Age of Blight

by Kristine Ong Muslim

  When school started and the homework began to pour in, Martin Strang thankfully forgot about Grampa Des and the issue about his hands. Also, there was Sally Martinez, the new classmate. How she occupied his recess-time daydreaming. He imagined her asking for a bite from his greasy ham sandwich. He imagined showing her his gamecard collection. He imagined sharing his world with her.

  Martin waved at her from the school bus. Sally saw him but she averted her gaze, looked away, pursed her pink lips.

  There was a tingling in his hands. The finger pads itched. He could not make his right hand stop from curling the pointer and thumb into an O. Trying his best not to scream, Martin automatically forgot about Sally Martinez and her pink lips. When he arrived home, the first thing he did was rush straight to the bathroom. Running cold water over his hands, he prayed under his breath for Gramps’ story about his hands to be a lie: “Not alive, not alive, not alive,” he whispered, chanting, willing the fear to go away. “Please, Lord, don’t make them BE ALIVE.”

  Just cut them off. He thought for a moment, then he closed his eyes and the vision of him cutting his hands disappeared. He rubbed the soap bar to make the strange itch go away. His hands, as if in revolt, maliciously flung the bar on the floor. Martin was not aware that he was already crying as he picked up the soap and threw it again and again.

  When he opened the bathroom door, his mother was there.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m okay, Mom.”

  “Are you sure?” she looked him over, trying to read whatever secrets were shielded by those young, all-knowing eyes.

  “I got a cramp in my leg and dropped the soap.” He was not looking at her. He would never, in a million years, say or do anything to make his mother think that he was going crazy. Lazy or dumb, yes, but not crazy.

  “You must be hungry. Come on,” his mother said gently. “Dinner’s ready.”

  He heard Lauren shriek happily while dancing with Winnie the Pooh. He did not have to look, but he knew that she was bopping at her self-appointed place in front of the television. Martin would give up everything so Lauren would remain like that, would never have to undergo all the crazy things that had been going on with him. He would find a way to solve this. He would, no matter what it took. I love you, Mom. I love you, Laurie. Daddy, please be home now. Hands not alive, not alive, not alive.

  Weeping, Martin eyed his fingers as they tap-danced across his desk. His half-finished homework was a pile of mess. His tears now blotted the ink. His evil hands—they simply would not stop. Gliding and wriggling and twirling like stick marionettes dancing to an imaginary tune, his fingers paraded across the surface of the soaked notebook paper. Helplessly, he watched them move.

  How did you do it, Gramps? I’m not so sure if this is your fault, but I hate you. I hate you very much. I didn’t know how you managed to do it, but I’d beat you this time. You can’t make me cut off my hands! Dad says I’m gonna grow up to be a doctor. I’m not going to end up dead and drunk like you and get buried in a stupid tie. You can’t make me cut off my hands.

  Turning under his sheets, he thought of his cousin Jimmy, who was born with an enucleated left eye. It made that eye socket look like a fleshy hollow and deformed the left side of his face. Last summer, Martin had made fun of him behind his back. Now, he would have traded places with Jimmy anytime.

  How did it start? Think, think, think. Maybe, if he could figure it out, he could make everything go back to normal again. The hands began doing what they’re not supposed to do after Gramps said his crazy little farewell statement, right?

  Gramps just said it, and that was it.

  Words.

  Just words.

  Like a curse.

  How does one break a curse?

  Martin cried and became angry at the unfairness of it all. He was only nine years old. Chief was safe inside the bottom drawer, but what about him?

  He finally fell asleep an hour past midnight. Everything else in the room took on the ever familiar mottled color of darkness. In his dreams, he was in the kitchen. He was about to cut off his left hand when it tried to grab Lauren. He wondered how he could get rid of the other hand when the left one was already severed. In the living room, Lauren sang and hopped with Winnie the Pooh, whose jar of honey spilled forth to lure the ants.

  How does one break a curse?

  Later, in class, as Mr. Rocero droned on the different parts of a flower, Martin sheafed through his thoughts, looking for loopholes. Perhaps, he was looking at it the wrong way.

  “Petal, sepal, pistil, stamen—”

  Perhaps, he was not supposed to break it.

  “This, here, is called the ovary—”

  Maybe, he only needed to pass it on somehow. To give it to someone else?

  Martin smiled his nine-year-old smile. Maybe, that was it, but how?

  “No, Billy, that’s just your tummy. You don’t have an ovary.”

  Laughter. The big guys at the back snickered. They would forever remember Billy Agaton as the boy with the ovary.

  Martin joined in, but his laughter sounded forced. It was better than nothing.

  He felt the dreaded, ever familiar tingling when he reached the end of the block where his two-story home stood. At his sides, his fingers began to quiver daintily as though they were hovering over piano keys and could not decide which particular note to strike.

  He did not know when it happened exactly, but he was no longer afraid. Instead, he just felt angry. “I hope you won’t ever rot, Gramps,” he said under his breath. He had never felt this angry before. His chest hitched, and he was out of breath. He stared at the glistening dragon kite tangled in the branches of the tree on the neighbor’s front yard. He concentrated on the image so that his tears would not come out.

