I stepped back, crowding Theodore, who was already leaned forward to catch the ball when it dropped, and I swung at a ball that was higher than my shoulders, a ball my dad would have already been turning away from in disgust, and knew the instant my bat cracked into it that there wasn’t going to be any lift, that it was a line drive, an arrow I was shooting out, blind. One I was going to have to run faster than, somehow.
Still, even though I didn’t scoop under it like I would have liked, and even though I was making contact with it earlier than I would have wanted, I gave it every last thing I had, gave it everything I’d learned, everything I had to gamble.
And it worked. The cover flapping behind it just like a comet tail, it was a thing of beauty.
Les being Les, of course he bit the dirt to get out of the way, and Gerald and Rory—second and short—nearly hit each other, diving for what they knew was a two-run hit. A ball that wasn’t even going to skip grass until—
Until left field, yeah.
Until Michael T.
And, if you’re thinking he raised his glove here, that some long-forgotten reflex surfaced in his zombie brain for an instant, then guess again.
Dead or alive, he would have done the same thing: just stood there like the dunce he was.
Only, now, his face was kind of spongy, I guess.
The ball splatted into his left eye socket, sucked into place, stayed there, some kind of dark juice burping from his ears, trickling down along his jaw, the cover of the ball pasted to his cheek.
For a long moment we were all quiet, all holding our breaths—this was like hitting a pigeon with a pop-fly—and then, of everybody, I was the only one to hear Amber Watson stop on the sidewalk, look from the ball back to me, exactly like I’d planned.
I smiled, kind of shrugged, and then Gerald called it in his best umpire voice: “Out!”
I turned to him, my face going cold, and everybody in the in-field was kind of shrugging that, yeah, the ball definitely hadn’t hit the ground. No need to burn up the baseline.
“But, but,” I said, pointing out to Michael T with my bat, to show how obvious it was that that wasn’t a catch, that it didn’t really count, and then Rory and Theodore and Les all started nodding that Gerald was right. Worse, now the outfield was chanting: “Mi-chael, Mi-cheal, Mi-chael.” And then my own dugout fell in, clapping some Indian whoops from their mouth to memorialize what had happened here, today. How I was the only one who could have done it.
But I wasn’t out.
Michael T wasn’t even a real player, was just a body we’d propped up out there.
I looked back to Amber Watson and could tell she was just waiting to see what I was going to do here, waiting to see what was going to happen.
So I showed her.
I charged the mound, and, when Les sidestepped, holding his hands up and out like a bullfighter, I kept going, bat in hand, held low behind me, Rory and Gerald each giving me room as well, so that by the time I got out to left field I was running.
“You didn’t catch it!” I yelled to Michael T, singlehandedly trying to ruin my whole summer, wreck my love life, trash my reputation—‘Even a zombie can get him out’—and I swung for the ball a second time.
Instead of driving it off the T his head was supposed to be, I thunked it deeper, into his brain, I think, so that the rest of him kind of spasmed in a brainstemmy way, the bat shivering out of my hands so I had to let it go. And, because I hadn’t planned ahead—charging out of the box isn’t exactly about thinking everything through, even my dad would cop to this—the follow-through of my swing, it wrapped me up into Michael T’s dead arms, and we fell together, me first.
And, like everything else since Les’s failed knuckle ball, it took forever to happen. Long enough for me to hear that little lopsided plastic ball rattling in Amber Watson’s whistle right before she set her feet and blew it. Long enough for me to see the legs of a single fly, following us down. Long enough for me to hear my chanted name stop in the middle.
This wasn’t just a freak thing happening, anymore.
We were stepping over into legend, now.
Because the town was always on alert these days, Amber Watson’s whistle was going to line the fence with people in under five minutes, and now everybody on the field and in the dugout, they were going to be witness to this, were each going to have their own better vantage point to tell the story from.
Meaning, instead of me being the star, everybody else would be.
And, Amber Watson.
It hurt to even think about.
We were going to have a special bond, now, sure, but not the kind where I was ever going to get to buy her a spirit ribbon. Not the kind where she’d ever tell me to quit smoking, because it was bad for me.
If I even got to live that far, I mean. If the yearbook staff wasn’t already working my class photo onto the casualties page.
I wasn’t there yet, though.
This wasn’t the top of a rocket, I mean.
Sure, I was on my back in left field, and Michael T was over me, pinning me down by accident, the slobber and blood and brain juice stringing down from his lips, swinging right in front of my face so that I wanted to scream, but I could still kick him away, right? Lock my arms against his chest, keep my mouth closed so nothing dripped in it.
All of which would have happened, too.
Except for Les.
He’d picked up the bat that I guess I’d dragged through the chalk between second and third, so that, when he slapped it into the side of Michael T’s head, a puff of white kind of breathed up. At first I thought it was bone, powdered skull—the whole top of Michael T’s rotted-out head was coming off—but then there was sunlight above me again, and Les was hauling me up, and, on the sidewalk, Amber Watson was just staring at me, her whistle still in her mouth, her hair still wet enough to have left a dark patch on the canvas of the sneakers looped over her shoulder.
