Child of Dirt
by John F. D. Taff
It started with dreams, dreams that were not dreams but nightmares.
She awoke one morning, earlier, bouncier than usual.
She’d awakened him, a rarity since she usually worked nights, and he found himself kissed lasciviously.
"Hey, whoa! Slow down, slow down!" he yelped, amused, aroused, confused.
"That’s not what you wanted last night," she said, kissing him deeply, in a way that she hadn’t kissed him in ages, that he hadn’t allowed himself to be kissed.
"What are you talking about?" he asked, her face so close that she breathed in his question.
"Last night, you were...incredible! I mean, at first I was tired, but well...wow!"
She shot a hand under the covers that at first lingered, then became provocative. Just as he was about to let her continue, she pulled free, patted his chest.
"Now, I think you deserve a nice breakfast before you go to work."
He lay there as she left the room, trying to figure out exactly what had happened, then threw the covers back. As he turned to roll out of bed, he noticed the sheets on her side were soiled, dark splotches on their butter yellow.
He drew a finger across one. It smelled of earth and stagnant, brackish water, and he frowned, wiped his finger on the already soiled sheet.
- - -
After breakfast, he started upstairs to grab his suit coat. He went to the staircase, his hand on the newel post, when he saw something on the runner, an indistinct, dark smear. It went all the way up, a meandering line that marred the clean, beige carpet. He wiped a hand across it, came away with a smudge of dry mud. His eyes drifted from the hallway to the family room.
He followed the trail to the sliding glass doors opening onto the deck. He pressed his nose to the glass, saw the mud cross the deck, disappear down the half dozen or so steps that led to their backyard. His gaze wandered to where the property dropped off, behind a thin screen of birches and scraggly forsythias, to a storm drain behind the house.
And he saw, thought he saw, branches between two of the forsythias that looked broken, pushed inward...as if someone...something had...
- - -
A few weeks later, he woke early, the sun barely over the horizon and the sky deepest, darkest blue. Light seeped from beneath the bathroom door. As he closed his eyes, he heard the door open, the scuff of it against the carpet. Vaguely, he waited for her weight to settle on the bed.
"Honey? You need to wake up to hear this. Honey?"
"Mmmm, OK," he groaned, rolling over.
She stood silhouetted in the doorway still in her sleep clothes, a tattered Ramones T-shirt from a concert years earlier.
She was holding something, a little white plastic stick she twirled in her right hand.
"I’m pregnant," she cried, then cried literally, tears spilling down her plump cheeks, onto Joey Ramone’s faded face.
She leapt into bed, the box springs groaning. She covered his face with sloppy, tear-smeared kisses. She blurted words at him at dizzying speed, and he was unable to sort them out. "...baby...parents will be freaked! ...the room...doctor...vitamins... names...girl...boy..."
Without lifting his head from her shoulders, he muttered, "Were we trying?"
"You can get pregnant even if you’re not trying," she said, then kissed his earlobe as if forgiving this question.
"But we haven’t...ummm...even...I mean, when’s the last time we even made love?"
She pulled from him, looked at him carefully.
"Remember, a few weeks ago, after I got home from the late shift?" she asked, wiping tears on the corner of her t-shirt. "You came into the shower with me?"
He remembered that while they did do various exciting and pleasurable things, he was sure, absolutely sure that nothing they had done could possibly have resulted in a pregnancy.
But he simply nodded, kissed her.
Her chubby face lit up in a way that didn’t just tug at his heart, but tore at it.
"Our baby," she said, the tears coming again. "Our baby."
Our baby, he thought. Our baby.
- - -
"Here, here," she said, hands fluttering over her expanded stomach. "He’s kicking. Give me your hand...your hand!"
He felt the hard, gourd-like arc of her belly through her maternity top, felt the rise and fall of her breathing, could even feel her heartbeat, faint and tremulous. But no flutter, no twitch, no greeting from whatever floated within there.
"Nothing."
"Well," she huffed. "He was doing the mambo a minute ago." Grabbing his hand and hiking her blouse up, she placed it onto her taut, bare skin. His hand splayed across it, as if palming a basketball, one finger resting on the nub of her belly button.
