by Mark Parker
Jonet eyed the cat, still rubbing itself against the air, and added, “No matter how much she tries to sweet-talk him. The Devil’s dues are due.”
All four of the women repeated it, chanting: “The Devil’s dues are due on Hallowe’en Night!”
“My mother really is a witch?” Hellen whispered. Why had she brought her here? Her head spun with dizziness.
Katherine set a hand on Hellen’s arm. She twitched. Katherine said, “Aye, but you can hardly blame her. What choice do we have, those of us with nothing?” She stroked her belly again. “We will do anything to protect what we hold dear.”
“Did she—do you—?” Her balance wavered, fingers gripping the bark. “The babies?”
They turned to look at the infant propped by the fire, crying now in earnest.
Euphemia grinned, showing off her few remaining teeth. “The Devil deals in souls, lassie. ‘Tis a small price to pay for all he can bring you.”
Hellen’s whole body trembled, but she raised her chin. “If she pays?”
“Then she’ll keep her soul, as promised.”
Jonet’s smooth, pretty face folded in sympathy. “There are worse things, Hellen. At least you’d still have your mother.”
The cat’s black fur gleamed in the firelight. She paused to look at Hellen. Hellen’s tears spilled over.
“It’s up to you, lass,” Jonet said. “There are three souls here tonight, and the Devil only needs one.”
“Three?” She looked at the baby, at her mother. Revelation shocked her. “Me,” she muttered. “I am a soul. I can give myself to save my mother?”
“If you wish.”
Who’d spoken that? The voice sounded deeper than the women here.
Goose bumps rippled on her skin. “Will giving my soul to the Devil make me a witch?”
“No, not a pure soul. You have to sign the pact to gain the power of witchcraft.”
“But won’t the villagers think me a witch if they see the Devil’s mark upon me?”
“If they see it, aye.”
As if they wouldn’t look. It was inevitable. The next person to be accused would accuse her in turn to save themselves.
Hellen pushed away from the tree, clenching her fists by her side. “I want assurance that the villagers won’t turn against me.” She pictured her mother screaming in the flames. “That my father won’t betray me. I need out of his house.” She thought of Richard breaking their betrothal so casually. “And not by marriage. I don’t want to marry. I want to bide on my own.”
Euphemia drew close, her neck skin waddling. “You’ll need to pay something for all that, lass. You get no protection unless you sign a pact.”
Jonet stepped forward as well, drawing a scroll from her apron. “Kneel, child. You can give yourself to save your mother, but you must pay to save yourself.” With what? She placed the scroll on the dirt and Hellen unrolled it with shaky fingers. If she had to pay to save herself anyway, she could pay to save her mother instead, and then run, but that still left her powerless against the villagers. She lived in dread, every day. She knew how it would end.
Her mother wove through her arms, purring. “Mother,” Hellen whispered, “how did you get yourself into this?” She closed her eyes as the soft top of the cat’s head stroked the bottom of Hellen’s neck. “I will save you. I will save your soul.”
Eyes clenched, Hellen signed with the tip of her finger.
When she opened them, her name appeared in blood. For a moment her mother’s tail wrapped her neck like a noose. Panic tightened her stomach, then her mother moved away in a silken caress, rubbing in and out again, but now it wasn’t empty air she stroked herself against. No, it was strong, muscled calves balanced strangely atop two large, bird-like feet. Their thick, putrid claws dug into the leafy ground for balance. Hellen held her breath, gazing up. Bulging thighs, and, oh—her cheeks hollowed, burning—an atrocious manhood, grotesque in its prominence. An eerily luxurious torso, ruddy, dark skin, beastly shoulders, a thick neck, and… Hellen almost fainted.
A face so handsome and so horrid, topped by vicious, curved horns. He crossed his arms over his chest and two large wings shifted and flexed behind him, leathery as a bat.
“My child,” he said, deep voice vibrating through the air like thunder.
She could see him. Hellen could see him.
