by Tony Burgess
“Wanna rotisserie?”
Joseph brings his face down and the smooth floor pools around him.
“Sorry?”
“I got a rotisserie for this. Wannit?” The auctioneer’s teeth are bark brown. He spits. “No charge.”
“Okay.”
The auctioneer blinks for a moment as if he’s never laid eyes on Joseph.
“Okay.”
He turns away to the boy that helps him. “I’m takin’ lunch and gonna run this guy over to my place.”
The kid looks at Joseph, then nods obediently to the auctioneer. The auctioneer omits details and does not like questions.
In the parking lot Joseph walks beside the auctioneer and the auctioneer doesn’t seem to like this. He slows and speeds up to make Joseph look awkward doing the same. He turns abruptly down a row of parked cars and Joseph is forced to step in a puddle. He stops in front of an old red pickup. The bed is ringed by warped wood rails pulled together by heavy wire. Joseph looks back to the arena. It is small now and far away. He notices this and disapproves.
“Where’s your car?”
Joseph goes to answer.
“Get in.”
The door moves as if it’s breaking and it closes as if it can’t. The seat is a red that has faded to pink and the cab smells like uncooked meat. Joseph sits waiting. The auctioneer starts the engine.
They bounce along in silence. Joseph notices the auctioneer’s hands. Swollen and dry, and the wheel glides through his palms. Such soft quiet hands. Like his throat. Pink and petal smooth.
They hit a pothole and the auctioneer’s teeth clap. They are false and he must keep them loose in there.
Joseph thinks: I should put on my seat belt.
They pull up a long mud driveway but there is no house; just a wide low garage.
The auctioneer reaches down as if he’s looking for a parking brake, but he brings up a tire iron. When he hits Joseph across the cheek, Joseph can see the side of his house peeking out from behind the garage. Some trees at the edge are keeping the snow on the ground. Joseph sees a purple curtain fall halfway across the windshield. The auctioneer hits his nose with something and Joseph thinks, That’s right, that’s how to stop me. It’s not so much that Joseph is hurt; it’s that the auctioneer has suddenly switched him off. Joseph’s legs and arms are turning in directions without him.
Oh White Christmas! Oh Mama Mia! Oh!
102 McAllister Street
She’s making an action with her hands. Old blue fingers make beak shapes and stab, biting at something imagined.
“There was none of this stuff.”
Under cottony brows her eyes cross to the centre. She adds a ticking sound.
“This! This! What is this?”
Sam watches, thinks, “This is what makes old people so frightening; they come from outer space.” Mrs. Stanley’s body seizes, then loosens. She is making wide sweeps with her arms, hands tilted in an olden way of conveying elegance.
“But that was not Fay. No. Fay Wray. When the monkey saw her. Oh! Oh! He was taken, well we all were, weren’t we? Fay Wray, all he had to do was, with one finger go, not dancing like this.”
Mrs. Stanley does a deliberately undignified jig, bouncing her shoulders and turning her head.
“And juggling.”
Her son, a large man of forty, in a brand new brown T-shirt, with his back turned. Mrs. Stanley slaps the desk, startling Sam.
“Why do all that? She’s nothing. Not a thing.”
Mrs. Stanley glares violently at Sam. An evil owl defiance. He gestures to the monitor in the corner of the store. Dinosaurs and an ape fighting in vines.
“Didn’t have this.”
Mrs. Stanley leans back, choking, clutching a thin lacey breast.
“Had it all! Had all that. This was in it.”
Sam is aware that a man standing in the horror section has stopped browsing and is still.
“I guess you’re right.”
Her son lays a DVD box on the counter. Hostel. He speaks in a monotone without looking up.
“She lives in the past. Everything was better.”
Mrs. Stanley backs away from the desk and seems to relax. She looks slyly from side to side as if hoping to catch someone watching.
The son stands Hostel on its edge so the cover faces Sam. Sam smiles in a corner of his cheek, and taps his bald head, thinking of what to say.