  “I never did anything to you,” he whispered, as he realized the only answer to a curse was making a curse of one’s own.

  Martin blinked his tears away. His hands stopped moving, and they suddenly felt like they were his again. He would never understand how he did it, but he knew he had won.

  And somewhere, an old man named Desmond Strang opened his eyes inside the coffin where he was stretched out. He saw nothing but darkness. He was unable to move, yet he felt everything that reached out for him inside the cramped space six feet under the grass.

  Jude and the Moonman

  It wasn’t our fault. You should understand that by now. But I don’t expect you to understand the reason we did what we thought we had to do that summer of 1999, because people don’t understand order as much as we do.

  At first, there were only three of us: Mel Arlington, Judith Legold, and me. By the end of the semester, just before summer vacation, Billy Gambale, a fourth-grader who once helped Mel push my bicycle out of the ditch, joined our little group. I could never forget that day. It was humid, and the whole world was the Mighty Godzilla out to get us. The burly Bartman and his ferocious pack were chasing me and Mel riding double with me on my bike. I lost control of the handlebars when we reached the embankment, so we landed in the ditch near Mr. Carasco’s farm. The Bartman and his gang were laughing their heads off as they walked away from us. Mel and I cursed silently. Easing our way out of the filthy mud bath, we understood that we had no choice but to endure the treatment, because that was how the world worked. There was an infinite allowance for pain because the course of natural hierarchy—the taut demarcation line that separated predator from prey—had to be sustained. We knew that. We respected that.

  “Want some help?” the freckled Billy Gambale called out from the embankment.

  According to Judith, Billy spent most of his life playing inside the video arcade at Kingshoppe because he didn’t have any friends. He flushed when we looked up at him, probably suddenly realizing that it would be a lot easier for him if we ignored him.

  “Come on down if you want to,” Mel said, laughing and splashing mud on me. “You’re Billy, right?”

  “Yeah.”

>   He brightened instantly. I could swear I’d never seen happiness as profuse as that which shone from Billy Gambale’s eyes. That afternoon at Judith’s house, Billy joined us to watch Flame of Recca, a Japanese animated series. We ate chocolate cookies and drank all of the milk in the fridge. There were now four of us in the spacious living room of the Legolds, and the thought of us being friends for a lifetime suddenly dawned on me. I felt proud.

  It was on the twenty-fifth of June when we first ventured into the vacant lot beside the Lares House to play baseball. It was Billy’s turn to pitch.

  Judith swung for the fences.

  Crack.

  I followed the ball’s course across the sky although the sun hurt my eyes. For some reason, I felt like a real man whenever I did that. It landed somewhere in the middle of the thick vegetation fifteen feet away from us.

  Mel turned fast and went for the ball. He’d told us earlier that he only managed to snatch the ball from his older brother’s bedroom because his brother had his head clamped with headphones. “The volume was turned up so high you’d hear the sound from the next room,” Mel said. “I think he’ll need a hearing aid when he gets older. Maybe two.”

  Mel was approaching the bushes when Judith screamed. I’d never heard her scream before; she was as tough as any kid I’d ever met in my life.

  We all froze. Following the direction of Billy’s frightened gaze, I saw it. It looked like a child, but its face resembled something of a white board cutout, with eyes made of buttons, a paper clip nose, and a piece of string shaped to form the lips. Then there were those terrible, hateful spots on his skin, miniature lunar craters.

  Mel stepped back as the creature took one step forward. Its grotesque limbs cradled the ball, stretching awkwardly towards Mel. We huddled close, our eyes fixed on the creature as it set the ball on third base and scuttled back into the bushes. Judith was the one who picked it up for Mel.

  “He’s just a freak,” Mel declared, looking down at his dirty sneakers as we walked away from the Lares House.

  “He must’ve gotten some radiation when he was a kid,” Billy added.

  I was annoyed by the way that they blatantly referred to the creature as a he. It wasn’t human to me. And I hated it, had to hate it more for what it represented. It was completely dislodged from my concept of primal order. The creature was a pure abomination.

  “What’s radiation?” Judith asked.

  “It causes things to mutate,” Billy said. “Like if I give it to you, you’ll change into a rat or something.”

  “Shit,” Mel said, horrified. “How do you get it?”

  “I don’t know,” Billy answered. “It’s everywhere. The government puts it on our food so we don’t get past fifty. And there’s this one time—”

  “I think it’s an alien invader,” I said. I was not smiling. “I think it wants to take over the world. We have to stop it.”

  “Us?” Mel gasped. His face was ashen with fear.

  “Shouldn’t we call the police, or something?” Judith said.

  “They won’t believe us. Not grown-ups. They won’t believe a thing like that. They’d laugh their heads off and then stick us in the loony bin, like what happened to Karl’s dad.”

  “You’re right, Jude,” Billy agreed.

  “Not if we take a picture of him,” Judith suggested.

  I noticed that Mel was looking around nervously.

  “How?” I said. “Say ‘hey, Mr. Moonman, we’d like you to pose and say cheese so we can prove your existence and get you destroyed?’”

  “Why don’t we just forget about him, okay?” Mel said. He was perspiring and taking shallow breaths. Crybaby.