"Talk to him. Let him hear your voice."
Feeling ridiculous, he lowered his head until his lips grazed her skin. "Ummm, hi, baby. It’s daddy..."
He barely got that word out when the tight skin of her belly stretched like a drumhead, something moving across it like the wake of a boat on water. It stretched and rippled, took on a shape...
...the shape of a small face.
It strained against the skin of her abdomen, lunged at him like a snapping dog. Her skin draped over its blunt, blindly searching features like a wet sheet, filled the tilted hollows of its eyes, stretched across the small open "O" of its mouth.
"Jesus Christ!" he screamed, sprawling off the couch, banging his head on the corner of the coffee table.
"Teeth," was all he could say before he passed out.
- - -
Three months, fifteen days later.
They race to the hospital, he driving, she in the passenger seat, huffing and puffing. He lets her hold his hand, but doesn’t allow her to place it on her belly. Too caught up in the throes of her labor, she doesn’t notice.
She is on a bed, mostly nude with sheets draped over her. Her thick, columnar legs are splayed, raised slightly, and she is screaming, screaming and sweating, sweating and cursing.
The thing slips from her, slides out of her curtained womb on a gush of amniotic fluids, screaming, screaming.
And then the thing that was his son, the empty, shriveled thing attached to the cord, comes out like a deflated balloon.
The doctors say it was the placenta, must be the placenta.
But he sees their faces, those of the nurses, sees the horror there, the confusion.
It isn’t the placenta.
It is his son, his real son.
This thing, this hideous thing is the son of another...
The doctor holds the thing aloft, and he sees, thinks he sees a look of vague concern cross the man’s face, a little frisson of discomfort.
"Would you like to cut the cord, dad?"
As if entranced, he steps closer, numbly takes the clunky pair of hospital scissors a nurse gives him, reaches out to place the rubbery, braided thing between its two blades.
But its cries increase in volume, rise in pitch as he approaches. Its dark eyes fix on him, and it sees him, he knows it sees him and doesn’t want him anywhere near.
Its mouth stretches open, open wide enough for him to see those teeth, those teeth he’d seen months earlier pressed against the skin of his wife’s belly.
His hand shaking uncontrollably, he drops the scissors.
They clatter to the floor, barely ahead of him.
- - -
Home.
He cannot be brought to touch it, and when he even comes near, it cries, wails as if his very presence is an affront.
She gives him moist, sorrowful glances, but can offer no explanation, no comfort.
He can’t get back to work quickly enough, and she knows this. At the door on his first day back, he barely pauses to peck at her upturned cheek.
It is pressed to her, wrapped in blankets. He glances at it, sees that its eyes are focused on him as he leans in to her, sees its beady little eyes tracking him, as if measuring the distance to his t
hroat.
He pulls away, turns and leaves the house.
- - -
Crying in the night.
She doesn’t stir, doesn’t act as if she hears this at all. Perhaps this is a test, he thinks, propped on one elbow and watching her. She is testing him to see if he will be a father and go see what is wrong.
Then, it strikes him that he is crazy, insane to think the things that he does.
How can he hold himself separate from her...from him...any longer?
And how can he possibly think that the child is anything other than what it is?
His child.
The crying, the teeth...all in his head...in his head, made up by him to avoid the responsibility, the love, the tie to him, to her.
Sometime during the course of his thoughts, the crying has stopped and the house is silent.
He stands in the hall and listens, hears only his own heartbeat, his own breathing.
The door is ajar and he sees the yellow glow of the Winnie-the-Pooh nightlight she’d installed so that it wouldn’t be there alone, in the dark. The light throws lengthy shadows of the mobile that hangs above the bed, strange, spidery shapes that creep up the walls, straddle the ceiling.
And he hears it in there, in its crib cooing, cooing like a real baby.
He pauses in the partially open doorway, listens to that sound, and it reaches into him and finds a soft, unguarded place that brings tears to his eyes.
My son, my boy!
He pushes the door open, and the baby’s cooing stops as if cut by a knife.
And that awful certainty comes back.
How could it know it was him?
He tiptoes to the crib’s side, peers in.
