BLACK STATIC #41

by Andy Cox

  “Are you?”

  •••

  “It’s very weird hearing your voice,” he says, and I strain to hear his chuckle.

  “I don’t sound like you thought I would?”

  “You sound softer, more Welsh.”

  I stretch out the hand that isn’t holding my phone. I squeeze it in and out of a fist, pressing my nails into the numb skin of my palm, the shallow lines of my head, my heart, my life, my fate. My stony heart is beating too hard. “You knew I was Welsh.”

  No chuckle this time, though he can no longer wield a threatening cursor. He still has silence; the roaring deafness in my ears.

  I close my eyes, give in first. “I knew exactly how you’d sound.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m talking to you.”

  Another chuckle. “No, I mean, what are you doing? Where are you sitting, what are you wearing? We men need visuals, you know.”

  I pretend to myself that I’m relaxed, though I’m not. “I’m sitting on my sofa with my feet up. It’s leather,” I add unnecessarily, in the wake of another pause. “I’m wearing jeans and a jumper.”

  Through the roar of fresh silence, I think I hear the far off drone of an ambulance siren. “Did you want me to lie?”

  He laughs loud and long, and it makes me jump, nearly curse. “No,” he finally says, “of course not.”

  I stand up because I can no longer bear to sit. I stagger a little as I go into the kitchen. My sense of balance is no longer very good, though I’m never certain why: if it’s timidity, or what has been done to me, or just forgetting again to eat.

  “What are you doing now?” The question is sharp, nearly accusatory, and I wonder at it, because I can’t hear a single thing that he is or isn’t doing at all.

  “I’m pouring a glass of wine,” I say, though it’s more of a tumbler.

  “Maybe I’ll join you.”

  I carefully carry both it and me back to the sofa. We talk about wine, about living rooms, about nothing, and when I get up again to bring the bottle back from the kitchen, I hardly stagger at all.

  “Don’t you want to know what I’m wearing?” he eventually asks, and when I say yes, he describes a black latex suit with strategically placed holes. I try to smile, and it nearly works.

  •••

  The doctor stands while I sit. He frowns at me from under giant, grey brows.

  “He’s signed a DNR. It means that—”

  “I know what it means,” I say. I clasp my fingers together. My nails are longer, but their press is no sharper. I stare down at the purple half-moons that they leave across my knuckles.

  “His brain tumour is very advanced; his cognitive abilities are questionable.” The doctor clears his throat, looks out of the window. “You can contest it,” he says. “If you want to.”

  I look out of the window too. I realise that it’s nearly dark: heavy darts of rain fall through the red-amber glow of stuttering streetlights. I wonder what time it is, I wonder what day it is. I have no sense of any of it at all, as if my body’s rhythms no longer have a clock, a sense of biological purpose. My numbness is only partly to blame for that. I can no longer work; I have no routine at all beyond coming here and going home. Days and nights blur, coalesce, and I forget what my life used to be like: its order and its cadence; its cosy certainties and terrors. I look up at the doctor.

  “Why would I want to?”

  •••

  “I’m very drunk,” I say, because it’s true.

  He chuckles that chuckle, although this time it’s different: low and rumbling. “Will you touch yourself for me?”

  I stretch out on the sofa, gripping the phone in my numb fingers. “I want you to touch me.”

  “I will be touching you,” he says. “When you do it.”

  A silence that this time I’m not afraid of, because I’m more afraid of what he might ask of me next.

  “Reach under your top,” he whispers. “Squeeze your breasts.”

  I acquiesce before realising that he will hardly know it. My nipples are tight, hard; I feel nothing at all.

  “Does it feel good? Is this okay? Tell me what it feels like.”

  I stare up at ugly swirls of ceiling and draw my fingers into a numb fist. “It feels good,” I whisper back.

  “Are you wet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to touch yourself there? Do you want to slide your fingers through all that hot wetness, push them inside?”

