I didn’t come here to hurt you or your family. I used to live in this house when I was your age, but I had to come back to get something I left behind.”

  “Is it in the cave?” Her voice was soft, because it was late or just because. “There’s something bad in the cave.”

  “I know. I put it there. Now I have to kill it. I was too little before.”

  “Good.” Callie’s grip tightened on the bat, but she was staring at the mural. “I hear noises at night from the cave. Bees. Screaming.”

  Jimi felt bad suddenly. Like with Alexis and her fetus, like his very existence was damaging to little kids.

  “Go to your parents’ room. Or the living room. Somewhere. When it’s safe to come back, I’ll let you know.”

  “Safety is an illusion.” Callie went to her bed and sat on the end of it, stubbornly.

  Jimi decided not to insist and risk her bringing the entire household down on his head. He knelt, putting himself on a level with the cave, which was only as high as his six-year-old self had been. He erased half of the charcoal markings scrawled low on the wall, while higher up, a suck of wind mussed his hair and rattled the curtains. A cold wind. Callie shivered on the bed. Jimi shivered too, holding his breath as he reached into the wall, above the charcoal markings, and encountered no barriers. The leaves brushed his hand, left smears of green ink on his fingers. The swirling darkness of the cave beckoned.

  Jimi stepped into the mural.

  The two dimensional aspect remained; no matter how he rotated, the foliage refused to develop depth. The cave was cramped, sized for a child, but once he cleared it, once he crawled into the light at the end of the cave, Jimi found himself in a huge room. The room of his six-year-old fantasies.

  A race car bed, gaming consoles, a huge TV, a chest overflowing with costumes, a cotton candy machine.

  The cave mural was on the wall in here as well, same light at the end.

  Dirt pressed against the windows, bubbling up through the gleaming floor boards, trickled between the cracks in the vibrant blue walls. The room was beneath the earth, an elaborate casket. A casket that housed a second, smaller casket—the toy chest at the foot of the racecar bed.

  Plain. Wooden. A huge chest that had held so many wonderful toys: board games, SpongeBob LEGOs, Power Ranger action figures. No toys in the chest now; Jimi had trapped the man in there. The Sack Man. Except…

  The chest was wide open.

  “Honey?”

  The clear plastic wing on the bottom of the otherwise empty box. It shouldn’t have been empty.

  Jimi bent to retrieve the wing—Honey’s wing; where the hell was Honey?—and a shove sent him tumbling into the box. Deep inside the box where there was so much more space than appeared from the outside. Infinite space. Jimi felt as small as one of his old Power Ranger dolls. A feeling that only increased when the man peered into the chest. A giant man.

  The Sack Man.

  Gaunt. Starved. Wisps of filthy hair clinging to his inflamed scalp. Gigantic but skeletal. The only excess of flesh was the marsupial pouch at his disproportionately long torso. An appalling stench wafted from that pouch, from the dead children jumbled within.

  The Sack Man leered at Jimi. Nose torn or rotted away, lips slack, no muscle or willpower to keep his grisly mouth closed. Small yellow eyes—same nasty color as his teeth—full of bitterness mixed with hunger. Hunger for Jimi whose flesh prickled as if already being gnawed on.

  “Told you I’d get you.” Such a strange booming voice that added new cracks to the walls. “Rotten little boy. Rotten little tricks. You won’t escape this time.”

  The net.

  Jimi pulled it from the clip at his waist. Fumbled it, as the Sack Man’s slack lips widened to accommodate the apocalyptic stretch of his jaw. The mouth bloomed wide over the toy chest, a carrion flower.

  Jimi was sucked up and swallowed in one gulp.

  If Jimi’s other mother’s home was hell, he didn’t have a word left over to describe this new place. What was worse than hell?

  A smell of sewers and open graves. Infrequent shafts of unsettling light dribbled over arcs of bone. The Sack Man’s ribs did not float as in humans, but were embedded in the fleshy walls of his body. A pair of working lungs way up high. Something dripping from up there, foul and acidic, splashing all
the way down where Jimi perched on a squishy mound made of slowly dissolving flesh.

  The mound drifted slowly in the acid pool, an ill-fated ship doomed to fail in this harsh environment, and Jimi’s flesh would fail with it. Not that he intended to stay long enough to melt.

  Like the toy chest, it was much larger inside the Sack Man than out. Or Jimi had shrunk. He didn’t understand it, but he wasn’t dead. That meant it wasn’t over. Like the Porterene saying, Think about what it all means after you’ve thought about how to get your foot out of its teeth.