The baby, in a plain white onesie, lays on its back, glares at him with malice and hatred so fervid that the air around the crib seems hot, infected.
But that could not be, what he was seeing was not so.
And then it moves, shockingly, unexpectedly moves, rolls over and pulls itself upright, its chubby little hands grasping the crib’s slats, hoisting it until it stands, stands on its two wobbling little legs.
Eyes, hot with rage, steam at him, and that little mouth works, open and shut, open and shut, snapping impossible teeth at him, impossible and sharp.
He takes a step away, falters, his heart freezing like a cowed animal in the den of his chest.
It shrieks then, shrieks with a terrible, maddened, high-pitched tone that echoes in the small nursery.
Instantly, she is there, at his side, pushing past him.
She reaches into the crib and picks it up, gently cradles it to her.
"Shhh," she coos, the shrieks still hanging in the room. "Mama’s here, mama’s here."
Though quiet, it glares at him, its eyes still roil with rage.
And he looks away, lowers his eyes to the carpet, to the carpet in front of the crib.
There, he sees something that makes his bladder feel loose and cold.
A patch of dirt, as if...as if someone, something had stood there, came there at the child’s cries to comfort it.
Numbly, he turns, sees that the dirt is connected to a rough, wavering line that leads across the carpet, back from the side of the crib to the door behind him.
Distantly, as if in a dream, he hears, thinks he hears, the whisper of the sliding glass door downstairs closing.
He does not, not once, entertain the thought of going downstairs to see what it was.
- - -
Nothing but to leave.
He moves out the next morning.
There are tears, a lot of them, some of them even his.
But he is determined and will not be swayed.
"I’ve done everything for you," she says, and he agrees, knows that this is true. I’ve given you a son...a beautiful son!"
"No," he says, simply shaking his head. "No."
"No?" That. Again.
"No. Not mine. That is not mine." And he points at it...yes, it again...and shudders when it turns to him, follows him with eyes that shouldn’t do what they do, see what they see.
Not yours? Her mouth moves silently around these words.
"It hates me. How can you not see that?"
"He’s just a baby. It’s just a phase. He’s yours, of course he’s yours. Who else’s would he be?"
He takes the handles of the two suitcases he’d packed. "I don’t know. I don’t want to know."
"This is crazy," she wails at him as he opens the front door. "He’s our baby...your baby."
"It may be a baby. It may be your baby. But it isn’t mine. I know it...and it does, too."
- - -
It’s not crazy if you think it is.
That’s what he tells himself, what he repeats in his mind as he drives out to pick it up, to take it with him for the day.
She smiles, not nervous, not concerned, but gratefully, lovingly, as she hands over the pumpkin seat, the bag stuffed with diapers and ointments, with bottles and powders and wipes and toys.
It, though, does not smile.
It, in fact, looks worried, begins shrieking as soon as the handle is passed from her to him.
But he coos down at it...him...coos and shushes it gently, but does not reach to touch it, to comfort it.
He knows she watches from the window as he straps the pumpkin seat into the car, closes the door.
She blows him a kiss.
And he returns it because he loves her, and for the first time he is sure, absolutely sure of that single emotion, which had been so unfaithful to him in the past, so apathetic.
He waves to her again, a smile spread across his face, sees his face reflected in the rearview mirror, ghastly, stretched taut.
He remembers it pressing through the skin of her abdomen, stretching.
- - -
Down the hill, not too steep.
It has grown silent, its screaming has ceased. It watches him with careful, intense eyes as he undoes the buckle, lifts the seat from the car.
He is two blocks behind his own house, and he sees it at the top of the hill, where the land falls off, on the other side of the birches and forsythias. He is able to manage the descent while carefully holding the pumpkin seat at his side.
Gaining the bottom of the little valley, he looks around. A thin stream snakes from the mouth of the storm drain. There is a wedge-shaped concrete apron that juts from the bottom lip of the storm drain as it emerges from the side of the hill. Dirty, scummy water trickles from it, choked with weeds and debris.
He sets the pumpkin seat onto the concrete apron, peers into the dark recesses of the storm drain.
Six, ten feet in, it swallows the light, and he sees no farther. Nothing but the circular concrete walls of the pipe and the thin ribbon of dirty water that trickles down its center.
