Attack of the 50 Foot Wallflower

by Christian McKay Heidicker

A scream tore through the night. Back at the test of strength an ant was slowly slipping its way up the narrow tower, pincers working toward the bell and Ruth, who quivered and clung to Pan-Cake.

  Then came more screams. “Phoebe!” On the Ferris wheel, the ants were building a bridge out of their bodies, working their way from gondola to gondola, to feast on the three warm bodies at the top.

  And then, as if this were all a joke in need of a punch line, a strange whirring emanated from the desert. A flying saucer buzzed its way toward Pennybrooke, sand spinning off its metallic sides, as if it had just unburied itself. From its base shot a blinding beam of light that sliced its way across the ground in a wave of fire, melting the sand into glass.

  Of course, I thought helplessly. If it were only ants murdering people, then Daddy might get bored.

  So this was it. We were dead. It didn’t matter how hard I fought. In the end, the Shivers would always get the best of us.

  Staring at that flying saucer, I realized I’d been doing exactly what the Buried Lab wanted me to do: kill for Daddy’s pleasure. Liz had led me to believe there was no other choice.

  I looked at the dying boy in my hands. Well, we would see about that.

  I set Connor back in Ook’s socket. I set Maria in the same socket and said, “Keep him warm. Hug him. But be careful of his stomach.”

  She nodded and wrapped her arms around his quivering body.

  I marched through the carnival, straight toward Daddy, his eyes glowing with the light from the saucer. If an ant dared scrabble up to me, its life ended in a quick, crunchy splatter.

  “HEY!” I screamed into the sky at my father. “HEY!”

  His smile remained unflinching, as wide as a mountain range. The remote rested on his knee. I may not have had Ma’s looks, but I was big enough and violent enough that he should be able to hear me now. He just had to.

  “YOU WANT MORE?” I screamed. “HUH? THIS ISN’T ENOUGH FOR YOU?”

  Right then Daddy only had eyes for the saucer, whose laser of fire was carving toward the roller rink.

  “YOU HAVEN’T SEEN ENOUGH GUTS AND BLOOD AND BODIES? ANSWER ME!”

  Daddy only grinned as the flying saucer’s laser started to melt through the building, which filled with screams. I needed to get his attention. But how? Liz had said Daddy liked only monsters and violence and women of a certain type . . .

  A thought sent a shiver right up all ten feet of my spine.

  “FINE!” I screamed. “YOU WANT SEX AND VIOLENCE?”

  I seized a nearby ant body by the antennae. I wrenched left and then right, and then with a juicy splintering, twisted and yanked, popping its head right off its body. I held the ant head high above my head.

  “I GOT SOMETHING FOR YOU TO SEE!”

  If the only thing Daddy responded to was violence and sex, then I would give him more than he could handle. I spun the ant head around and I kissed it. I kissed it as passionately as I had imagined kissing Lear, stroking the ant’s antennae like it was luscious hair while writhing my body like the women on television, making sounds only appropriate for the bedroom.

  “OH, YEAH! MMM-MM! GIVE IT TO ME, ANT! MM!”

  Daddy’s head slowly turned.

  And something in him changed.

  It wasn’t his smile.

  It wasn’t his hand on the remote control.

  It was his eyes.

  Daddy’s pupils shrank, like shrinking moons. They grew smaller and smaller, moving more quickly than anything on him ever had. His pupils shrank to the size of black stars as they focused on me. Our eyes connected. His smile started to fade.

  That’s when I slid my tongue between the ant’s mandibles.

  “OH YEAH! OH GOSH! YOU SURE KNOW HOW TO TURN A LADY ON, YOU BEAUTIFUL, DISGUSTING INSECT!”

  Daddy’s expression turned to horror. While he’d smiled every time someone died a splattery death or a town was flattened, this is what scared him. A giant girl French-kissing an ant head.

  Daddy’s hand leapt out of his lap in real time, moving so quickly that it made me drop the ant head. His hands fumbled with the remote control. He nearly dropped it behind the mountains, but then he recovered and quickly pointed it directly at me, his thumb trembling over the big power button.

  “WAIT!” I screamed, putting my hands in the air.

  This was it. The end of the world—the entirety of existence clicking off, collapsing in a line and then shrinking to a single brief blip.

