She smiled mumbling something. Then she realized she was talking to herself. She quickly looked around. Nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention to her anyway. The cookies, even in this crowd, would be the only thing that had a chance of satisfying her.
And why not. Ramey deserved to get a little pleasure from life like anyone. She picked one cookie up off the stack.
First, she admired it.
Her psych professor had been right. These were a work of art. Ramey was the Andy Warhol of cookies. Each, in either red or green, was an exact replica of the next stuttering down to Santa’s image at the bottom of the pile. These losers don’t have any idea what they’re missing.
She crammed the cookie in.
A wave of guilt washed over her. She had done it; she had blown her diet. If there were ever a chance for retaliation, she’d have to be skinny to achieve it. If not today, in some distant tomorrow, she must prove to Marcus and Karen that she was also something beautiful.
She only had one cookie. Surely, she had not exceeded her calorie allotment. Ramey had not eaten anything all day except for a few small spoonful’s of cookie dough, but nothing else. A couple of mouthfuls of dough and one baked cookie could not have all that many calories. Could they?
She picked a second one up turning it over in her pudgy hand. The cookie was small, but oh, there was so much flavor packed into it. Red icing filled the dent she had made with her own thumb.
She put the cookie into her mouth. It disintegrated into buttery crumbles mixing with the sweet icing. She let the flavors run together savoring them. The liquidly mass slid down her throat. She picked up another one.
Just one more, she thought, but once Ramey got started with the food, she was a woman possessed. She began to down them popping one after the other in quick succession, her face contorting as her mouth tried to accommodate larger and larger gobs.
Santa’s eyes now stared up at her. He would understand having his own bowl full of jelly to contend with. She uncovered more of him. First, his red suit and boots. Next, his white sack filled with presents. Then the rest of his face complete with beard and good-natured smile.
No, he wasn’t smiling. He was smirking- My belly has a purpose does yours?
Ramey pulled back dropping her hands to her lap. She felt out of control. Looking around the room, she saw that a few people were staring at her. She rubbed her sticky fingers on her jeans, and gulped down what was in her mouth. More people began to turn around.
Somewhere, somebody turned off the music.
There was no biting remark, however, no directionless laughter. There was just one word in the quiet that now hung around her. The word was low but audible. It was her own name.
“Ramey.”
She strained to see who had said it. Through the crowd, she saw that Karen and Marcus were coming into the room. They were holding hands. They talked to the people they came into contact with. Everyone turned around to look at her. All of their lips were moving.
“Ramey”
She remembered that Marcus had talked to Karen, a lot, in Psych I. She remembered, now, that Karen had confided to Ramey that she was talking to Marcus. Ramey looked through the crowd. She and Karen locked eyes.
Here Ramey was on the worst day of her life. Her best friend and her future boyfriend were lovers, and she was caught with cookie dust all over her!
She looked down at the stupid platter. She noticed a spotted bug crawling over Santa's exposed boot. In the midst of all of her pain, Ramey was able to ask herself this question: how in the hell did that get there? And in the midst of her pain, she was able to answer: the bugs must have been on the dish when she replenished the cookies leftover from school. But there were more than ten bugs on the dish now. They must be breeding in there. A couple flew off the dish, hovering in front of her. She shooed at them waving both hands.
Marcus and Karen were coming toward her, quickly getting closer. She shooed at them again. This is great--just perfect. Ramey tried to think, tried to reason in her own mind a way out of this humiliation. But there was no reason to down eighty gazillion cookies. No reason other than that she was a pig--a big fat pig!
In Psych, he had kissed Karen’s cheek.
Marcus would talk to both of them, though, Ramey also. He had told them the story of his own worst day: The day he ate the worm. Marcus had said he was a weird little kid. One day he was digging for worms in his front-yard and this other, bigger, kid showed up. The kid told him to eat one.
The kid had said. “You like them, so much, why don’t you eat one?” And Marcus had done it.
In Psych I, Marcus had looked Ramey directly in the eye and said, “It was my worst day, but it was also my best day because everyone at my school found out about the worm and I got respect.”
She looked past the crowd toward Marcus. He was so good looking. Did it matter who he had been? She wanted to sneak out, but they were staring right at her. They were saying her name.
It rippled through the crowd taking on its own beat. “Ra-Me, Ra-Me, Ra-Me.”
