“Don’t touch it. He shouldn’t have made you do it. It’s not natural for a man to live without a heart. He told me he’d cut it out, but he shouldn’t have made you help.”
“He couldn’t have finished by himself,” I said.
“He should’ve asked me. I’m his wife.”
After that we washed the dishes in silence. My mother rinsed and I dried everything with a thick cotton towel. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. What woman wants to help her husband cut up his heart?
My mother handed me a tall water glass, but I didn’t grab it in time. It shattered against the floor. We looked at each other and before my mother could say anything, I walked into my bedroom and slammed the door. She could pick up her own mess.
*
By the next week my mother was very cranky with all of us, but my father didn’t seem to feel a thing. He’d gotten in trouble at the hospital where he worked in the maintenance department. He kept bleeding through his blue work shirt. He had tried to stitch up the wound, but did a poor job, so we took him to the doctor.
Everyone at the hospital called my father “Ed.” My mother hated it. She said it made him sound common and boring. The doctor was only a little surprised to hear about his heart. He said he saw this kind of thing every once in a while, but most people didn’t talk about it. Then he cleaned and properly sewed up the wound on my father’s chest. The doctor made jokes the whole time. Apparently, my dad liked to laugh with people at work. He was never like that at home. My father didn’t laugh with the doctor that time. He just stared at the wall.
*
My mother, still angry with me for helping my father, gave me even more chores than normal. Dishes had to be done after supper and breakfast; I had to start picking Freddie up from daycare; I had to wash all the clothes every other day instead of once a week. At night before bed, I had to iron my father’s shirt and put it out for him. Ironing was the one chore I enjoyed, mostly because my entire family left me alone while I did it. I always ironed when my mother was giving Freddie a bath. I’d pour just a little water in, plug in the iron, and stand out on our apartment’s little balcony while it warmed up. Sometimes there’d be a breeze. Sometimes it would be windy and leaves would hurl by in a dust storm. Usually my father would stay in the bedroom, but one night, he sat at the kitchen table smoking his Marlboro 101s while I ironed. My mother hated the smell, but I kind of liked it. It hurt my chest a little and made me want to cough, but the smell was interesting.
My dad had smoked three cigarettes in a row. I pushed the iron down and listened to it gasp. “Why’d you make me help you?” I asked. “Mom’s pissed.”
“I couldn’t do it myself. Your hands are smaller and I was too tired to cut it up.”
“Why not wait for her?”
“She would have tried to stop me,” he said, blowing yet more smoke into the air. It mixed with the smell of chorizo from dinner.
“Why’d you do it?”
“You aren’t old enough to understand.”
I imagined pressing the hot iron into the side of his face and just watching it burn. Would he even feel it?
“Whatever, Dad,” I said. I didn’t want to be around him. I unplugged the iron and set his pressed shirt on the couch. I went into my room and tried to focus on my homework. I fell asleep instead, but the yelling woke me up.
“Why would you make your daughter do that?” my mother asked. “How do you think that made her feel?”
“She’s fine,” my father said. “She’s a good girl and she did what needed to be done.”
It was strange—my father wasn’t yelling. On nights when they’d fought in the past I was surprised no one called the police. His screaming was so loud that even if I took Freddie for a walk, we could hear them a block away. Now, without his heart, he didn’t have any fight left in him. But my mother sure did.
“I didn’t want you to be the way you were,” she said.
“And now?”
“Now, it’s like you’re nothing. You don’t smile, you don’t yell, you don’t cry.”
“You don’t like that?”
“I don’t know,” my mother said.
*
My mother tried to have this fight, and several others, every night for the next week. She would rage and my father would speak quietly or say nothing at all. I could imagine him pouring a glass of Jack Daniel’s and just staring at her while Freddie and I hid in our room. I imagined him trying not to give her the satisfaction of getting angry, but he couldn’t have gotten angry now even if he wanted to.