  Daddy’s lips started to tremble. He realized I was talking to him. Was he staring at a TV screen and seeing one of the characters in the movie staring back? Or did he recognize some of himself in me?

  “I’M YOUR DAUGHTER, YOU BASTARD!” I screamed.

  Daddy’s face turned pale.

  And then he changed the channel.

  KSSHT!

  Trees swayed above me. Trees unlike anything I’d seen before. Their trunks were thin and white, and they were bushy at the top. I was lying on a forest floor.

  My hands ran along my body. Besides being covered in mud, it felt . . . good. My bruises were healed, my cuts all closed up. When I stood up, I didn’t stretch as high as the trees. I was normal size. I was just Phoebe.

  At first, the gentle sway of the trees and fluttering of leaves was soothing. But then there came an explosion of sound from the other side of the bushes. I remembered Lear and the kids and pushed through the leaves to see if they were in trouble. I stepped out of the forest and into a war zone. Asian people were running, screaming. Men dressed in army fatigues shot at them. I was close enough that I could smell the hot oil of the guns. The bullets nearly deafened me. One of the men shooting had something standing up in his pants.

  “Have at ’em, boys!” he screamed, laughing.

  It was Calvin. His head was intact, but he was shooting people and getting the same sort of kick out of it as most men would get at a striptease. I wanted to shout out to him, but he looked nearly unrecognizable. He was scruffy and dirty and the humor in his eyes was replaced by the same metal Officer Shelley had before he’d become a pod person.

  As Calvin advanced, shooting at the people, I looked up in the sky. Daddy stared down, horrified. When our eyes met, he started as if he was just as surprised to see me there as I was.

  “Change it!” I cried, waving my hands at the sky. “Change it!”

  One of the soldiers pointed at me. “There!”

  Calvin turned his gun in my direction and—

  KSSHT!

  Everything was dancing. The flowers, the butterflies, the clouds in the sky—all moving to the rhythm of a three-animal band: a pig blowing into a jug, a wolf plucking a bass made out of a cigar box and a single string, and a turtle scrubbing a brush against a washboard.

  I was dancing too. I couldn’t help it. The music was making me. My noodle arms were wobbling at either side. My hands were covered in white gloves and only had three fingers each. A cow pranced by on noodle legs, singing a song about the birds and the trees and the little bees’ knees.

  A hunter snuck out of the brush with a gun and took a shot at the cow. It struck her bell, which swung in a circle and bonked her right on the noggin. A large lump raised from the cow’s head like a mountain and three birds started to fly around it. One of the birds noticed me staring, rolled up its feathered sleeves, and spit at me.

  Up in the sky, the sun was beaming. I expected to see a smiling face, but instead . . . it was Daddy’s.

  “No!” I screamed at him. “No no no no no n—”

  KSSHT!

  I was standing in front of a conveyor belt. Liz stood next to me, wearing an apron and a chef’s hat. Her face was covered in chocolate. I noticed the conveyor belt had stopped, and fresh-cooling chocolates were piling up at its end.

  Liz put her gloved hands on her hips. “Look at the mess you’ve got us into this time!”

  We were in a factory. I also wore gloves and an apron.

  “Me?” I said.

  Liz rolled her eyes
at the factory wall, even though we were the only ones there.

  She waved a chocolate-covered spatula in my face. “If the boss asks what happened, we’ll tell him a toucan came in through that window and broke the machine.”

  I furrowed my brows at her.

  “Huh?” I said.

  Liz elbowed me. “I said, if Daddy asks what happened, we’ll tell him a toucan broke through that window and broke the machine.” She gave me an expectant look.

  “Why a . . . toucan?” I said.

  “He’s hated ’em ever since he went on safari and one stole his hairpiece. Every chance he got, he blew the feathers right off one and screamed, ‘Toucan play at that game!’ ”

  The rattle of the conveyor belt almost sounded like applause.

  Outside the window, I could see Daddy’s same shocked expression.

  This time, all I had to do was shake my head.

  KSSHT!

  I was in a brightly lit kitchen, pastures rolling toward a sunset outside the window. Something smelled heavenly, like cinnamon and gravy. A woman stood up from an oven and turned around.

  “Ma!” I said, and threw my arms around her waist. My head only came up to her chest. Pigtails draped over my shoulders.

