Simple Things

by Press, Lycan Valley

  Another time, I needed a carpenter’s level to repair the warped frame of my front door. Before driving into town to shop for one, I already knew which warehouse sold I-Beams for the lowest price. I also knew the prices at every other place in town. After I bought the level at a hardware store on Victoria’s Store Street, I decided to go to every vendor in the area and check the prices. You know, just to see if my predictions were true. Sure enough, and to my surprise, every single price tag was exactly as I’d predicted.

  It didn’t end there.

  I’d see flitting movement at the corner of my eye as though something were escaping my sight once its presence was known.

  Whenever this happened, Astrid’s words resurfaced: Our world is theirs. You can’t see them, but they’re here.

  ***

  On my hallway floor, where the carpet met the wall, I found something. It had been weeks since the trauma cleanup crew had left. They must’ve missed the small, hard, pebble-sized object. I picked it up, feeling its uneven edges

  It grew hot in the palm of my hand. At first, I thought it was my imagination. Then, the heat sank into my palm and rose up my arm. Anguish, grief, horror—these overwhelmed me, but they weren’t my feelings; someone else’s emotions were spilling into me. I looked up. Like a camera lens zooming out, the world pulled away from me with a streaky blur. A moment later, another world emerged, the way an ink stain spreads to the other side of a piece of paper. It was eleven p.m., but sunlight poured through the windows, growing brighter and brighter as though someone was adjusting a dial. Music from the stereo swallowed the silence. Pictures on the wall dissolved to nothing, then reappeared in other places on the wall.

  I watched my body’s shape grow spectral. Its colors chalk marks in a rainstorm, fading away until I was transparent, an outline in the hallway.

  I heard humming. Astrid came out of the foyer closet, lugging the vacuum cleaner, her belly swollen with our unborn child.

  “Astrid?” I said in a surprised whisper. “Honey, is that you?”

  She continued to hum along with the music and walk forward, then move right through me, like warm water flowing through my body.

  This was a vision of the past, the day Astrid died. The small white object in my hand—her chipped tooth, I realized now—had somehow absorbed her thoughts and emotions.

  She set the vacuum cleaner down and plugged it into the wall. It came alive with a loud whirring sound that muffled the stereo. As she vacuumed the hallway, she swung her hips gently to Roam from the B-52’s, one of her favorite songs.

  Suddenly, she stopped. She put one hand against the wall and the other one on her belly’s lower curve. Her face scrunched up, red with pain. Trembling, she groaned as cramps stabbed into her. Astrid’s upper body lurched forward. Beads of sweat glistened on her face.

  She slipped a hand under her dress and felt around her thigh. When she brought her hand back out, what she saw drew a soft cry quavering from her lungs. Her eyes, shimmery with tears, widened and her mouth rounded into a trembling black hole.

  Blood. Lots of it. It made slick smacking sounds when she moved her fingers.

  “The baby… Oh God, no… the baby…” She panted.

  She stepped quickly toward the kitchen, where we kept the telephone. For balance, she kept her hand to the wall, marking it with a row of bloody palm prints, each one lighter than the one before it.

  When she crossed the threshold into the kitchen, Astrid screamed under the convulsions. She tripped, fell sideways. Her temple struck the corner of the central cooking island.

  I watched her body crumple to the floor, the same body that had nestled in my arms each night for the past two years. Her eyes glazed over, the same eyes that had watched sunsets with childish wonder. Her legs were smeared with blood, the same legs that would cross over mine when we’d sit on the couch together. There she laid, a grotesque parody of a Russian nesting doll, her lifeless body housing our dead son.

  ***

  I placed the tooth in a small tin box, the kind used for storing tea. It made a small tink sound when it hit the bottom. I fit the slip-lid on and set the box on the bookshelf in the living room. Until I decided what to do with it, that’s where it would remain.

  Each day it remained in the house, things grew worse.