Witch.
The other women began dancing, laughing and chanting as they circled the fire. Their comfort so near him told her more than she wanted to know. What had she let herself be backed into?
Hellen reached shaking arms to scoop her mother away from him, cradling her, the warm purrs vibrating against her chest. Mother, what have I done?
He knelt to look into her eyes, and Hellen’s very spirit shrank, cringing away from him. His smile was profane, teeth thick and yellow as a horse, but his eyes fiercely human. The worst part was that he looked almost… familiar. Not someone she had met, but someone she should know, maybe. Like finally tasting a food she’d long smelled cooking from afar. Was this the presence she’d often felt when she was alone in the dark, hurrying through the village at night or afraid, as a child, to check for when she heard sounds across the room? How long had he been watching her?
“You owe me a soul,” he said. His voice echoed with an almost bird-like chorus—like a flock of rooks taking flight—like the cries of the damned cawing up from Hell.
Her body shook, but it would not be her mother’s soul. It would not be her own.
Hellen nodded, swallowing, and turned to the baby now screaming beside the fire.
THE GLAD STREET ANGEL
Ronald Malfi
We stop for lunch at the Harbor Grill, although neither of us are really very hungry.
“You gotta get your act together now, Gideon, gotta keep your nose clean,” my father tells me. I watch as he arranges a mound of crumbs into a straight line with his pinkie. “There are no more second chances.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“For real, man. You’re eighteen now. Ride’s over.”
“Yeah,” I say again, “I know.”
I watch him take two bites of a hefty club sandwich from across the table. He chews slow and methodically, as if the act itself requires much thought, and his eyes alternate between me and the throng of cars along Pratt Street. My father and I don’t really get along. Throughout my childhood, I maintained the constant notion of him as some brooding, elusive cloud on the horizon, rattling the ground below with thunder. I can remember watching him shave before the bathroom mirror, the sink half-full with water and clogged with shaving cream icebergs. He seemed so big. Once, I held a ladder for him while he scooped gunk out of the gutters of our duplex. I remember looking up and seeing straight up his shorts. His genitals looked like snarled, graying fruit.
“What are you thinking about?” he says suddenly.
“Mom,” I lie.
“Well,” he says, exhaling with enough zeal to send the queue of crumbs scattering like fleeing troops, “your mother, she’s not feeling well. She’ll be glad to see you, Gideon, but she’s not feeling well.”
“What is it now?”
“Her headaches.”
“I thought she was taking something for that.”
“She is,” my father says. “The pills, they don’t work like they used to.”
“Is there anything else she can take?”
“Sometimes she can’t even get up,” he continues without hearing me. “You remember what she was like when she first started getting them? Goddamn migraines.”
Suddenly, I’m thinking about pills. One day out of the blue, when I was a freshman in high school, I was struck by these dull, throbbing stomach pains, but not really in my stomach—more like on either side of my stomach, and just below it. The groin area. It felt like someone had stuffed two billiard balls just below the lining of my belly. My plan was to wait it out and not worry about it—tough it out like a man—but the pain wound up lasting for several days, and
I grew increasingly frightened. All I could think about was my junior high sex education class and if there was a possibility I’d contracted some venereal disease from Jenna Dawson, even though we’d never gone all the way. So I panicked and wound up passing out one morning in the school bathroom, cracking the side of my head against a grimy urinal. I’d imagined my urine coming out in thick, coagulated, snotty ropes (it didn’t) and that sent me swooning. I awoke sometime later in a bed at U of M with my father at my side. His first words to me had something to do with how real men don’t whimper like little girls, and just what did I think I was doing in that bathroom anyway? Was I on something, for Christ’s sake? When the doctor recommended I take pills, my father scoffed and told him I didn’t need any pills. The pains went away after about a week, anyway. The problem was never diagnosed.
I sip my Coke and don’t touch my roast beef sandwich.
“Anyway,” my father says, “things are gonna change. They have to. You understand that, right? You understand that your mother can’t handle your crap anymore?”
