by Tim Curran
So, when she saw Polly standing there, all the predatory evil and manic addition of the meat faded, and there was only love. Because, realistically, Polly was the only thing in this world she ever had loved.
“Oh, Polly, oh darling,” Margie said. “The dog…the dog died. I don’t know who could have done such a horrible thing.”
The lie came easily and it didn’t feel like a lie at all because it really seemed like someone else had killed Bigsby. Even though she knew she had done it, part of her rejected the possibility.
Polly stood there in a pink Abercrombie & Fitch tee and a pair of white denim shorts. She was a tall, leggy girl with dishwater blonde hair, small breasts, and a hard look around the mouth. She was pretty but would never be called beautiful. She had always been very neat in appearance, but today she looked…grimy. Her hair was oily, her t-shirt stained with speckles of something dark, her shorts smudged with dirt.
“You did it, Mom,” she said. “You killed the dog. You laughed afterwards. Why are you forgetting these things?”
Margie blushed, her brow darkened, then she simply looked confused. “I…I don’t know what happened.”
“Well, I do. You killed the dog because I made you kill it,” Polly told her. “Just as you ate the meat because I compelled you to.”
“No, no, no, darling. Please no.” Margie was crying now, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I don’t know what happened, but it wasn’t you. It couldn’t be you.”
Polly grunted at that as if it was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard. It was at this moment Margie noticed that Polly had a tattoo of a red devil on the underside of her left forearm and what looked like a buzzard on the underside of the right.
But she’s never had tattoos, Margie thought. Those are for cheap, common people, and Polly is not cheap or common. She’s always been afraid of needles. She wouldn’t do this. She would never do this.
Polly leaned against the fence next to the corpse of the dog. She looked at Bigsby, grinning. Her teeth were crooked and yellow, black grit packed between them.
Margie shook her head from side to side. That was as impossible as the tattoos. Polly had always been very fussy with her dental care. She brushed and flossed and gargled. Her teeth had always sparkled white. Like a girl in a Dentyne commercial, it occurred to Margie. But these teeth…they were not hers.
“I got tattoos because I like the pain of the needles,” Polly admitted as she prodded Bigsby with one dirty finger. “I have one on my ass, too. And a tramp stamp—a rising sun. I wanted one of those so that when I’m being fucked doggy style, my lover can stare at it as he pounds into me.”
“Stop it!” Margie snapped at her. She did not raise her daughter to talk like this and certainly not to act like this, like some cheap carnie whore. “You don’t say things like that!”
“I’ll say anything I want.”
“Polly!”
“Polly, Polly, Polly,” the girl said, grimacing at the word. “Sweet little Polly Purebread is not so pure. Do you have any idea how many rods have stirred my batter? How many I’ve had in my mouth and my pussy and my ass or how much I loved it—”
Filth! Obscenity! Pornography! Margie jumped to her feet, enraged, fully intending on giving her daughter the thrashing of her life. She had not raised her to be like this! She had given her everything and arranged every opportunity, molded and worked her from a lump of shapeless cold clay into…into…into the girl I wanted to be. So this…this kind of talk…it was unacceptable. Polly was pissing on the perfection of herself that Margie had worked so hard to achieve.
“Now you listen to me!” Margie said, waving a finger in her face. “You do not talk like this. You do not act like this. You do not—”
Polly slapped her across the face.
Margie’s mouth went as wide as did her eyes. It was no gentle, playful little slap; this was the real thing. She started to protest and Polly slapped her again. In fact, she slapped her four times in rapid succession, making Margie fall back, her face red and stinging.
Polly dipped a finger into the dead dog and then licked the blood off of it. “Mmmm.”
Margie sagged against the porch. Her heart was trying to pound its way out of her chest. She was shaking, shuddering. Tears rolled down her face, and she tasted blood on her lips.