  I avoided the kitchen as much as possible. Whenever I went in, I could feel Astrid’s last moments of pain and anguish, concentrated in the spot near the cooking island. Those flitting movements at the corner of my eye were no longer vague. They began to solidify into definite shapes. Tentacles. Giant spider legs. Claws. Worms. Eyes with vertical pupils, like a goat’s.

  They’re coming to kill us.

  I couldn’t help but remember how Astrid, during her nightmares, would swipe her hands over her body as if she were trying to keep bugs off.

  Our world is theirs. You can’t see them, but they’re here.

  Then, I had my own nightmare.

  In the kitchen, I kneel beside Astrid’s corpse, holding her stiffened hand. Suddenly, her eyes are filled with haunted, demonic life. Her hand seizes mine. I scream, trying to pull free. She speaks with an earthy, grinding voice like twisting roots up from the soil: “We’re coming through, Steve. You can’t stop us. She can’t stop us. We’re hungry. This world is ours to feed on…”

  She chants those last two words “feed on” until it becomes the fatal pounding of a judge’s gavel.

  “What the hell are you?” I roar.

  “The Thayne-too. The eaters of dimensions.”

  Something sloshes inside her, distorting the surface of her swollen belly.

  “Our baby’s here,” the Astrid-thing says.

  A large spider leg, its bristly length dripping with red afterbirth, pries its way out from the pink folds of flesh at the joining of her thighs. The spider’s head nudges through her opening with a slick and oily sound, one that reminds me of peeling wet wallpaper from the wall. When the head pushes all the way through, its array of eyes stares at me through a forest of bristles. They have horizontal pupils—like a goat’s.

  Its mandibles click open and closed.

  The spider hisses, and when it does, I don’t so much hear it as I do feel it—a hideous buzzing sensation that ripples through my stomach. The hissing forms the two-syllable word: Thayne-too.

  The Astrid-thing laughs. Awful, earthy, grinding. Then, her throat bulges and a slimy tentacle pushes out of her mouth, choking out the laughter. Worms—black and glistening, as thick as your finger—slide out from between the eyeballs and the sockets.

  I try to pull my hand free. At that moment—

  —I woke up screaming, swatting my body and kicking the sheets, still able to feel those bristly legs padding against my body and the hiss vibrating in my stomach.

  In the bathroom, I turned on the sink and threw water on my face. I looked up. In the mirror, behind my reflection, there was a giant spider on the wall. And by giant, I mean the thing could fight a pit bull. Startled, I spun around. The wall was bare. I looked in the mirror again and saw the eight-legged creature.

  The nightmare returned every night. Each time, it felt less like a dream and more like reality, and somehow I just knew keeping her tooth was making it more real.

  Anything in the house that had reflective surfaces—the silver teakettle, the oven’s tinted glass, the polished tabletop—were windows through which I could see these monstrosities. Every day, I looked at the tin box containing my wife’s tooth, knowing that the longer it was around, the weaker the barrier between our reality and theirs became. It wasn’t long before I covered the bedroom mirror with a sheet. I soaped over the bathroom mirror, and covered all the reflective surfaces I could find.

  They’re coming to kill us.

  Throwing the tooth away wouldn’t solve anything; it would still have all of Astrid’s pain and anguish stored in it. No matter where it wound up, it would continue to erode the veil—that is to say, the flesh—of reality, making a hole for the Thayne
-too to come through.

  Our world is theirs. You can’t see them, but they’re here.

  ***

  Just before sunrise, I awoke from the nightmare again. This time, I sat up in bed and gave in to the overwhelming sense of Astrid’s presence, which I had been trying to block out. Today, however, something was clear: if mirrors were really windows into other worlds, if a chipped tooth could retain the memory and feelings of my wife’s death, if I could know things before they happened, then I should be able to believe that Astrid’s consciousness had continued on.

  “Astrid, I can feel you here so strongly,” I said aloud, speaking to the sense of her presence in the room. “If you’re here, please, show me what to do.”

  I crawled out of bed, went to the bathroom, and showered. I brushed my teeth, staring at the soaped-over square of the mirror. Once I had a bathrobe on, I made a cup of coffee and sat outside on the porch.