  Ma looked more radiant than she ever had onstage, her hair a perfect swoop over a polka-dot shirt and striped apron. She held a steaming tray.

  “Looks like someone smelled dinner,” Ma said, smiling.

  She set the steaming tray on the clean kitchen counter and removed her oven mitts. She still had her fingers.

  “How did you escape?” I said, grabbing hold of all ten of them and squeezing. “Did they hurt you any?”

  Ma took her hands back and grabbed plates and forks, not seeming to have heard a word I said. “You know, Phoebe, you’ll be a mother someday, and you’ll need to learn all the tricks of the kitchen.” She opened a hand attractively toward the steaming food—meat loaf and mashed potatoes and mixed peas and carrots. “Now, how long do you think this took me to cook? Five hours? Six?”

  “Ma, what are you talking about?”

  She answered her own question. “Ten minutes. Can you believe that? Two pounds of food, and all for a dollar. The advertisement for this Indian Brave Meat Loaf said for the modern woman on the run, and I thought, if that doesn’t describe my daughter and me, then nothing will. Ha-ha.”

  I shook my head, trying to figure out where my ma had got to and how this woman was walking with no strings attached. She had Ma’s voice and Ma’s face . . . but she wasn’t Ma.

  The woman’s eyes smiled straight through my horrified expression, and then she started to serve up the food. “Now, who’s hungry?”

  I found Daddy beyond the rolling pastures and slowly shook my head.

  KSSHT!

  I was in Joe’s malt shop.

  Sitting across from me was Rhoda. She’d lost the braided pigtails and wore a tight sweater. A part of me wanted to run, get away from her, but she didn’t look like she was about to set any fires. Her ice queen expression had thawed and she smiled too big at Calvin, who sat beside her in the booth, head intact, delivering an animated anecdote.

  “Officer, I says. You’ve got the wrong guy. And he says, ‘You’re darned tootin’ I’ve got the wrong guy. Calvin Marple, when have you ever been right?”

  A hand squeezed mine, and I found my fingers were interlaced with Lear’s. He gave me a wink, and his eye didn’t twitch or his mouth tic or anything. Every inch of him was covered in muscle, which made my knees go watery. He was wearing a letterman jacket, and he squeezed my hand so hard, I could feel his class ring. It shined like nothing I’d ever seen before. I had a brand-new word to describe what it was doing to my eyes . . . Gold.

  Calvin continued his anecdote. “So I says to the officer, I says, ‘That firecracker may have been a doozy, but it’s nothing compared to the firecracker you’ve got at home.’ The officer laughed so hard he let me go!”

  Rhoda burst into giggles, a strange sound coming from her. I stared around the malt shop, more words springing to mind. The squeeze bottles next to Lear’s elbow were yellow and red. The window shone with the neon light: pink and blue. My trapeze dress was Sherwood green.

  “Ah, c’mon,” Calvin said, opening his hands toward me and Lear. “That was a killer comeback.”

  “Sure,” Lear said all cool-like, “Jack Paar will be calling any minute now.”

  Calvin waved him away. “Ah, go jump off a bridge.”

  So much was happening. Too much to wrap my head around. But they were all good things . . . My size: check. No noodley arms: check. Calvin wasn’t murdering people: check. Rhoda had kindness in her eyes.

  And the colors . . .

  I found Daddy’s eyes through the plate glass window. He looked more bewildered now than frightened. I gave my head a little shake, and he lowered the remote slightly.

  “I thought it was hilarious, Daddy,” Rhoda said to Calvin, a little too eagerly.

  Daddy?

  “Of course you did,” Calvin said, “but you crack up reading a postage stamp.”

  Rhoda blushed, her cheeks a vibrant pink.

  Had that other life been a dream? Had my mind borrowed faces from the real world and mixed them up in a nightmare involving ants and a flying saucer and a giantess and all the rest? Was it all over now? My insides warmed at the thought, but then turned cold twice as quick. A dream was a break from life. I didn’t remember living this colorful life before the nightmare. If anything, this was the dream. My fingertips squeaked along the purple vinyl of the booth. It felt so real.

  “You need some water, Phoebe?” Rhoda said, looking at me concerned. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I’m . . . I’m okay,” I said, still wary of her.