Polly advanced on her, standing three feet away with her hands on her hips. For the first time Margie noticed that her skin lacked the usual golden glow it took on in the summertime. It was pallid and blotchy, a jaundiced yellow in color, particularly around the eyes and mouth. A dead animal stink wafted from her. Her eyes did not blink.
“Don’t you want to hear how I fuck and suck?” she asked. “The men I laid with? The women? Sometimes I laid with both at the same time.”
Margie broke down into tears.
This was not Polly. This was an alien, a monster wearing her skin and wearing it poorly. This was a grinning evil from the darkness, a demon from the pit. Though she was frightened of her, Margie was not about to give in. Polly had been her hobby, her project, her obsession for the past twenty years and she was not abandoning all that without a fight.
She got back up again and when Polly tried to slap her, she blocked it and slapped her hard across the face so she would see that this sort of conduct was unacceptable. Let her see the error of her ways. And let her know that her mother was an immovable object.
Polly giggled, her eyes as flat and dead as those of a carp rotting on a beach. She offered her mother a Medusa smile that showed teeth and gums.
Margie took hold of her and immediately wished she hadn’t. Polly did not hug her back. No, she hung limply and coldly in her arms like a rag doll stuffed with fish guts. Just the feel of her was perfectly vile, perfectly repellent. Her cheek against Margie’s felt almost scaly. She moved in her arms with a hot, serpentine sort of motion and Margie could feel the coiling, reptilian tangles of muscle beneath her feverish skin.
Then Margie, horrified beyond reason, tried to pull away, only Polly would not let her. She clung to her like a cobweb, a breathing hot/cold mass of flesh that writhed and squirmed.
Oh please please please let me go let me go—
Then Polly did.
Margie hit the ground and her daughter jumped on top of her the way a bird-eating spider would pounce on a mouse it was going to feed upon. Margie fought, but it did her little good because Polly was glued to her. But this isn’t what made Margie scream, as awful as it was. What made her vent her mind in one drawn-out screech of madness was when her daughter began to lick her.
25
It amazed Bria how completely disinterested she was in the social scene back at school, who was fucking or being fucked by who, all the daily petty grievances and imagined injustices and tiresome drama. Divorced from it, it all seemed so perfectly inconsequential. She received her usual barrage of texts, but she barely answered any. Which also amazed her, because most days, she couldn’t go twenty minutes without reading or sending.
Funny…but the thrill was gone.
Or maybe it had been replaced by a much greater and more bizarre pastime, that being the slow and inexorable change coming over Birch Street.
At the Sicilian Pizza Kitchen across town, waiting for Aiden, she kept trying to find a rational explanation that would make sense of all she had seen in the nabe thus far.
There isn’t one and you know it. Birch Street is losing contact with reality. If it was a patient in a clinical setting, the delusional behavior alone would be enough to suggest an ingrained psychosis.
Ah, technical terms. They were bricks with which you could build a wall of rationality between yourself and that which you feared the most.
When Aiden finally got his break, he came over and collapsed in the booth across from her. He looked exhausted. He probably was, she figured, and hungover to boot. He stared at her untouched pepperoni thin crust, swiped a slice, and chewed it with his eyes closed. “Well?�
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Bria scowled at him. “Don’t sound so enthused.”
He opened his eyes long enough to counter this with a sour look of his own. “I haven’t been off my feet in four hours. It’s been crazy. Excuse my fatigue.”
“I shot you three texts in the past hour.”
He sighed. “Sorry. This is a funny place to work at. They expect me to roll dough and make pizzas and bus tables and not play on my phone.”
“Ah, such levity.”
“I’m known for it,” he said. “And now that we’ve established that, Bree, why don’t you dive in and tell me how Birch Street is going insane. This I gotta hear.”
She nodded, realizing that their usual pithy banter could go on indefinitely if she didn’t put on the brakes. Aiden’s break was twenty minutes and they needed to make good use of it.
She began with the general weirdness of the nabe and segued quickly into how everyone on the block suddenly felt the need to take their garbage out at the same time.