“Well, the first half is sex and the second half is torture.”
Sam widens his face. Wideness is innocence.
Mrs. Stanley pulls the DVD case, hurting her son’s hand.
“Perfect. I’ll sleep through the sex and he’ll sleep through the torture.”
She jabs the case to her chest, chasing her breasts away.
The intersection is backed up with black trucks. Traffic lights change from orange to red without making a difference. Mother and son in a space-age white van make a left-hand turn. Sun and wind are single, blind and dry. Sprinklers toss party rice across lawns and bent crosses like plague graves hold yellow leaves and hot tomato sacs. Mrs. Stanley sits in the passenger seat with the window down. She looks for scalded children in the shadows. Little new people succumbing in the dark corners. DDT and purple foam and millions of burning pebbles. What made us live forever, she thinks, fills their pointless little ears with cancer. Her son tries to close her window.
“Hey!”
“The AC’s on.”
“I can’t breathe with that thing on.”
“It’s a smog day.”
You expect his voice to be whiny, but it’s not. It’s flat.
“Not a fuckin’ smog day. It’s a goddamn summer day.”
She closes her paper eyelids and pushes her face out.
As they approach the driveway and slow to turn, two children teasing a tethered dog see her in the window of the van. A death’s head. A skull and crossbones on the wide body of a bleach bottle. The van rolls up the driveway, tires snapping dry stones. One of the children has stepped inside the dog’s reach and is bitten on the hand.
Mrs. Stanley enters the house first, backwards up grey steps, like a crab blind in tall grass. The son swings open the van’s side door. He threads seven plastic bags onto his forearm. He stops for a moment and listens to the dog crying as it is struck.
Mrs. Stanley sits, disappears really, into a massive green chair. She is asleep with a remote in her hand pointed at a silent dark television. Cupboards can be heard softly opening and carefully closing. The sound of weight on linoleum. A small cough that needed to be much bigger. Then silence. The son has slipped to another part of the house while the mother sleeps. Sunlight on teacups for about an hour and a half, then as butter on the old face of an old, old clock. It thins eventually; its thinning gains some momentum near the end. Who knows what produces these effects in this ancient house? The lowering sun and ascending earth, the back of a spoon in a stand on the sill and the empty snowball tree rolling to the edge of the yard. Who knows? Late afternoons that grow later and later then, near the end, too distant to see.
She stirs when the light has gone. For a moment she thinks her husband is alive, that she has left something on the stove. She drops the remote, not seeing it, and tries to remember what she had in her hand. Far away, up in the house, footsteps. Someone big. Her husband is a small man. Light-footed. A monkey. Someone bigger is coming down. The boy? She can feel her heart start to bang. Something’s wrong. He just turned eight last week. A yellow cake in the shape of a tire. The floor in the kitchen squawks. A man’s cough. Mrs. Stanley calls out:
“Let’s watch that fuckin’ movie.”
The son stands for a moment in the doorway, then swipes a light switch. The resulting light, a dull orange dome, makes his mad face look tired.
“What about dinner?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I mean me. For me.”
Mrs. Stanley raises a hip then softly returns it. The thought of food has made her release liquid int
o the back of her underwear. She leans to smell herself, then clutches the couch to keep put.
The son sighs and opens the plastic DVD case.
The film begins with women baiting tourist boys by undressing.