  We were silent for a while.

  “Come back here tomorrow,” I said when we reached my house. Something important was happening. I would take the responsibility if I had to. “We’ll talk about what we’re supposed to do.”

  I turned and walked across the yard, feeling their eyes on my back. I did not wait for them to respond because I knew they would stick with me no matter what happened.

  In the end, everyone agreed to join me in hunting the Moonman. Mel, anxious about the idea, finally gave in when he saw Judith’s enthusiastic response.

  We tracked the Moonman for three days without success. On the fourth day, we had some luck, spotting it near the stream. It was playing, forming a mound of sand with its bulbous fingers. The scene disturbed me; it was a blasphemy. The creature was building what appeared to be a sandcastle.

  It did not have a right to do that. The Moonman had corrupted my innocence, my sense of order and I was convinced I had nothing to lose. I pegged my first rock with such murderous force my right arm ached in its socket for days after. One shot was all it took. The rock hit the creature squarely on the forehead, and it collapsed against the stream bank. Yes, close your eyes now, Moonman, my mind screamed triumphantly. Close your eyes and seal those lunar craters on your skin forever. Let the earth feed on you and leave us in peace.

  Then I saw red stuff ooze out of its hairless head. I could not believe what I saw but I knew it was blood.

  Mel wailed, and all three of his rocks fell out of his shirt. Clack, clack, clack. Colder than the earth, the rocks whispered a rhythmic chant as they hit the ground.

  Billy and Mel quickly found their way out of the dense undergrowth we used as a hiding place. They ran. They ran away. They never talked to me after that. Judith cried on our way home, and I never heard a word from her again. But I knew everyone would keep the secret. It was a pact none of us needed to talk about.

  A month later, I overheard my father talking to my mother about a rotting carcass near the stream two miles from the Lares House. According to my father, the police swore they never thought the remains could be human until it was autopsied.

  But I knew better.

  Dominic & Dominic

  When at last six-year-old Dominic finally learned to trim his fingernails without accidentally cutting himself, he grasped the clipper’s tiny lever and brought the blade down expertly against his nail, the sharp click-clack of stainless steel striking keratin satisfying him. He gathered the nail clippings on his lap, unceremoniously deposited them in a shallow hole in the backyard, and sealed them underground by toeing loose soil into it. Burying his fingernail clippings was a move that wasn’t at all symbolic to Dominic. In fact, he did not even think why he chose to do so instead of tossing the clippings in the trashcan in the bathroom or the one under the kitchen sink. If asked why he buried the nail clippings in the backyard, he would probably shrug and say he didn’t know.

  The morning of the next day, Dominic happened upon the same spot in the backyard and noticed the tip of a finger. It was small enough to be inconspicuous but pale enough to stand out against the dark brown of the loam. Dominic, who was curious at first because fear would only come later, knelt to inspect more closely the odd flesh-colored protrusion.

  He retreated to the screen door where his mother was going through the motions of domesticity, and asked her whether or not it was possible for a fingernail to grow back into a finger.

  Distractedly, his mother explained that fingernails were dead. “That’s why you don’t feel a thing when you trim them,” she said. “They’re like our hair. They’re made of a type of protein called keratin. And no, there’s no way for nail clippings to grow into fingers. What’s dead stays dead.”

  So, armed with the newfound certainty of the dead supposedly staying dead, Dominic headed to the backyard, scrutinized the spot where he buried his nail clippings, and gently touched the finger growing therein, the finger that was now exposed down to the proximal phalanx, the finger pointing skyward with the surliness of a person whose belief system was based on self-importance. Dominic carefully, almost reverently, disturbed the earth around the jutting finger. He recognized the tips of three more fingers close to it. The thumb, not yet visible, would be down there along with the rest of the hand. Dominic, who was still curious because fear wo
uld only come later, replaced the soil to cover the three fingers he had exposed and left the partially buried finger pretty much how he found it. He rushed to the kitchen. Breathless and excited, he told his mother that fingers were growing in the spot where he had buried his fingernail clippings.

  “They’re what?” she asked, wearing the harried look of a single mother on a Monday before the morning rush hour. She scanned the notepaper sheet attached to the fridge door with a watermelon-shaped magnetic holder. “Not now, honey, I’m busy.”

  “But you have to see them. They’re really fingers, I swear. What if there’s a whole hand in there? We have to do something.”

  She waved him away with a stern expression, grabbing the yellow pages from a shelf under the telephone stand. “The hand will be fine. There’s nothing you and I can do for it. Now, you can play in the backyard as long as you want after you’ve had your breakfast. Aunt Nancy will be here any minute.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “I’ll be home early tonight. Then we can look at those fingers you say are growing in the backyard.”

  Of course, Dominic’s mother was exhausted when she got home that night and retired to her bedroom after dinner. As for Nancy, her mother’s cousin, she fiddled with her laptop the rest of the time, memorizing coursework aloud and calling out to Dominic once in a while to check if he needed anything. He said over and over that he didn’t need anything. He just needed her to come to the backyard and to check out the fingers that had grown out of his fingernail clippings. She replied with either a “not now” or a “later.”