by Dima Zales
“So, I saw someone new downtown yesterday when I was taking pictures. Short, balding African American guy with a slender build. You know who he is?”
Suzanne shook her head, looking intrigued. “No, I haven’t run into him yet. Did he move up from Chicago?”
Folks here always seemed to think any black person they encountered was probably “up from Chicago.” It was one of those things that gave me Dorf-claustrophobia.
Then I remembered how the picture had creeped me out the night before. Maybe I wasn’t any better myself.
“I don’t know. I didn’t actually talk to him. I just saw him walking in front of J.T.’s.”
“Sure it wasn’t Grange Consecki or Bob Garter?”
Bob and Grange were the only African American men who lived in Dorf.
“No, he was way shorter than them, and he was really thin. And his skin was darker.”
“Like a Hershey bar?”
“No, more like licorice.”
I did not just say that. Oh my god, what’s wrong with me?
“Huh. Well, I’ll ask around and see who he is,” Suzanne said. Then she winked. “You know Twanda will want to hear if there’s a new man in town.”
Twanda Sullivan was the only single African American woman in town.
Great. Now Suzanne would talk to Twanda, and Twanda would think I thought she wanted to jump every black man who walked through town, no matter who he was. Why did I bring this up? I needed a fire alarm, so I could escape in the chaos. Or maybe a fistfight. Suzanne would forget all about the mystery man if that happened.
Unfortunately, no one chose that moment to faint or moon us or do anything else the slightest bit distracting.
“Well, we’ll just see,” Suzanne said, looking like I’d put her on the hunt.
Thank god I hadn’t included the nudity thing. That would’ve had her asking every person in town about him, for sure, and probably calling the cops, too.
It took another twenty minutes to get out of Pete’s. I drove home feeling especially shitty for reasons I couldn’t exactly put my finger on — some combination of acute racial embarrassment, Justine’s outburst, and a nebulous sense of anxiety.
Since the light was better that afternoon than it had been the day before, I picked up my camera and drove out to the old cemetery behind St. Mary’s. I shot a whole bunch of pictures. It made me feel better, tamping down my anxiety, as it often did. After that, I headed to the grocery store. There’d be time that evening to hit the computer and get a better look at the images I had taken.
I stood there holding a photo of a nineteenth-century grave marker. The eroded carving wasn’t legible in the picture, but I’d looked at the stone many times and remembered what it said: “Daught. Died Dec. 25, 1859. Aged 2 yrs. 9 ds.” It was such a strange, sad monument. It offered no name for the dead child, yet told us exactly how long she had lived and that she had passed on Christmas Day.
This time, I hadn’t noticed the problem onscreen. I’d printed the picture, expecting nothing unusual. But holding the print, I could see that someone had again walked right by as I took the shot. He’d passed no more than a couple yards in front of me, leaving the frame just as I opened the shutter. His foot, ankle, and a little bit of calf were plainly visible, flexed like he was pushing off for his next step.
There had been no one besides me in the cemetery, certainly not that close to me.
I went and stood right under the bright naked light bulb suspended from the ceiling near the washer and dryer.
The foot was huge and bare. Its pale blue skin was patterned with gray, donut-shaped blotches. It had jagged, horny toenails.
It was a monster foot. Strike that. It was a cliché of a monster foot. If someone had asked me to imagine a monster’s foot, that’s what it would’ve looked like.
It had to be some kind of joke. But how? I couldn’t think of any way someone could’ve gotten the foot into the picture.
I looked again at the print. I could see the tendons and muscles of the lower leg flexing. It wasn’t just some rubber Halloween-costume foot someone had dangled from a tree.
The basement walls started pressing in on me, and my breathing sped up. I backed up to the wall and sat down on the floor. I gave the rubber band on my wrist a hard snap and started focusing on breathing more methodically. In, out, pause. In, out, pause. Slowly, the room stabilized.
I groped for an explanation. There had to be one.
Someone had tampered with my camera. A joke, maybe. April Fools’ Day had been, what, a week ago?