  And I can’t bear it, not any of it. I feel sick and scared and lonely and entirely frigid, entirely numb. I don’t even feel the lump at my throat, though I know that it’s there.

  “I want to feel your fingers inside me, not mine,” I say.

  “Then do it, do it,” he says, and his breathing is choppy, his self-restraint spooling loose like magnetic tape.

  And I only obey because obey is what I do, but in that instant some memory of what it felt like to feel returns; it burns at my face, pricks tears in my eyes.

  “Fuck me,” I whisper. “Get on top of me and hold me down and fuck me.”

  This time the silence is not silent. I can hear his ragged breath, I can nearly hear what he is doing somewhere else; somewhere I’ve only ever half tried to imagine.

  “Hurt me,” I whisper, though I am no longer touching myself at all. “Choke me.”

  “God.”

  I think of his too white teeth, his dark hair caught inside a breeze, his big arms, the squeeze of his fists. “Bite me,” I whisper, listening to his faraway groans. “Fuck me so hard that it’s all we can hear.”

  When he comes in a choked roar, I press End Call and drop the phone. I shiver and shake; for a while I forget how to see or hear or think. When I wake up again it’s light outside. And I still can’t feel anything at all.

  •••

  This time the hospital phones me before I’ve showered and changed and prepared myself to go back.

  “You should come now,” the nurse says. “It won’t be long.”

  When I arrive, there are more people, more careful stares. I struggle to focus, I struggle to balance; a nurse has to steer me back to my bedside vigil. There are even more machines, but their beeps and slow clicks are muted metronomes. I don’t hear them any more than I hear anything else, anyone else.

  I hold his hand, though neither of us feels it. I squint, trying to see those blue slow veins under his skin. His big arms, his big hands have become mottled, sluggish. When he finally opens his eyes, they are crusted yellow.

  He smiles; I think he smiles. As though he could, quite literally, return me to my senses. Though I know he won’t. I know now that all these hours and weeks and months of waiting are for nothing.

  He grips my fingers suddenly hard enough to almost hurt. His voice is ragged, unrecognisable as his own. I can’t smell his breath, his skin. “We were happy once, weren’t we?”

  I don’t let him see my phantom tears – not even then. I try to speak: to shout and snarl and snipe, but I can’t. I stroke his skin, it’s dry and scaled and friable; I feel it under my nails, and shudder. And I try to think of any time that we were.

  The doctor has to prise our hands apart. Has to whisper a “he’s gone” before I realise that it’s true.

  When I finally get up to leave, the nurse has me wait in the corridor while she goes off to get his personal effects, though, of course, I don’t want them.

  The prison officer standing next to the door clears his throat, tries not to look at my scars. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs Barton.”

  “We’re getting divorced,” I whisper, willing the nurse to return.

  And he nods a quickly embarrassed of course, even though he’s right. Even though it’s still my name.

  •••

  “I’m sorry,” he says, even though it was all my fault; even though I was the one who spoke the words. “I don’t want you to think—”

  “It’s okay,” I say, but my voice is t
oo cold, it betrays my lie too quickly. I think about hanging up again.

  “I think you’re very pretty,” he says.

  I close my eyes. “I’m not.”

  He pauses. I hear him swallow. And I want to ask him to do it all again – and this time properly. To hurt me, defile me, debase me. To make me feel. To spit in my face and tell me that this is what I’m worth, this is what I’m good for.

  But still I don’t dare, not even now.

  “This isn’t enough,” he says.

  I hold my breath behind my tongue. I hold it alongside the things I don’t dare to say.

  “Meet me,” he says, and his voice his flat, its threat inflectionless.

  •••

  It’s been a very long time since I was in a bar. I perch awkwardly on a fake leather stool, sipping my wine in shaking fingers, trying not to look at my reflection in the dark, wet window. I want to leave, and yet I’m too afraid to move. I’m too afraid to go home, to sit on my sofa, to remember that I have nothing else left to do.