“Wow. Now that’s a conspiracy if I’ve ever heard one.”
“Just listen, smartass. I thought it was freaking weird, then I went home. You know what I found?”
“Alice took out her garbage, too?”
“Yes. But that’s when I realized what it was all about. There was absolutely nothing in the refrigerator or in the cupboards. Alice had cleaned out everything, thrown it all away.” She stared at him pointedly.” And don’t tell me that’s not strange.”
“Oh, it’s strange, but then so is Alice.”
She rolled her eyes. “Listen. I went outside and everything was in the trash can. That’s when it all started to make a certain sort of sense,” she explained. “So, I wandered around the neighborhood. I peeked in other trash cans.”
“My sister, a garbage picker. I never thought it would come to this.”
“Hilarious. All the bins were like Alice’s—nothing but food items. Everything from canned goods like pork and beans, soup, and canned pasta to dry goods like rice and noodles and cereal.”
“Clean your cupboards day in the old nabe?” Aiden said, still obviously disinterested.
Bria ignored that. “That’s not all. I found entire loafs of bread, coffee cakes, and hot dog buns. Cheese and eggs and salad dressing. Ketchup, mustard…and meat, Aiden. Lots of meat. Hamburger and steaks and chicken, lunchmeat, even seafood. Who throws out bags of shrimp and lobster tails? And veggies and fruit. Bags of oranges and bunches of bananas. Everything, everything.”
“Strange, but—”
“I could see one house cleaning out everything, but all of them at the same time? Doesn’t that tweak the titty of chance a little too much?”
“I guess it kinda does.”
She started spilling everything and the more she talked, the crazier it sounded. But now that she had started, she kept going, not just about food being thrown out or Alice’s oddball behavior but Mrs. Standish running around naked and Mr. Hammerberg’s tales of falling meat.”
“I would have thought his meat fell years ago.”
“Aiden, goddammit! I’m dead fucking serious here.”
“Sorry, Bree.” He shrugged. “Maybe…maybe you’re seeing this too much through the eyes of a writer. Maybe you’ve blown it up into something it’s not. Maybe you’re trying too hard to see a common cause, you know? A blanket conspiracy or something and there just isn’t one.”
In other words, Bria thought, maybe I’m the one who’s losing it, not the neighborhood.
“Maybe you’re imagining things that aren’t really there,” he said.
She felt her face flush. This is what it felt like when people thought you were paranoid. She was on the verge of getting very pissed off, but she didn’t. That wouldn’t solve anything. “And when you run out of maybes, Aiden, then what?”
He looked very serious for the first time. “Then I guess I’d think…I’d think something is going on.”
“I’m not a whack,” she said.
“I know. That’s what bothers me.”
“So what should I do?”
“I don’t know. I mean, if you went to someone with this, they’d…um…you know.”
“Think I was losing it?”
He shrugged. “Well, it does sound weirdly paranoid.”
He was right and she knew it. She was grateful she had not told him about what she heard behind the cellar door. That would have really got him wondering about her state of mind.
But it all gave her an idea. “Why don’t you come over and see Alice tonight after work? A surprise visit. Then you’ll see. You’ll know exactly what I mean.”
He shook his head. “Can’t, Bree. Me and Ryan and Poke are driving down to the Rave to catch Sleigh Bells. We’re leaving soon as I get done. I won’t be back until Sunday night.”
Bria felt her spirits slowly collapse. “Which leaves me alone with this. Great.”
She needed badly for him to come over, to see what she was seeing and feel what she was feeling. If for no other reason than to prove to herself that it was indeed happening. Corroboration was critical.
“Oh, don’t be pissed, Bree. We’ve had this planned for two months. How about we do this—you come and crash at my place all weekend, relax and shit, then I’ll be home Sunday. Monday, I’m off. We go over to Alice’s together, see what’s what, and head over to Olive Garden for supper, talk it out.”