But how? No one could’ve known I’d be taking pictures at the cemetery today. Besides, even if someone else had put the monster-foot image on my camera’s card, the one I took of the gravestone would be on there too.
Some kind of hacking thing, maybe? But I didn’t have internet service.
I looked down at my computer, which was Ben’s latest castoff. Someone could have connected it to the net wirelessly without my knowledge. Maybe someone was controlling it remotely at that very moment, grabbing my images and altering them as soon as I uploaded them.
I pushed my chair back from the desk, then immediately felt silly. What did I think they were going to do? Reach through the monitor and grab me?
How could they have gotten into my house to monkey with my computer, anyway? And who would do something like that? I didn’t think anyone I knew would go to the trouble of such an elaborate prank. I didn’t have the kind of friends who would enjoy making me freak out and then laughing about it with me later, and I didn’t have enemies committed enough to go to so much trouble.
There was Justine.
I remembered that look she’d given me at church.
I’d never thought of her as an enemy, per se. She’d been more in the category of “family you can’t stand, but they’re still family.” Maybe I’d been wrong, though. Ben and I co-owned the house, so he kept a key. Justine could’ve used it to get in. She didn’t work during the day, so there’d have been plenty of opportunity.
But could she have set up some elaborate computer prank? It didn’t seem likely.
Someone could’ve helped her.
I studied the print again. The grass the foot was stepping in was of a piece with all the rest of the grass in the picture: dead, wet, and a bit too long to look well kept. The foot was wet and had little bits of sodden grass stuck to it. It looked real.
Maybe I was hallucinating. The naked guy had also apparently walked right in front of me, and I hadn’t seen him. That image looked real, too, but maybe it wasn’t.
Serious mental illness often emerged in your early twenties, right? And I already had one — panic disorder. Maybe that put me at risk for others.
But if I really was hallucinating, wouldn’t I believe I wasn’t?
I slid the photo under the keyboard and sat there, rubbing my hands on my jeans. I couldn’t get rid of the clamminess. I tried to come up with another plausible explanation for the monster foot, but the more I thought about it, the more my chest tightened up.
Finally, I pushed the whole issue away, and my mind settled into a fragile state of blankness. Carefully not thinking about the photo, I went upstairs, got in bed, wrapped my arms around my tattered childhood bear, Sniggles, and willed myself asleep.
I woke up with a plan. It was so simple I should’ve thought of it the night before. I would show the weird pictures to someone else and see if they saw what I saw. If they did, then I wasn’t going crazy, and it was just a matter of finding out who was messing with me, and why. And how.
2
“What is that?” Janie said, scrunching up her nose adorably. She was holding half of her BLT in one hand and the cemetery picture in the other.
Since it was just the three of us in the office, Dr. Nielsen always closed up for an hour at lunchtime. Janie and I usually ate at our desks to save money, but every other Monday, we went to Pete’s. I’d put my possibly hallucinatory photos in a folder and brought them along.
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br /> Clearly, she could see the monster foot. Some clenched-up thing inside me loosened. I quietly slid the other photo — the one of J.T.’s with the mystery man — back into the folder. If the foot wasn’t a hallucination, surely Mr. Streaker wasn’t either.
“I’m not sure. Someone must be pulling my chain, but I can’t figure out how. Any ideas?”
“Dunno.” She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Are you sure you didn’t Photoshop it?”
“Of course I’m sure. I don’t even own the program.”
“Huh. Someone must’ve been at the cemetery, and you didn’t notice them.”
“But they would’ve been so close to me. How could I not have seen them?”
“Huh.” Janie turned the print this way and that. “What do you think, Jackie?”
I hadn’t realized our waitress was standing behind me. Jackie, a tall, spare redhead, came around to look at the picture. She rolled her eyes.
“Gimme a break. It’s some guy wearing a costume.” Jackie looked me up and down, not very flatteringly. “You must’ve been zoning out, and he snuck up on you.”