Marcus and Karen walked to the line of people who had begun to gathering in front of her. Desperately, or defiantly Ramey picked up another cookie. She could see the tiny antenna poking up from its rim, wiggling. She could see the spotted back of its ascent. The cookie sparkled all over with tiny iridescent sprinkles Ramey did not remember sprinkling. Or were they eggs?
Karen smiled at her.
Ramey didn't exactly get it; all of them were smiling. Suddenly it was like a sweet dream. She was doing what she wanted and they wanted her to do it. If judgment or disgust lurked behind their eyes, for once, it didn't matter because they were not ignoring her.
They began to chant: eat, eat, eeet!
Yes, she had seen the bug, but if Marcus could do it then so could she. Ramey crammed the cookie in. Spontaneous clapping broke out around the room.
They love her.
Then she heard the grumbling noise, “gurrr!”
She felt a small pain. Not hunger, she thought, not this time; no-way. Sweat broke out on her forehead. This was what full feels like. If she had been alone in her apartment, she might have stopped. Not here, though, here the pain was worth it.
More cookies. She chewed them opened mouthed watching the crowd. Crumbs fell down her blouse and all over the couch and the floor. She licked her sticky fingers brushing the crumbs away indifferently.
She couldn’t taste them anymore. But it was no longer about satisfying her own bottomless hunger or even the crowd’s. Something had become attainable that was not before—respect? Santa’s face grinned up at her.
“Ra-Me, Ra-Me, Ra-Me…”
She, then, heard a different noise. It was like the sound of a zipper coming down very quickly or triple extra-large pants ripping, and suddenly the pain increased. A look of panic crossed Ramey’s face as she looked down just in time to see a small red split open at her belly. Bits of frayed blouse stuck to wet edges of skin. Buttons shot wildly into the air. Her mid-section opened vertically and the content of Ramey’s gut spilled out into the room.
Crayon red and green icing oozed from a deflating stomach. The colors mingled with the deep blues and maroons of her internal organs. The split continued upward dividing her body precisely in half. Her skin flopped limply to either side onto the couch. Fear was still visible on Ramey’s face, as it too, came apart and sloughed off.
But there was something else inside of her.
A being stepped from what was once Ramey. She was vaguely human in form, but glowing like gold and with the countenance of a lion. She stood up and roared at the crowd.
There was true pandemonium as people ran. Many burly young men tripped over each other beating it out of the room. Karen and Marcus seemed only able to stare.
A pair of glistening wings became visible, and the being flapped them lightly hopping over the coffee table. Cocking her head at Karen and Marcus, that part of her who was still Ramey, could understand they tried to b
e her friends.
“What happened?” Karen whispered to Marcus, “What is she?”
Marcus shrugged, but the scientist in him really wanted to answer her, “Homo sapien papilio?”
Karen shook her head, a human butterfly? No, I don't think that's it. I'd say, Alis volat propriis --she who flies with her own wings.
She walked, half floated to the window. With both hands, and gazing up at the sky she pushed against the glass shattering the windowpane. Pieces fell to the floor reflecting back as gold and silver. She jumped up onto the ledge. She did not look back. Perhaps it didn’t matter where she came from: only what she had become. And the beautiful nameless being took flight.
THE END.
LUKE BY JASON PALMER
Ever since Mother, I had started heading there at the stroke of a holiday or a long weekend. I would make the hour-long drive from the old family house in Chester, half smothered by a feeling of contradiction too deep to grasp and never knowing what good I expected. Sometimes going there was my own impulse. When the rooms of the old place began closing in, a drive became appealing, and it was easy to go someplace familiar. Other times it was because of Mother’s four dying words: The Family. The Family. I could not understand why I kept going back to that house.
I did not enjoy being there.
No, I did not enjoy it. I cannot say I enjoyed anything about it.
It was during my earlier visits that I first began to be annoyed by a perceived lack of courtesy and civility: little things. I thought I saw a manner, an attitude toward the world, which I would describe as willfully ignorant – despite every advantage and education. I might as well have worn a jacket of thistles to the dinner table; I would not have prickled any more. I said my good mornings to taciturn chicken farmers; I said good night – gentle good night – to overfamiliar prison inmates. I wanted to wonder whether we were really related, but I knew we were. Amazingly, we were.