  “You gonna finish your fries?” she asked.

  I looked down at the plate in front of me. Apparently, I’d taken only one bite of my hamburger. But I felt famished. Not the giant hunger I’d experienced before—I wasn’t about to put my fist through the plate glass or anything. But everybody else’s plates were empty, and I’d barely touched mine. Strange.

  I put my hand to my stomach and found it was tight as a drum. Here I was, regular-size Phoebe, only less so. I was thin for the first time in my life. This channel was getting better and better.

  “You mind?” Rhoda said, reaching over to my plate.

  “Oh,” I said. “Go right ahead.”

  Rhoda took a fry, and that’s when I noticed her pudgy cheeks. However many pounds I was missing, she had gained.

  I picked up my blue milk shake with red cherries on top and took a sip, hoping it would help me think.

  “Whoa,” Lear said, “careful now. You don’t want to end up like Joe over there.”

  Joe was wiping down the counter, his belly ballooning his apron, so grease-stained it was almost yellow.

  “Yeah, or old Rhoda,” Calvin said, giving her chubby cheek two little slaps.

  Rhoda set down the unfinished fry. Now that I was getting a better look at her, I noticed one of her eyes seemed to have gone lopsided. The line of her mouth was drawn taut.

  “Don’t mind her,” Calvin said. “She’s just broken up about the bug that got the Indians.”

  “The . . . bug?” I said. “Just one?”

  “Yeah,” Calvin said, “flu wiped out half the tribe.”

  “You mean . . . it wasn’t giant ants?” I said.

  The table fell silent a moment, and then Calvin started cracking up. “Giant ants! That’s a good one, Pheebs. I gotta write that one down.”

  I wasn’t laughing. Half of the Navajo people had died.

  Rhoda sighed. “I just wonder how many we could’ve saved if we had baptized more.”

  Calvin pointed a thumb at her. “Rhoda thinks she’s Laura Ingalls or something.”

  Lear snorted.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “The flu didn’t touch Pennybrooke,” Rhoda said. “Well, except that Graha
m girl. She was always going out to the reservation to tend to the sick without wearing a mask, but that was her own fault.”

  My heart squeezed. Beth was gone in this world too.

  Rhoda got a self-important look on her face. “Reverend Marsh said Pennybrooke was saved because we’re a God-fearing people. The Navajo are plagued by sin and drink, so they were struck down.”

  I swallowed deep. Marsh was alive on this channel. I was surprised by how excited I was to see him. Even if he hadn’t developed into the person he’d died as in my world.

  Calvin snickered. “I keep asking Rhoda if the church is so special, then why did lightning strike the clock tower and burn the whole thing down?”

  Rhoda cleared her throat and answered simply. “The reverend said God was providing us the opportunity to build a church that could hold more souls, to rebuild stronger than ever.”

  “Sure,” Calvin said, smirking. “God plays favorites in mysterious ways.”

  Flustered, Rhoda reached for a napkin and accidentally knocked over a Coke. Brown soda frothed across the table, spilling all over Calvin’s pants. Rhoda’s hands leapt to her mouth.

  “Ah, jeez!” Calvin said. “Look what ya did, clumsy!”

  Rhoda grabbed a napkin and started dabbing at his pants.

  “Just . . . don’t touch me,” Calvin said.

  Rhoda stood and grabbed her purse. “I’ll replace them, Daddy. I promise.”

  Calvin got up and brushed at his clothes. “It’s all over my leather jacket, too. You gonna replace that?”

  Rhoda’s shoulders deflated, and I actually felt a touch of sympathy for her.

  “Didn’t think so,” Calvin said. “I’ll be in the car.”

  She turned back to me and Lear, her cheeks flushed.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “I can be such a klutz sometimes.”

  “That wasn’t your fault,” I said. “Accidents happen.”

  Lear gave another snort, but I didn’t look at him.

  “Yeah,” Rhoda said. “Accidents happen to disasters like me.” She waved and headed toward the door. “Well, see you at prom tomorrow.”

  Prom? I was going to prom? Did I have a dress?

  This channel may not have been totally free of horrors—sickness and fires and guys who spoke to their girlfriends like they were less than human. But hey, at least the streets weren’t swarming with giant ants too.