I blushed at the implication that I was spacey. Then I got embarrassed at blushing so easily, which made me blush more. Jesus, I was such a dork sometimes.
“I only knelt there for a few seconds to get the shot. I don’t see how someone could’ve snuck up on me that fast without making noise.”
“Well, if you’re not paying attention, you don’t hear stuff going on around you, do you?” Jackie said, arching an eyebrow as if I were denying the obvious.
Maybe I was. But my memory of the moment seemed so clear. I hadn’t zoned out when I was taking those pictures. I’d felt pretty focused. Photography usually made me feel that way: sharp and observant and detail-oriented. It was one reason I liked it so much.
“Sure, that can happen, but if he snuck up on me while I was lining up the shot, where was he when I stood back up a second after I took it?”
“Behind a tree, maybe?”
“What’re you gals arguing about?” Doyle Schumaker asked.
Doyle was having lunch with Billy Wozowski at the next table. Billy and Doyle were police officers. Doyle’s K-9 partner, a German shepherd named Abby, was snoozing under their table.
“Someone’s trying to put one over on Beth,” Janie said. “She took this picture at St. Mary’s yesterday afternoon, and it has a weird foot in it.”
Janie gave him a flirty smile and tossed her hair a little as she handed him the photo.
I spent a little bit of each work day envying Janie. It’s not that she’d dated some guy I wanted, or anything like that. I just wished in general I could be more like her, at least in some ways. She was pretty, yeah, but more than that, she just seemed comfortable in her own skin. She was never anxious, never restless. She seemed grounded, like she knew what was important to her and was sure she was going to get it eventually. For lack of a better word, she seemed satisfied. I’d never felt that way.
Maybe it came from growing up in a big farming family. I used to love hanging out at her place when we were kids. There was always a lot of noise and bustle, and plenty of arguments, but it was clearly a happy, loving group of people. Not that my mother hadn’t loved me plenty, but for much of my life, it had just been the two of us. Janie’s family was different. With a family like that, you’d never be lonely.
Doyle took the print from Janie and looked at it. His expression turned serious. He looked up at me searchingly.
“What time did you take this, exactly?” he asked, casting a meaningful glance across the table at Billy, then handing him the picture.
“Um … about 2:00 in the afternoon, I think. Is something wrong?”
“I might have to take this in as evidence, Betty.”
I felt a little breathless. “Really? Why?”
“About that time yesterday, there was an APB out for a seven-foot-tall bagel monster,” he said, waggling his eyebrows at me.
Jackie, Janie, and Billy laughed, and I blushed all over again. Even worse, people at the tables around us started asking what was so funny. Soon the picture was being passed around Pete’s Eats to a mixture of guffaws and speculations about Photoshopping.
If Justine had somehow engineered this to make me look stupid in front of the whole town, she’d sure as hell succeeded.
I went back to my meal, watching out of the corner of my eye as Jackie circulated among the tables, laughing with folks — no doubt at my expense. Someone’s gaze caught mine. It was Callie McCallister, Dorf’s most committed moral crusader. She was holding the photo and looking right at me, fear and revulsion plain on her face. Great. My picture was in the hands of the one person in town most likely to think I’d actually photographed a monster.
Sure enough, on her way out of Pete’s ten minutes later, Callie stopped to drop the picture on our table. Her tiny hands were shaking. When she spoke, so was her voice.
“Elizabeth, you have to stop spreading this image. Glorifying hellspawn this way — it’s unlawful.”
“Callie, come on,” I said. “It’s just someone’s idea of a prank. I’d like to know who, so I can smack ’em.”
Callie’s expression didn’t change one bit. She was a little wisp of a thing, but when she’d made up her mind, she didn’t back down. The whole town knew it from experience.
Janie rolled her eyes.
A man reached down to our table and picked up the folder containing the other photo, the one of the mystery man in front of J.T.’s. I looked up at him in surprise. He was standing right beside Callie, but I hadn’t noticed him. Maybe this was the new live-in boyfriend Suzanne had told me about.