  The sun, rising behind the forest, pulled away the veil of darkness from the world. The shapes and colors of houses and trees and roads emerged, shrugging off the night. Dew sparkled on the blades of grass. A gentle breeze stirred the branches.

  Something caught my eye in the garden, in Astrid’s Feather Canyon.

  When my gaze turned to the flowerbed, my cup of coffee spilled from my hands, splattered my bathrobe, and rolled across the porch.

  I didn’t bother to pick it up. Instead, I blinked twice and examined the flowerbed again. I looked at the bleeding hearts and astilbes, and saw Astrid’s face in their shapes and outlines. Tufts of sweaty hair poked out from under her bandana and clung to her brow. In the primrose clusters and the circular rock border, I saw her body’s shape. She wore her scuffed Levis, the ones she used for outside work, and a plaid chambray shirt with its tails un-tucked. She was on her knees, working the soil. She looked up at me, smiled and waved. After that, she leaned forward and continued her work.

  There she was, a specter among flowers, preparing the soil for the phantom begonias that she had beside her in plastic pots.

  Like the delicate beauty that hid itself amongst her plain features, her ghostly figure hid itself amongst the flowers, visible only when the light fell a certain way… and only if you paid attention.

  As the sun rose higher, and as more shadows fell away, Astrid disappeared—her eyes faded, blending into the spaces between two leaves; her red bandana faded, blending into a cluster of bleeding-hearts; her knees faded, blending into the rocks I had once gathered to form the circular border.

  I knew then how to keep the monstrosities out. I went into the living room, removed the chipped tooth from the tin box, and walked back outside to the Feather Canyon. For a moment, my eyes traced the circle of stones. I knelt down, poked a hole into the soil, dropped the tooth in, and covered it with dirt.

  Back inside the house, I took her guitar case, which was still leaning against the wall between the sofa and the bookshelf. I opened it, flinching. I was afraid an avalanche of memories would bury me. It never came. Instead, I touched the guitar and… heard music. Her music, woven into all the sounds around me—the birdsongs, the rustling wind, the bubbling stream. My heart soared with every rising octave and settled with every falling one. I placed the guitar back in its case and snapped the buttons shut. The music slowly faded.

  And that morning, my grief faded too, swallowed up by a reassuring calm.

  I recalled how fervently Astrid had tended her garden, and understood why. Deep down, where we perceive things instinctively, she knew she’d die soon. She’d stamped her thoughts, memories, and feelings on everything she’d touched. This was her legacy.

  Astrid met a horrible death, yes. But that was a single moment. There are so many memories of happiness and love. Together, they form a protective ring that serves not only as a boundary between sorrow and myself, but also between our reality…and theirs.

  I’d like to call your attention to this fine handcrafted hairbrush. Notice the ivory handle with the carved braid outlined along the edge and the array of exquisite jewels.

  This truly remarkable item came from prose and comic writer, Frank Martin. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two children.

  LOCKS OF LOVE

  Frank Martin

  “ONE, two, three…”

  My hand bounced from head to head as I counted off the students.

  “…seven, eight, nine…”

  The first graders did their best to remain facing forward, but their anxious energy forced them to move about in their line against the wall.

  “…eleven, twelve, thirteen?”

  I reached the back of the line and realized I was missing one. Curious, my head looked up to scan the small elementary school hallway. Like me, the rest of the teachers organized all of their students in single file outside their classroom. Two full months into the school year, dismissal had already become routine for many of the first time students. We hadn’t had an issue in weeks, which was why I found it so strange I was missing someone now.

  I quickly dipped my head back into the classroom and spotted Annabelle sitting in the center of the desks with her head lowered and back to me. It was only my third year as a teacher, but I’d already grown accustomed to the universal body language all children possessed. Sometimes they pout just for the sake of pouting, a manipulative call for attention. Other times there’s a real problem simmering under the surface that needs to be addressed. Annabelle’s slouch told me it was the latter.