I put two of my fingers to my eyebrow like I’d seen my dad do, launched them off in salute to her, and in return she shook her head in disappointment. At the kid I still obviously was. So, yeah, if you want to know what it’s like living with zombies, this is it, pretty much: they mess everything up. And if you want to know why I never went pro, it’s because I got in the habit of charging the mound too much, like I had all this momentum from that day, all this unfairness built up inside. And if you want to know about Amber Watson, ask Les Moore—that’s his real, stupid name, yeah. After that day he saved my life, became the real Indian because he’d been the one to scalp Michael T, he stopped coming to the diamond so much, started spending more time at the pool, his hair bleaching in the sun, his reflexes gone, always thirty-five cents in his trunks to buy a lifeguard a lemonade if she wanted.
And she did, she does.
And, me? Some nights I still go to the old park, spiral up to the top of the rocket with a ‘Bury the Tomahawk’ or ‘Circle the Wagons’ spirit ribbon, and I let it flutter a bit through the grimy bars before letting it go, down through space, down to the planet I used to know, miles and miles from here.
BECAUSE MY THERAPIST ASKED ME TO TELL A STORY USING HAMSTERS
Bedtime in the cage.
Our Mommy Hamster would sit in the hall between my sister’s wire room and my wire room and read us wonderful stories. We could see her just a little, sitting there in the chair she’d dragged over, and we would lie at the edge of our beds facing the door, making sure she hadn’t scampered away to the dishes or the food bowl or to her bed of newspaper.
Sometimes too, through the walls we could see the shape of our Father Hamster, walking on all fours, smelling of each thing and then whipping his face away, disgusted. But coming back to smell again and again.
It was our Mommy Hamster’s voice that carried us into sleep each night, though. The last thing we’d see would be her fuzzy, backlit shape in her chair. On the best nights, we could stay awake long enough for her to fall asleep as well, the corner of her book gnawed i
nto a soggy mess. Then, every time the cage rattled and we shook awake, there she’d be in her same place, and we could go back to sleep again, because the world was all right.
But, as she told us each night before reading, she had a lot of stuff to do before bedding down herself. And when she said it, her whiskers would flick back towards the living room, giving away the source of her twitchy nerves: Father.
She wouldn’t tell us the story, but we knew from an aunt that when we were born, Father had tried to eat us.
If we ever told Mommy we knew this, , she would have just hushed us, told us that it was all a big misunderstanding. That that’s not the way daddies act, is it?
So of course we never told her. It would have hurt, to hear her have to lie.
And, even though the plea was there in her voice each night, for us to go to sleep early this time, so she could do her chores, still, her voice, we never wanted to let it go.
We don’t blame her is what I’m trying to say.
What she did, finally, was when we’d start to nod off while she was reading, just our nose moving but to no place in particular, she’d take one of her old jackets, a few armfuls of loose paper from the corner, and some of the colored string that had been dropped down through the ceiling for us to play with, and fashion a surrogate for herself. A dummy Mommy. One that, our eyes still thick with sleep, and the lights off anyway, the only sound Father working the ball in the drinking tube, we could mistake for her. Or not question before falling back to sleep anyway.
The weeks after she started doing that, we slept better than ever, like we were curled around ourselves twice, and then had enough energy that we were chewing up all the papers before Father could even get to them. It was a dream. And Mommy even lost that frantic look around her eyes, a little. She was finally getting to the dishes, the bedding, all the things she needed to do but never had been able to.
It was the perfect solution.
Until we found the dummy Mommy in the hall closet.
But we loved her, too, the real one, were beginning to have a sense of what she was going through in the cage night after night, day after day, week after week. So we allowed the charade to continue. Each night while she read, we would chant to ourselves in our head, either that it was the dummy Mommy reading, and that that was all right (just don’t think about the mouth), or, if that wasn’t working, we’d pray that when we woke in the night, we’d have forgotten that it wasn’t really her sitting there.
Like all good games of pretend, though, there came a night where . . . where—
What happened, and I’ve never told my sister this, because I love her too, but what happened is that I woke. Not from a sound, but a sense. It was Father. He was creeping along the wall in the next room, his nose to the corner, following it like a rat.
Through the wire wall I could only see his general outline, but it was enough for me to know the look he had on his face.
It was the same one I’d imagined a hundred times, the same I knew he’d had the day we were born.
But it was okay, it was okay. We weren’t furless pups anymore. The instinct had to be drained out of him, right?
Somewhat.
He wasn’t after us was the thing.
I settled my eyes on Mommy Hamster just as he got to her, just as he stood on his hind legs, his forepaws clamped onto her dry shoulder, his pelvis thrusting over and over into — the side of her head? Her ear?
And she just took it, and took it, and then I remembered: it was a thing of straw he was abusing, a dummy made from string, made to take her place.
I smiled.
Two floors up, through the wire so that she was just the dimmest of shadows, I could see our Mommy Hamster.
She had paused for a moment in the mouth of one of the great tubes that went forever away. Paused to check the air, to check on us.