Freddie would climb down from the top bunk into my bed when my mother screamed. He never cried, though. He just asked lots of questions about why he had to go to daycare and couldn’t come with me to school or why our parents were the way they were. Sometimes he’d ask about the heart-bottle and I’d just pretend I didn’t hear him. Then one night he asked again and I couldn’t help myself.
“It’s Dad’s heart. That’s what’s in the bottle.”
“Cool,” Freddie said. “I mean, that’s gross.” He looked at me and when I didn’t say anything he asked, “How did it get there?”
“Dad cut a hole in his chest and made me pull his heart out. He made me cut it up for him and then stuff it in there.”
“Why?” “
“I don’t know.”
“Sara, can Dad live without a heart?” He put his hand on mine as our mother continued her tirade in the other room.
“I think so.”
“Then why is Mama so sad?”
“I’m not sure if she’s sad or mad or both.”
“Why’d you help him?”
“If Dad asked you to do something, you know you’d do it.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” he said.
Freddie slept in my bed that night. He said he didn’t want to be alone.
*
I couldn’t concentrate the next day at school. In every class I asked for a pass to go to the bathroom. I’d just sit in there for a while, on a toilet where I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone or I’d wander by the lockers and duck down as I passed classrooms so the teachers wouldn’t see me through the windows. During Spanish, I went by the art room. It was empty so I walked around, looking at everyone’s projects. They were working with clay so lots of lopsided pots were spread out around the room. James, one of the annoying white boys who laughed when my friends made fun of me for not speaking Spanish, came through the door.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
James walked over to me and looked into my eyes. For a second I thought he was going to kiss me, but instead he slid his hands over the front of my green dress. I felt embarrassed. Suddenly my boobs seemed so small and I wished that I had waited to let someone touch them. I looked into his face to try and see what he was thinking, but he left without looking at me again. I’d always imagined that when this finally happened, when a boy noticed me, he’d kiss me too. I tried not to think about it as I went back to class because I didn’t know where else to go.
After school, I tried not to make eye contact with any of James’ friends as I walked to the daycare center a few blocks away to pick up Freddie. It was windy again. The yellow leaves rushed along the sidewalk. Pamela, Freddie’s favorite helper, pulled me aside right before I went in. Pamela was old and her boobs were way bigger than mine.
“Have you and Freddie been watching a lot of horror movies lately?”
“What? Why?” I asked, looking up from her chest into her face.
“Well, he was asking about zombies and said something about your father keeping his heart on the kitchen table? He really frightened some of the smaller children,” she said as she pulled her sweater closer to her body. The sun wasn’t setting yet but the air was becoming chillier. We’d have to walk home fast.
“Oh, right. We did watch a zombie movie the other day. That’s completely my fault. I’ll talk to him,” I said.
; As we walked home, Freddie grabbed my hand. I wanted to shake him off, wanted to say: You’re going to have to learn how to take care of yourself someday. But I didn’t.
“Dude, you can’t tell people about Dad, okay?”
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s nobody else’s business and they won’t understand anyway,” I said.
“Because Dad’s a zombie.”
“Seriously? No, Dad is not a zombie.”
“Then what is he?”
“He’s just Dad. He cut his heart out because he’s weird and sad.”
“I think he did it so he won’t be mean, anymore.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But if he can’t be mean, then he can’t be nice either, Freddie. He can’t really be anything.”
We turned onto our street and walked toward the apartment complex. We could hear yelling. It was definitely Mom, which didn’t make sense. Neither of my parents should have been home from work yet. My mom worked at the hair salon until six every night except Sundays. Did they come home just to fight or did something happen? Freddie tightened his grip on my hand.
“Sara, let’s not go home.”
“I can hear your stomach rumbling. We’re both hungry. Maybe if we go home they’ll stop fighting.”
“That never works,” he said.
I thought about maybe taking him to the park, but as we got closer I could hear my mom.
“I should have been the one to help you! You shouldn’t have made one of our children do it.”