  Or your body out of its belly.

  Jimi hopped from one jellied mass to the next until he stood beneath the dribble of light. He removed his shirt and flew up. His back was sore. He’d overworked the muscles flying with Ophelia, was overworking them now as he took care to dodge the unpredictable acid drips, took care to avoid touching any of the Sack Man’s innards.

  Jimi wasn’t the only person who’d traveled this path, though he was probably the only one who’d used wings. The others had climbed. Jimi spied a small skeleton stretched across one of the impacted ribs, its skull propped on a striped pillow.

  Yellow and black stripes.

  “Honey!”

  A twitch. An excitement of fluttering that dislodged the skull, and then Honey shot awkwardly toward Jimi, beating his one wing. Jimi caught him easily, tucked Honey under his arm and flew the rest of the way toward the light’s provenance. He hovered before a thin membrane, yellowy-red and translucent. A fleshy window through which he could see the tangle of dead children. A rotted leg here. A skeletal smirk there. A stiff bony hand pressed to the membrane. Jimi pressed his own hand to it. Through it, clawing open a hole big enough to shimmy through.

  He heard the Sack Man’s screams of pain as he worked. A dim roar, so different outside than in. Jimi passed through the wet tear he’d created, the screams suddenly clear and sharp. Massive hands with putrid fingernails tried to shove him back inside, but Jimi fell free, dead children spilling out of the sack with him as he hit the floor, Honey sliding away toward the cave mural.

  The Sack Man shrieked, holding his belly, the bloodless slit, the hollow universe inside that only children could fill.

  Jimi hurried to the toy chest and reached inside for the net he’d left behind. Reached and reached until his arm no longer felt attached to his body. Felt instead as if it had broken free and was skittering along under its own volition. But it grabbed the net. That was the important thing.

  Jimi wrenched away from the toy chest, and flung the net over the Sack Man who was lunging toward him.

  Jimi whipped to the side, out of reach, and screamed, “Now!”

  The bees woven into the net obeyed him at once and peppered the Sack Man with hundreds of stings. Ophelia was right; he could control winged things.

  Still didn’t give her the right to be mean to him.

  Jimi darted behind the screeching, netted Sack Man and kicked him into the toy chest.

  Jimi flipped the Sack Man’s legs in, crammed him into the tight but malleable chest, stomping on his tightly wrapped body a few times to stuff him deeper inside. Honey’s detached wing had gotten tangled in the net and Jimi worked it free before slamming the toy chest closed. He sat on it. Removed a piece of charcoal from his pocket and drew a keyhole on the lid. Just a drawing, but Jimi’s silver key, the one the Mayor gave to every Porterene at birth, fit it easily. He locked the chest and felt a great weight lift from him.

  Jimi listened to the Sack Man scream for a while, guessed the bees were still stinging him. Maybe they always would—he hadn’t told the bees they were allowed to sting only once, as he’d done with his bumblebee watch. When Jimi felt sufficiently in control of himself, he stood and grabbed Honey from the floor and crawled back through the cave to his old room.

  Callie’s room now.

  She had the strangest look on her face, as she watched him exit the mural. “Are you a fairy?”

  Because his wings were out. Couldn’t even put his shirt on since it was somewhere inside the Sack Man.

  Jimi decided not to be embarrassed.

  “Maybe.” He spat on his fingers and rubbed away the rest of the words and pictures he’d drawn low on the wall. Words and pictures that made no sense to him now, but that had opened a door once upon a time. Little kid alchemy. Jimi checked the wall, but the whole of it was now solid.

  “Were those magic words?”

  “There’s no such thing as magic, but if you want something to happen, it will. I wanted to disappear because my folks were fighting all the time, so I created a special place where I could have fun and no one could find me. Nobody did, except the Sack Man. He looks for kids like I was—sad and alone. I realized I didn’t want to disappear that bad. So me and Honey here tricked the Sack Man. Honey stayed behind to make sure he stayed tricked; he did it to protect me. I promised when I was stronger I’d come back for him, so I did, and now there’s no need for a hidey hole.”

  “I can’t make a hidey hole.”

  “You could if you wanted. I know a girl who can do it. She doesn’t need words and drawings either.”

  “Is she like you?”

  “More like me than anyone.”