I tell him yes, I understand.
“And I’m through dealing with it, too.”
I tell him I understand.
“I got you a job,” he tells me, “doing some construction work for a friend of mine. This friend, he knows the deal—knows what you been through, I mean—and he’s doin’ me a favor by bringing you on. That means you don’t embarrass me. I said it’d be okay if he gives you a monthly drug test or something. Told him I’d prefer it, really. I think that made him feel good about the situation. He’s a good guy. Just don’t screw shit up.” He sighs and looks instantly miserable sitting out here on the verandah with me. Maybe he’s thinking of my mom and her headaches. Or his construction worker buddy. Or whatever. “You start Monday,” he says after too long a pause. “You better buckle down, Gideon.”
I tell him thanks.
He is mulling something over in his mind. Caught in the throes of concentration, my father looks the way a washing machine might look if capable of thought, his brain all jumbled with faded chinos, polo shirts, worn house dresses stained with grease. “All right,” he says finally, and there is some sort of resignation in his voice, “let’s see ’em, Gideon. Up on the table.” He says, “Let me see your hands.”
I show him, holding them palms up, and there is no expression on his face. I feel I owe some sort of explanation. I say, “I haven’t done it since I don’t know when. A long time, anyway.”
“Yeah, okay,” he says, and only because he isn’t quite sure what to say. He does not understand my hand thing. Neither do I, really.
A lumbering silence passes between us. I think of him shaving in the mirror again, his shirt off, his doughy paunch obtruding over the frayed band of his Fruit of the Looms, a wiry braid of black hair spilling out of his bellybutton.
“Can we stop at the gas station on the way home?” I ask. “I need to grab some smokes.”
My father sets his hands in his lap, anxious to leave. I am familiar with almost all of his idiosyncrasies. And I am familiar with his hands, too. I start to think about the way he rolled his handgun around in his hands that night, sitting on the edge of his bed, his head down. I am still thinking about this when he finally opens his mouth and says, “Anything you want to get off your chest before we get home?”
“Like what?”
Casually, he rolls his shoulders. He looks goofy doing it. Simple, somehow. “Anything,” he says. “Anything. Whatever.”
I think about my time in rehab, almost laugh, then shake my head.
We leave.
***
There is something frightening about my mother. And I realize I haven’t seen her in five months.
She is sitting in a green recliner in front of the television set, her white hands pressed firmly in her lap, her eyes glazed over. Her hair is pulled back into a bun, gray and dull in the slivers of daylight that slide in through the partially-shaded windows, and her mouth is drawn tight as string. Seeing her, I am suddenly reminded of my grandmother’s funeral and the way my mother had pressed rosary beads into the palm of my hand, insisting that I pray as we stood before the casket. She pressed hard, leaving behind tiny pea-shaped indentations. I cannot recall her words, cannot recall what Nona had looked like packaged in her satin-lined mahogany tube; I can only recall the brush of my mother’s hair against my cheek, frizzled and damp with tears, and the stale-sweet smell of her breath in my face. Funeral breath. Mourning breath. Breath that cannot be masked by a million slabs of spearmint gum.
She looks up and sees me and smiles in her medicated way. Struggles to get up. I picture scarecrows swaying in a corn field and feel something hard and sick and moist roll over in my stomach.
“Ma,” I say, and advance toward her before she has time to rise. Too much movement and her headaches start up.
I bend down and she hugs me, kisses the ink-spot birthmark just over my left eyebrow.
“Gideon,” she whispers, squeezing me tight. I can feel the dull knobs of her fingertips pressing into my back. She is crying now. “Honey. You look too thin. Your father said you were being fed at that place…”
“I was fed,” I tell her.
“Ralph,” she continues, and her eyes—now wet and muddy in their sockets—shift beseechingly toward my father. She looks much older than I remember.
“They fed him,” my father promises her from the tiny kitchen. He is searching through the refrigerator.