  “Hello.”

  I turn too quickly. Close my eyes and then open them again. His hair is blond, his beard very far from manly.

  He laughs, but I see straight away that it isn’t at me because his cheeks colour red. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It was an old photo.”

  “No,” I say. “You look the same.”

  “You’re very beautiful,” he says, and he doesn’t even look at the burns on my neck, the deep gouges that knives and teeth have left in my skin. When he touches my arm, it tickles. When he kisses my cheek, I feel it from the roots of my hair to the ends of my toes. When he smiles, I feel my own stretching wide, warming every part of me that I’d forgotten had ever existed.

  •••••

  Carole has appeared in Black Static several times since we published her debut story in issue #3. One of those stories, ‘Signs of the Times’, has been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award.

  THE DRIVEWAY

  LEAH THOMAS

  She held her child’s severed hands behind her back. Bloodied water dripped from his wriggling fingertips down to her flowered apron, but she did not loosen her grip.

  “You’re being punished for good reason.”

  “Please, Mom.” The sound that emanated from him was as much of a gargle as a voice. From the highchair he waved his arms – two chicken drumsticks. “I’m sorry!”

  “Never try to run past me again. You are never to leave this room. Understand?” His hands snapped and squelched. Had she not been wearing rubber gloves, popsicle-stick fingers jutting from chicken breast palms may have riddled her with splinters. “Lift your arms, Dearheart.”

  “Why do you call me that? It’s not my name.”

  “That’s what my mother called me. And don’t change the subject. You scared me half to death.” She jabbed his hands into the meat of his arms and twisted them into place.

  “I just wanted to go outside.”

  “Why?” She gestured to the aging country kitchen, a spacious room coated with pear-patterned wallpaper and bottomed by peach-colored linoleum floors. Overhead, the blue ceiling had been spotted with painted puffs of white clouds. Between a battered old fridge and the highchair was a wooden toy chest, a family heirloom that spilled over with washable toys, hairless teddies and plastic soldiers. “You have as much to play with in here as any kid could want. As much as I had.”

  “Other kids play outside.” Two marble eyes gleamed from deep inside pig-skull eye-sockets.

  “What would you know about other kids?”

  “I see them out there sometimes.”

  She glanced out the room’s only window, which overlooked an unkempt lawn shadowed by the forest. A disused dirt driveway, overwhelmed by encroaching ferns, disappeared between the pines. “You saw kids here?”

  “They were swinging a very long string…like your knitting wool, but thicker. And taking turns hopping over it.”

  “Jumping rope, that’s called.” She pulled the curtains shut.

  “Can I try jumping rope?”

  “Maybe, if you behave.”

  “Outside?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Please, Mom.”

  He stood on pig-hoofed tiptoe on the arms of the chair. Most children could not have climbed out of the highchair, but Dearheart’s sausage-legs could bend any way he willed them; she had animated each mismatched part of him in full. He clasped his hands together as best he could. Melting ice slipped down his meat appendages. She would say his expression was pleading, but pig-skulls really have only one expression.

  “Let me out. I’m not afraid!”

  “Bedtime. You’re defrosting.”

  Dearheart hissed when she hoisted him up. He twisted his limbs backwards in protest when she placed him in the freezer atop a bag of frozen peas.

  “Enough fussing.”

  “When I’m as tall as you, can I go out?”

  She did not say You will never grow. You are made of dead things.

  She closed the freezer, trapping his unhappy sniffling within it. She filled the kitchen sink with warm water and a tablespoon of bleach and scrubbed every corner of the room before hanging her apron to dry. Upon leaving, she padlocked the kitchen door.

  •••

  His arms were crossed the next time she opened the freezer to wake him. She pulled him out and stood him up by the window.

  “There are some squirrels gathering acorns on the lawn this afternoon. Look!”