He was looking at my picture without permission, so I didn’t hesitate to give him the once-over. He was a white guy of average height with brown hair and eyes and bland, even features. He was wearing jeans and a blue sweatshirt. Thoroughly uninteresting. And really rude.
“Excuse me, you didn’t ask to see that,” I said, reaching for the folder.
He ignored me except to turn slightly, so the folder would be out of my reach.
Just as I took a breath to object, Janie cut in. “So,” she said, drawing out the word in a way that made me cringe, “you’re the one who’s living with Our Lady of Christian Virtue, here? Living together outside the bonds of matrimony? Are you sure that’s proper?”
Oh god. This was the part of Janie I didn’t admire so much: she had the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
The man ignored Janie, but Callie sucked in a scandalized breath and turned tomato-red. That heavy, quiet feeling instantly surrounded us, the one that means every person within earshot is holding very still and listening. Two short-order cooks and a busboy stuck their heads out of the kitchen to watch. Jackie paused with her water pitcher cocked over someone’s glass. Pete himself stood up from behind the counter, hands full of the straws and napkins he’d been stocking.
“He’s not … I mean, we’re not … he’s just a houseguest!”
“Oh, right, he’s a houseguest,” Janie echoed in a knowing tone, added a wink and air-quotes for good measure. “Got it, got it.”
“He is! I’d never … you know.”
“No, no, of course you wouldn’t,” Janie said in a soothing tone, which she immediately undercut by snorting loudly.
“Oh,” she said, “excuse me.” And snorted again.
The man slid the photo back into the folder and reached over to set it on the table. A thick, lumpy red scar ran across the back of his wrist. Yikes. No wonder he wore long sleeves.
Callie stood there another few seconds, stammering out protests. Then the man put his arm around her thin shoulders and guided her out of the restaurant. I could hear her talking as they walked down the sidewalk. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but I could tell from her voice that she was crying.
After another few seconds, conversation and the sounds of eating picked back up. Janie leaned over to me with a grin.
“Whatcha say we tee-pee
her house tonight?”
Doyle said “I heard that, missy!” in mock outrage.
“Did you get a load of that guy with her?” Janie said. “Blandy McBlandsville, if you ask me.”
“Yeah, I’ve forgotten him already,” Doyle said.
A few people around us laughed.
It was bad. I mean, of course I couldn’t let Callie go around claiming I was consorting with demons, or something. Dorf was a fairly religious town, and if people heard that kind of accusation enough, some of them might start believing it. But Janie’s way of defending me had been over the top. I had profited from it — before Callie came to our table, I’d been the laughing stock, and now the laughing stock was her. I felt like a shit.
Janie got busy chatting up Doyle and didn’t notice how quiet I’d gotten.
We finished up and headed back to the office. Once there, I set about returning the calls on the answering machine, but I didn’t give the task much attention. My mind alternated between feeling guilty over Callie and thinking about the photo.
It was good to know I hadn’t hallucinated the foot — for Christ’s sake, practically half the town had seen the thing.
But there still wasn’t a good explanation for how someone’d managed to create the effect. That was a problem: having been humiliated, Callie would probably be out for blood. She’d be spreading all kinds of crazy ideas about me.
I needed a logical explanation for the photo, and I needed it soon.
What with all the commotion, Janie and I had taken more than an hour’s lunch, which annoyed Dr. Nielsen. I stayed late to make up for it, then headed over to Ben’s house. It was something I hadn’t done in years — just drop by unannounced. Justine had made it clear she didn’t appreciate it.
But this time I actually wanted to see her, not Ben. Maybe if I surprised her with the photo, she’d admit to engineering the prank. Or at least I’d see a hint of guilt or embarrassment on her face.
It was nearing sunset by the time I pulled up in front of my brother’s modest 1930s bungalow. The sun was casting deep shadows across the front yard. It made Justine’s decorative lawn tableau of deer and garden gnomes around a wishing well look sort of sinister.