The movie is direct with its nudity, European, and the mother and the son both watch to see how much vagina will show. One woman stares squarely into the camera, walking, unselfconscious of her large brown hair. The tiny upside-down shoulders of her vagina roll in and out of view, and if they are at all hidden it is because they point down, not because she hides them. Mrs. Stanley enjoys watching the girl’s slim young sex organ rolling like dough between the twin pins of her thighs. The son is frustrated that more is not shown. It is more than usual; most films only show women’s bums and tits, and even then, they are so briefly seen that they add nothing. This film shows things that are normally found in dirty movies. This overrides all else that might go on or be seen in the movie. The son wants these easy girls to lift their legs up, to pull apart their labias, to draw out into the light that final wet aperture. The son has lost interest in the movie. Wealthy men paying large sums to vivisect tourists in a filthy warehouse. It is something that doesn’t happen in the real world, not like this, our fantasy of women with cocks as big as a gorilla’s and vaginas opening on her, ahead of us, on her arm just before we touch it, and then, like a red stone exposed by a retreating wave, it shows on her face. Of the cocks we keep on our chest, a number spring up like planks and she uses the softer longer cocks on my hips as strings to draw me closer. Soon she is under me, her body waffled by cock dents and our mouths touch like the big balls that sway and meet between the knees of all our cock heroes. I can see them on the pillow as she surrenders, Phallic Boy with his hard orange grin. Asia Tube, Nuts Monster, and Glue Tip are warring with a witch, knocking her down with cock clubs, then crushing her warty face under the unimaginable weight of ancient ball matter.
The old woman lies on the couch while her horny son masturbates in the easy chair beside her. She knows but says nothing, doesn’t look over. She grabs at her shawl as if to protect herself. This slows him for a moment, but not for long. As he orgasms, he accidentally kicks a coffee table leg and spills a glass of apple juice. Mom sits up suddenly, shrieks at him as he squeezes small tabs of semen out onto the back of his hand.
“You spilled my juice all over!”
The son has folded his hands over his penis and his thumbs are trying to drag the bottom of his shirt down.
“Don’t worry! Don’t worry! I’ll clean it.”
He sits up, his manatee body swallows his cock.
“You wanna pause the movie?”
“No. It’s stupid as shit. I’m gonna clean this up and go to bed.”
The son has paused the movie and is sitting forward on his long belly.
“Watch it!”
The haughty son martyrs.
“I can wait.”
In the kitchen, Mrs. Stanley is suffused with rage. “He spills my drink, then pauses the movie I don’t want to watch. I hate this about him. Now he’ll sit in there and wait for me. That shitty movie paused and he’ll sit up as if it hurts to wait.”
Mrs. Stanley holds a folded linen cloth over the spill. Her son doesn’t watch, but she was right, the way he sits conveys both discomfort and grand patience.
“I don’t like this movie.”
Mrs. Stanley’s tone is softer. In spite of intensely disliking her son’s pretenses, she wants to at least get along now. He picks up on this. Weakness.
“Well, you know, you were there when we rented it.”
“I guess I thought you wanted to see it.”
She is dabbing the cloth ineffectively. Lifting liquid, then dropping it back.
“Well, I did. But I’m not, am I?”
Mrs. Stanley looks at the screen. A man in a suit standing by a red drain.
“I’m sorry, you go ahead. I’ll be quiet.”
He waits before releasing the pause button, knowing that this will increase his mother’s anxiety. He’s right, and as the film resumes, Mrs. Stanley rattles the glass as she rights it. The noise is enough for the son to pause the movie again.
In the kitchen, Mrs. Stanley stands at the sink. She wonders who he’s making her be. Could be he’s like his father. Could be he’s like her father. But he’s not. Mrs. Stanley standing at the sink is not Mrs. Stanley sitting on the couch, either. She lifts a long thin knife from the block.
The son isn’t expecting her. The sharp tip of his cock hidden sorely against his palm. He turns angrily, shaking his wet chin red, and says, “Mom, can I watch my fucking movie?”
Mrs. Stanley has tripped, but she is careless of how she might fall, only mindful that the knife go in her son somehow. It does, along his fat arm. So sharp is the knife that the end slips through his soft limb until stopped by bone. The knife stops but she falls past, her own bones weak and endangered. She pushes back up, slapping her flat fingers on the arm of his chair. His eyes are closed and he’s crying, “Ow, ow, ow.” She watches for a moment. Repulsed. Who cries like that when they are stabbed? You have a knife in you and the first thing you think to say is “Ow”? Mrs. Stanley finds new strength in his blubbering. She grabs the knife handle. The intensity of the tremors loosens it from bone. He wails and throws himself over, sobbing.