“How you feeling, Ma?” I ask.
She ignores me. “Are you angry with me for not coming to see you? I wanted to, I did, but your father, he said it would be too much, that I should stay home because it would be too much—”
“I’m not angry, Ma.”
“I wanted to go and to bring you some food, some good food from home, and I can’t image what...” She trails off. “My God, Ralph, they didn’t feed the poor boy. Look at him, will you?”
“I’ve seen him,” my father says back. “He’s fine.”
It’s already too much. Five months at Crownsville and I’ve forgotten how easily people cry. Particularly mothers.
The apartment is smaller than I remember, too—much smaller than the old duplex. The carpet is an amber-colored shag, filthy and stiff with dried food and spilled cola, and the furniture looks cramped and uncomfortable against the paneled walls. There are only a few windows, the shades all half-drawn, and the room is musty and oppressive. I think of retirement homes and abandoned cars left on the side of the highway.
“I’ve been planning this all week,” my mother says, finally pushing herself up from the recliner. She is all skin and bones, like a blouse and sweatpants threaded with pipe cleaners. “We’ll sit down tonight, have dinner together like a family. I’ll make something, cook it up. What would you like, Gideon?”
“You don’t have to, Ma.”
“It’s your first day home. Tell me what you want.”
I tell her hamburgers would be perfect, and that seems to make her happy.
While she busies herself in the kitchen, I move down the hallway and see my father staring without interest at some framed photographs on the wall.
“Look at these,” he mutters.
“She doesn’t look good,” I tell my father.
“What are you talking about?”
“How long has she been this way?”
“What way?”
“So out of it,” I say. “You can’t tell?” I think maybe he’s been around her too long to notice. “She needs to see a doctor.”
My father finally looks up at me and his face is stern, his jaw set…yet his eyes seem hurt. I am not used to seeing him in this way. He says, “Your mother’s fine.” He says, “They’re only headaches, for Christ’s sake, Gideon. Just migraines.” He says, “You worry about yourself, that’s all you need to worry about.”
Later, I go to the bathroom, urinate for what feels like an hour, then find myself standing before the bathroom mirror for a comparable
amount of time. I have taken some of the clinic home with me, I notice: my face is pale like the walls, and peels like plaster. My cheeks are chapped and cracked and interrupted by a network of very faint blood vessels. My eyes look sucked into my skull, hollow like busted light fixtures. My skin is jaundiced, the color of the mashed potatoes served on Fridays. It is also the same color as my mother’s skin.
Rinsing my hands at the sink, I scrutinize my palms. It used to amuse me the way my father would ask to see my hands, to hold them out for him. Yet today at the restaurant I found I only felt sorry for him. For whatever reason.
I stick my tongue out at my reflection, wag it back and forth, and go to the kitchen for dinner.
***
My bedroom seems alien to me, and I think it’s only because we’d been living in the apartment just a few months before I was arrested. It’s small and smells vaguely of turpentine. There are a few scattered comic books on the floor, some Star Wars figures still in their packages tacked to the drywall. A large poster of Jimi Hendrix covers the back of my door.
I lay on the bed in silence for a long while, thinking about my hands and that night on Glad Street. I remember thinking about my father the night I was arrested—sitting in the back of the police car, I had summoned the image of him on the edge of his bed, holding his handgun. It was odd to think of that then. Odd now, too.
Once my mom has gone to bed, I creep down the hallway and grab my jacket from the hall closet. It’s been five months and I expect it not to fit, or to just feel strange, but it fits and doesn’t feel any different than I remember. In the kitchen I load my pockets with matchbooks and stuff a pack of Marlboros into my jacket. Without having to look I can tell my father’s watching me from the living room. He’s seated in the recliner in front of the TV, but he’s not watching television—he’s watching me.
“What?” I say, not looking up. I pretend to busy myself with the zipper on my jacket. “What is it?”
“Where are you going?”
“Out for a while. That a problem?”