It contemplates his every move sitting there in the pumpkin seat, wearing its little Oshkosh bib overalls, its little fake tennis shoes. Its eyes follow him, wondering what he is going to do next.
He reaches out, and it starts, its eyes widening, and it hisses, hisses catlike, venomous.
But he grasps the clasp of the harness that holds it, releases it, removes the straps.
It remains motionless for a time, then shrugs off the harness, lifts itself from the seat...
...stands.
Stands on two tiny legs that neither shake nor falter as they bear its weight.
It moves with a speed, a fierceness that takes him by surprise. He feels those tiny, sharp teeth close on his arm, and there is a hot, needlelike pain, the warmth of blood spilling. He feels its tiny tongue lapping, lapping at the blood.
He grabs it with all his strength, pulls it from him, hurls it away.
The tiny body flies through the air, strikes the edge of the concrete apron, flops to the wet ground, lies there stunned.
Dear God, what have I done? What have I done?
Unafraid now, he takes it...him...in his arms, lifts him from the muck, clasps him.
Wh
at was I thinking? What have I done? I can’t have...can’t have...
He stumbles, his back to the storm drain, still holding him tightly clasped, smelling the downy hair on his head, feeling the sticky wetness of his face and hoping, praying that it was mostly mud.
After a moment, when his anxiety subsides, he lifts him to get a good look at the boy, at his son. There is some blood, not a lot, a bump on his forehead that is turning black-purple.
But that isn’t it, isn’t it at all.
He smiles at him, at his father, smiles like a baby boy, a child is supposed to. Color suffuses his cheeks, and his eyes twinkle merrily. Then he laughs, and it is like clean water, the laughter of a baby, innocent and full of pure delight.
And his heart leaps to see it, to hear it, to know that it isn’t too late, that he hasn’t done anything yet he can’t take back.
Of course this was his child.
But then he notices he...it...isn’t looking at him, isn’t laughing for him, smiling at him.
It is looking behind him, into the darkness of the storm drain.
He doesn’t turn, doesn’t want to know.
But he hears it behind him, slithering behind him in the mud and brackish water of the drainpipe.
Hears it hiss gently, not at him, but at the child...its child.
Feels its breath, cold and spoiled on the back of his neck.
Last of all, hears the child say its first words as it throws its arms wide for an embrace.
"Da-da."
The Catman Blues
by Leisa K. Parker
Okay so the blues are the blues and a cat is a cat and so what about that? Well I’ll tell ya what. Cause sometimes things aren’t always what they seem. Like on that strange night in August when the winds were howling and I was counting out receipts at my back corner table and he rolled in. The Catman. Into my JazzHut on open mic night and I didn’t know what to think. After all, the evening had already been pretty odd-ass-weird as it was. For starters, not one of my regulars was to be found. Not one. Not fat ole man Jake, who reeked of gin and tonic and was usually slumped up over the jukebox punching at the same old tired song. Again and again and again. Or old Sheila-blue hunched up at the bar and sucking 'em down like there was no tomorrow. J.D. and cokes through a red stirring straw. Sucking at the ice with those thick slurpy sounds. Her eyelids drawn. And if that wasn’t weird enough, those two lushes not around—the place was hoppin'. Cause truth be told, this ain’t exactly a hoppin' type of joint. Just the way I like it, mind you. And maybe that’s why my regulars weren’t around either. Not after getting' an eye-full of all the traffic tonight. Not that you could actually get an eye-full, what with all the curtains of smoke hanging in the air and the blown out bulbs. But it was more than that. Cause the place just smelled different too. Not like dirty ashtrays and stale booze and even staler people. No, it was musty and wild and kinda classy. If that makes any kind of sense. Kinda like the way an ole hay barn would smell if there were a bunch of pricey perfume counters scattered about. Those crazy perfume broads chasing you down, kicking up dust and hay. And then throw in some just rolled Cubans, some wafting champa, and slick hairdos. Sweet and thick and earthy. Kinda like that. And then, as if all that wasn’t odd enough, there was him.
One Buck Horror: Volume Three Page 2