It sounded great, but in a way it felt too much like running away or cowering in a closet. “No, no, I better go back there.”
“I don’t want you going back there.”
“I can take it.”
“Bree…”
“No, Aiden. Just give me your spare key in case I need to escape. Call me Sunday and we’ll make our plans.”
He needed to get back behind the counter, but he hesitated. She could see that if he wasn’t exactly worried, he was certainly concerned.
“Go,” she said. “It’ll work out.”
But, inside, she wasn’t so sure of that. Things on Birch Street were either going to get better or they would get a hell of a lot worse. She stared down at the remains of the cold pizza on the grease-stained cardboard round, but she had lost her appetite. The pizza reminded her too much of Mr. Hammerberg and his tales of meat.
It was at this moment she began to feel uneasy. The skin at the nape of her neck was crawling. In fact, that crawling sensation was going right down her spine. It was like being back on Birch Street. More than once since she’d gotten home, she’d felt eyes on her…studying, probing, scrutinizing. Except this time as she looked around, she realized there was a very good reason for itpeople were watching her. The young couple over there were eyeballing her, as was the elderly man with the books and the trio of students at the next table. They were all staring at her. As she met their eyes, they looked away.
Now they weren’t looking at all. Everything was more interesting than hertheir pizza and breadsticks, tablecloths, pop bottles, even the floor.
Am I imagining things? she wondered.
She looked down at her pizza. There were flies investigating it. Coagulated pools of grease. It was untouched. Hadn’t Aiden
Imagine the fat, the cholesterol.
Bria felt that sense of being watched again, but nobody was looking at her. She glanced towards the plate glass windows where SICILIAN PIZZA KITCHEN was lettered in an antique scroll. She saw someone staring in at her. Whoever it was darted away, but she was almost certain it was Sady.
What the hell?
She realized then she was half-standing, pointing towards the window, trying to draw Aiden’s attention, but he was not behind the counter any longer.
“Miss?” a voice said just as she was about to race after Sady.
Bria turned and a small, round man with thick black hair was standing there in a flour-powdered apron. He was looking at her curiously.
“Yes?”
He cleared his throat. “Miss…i
s there something wrong?”
“No, I’m fine.” She shrugged. “I thought I saw someone.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Jeez.”
She went over to the counter to pay her bill, feeling very warm, her scalp crawling with prickly heat. Her cheeks felt hot, a dew of sweat on her forehead. As she handed the girl at the cash register her debit card, she realized her hand was shaking. She pressed it against her hip. The girl ran her card through, smiled, but refused to meet her eyes.
By the time Bria made it outside, she had to drop in a bench down the way to catch her breath. It had not been a full-blown panic attack but, dammit, it had been close.
The only question was: why? What had initiated it? Something always brought them on, only this time she could not be sure what it might have been.
She sat there for the longest time, taking small drags from a cigarette and pretending everyone that passed by was not staring at her.
Chapter Five
Now that war had been waged, it took on a life of its own. Bad Girl could barely even look in a mirror anymore without seeing her arch-nemesis, Piggy. Whether that mirror was at home or at school, in the mall or a reflective plate glass window downtown, it really didn’t matter. Piggy was there, dogging her, tormenting her, grinning at her. Bad Girl even saw her image in puddles and bathwater. Despite all the suffering she had imposed on herself, Piggy had not been weakened, not in the way she had hoped. She was still there and every time Bad Girl looked in the mirror, there she was flaunting her jiggling obesitytrembling, weighty thighs and pendulous feedbag tits, swollen pink abdomen and greasy puffed cheeks.
“Eat, you silly little twat,” Piggy would say in her slobbering, lisping voice. “Stuff yourself to bursting. Fill yourself like a bag until your seams are ready to burst. Pack it in until you are most certainly ten pounds of pig shit in a five-pound bag…then, my dear, and only then will you be rid of me.”