She drives the knife into his shoulder and he hoots loudly, straightening like a baby in a crib. His red lips are wet with snot and tears and his hands are sticky with cum. He cannot see or grab the knife. The blade slips, farting blood through his fingers. Mrs. Stanley splits the grey back of his penis and, as a tent-pole stretches a tent, the knife stretches the scrotum downward. The scrotum pops open and the imagined contents appear on Mrs. Stanley’s wrist like pink leeches racing to her palm. The son vomits, but remains aware that he should express outrage.
“Mom! Stop!”
Mrs. Stanley stabs again, this time at the vomit on his stomach. She is offended by it and seeks, in jabbing repeatedly and shallow, to colanderize his soft belly, so that the vomit might fall back through. As she stabs like this, popping red corn across his torso, her son is shoving his shirt bottom low with both hands. The knife point gets caught between two hard bones on the back of his hand and, in what is probably the most painful moment, lifts a thin white straw of skeleton clear through the flesh. The son is unable to bear this and he simply passes out. He stops suddenly. The mother is on her knees, breathing heavily, the knife still screwed up into his hand. She watches his breathing for a while, the tiny bloody helicopters on his shirt swooping in closer. He is sleeping now. She wonders if he’s dreaming. Do people who pass out under such circumstances dream? The cloven penis shimmies in her hand and she removes it at the base.
The movie is still on. There is probably thirty or so minutes left. It’s hard to say what’s happening, or even sustain interest. There is a mother on the floor, both ankles shattered and her son’s penis in her hand. It’s hard to pick up the film’s threads. Too exhausted or excited for the movie. Movie about torture and sex might seem part of the scene, but it’s not really, not with the mother’s head low and snoring and the cock socket draining the fat body away. The carpet edge. The slipper bent in half, soaking. The “this kind of thing happens all the time” rumble of the sump pump from below. Happens all the time. Lying on your back nearby, a phone cord between your toes and the smell of those two. So many Americans are fucked up. Lost. Hiding in alligators. Pregnant with filler. Moss hangs off them. Yellow teeth and eyes. The curtains here hang heavy, unmoving. Purple. There are lots of people no smarter than dogs.
102 McAllister Street
At this time of year, late summer, Main Street lines up with the rising sun’s rays. Through the gold air walks ten-year-old Lisa. Her red hair hangs in front of her face. She has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. She would seem rude if you asked her the time. There is a smile on her small red lips. She turns at a sculpture of a Victorian man and woman. It is the Horticulture Society’s Memoria
l to Innocent Victims of Abortion. She has a parasol and he, a tall hat. Some of the stones in the base garden have been loosened deliberately and lie on the path. Lisa steps through them and across Elm to Hickory. Hickory has a sidewalk and is shaded at this time of day and she continues along, even though Elm would be more sensible. Russian sunflowers are lawn monsters in late August. None of the crisp lighter green or sharp citrus colours of spring. Gardens and lawns are plant-gory from protracted sexual wars. Lisa comes to the end of the sidewalk and walks along the edge of sodden ditches that foot properties. She sees something out of the edge of her view. A sleeping dog on bare ground. A policeman sitting on the steps of a side porch. Lisa slows to look. This is Mrs. Stanley’s house. She cannot resist the impulse to march up the driveway. If her mother hadn’t drank continuously throughout the pregnancy then Lisa could have minded her own business. Instead, she approaches the officer.
Officer Shelley turns his rock face to the girl. She is reflected in his mirror shades as an older, thinner woman who bows through the middle.
“Hello, young lady.”
Lisa stops, puts a hand over her eyes and settles all her weight on her left side. She stares down at Shelley. The officer grows uncomfortable, which is something Lisa intends or is entirely oblivious to—either way, her mother should not have kept drinking.