“Go,” I whispered to her in my loudest quiet voice, “run away,” and, slowly at first but then faster and faster, so that her claws were clacking on the plastic, she did.
THE CALORIE DOCTOR
The therapist I find in the yellow pages tells me both that I’m overweight—the obvious, why I’m there in his office in the first place—and that overweight people, while not quite schizophrenic, seem nevertheless to be touched by it, as, since they’re unable to accept that the person who sits down to this big meal is the same person who’s going to wear that meal around their middle, they must in some essential way be two people, at which point he makes the standard joke about those amazing weight-loss stories and the associated visuals—the pants two people could fit into, sit in like a hot tub—but that’s anecdotal, not really support for his schizophrenia argument. What is is that later, when I’m field dressing him on his mahogany desk, both of us medicated (him with anesthetic from his locked drawer, me with appetite), he’s still trying to make his point, explain to me how his offhand observation about two people in one body was my trigger, my psychotic break—this his words essentially gave me license to ‘feed’ (his word) my other, gluttonous self, the one who’s going to have to deal with this meal, and that both of me should understand that none of this is our fault, but his, an elaborate suicide, ‘obesity kills,’ ha ha, and I smile, pull a string of meat from his between his surprisingly shiny ribs, hold it up to the bare bulb of his expensive lamp, to check for marbling, and ask him who’s dissociative now?
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
—GOYA
. . . after this there was only common experience
—CLIVE BARKER
STORY NOTES
“Good Times”—If I were a better person, I wouldn’t have written this story. Or I would have deleted it. But alas.
“The Age of Hasty Retreats”—This is the middle section of a story Weird Tales published, “Notes from the Apocalypse.” It’s somehow the heart of that story, though. You know how some people will write a fantasy story just to see a unicorn? I think I wrote this one just to get a better look at that ‘progenitor’-guy, with bandolier kittens.
“My Hero”—I used to work in Book Cataloging at a university library, which had a lot of cubicles. That’s where and why I wrote this story. Really, back then I wrote a lot of office stories. It was such a cool place, and there were just stories all around, and I found myself, like Vigilante Man, always getting carried away, always making things more meaningful via secret identities and distant pleas for help. I didn’t do my job just exceedingly well, but I did write a whole, whole lot. Which is my real job, of course.
“How Billy Hanson Destroyed the Planet Earth, and Everyone On It”—This is maybe my longest title to date. Either it or “The Complete Silence of Cats is Another Definition for Silence.” And, I wrote this because I wanted to see if you could actually use stars’ gravity to look through like a tunnel. Turns out you can, but you shouldn’t. That seems to be the story a lot of the time, really.
“Little Monsters”—Paul Tremblay and John Langan hit me up for a monster story for their Creatures anthology, and I told them sure, then forgot about it until the last possible instant. So I sat down, tried to see what a monster was made of in the forty-five minutes I had left. Turns out they’re made of love and tenderness and regret and nostalgia and hope. Who’d have guessed.
“The Half Life of Parents”—The first time I wrote this, that young couple’s kid dies, and then it ends with muppets. Or hand puppets. But my agent and a friend both told me that was stupid. And, I like it better like this, finally, after so many versions. As for where it comes from: my dad gave my kids a VHS of some old half-cartoon Beany and Cecil, and it’s completely and permanently freaked me out. Even just to think about. It’s a cartoon, but there’s this live-action hand-puppet in the background. Which I just cannot process. Thus, this story. Stories are always me trying to make sense of the world. Because the world’s sure not doing it on its own.
“Old Meat”—Finding the delivery method for this story was a trick. I had to take a few runs at it. Bu
t then I read somewhere about the origins of that old hook-hand story, and I knew this was a help-column letter. And, everybody writes about werewolves in their prime, yes? What about the golden years, though? What’s left then? Love, devotion, and a terror so abject that you shiver inside. It’s wonderful, I mean. It has to be. I can’t wait.
“Nearer to Thee”—I started into this one thinking it’d be cool to play with names so as to foretoken a re-disaster. But then all the gameshow trivia presented itself, completely on accident—the character had to have some mechanism for recognizing this. This story and the “Billy Hanson” one go hand-in-hand, for me. And they’re each just trying to burrow inside Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God,” of course. Trying to burrow inside and live.
“Jumpers”—I wrote this right around the same time as “My Hero.” There’s also a third in this series, “Amateur Hour,” the longest of the three, and probably indebted to a Seinfeld episode. This one, however, owes itself largely to Harlan Ellison’s “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore.” Hopefully obviously, but not quite illegally. Hey, Harlan.
“The Sea of Intranquility”—I never sit down with the purpose of writing something way on the edge of the real. Except this time. Court Merrigan hit me up for his Pulp issue of Pank, and just told me to surprise him, pretty much. To see what I could do if not just the blinders were pulled away, but the eyeballs too. The eyeballs with stems. This is that story. What surprised me too was that, once I wrote the first line, the whole story seemed to be already there in my head. I just had to race to get it all down right. Took maybe two hours?
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