“I needed help. I didn’t want you to do it. I couldn’t give you the satisfaction, Izzy. Now you’ll always feel this and I won’t feel anything, just like you said.”
My mother’s voice became high-pitched, and we could barely make out what she said even as we got closer.
“Let’s not go in,” Freddie said.
I opened the door and my mother turned to look at us. She had rubbed most of her makeup off, but she wasn’t crying anymore. My father just sat on the couch, smoking.
“This is how it had to be, Izzy. You said you wanted a better man. Now I am one.”
I dragged Freddie past my parents into our room.
“Stay in here, okay? Just color or something and I’ll make you a sandwich.”
“Sara, don’t leave me in here.”
“I’ll be right back.”
I didn’t look at my parents as I walked into the kitchen. My mother kept yelling about everything. How was she supposed to spend the rest of her life with a man who had no feeling? Now he didn’t love her. My father kept saying he was sorry, repeating it like a chant. My mother screamed that he didn’t mean it.
I got a paper plate out as fast as I could. I slapped some bologna and American cheese on bread, added a squirt of mayo and mustard. I headed for our room and left the kitchen just in time to see Freddie walking to the balcony with the heart-bottle.
“I want you to still be my dad,” he said.
Freddie threw the bottle off the edge of the balcony. It landed with a crash as it split open. Jagged glass and black meat were scattered everywhere, dark purple oozing and pooling in the cracks on the sidewalk. I grabbed Freddie’s hand in my own as my parents came to stare off the edge of the balcony at the leftovers of my father’s heart.
“Go get the pieces,” my mother said.
Freddie put the pieces in a bowl and carried them back upstairs. I got on my hands and knees and scrubbed at the dark stain with bleach. It started to rain and still the stain wouldn’t come up. Even though I was freezing, I must have scrubbed for at least an hour. I dreaded going back inside, but when I did, everyone had gone to their rooms.
The bologna sandwich I made sat on the living room table. I went into our bedroom and Freddie was already in bed. He rolled over and threw the blanket off as soon as I shut the door.
“Did you see that?” he asked.
“What the hell were you thinking?”
“Dad, didn’t even get mad and nothing happened to him. He’s like invincible.”
“Damn it, Freddie! Just eat your dinner,” I said. “You’re going to be in so much trouble when Mom finally comes to deal with you.”
“But nothing happened,” he shouted.
“That’s never stopped Mom from yelling at us before.”
Freddie climbed down from his bunk to get his sandwich, and I got under the covers in my bed. I pulled them right up over my head. I was so angry. We were lucky Dad didn’t have a heart anymore. Lucky he couldn’t have felt mad or done anything to us. Who knew what Mom would do. But she never came in our room.
I woke up after midnight shivering—I’d fallen asleep still in my wet clothes. The door to our bedroom was ajar. Freddie wasn’t in his bed. I flicked the bathroom light on. He wasn’t in there. I ran to the kitchen and turned the light on. Not there. That’s when I saw my mom sitting on the couch in the living room.
“Where’s Freddie?” I asked.
My mother said nothing, but looked at the kitchen table. I followed her gaze and felt as if my whole body was tumbling through space. A second bottle—less full and containing smaller chunks—had joined the bowl of my father’s shattered heart-bottle pieces on the table.
“Your father asked me to help him this time,” my mother said. Her hand shook as she lifted a glass of whiskey to her lips.
“I guess you got what you wanted,” I said, sitting next to her on the couch. I hated myself for saying this, but I had to. I squeezed her bloody hand. Did we do this? Was this our fault? I tried not to think about what would happen to us now that we were two women alone in a house with men who weren’t really men anymore.