  Jimi examined the bee, which had seemed enormous when Jimi was little. Same cashmere softness, same friendly black eyes. Just a toy though, as the mural was just a drawing.

  “Where’s your mom keep her needle and thread?

  “In a basket in the living room. It’s different now.” She was staring at the wall. “I can tell.”

  “Good.”

  “But will you stay til I fall asleep?”

  Kids could be so cute sometimes. Even a kid who’d nearly bashed his head in with a bat.

  “Sure. What’s a fairy godmother for?”

  Later, back at César’s house:

  Jimi sat in the kitchen, still shirtless and wingful, inhaling a plate of cold, fried chicken when his dad came in and switched on the light. Shrieked.

  “What the hell?” He was clutching the lapels of his smoking jacket like a scared grandma. “Why’re you sitting in the dark?”

  “Not dark to me,” said Jimi, mouth full.

  “Were you out? At two o’clock in the morning?”

  “You told me to get Honey. I got him.”

  César raided the fridge for pickles and yogurt. For Giselle, no doubt, whose tastes didn’t extend to caviar. “He wasn’t in the attic? Where was he?”

  “Somewhere. Then I had to clean him up.” Honey was freshly laundered and mended, wing reattached and gleaming.

  “Looks good.” César ruffled Jimi’s hair as he passed by with the pregnant lady snacks. “Hope it wasn’t too much trouble.”

  “It was nothing.”

  Chapter 15

  Jimi leaned on a red Mazda across the street from Ophelia’s house while the rain soaked his clothes and turned her frosty lawn into brown soup. It would be smarter to wear his jacket, to wait on her porch, but he needed his jacket to keep the gift dry, and he didn’t like to be that close to the cobweb tree and its poison fruit. Not without witnesses.

  So he waited out in the rain until, finally, the Rolls pulled into the driveway.

  Ophelia stepped out of the backseat, stony-eyed beneath a ridiculously small umbrella, purposefully chosen so that he couldn’t shelter beneath it or be close to her. He joined her on the walkway anyway, feet squelching.

  “The answer is no.”

  “To what question? I didn’t ask you anything. I wanna give you something.”

  He stopped Ophelia at the porch steps and shoved his wet jacket at her. When she just stared, he unwrapped it to reveal the small square box.

  “I went to Gourmandise, had the chocolatier make it special.” Could she understand him through his chattering teeth?

  She studied the box’s contents: a chocolate, winged girl sat reading a book inside a clear globe. “The details are pretty sharp, aren’t they? Quality stuff, not that Nestlé crap.” He had a sud
den, terrible thought. “You eat chocolate, don’t you?”

  Ophelia went inside, left him out in the rain. But she carried the chocolate with her.

  Again, the next day:

  At least it was sunny. Better for the gift, better for Jimi’s spirits. As he joined Ophelia on the walkway, he actually felt hopeful.

  “Are we friends now?”

  No answer.

  “Was the chocolate too impersonal? You’ll like this better.” He passed her a brown leather diary. “I started keeping it when I was seven. I had a lot on my mind back then.”

  She flipped through the diary, ran her finger over the blocky, grade school scrawl. In ink, not pencil. Blues and reds and purples.

  “It’s not all in English, so you won’t understand a lot of it. And the English that’s there is obscure. I was terrified that someone would read it, so I tried to be as vague as possible. Some of it even I don’t understand anymore.”

  Ophelia tucked the diary under her arm and left him alone once more.

  Again, the next day, on Ophelia’s lawn:

  “Are we friends now?”

  No answer.

  “Did you start reading?” Jimi had spent all night imagining her curled up in her little bubble all alone with his thoughts. “Did it make sense to you?”

  Even though it was a sunny day, it felt gray and chill as she stalked past him without answering, her face not only closed, but crisscrossed with chains. Jimi passed her the gift anyway, a CD he’d mixed the night before. “Listen to this,” he said. “Just in case you’re more of an auditory person. My tito told me once that music was a universal language, and things he couldn’t understand intellectually, he could understand emotionally when it was presented to him in a song. When you understand the kind of music that speaks to me, maybe you will too.”

  She wouldn’t even look at him.

  Again, the next day:

  “Are we friends now?”

  Nothing.

  “Was the music not biographic enough? Do you still feel like you don’t get me? Even after ‘Dance of the Knights’?”

  “Are you trying to drive me insane?” Ophelia stopped so abruptly, he almost crashed into her. “Is that the plan? I should never have let you use that phone.”