  He swiveled his skull around all the way to look at her. “Where are the kids?”

  “Enough of that, now.” She peered out at barren branches bitten by autumn frost. “I’ve never seen anyone out there.”

  He sat down hard, clunking against the floor. She remembered tantrums in which his hands and feet had scrabbled away from the rest of him to hide in cupboard corners, and angry fits when his head had rolled off his shoulders. She leaned over to hug him and hold him together.

  “I have something for you.”

  Every day they played together, pushing matchbox trucks across the tiles or walking soldiers up and down the highchair tray like it was some runway. Sometimes they pretended the floor was lava (after she explained lava to him), and sometimes they simply played House (he always insisted on being Mommy). Today she had brought him a length of twine that was knotted at both ends.

  “It’s a jump rope.”

  “It’s not.” He tried to kick the twine away, but it stuck to his freezer-burned foot.

  She peeled it off of him. “It will work. Trust me.”

  “Can’t you go out and find a real one?”

  “We can just play something else.”

  “I’m tired, Mom.” His head sunk down from misshapen steak shoulders, all but touching his feet.

  She said she loved him, but he turned his back on her before she closed the freezer.

  Before leaving, she laid the length of twine on the countertop.

  •••

  That night she propped herself up on her mother’s old pillows and retrieved the family cookbook from among the battered books on the nightstand.

  Some children in the book were close to eternal. There were children made from metal and clay and glass that would not decay for ages. Those pages were untouched. One recipe was dog-eared:

  A Somewhat Child (a provisional option)

  She tapped her finger down the list of ingredients, squinted at the fine print that recommended using a higher proportion of pork than any other substance (because pigs were not so far from human, when it came right down to it). She peered at yellowing pages that diagrammed how to make simple armatures from household items such as wicker chairs and hangers and nail files and yes, popsicle sticks.

  Nowhere did the recipe tell her how to stop Dearheart from leaving.

  If she read the recipe to him during story time, maybe he could understand why he could not play in the driveway. All children had to find out where they came from one day, after
all. She often wished her mother had been the one to tell her such things, back when she was growing up.

  •••

  Because she carried the cookbook into the kitchen with her, her hands failed to catch her when she fell.

  She awoke with a cracking headache and peeled her face from the linoleum. Her eyes scanned the length of her body until she caught sight of the twine pulled taut across the kitchen entrance, the door closed beyond it. Gray light seeped through the window; evening had not yet arrived. She stood, wincing at her bruised knees and pounding skull, and stumbled to the refrigerator. She tore open the top-hatch to find it empty apart from the peas.

  She ran to the window. Dearheart stood at the head of the driveway, farther away from her than he had ever been, dead leaves stuck to his legs. She made for the door. The doorknob rattled but had been locked from the outside. If he could hear her when she pounded on the glass of the window, he did not show it. He stood on tiptoe once more, vibrant crimson and pink against the colorless trees and sky. He was peering down the long driveway, neck elongated as each piece of him shifted upwards to raise his line of sight higher.

  When he took another tottering step forward, she hollered. Fighting a sob, she upended his toy chest and braced it against her diaphragm like a battering ram.

  Every time she slammed the chest against the window she thought he was about to vanish between the trees forever.

  No one had replaced the window since her grandmother had lived there, and the ancient wood cracked and gave out when the glass shattered. She left her house slippers behind and shards scraped her sleeves and legs as she crawled outside. Her skirt tore on the window frame. She sprinted across the lawn, ignoring the acorns that jabbed into her bare feet.

  He was already around the bend when she closed her arms around him.

  “What on earth are you thinking?” The chill autumn wind blurred her vision, made her chest tighten. “How can I look after you if you leave?”

  “The children ran away from me.” He was trembling, unusually warm and damp under her hands. “Can I follow them?”

  She was already pulling him back towards the house, eyes fixed on the front door.

  “Are you going to take my legs away this time?”