KATHLEEN KAYEMBE
You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych
ISOBELLE:
THE WHISPERS OF DOGS
Uncle says there’s a pit bull in Mbuyi’s old room, but he’s lying, and his eyes are scared. Dogs aren’t pets in Congo, they’re for guarding—it’s why Dad never got us one, and how I first knew Uncle had no pet dog. I tried to learn what he was hiding, but the more I asked questions, the worse his lies got, until I finally asked if I could just see the dog, and Uncle snapped. His fear and frustration exploded into an angry lecture about respecting my elders; and how I’m too much like spoiled American kids; and that I’d better be careful—no self-respecting man wants a woman who badgers him with questions, and that’s true no matter what country you’re from.
I bore the tirade in silence, which my American friends didn’t understand. Dad and Uncle were close friends in Kinshasa; although he’s not blood, he’s family, and his lectures carry near-parental weight. His French and Sociology lectures at UMass are far more pleasing, of course, but to hear Uncle at his best, watch him gather folklore. Once he’s turned in spring grades, he travels the country collecting stories of other people from Congo, living off of grants for the eventual book these stories will become, and on the hospitality of those he interviews. Uncle records oral histories, conducting interview after interview and transcribing them.
Uncle loves stories about The Way Things Were—my favorites— but he loves stories of the old religions and witchcraft more. Those are the stories my grandparents never told their children except through actions and naming, and superstitious talk in outdoor markets with other adults about rain and harvest and what evil magic can be done to you if you don’t properly dispose of your hair when it is cut, and a witch gets hold of it.
Those are the stories Uncle is really seeking. They’re what made him lean forward in his seat, dark eyes narrowing and hands stilling over the scuffed cherry wood of our kitchen table. He didn’t look down at his list of questions the entire time Dad and Aunt Ntshila talked about their strange dreams the week before my grandmother died. He listened—really listened—when they told him their mother had asked them to gather all of her children and bring them back home. When Dad said sometimes he feels her spirit with him, Uncle even seemed to understand.
I watched Uncle as avidly as he watched them.
; And then I watched him lie about the dog shut in the upstairs bedroom. I watched his fear when I stood on the stairwell to move my suitcase from his path. I watched his panicked insistence that I stay closed in the office bedroom from midnight until dawn whenever I slept over.
Something makes noise in Mbuyi’s old bedroom, but I know it is not a dog.
I climbed the stairs once, to the second floor of Uncle’s apartment, when he left to buy goat meat to teach me to cook. I wanted to see what was up there, but in case he asked, the downstairs bathroom— mine for the summer—was out of clean towels, and they are stored in the upstairs hall closet. I climbed the wood stairs, black twisted railing under my hand wobbling the whole way up, and stairs creaking under my feet. I stood at the closet door with closed bedroom doors on either side of me. On the right was Uncle’s bedroom. On the left was his son Mbuyi’s room, before Mbuyi disappeared.
Now it is the dog’s room, Uncle says.
But dogs don’t bang on doors with the sound of a shoulder or a fist. Dogs don’t rasp obscenities in jagged French with a voice as sweet as sugar cane. Dogs don’t make fear rise up in your bones from somewhere so deep you didn’t know it was there. They don’t make you afraid to turn away from whatever space they could inhabit, or to sit with your back to the door they are behind, or to close your eyes—even to blink—for fear they will be in front of you when your eyes open again. They don’t fill your chest to bursting with a haze of adrenaline and sluggishness. The whispers of dogs are not meant to haunt our dreams.
I never did open that door.
That night, like every night, Uncle said, “This is an old superstition,” and he blessed me with wrinkled fingers pressed to my forehead, hung a necklace of beads on the lintel, said goodnight, and gently closed the door. That night, the summer of my freshman year at UMass, Uncle’s odd superstition suddenly held new meaning—and wasn’t enough. I locked my door. I spent that night huddled on the futon in the downstairs office, for once all too happy not to open my door until dawn, even if I had to go to the bathroom. I wait to lock it now until I hear him moving upstairs; I don’t want to seem rude. I also don’t want to sleep with the door unlocked while something lives up in Mbuyi’s old bedroom.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 5