  I returned to the hall and looked back at the teacher behind me, who’d just finished her own head count. “Donna, would you mind bringing my class down to the bus ramp? I have a straggler.”

  Understanding the situation from experience, she offered me a sympathetic smile. “Sure thing. Come on, kids.”

  Our two classes, as well as the ones behind us, all began an organized march down the hall like lemmings. No matter how many times I saw it, the cute sight always made me smile. But as they all turned a corner and out of sight, I remembered that one of those little lemmings needed some attention.

  I walked into the classroom, passing by the kids’ crayon colored maps hung from the bulletin board, and Annabelle’s long blond hair stood out amongst the desks. From this angle, her impeccably straight locks shimmered in the afternoon light coming in through the windows, and I actually felt ashamed for being jealous of an eight-year-old’s perfect hair.

  I could’ve addressed her upon entering the room but waited until I’d crouched beside her before seeing what was wrong. “Annabelle, honey? It’s time to go.”

  She answered with her head still lowered and her face still hidden behind the flat curtain of hair draped across her cheek. “Miss Rosen…can I stay with you?”

  Given that she didn’t want to line up for dismissal, I was hardly surprised by the request but still tried to push her in a gentle, calming voice. “I’m sorry, but your mom is waiting for you.”

  “Please…?” The girl then slowly looked up with a saddened face on the verge of tears. “Just a little while longer?”

  She hadn’t cried yet though, and the young girl’s remarkable beauty still shone through her sadness. Milky white skin surrounded two high, rosy cheekbones on either side of her face. Lush, full lips accentuated her already flawlessly clear complexion. And in the center of it all, Annabelle’s stunning, blue eyes stared up at me from under a set of puffy eyelids ready to erupt in tears.

  At such a young age, the girl still had a long way to grow, but even now it was evident she would become an exceptionally attractive woman. I’d yet to meet her mother; a single parent that kept rescheduling our parent-teacher conference, yet I assumed she was just as beautiful.

  But right now, none of that mattered. She was still just a little girl calling out for help, and as her teacher, it was my job to offer it. “Anna, why don’t you want to leave? Is something wrong at home?”

  “It’s nothing. I just don’t like it there.”

  She continued to look up at me, and
I could see something hidden behind her eyes. A secret or fear bubbling under the surface that she was just too scared to unleash.

  In the weeks I’d gotten to know her, Annabelle never struck me as a troubled child. A loner, sure. By far the quietest kid in class, she mostly kept to herself, and the boys were still far from the age where her good looks would grab their attention. But being shy wasn’t an indication of distress. I never suspected anything was wrong with her.

  At least, not until now. “You know you can talk to me, right? About anything. You can tell me if something’s bothering you.”

  Clearly distraught, the girl parted her lips ever so slightly, a sign she was about to speak, but swallowed down whatever words were stuck in her throat. Now she only looked defeated.

  There wasn’t much else for me to do. I could only offer her a hand. I couldn’t make her take it. “Come on. I’ll walk you down to the bus.”

  Annabelle reluctantly nodded her head with a grimace, and we both prepared to leave. I stood up from being crouched by her side, but as I looked down over top the girl’s head I gasped out at what I saw. In between the immaculate parts in her hair were long, red scratches imbedded into her scalp. The marks looked painful, etched in streaks of dried blood.

  The audible sound of shock I made caught Annabelle by surprise, and she quickly looked up bashful and ashamed. For an instant we locked eyes, each of us unsure what to do or say, but there was an odd moment of understanding between us. One which caught me so off guard that I was utterly speechless by what it probably meant.

  Once the sudden tension faded, the girl and I didn't say another word as I proceeded to bring her through the halls and out onto the bus ramp at the back of the school. The rest of the children were already on board their respective buses, waiting for the drivers to take them home. I wanted to stop Annabelle one last time and ask her to open up to me. But before I had a chance to place my hand on her shoulder, the girl had already stepped away from me and headed towards the bus.