Later, even after the tide of irritation had swept fully over me and I stopped going there, I still found myself there, like an amnesiac. Even when I began to resist the holidaying impulse and the weight of Mother’s words, I continued arriving on that prosaic doorstep. Part of it must have been a flaw in my own character. As a young man I had found almost any company agonizingly dull; after thirty, I was crippled. Not only was company dull, but the prospect of getting to know the specific demerits and the peculiar dull twists of a new acquaintance was like a blow to the head. I couldn’t move. I was caught in a riptide not of my own making, a grand conspiracy of false sentiments that brought The Family together.
I trudged on. I sat there while they slouched from the couch to the television to the refrigerator and back again. I starved rather than eat the white bread and soft cheeses. I gave up reading as the radio competed with the television on the lower level. I stared at the wall, growing small and cold, wondering how I could have gone so wrong. I endured lunches of short, obvious sentences. I woke to leaf blowers, snow blowers, and weed whackers. I once spent a day moving rocks from one side of a pointless yard mound to another, like an idiot child. The worst part of it all was that they had no idea what it was doing to me.
In my helplessness, it didn’t matter. I knew I would go on returning to the asylum of my brother’s house, just the same as I knew the shrinking rooms awaited me at the old place. I began to see that nothing could stop it. Nothing would bring relief. I was at an age when time was against me.
Then, one day Labor Day weekend while I was at my brother’s house, they brought Luke home from the breeder. Another rite of passage on the road to comfortable oblivion. They brought him inside, and I watched the little bundle shiver in his baby fat, blinking around the living room. I watched as he rolled on the carpet and knew that he would become another vapid fixture of their lives, another requirement of mediocrity. Yes, I thought, of course the dog.
They intended to do everything right: gourmet dog foods, the best veterinarians. The formula for what is called living would be satisfied. I cringed. I was always cringing. Something, somewhere, never stopped lumping on more inevitability. Though…I turned out to be wrong, this time. I did not know it at the time, but a strange new era had begun in that house. The days of Luke. We would soon discover that not even blunt ignorance can knock everything into line, and not everyone is who they are supposed to be, and not every dog is good.
I hated the dog, naturally, first for itself, but then because of the reaction he spurred in my brother and his wife. At first I was amused when Luke pissed puddles in the deep pile carpeting, at the way it made them piss paranoid, coming into a room and turning it over for dark spots, thinking they smelled something. But it was the way they shouted endlessly to each other from distant rooms or up the stairs their reports about the enemy – the location, whether it was the fourth or the fifth time, Luke’s whereabouts so he could be punished – that soured everything. They shouted and they shouted. They discussed the problem at the dinner table. The water glass stopped below my lips. I hated the dog.
It was hard to imagine such a large and well-provisioned (if not appointed) house so dashed apart by the mere possibility of piss. It happened all around me without seeming to touch me: the ill temper, the worry, the shouting. I became a bit of furniture while the obsession progressed. I watched them pass sniffing by me in the darkening rooms, following an imagined odor. The puppy went wobbling by me on uncertain legs, fleeing them. I was amazed by the stupidity of it all, so much so that it seemed to become a moment of clarity, showing me the depths to which I myself had sunk.
There were other annoyances, sabotages, and stupid rows. The pup chewed, farted, and was prone to vomiting up most of a meal. I watched it curl in corners and look around a room with eyes that were too liquid, shivering even in the heat. I realized the creature was not just young but nervous, and that it was a cursed and unfortunate thing: it was intelligent. I wondered what would happen to it in my brother’s house.
By Christmas, it was obvious that they liked the dog even less than I did. I couldn’t fathom why they kept him. Maybe was a chance to get ahead of the neighbors, but ugly dogs were coming back into fashion; Luke was stubbornly becoming beautiful. They complained about the costs of keeping him up. They complained about dealing with his scat and nervousness. They treated Luke – bright-eyed, intelligent Luke – like a bit of livestock, a pig or cow. I thought it suited them.
It did not particularly suit Luke. It also did not work.
When my brother wanted him to be stupid and aggressive, Luke was discriminating and thoughtful. He watched with mild curiosity the Frisbees and sticks that flew from his master’s hand. When he sensed their displeasure at having to carry his stool home from a walk (neighbors peering through slitted blinds), he became constipated. When they administered the expensive laxatives and failed to understand Luke’s nuanced whining in the night, he rewarded them with fine Shetland diarrhea, trailing it across the carpets as he moved dejectedly from his failed scratchings.
(I knew exactly what the whining meant and enjoyed a cozy feeling pulling the covers up over my head.)
While these things went on, I tried to understand the pleasure I took in them. It was simple. For the first time, they felt worse than I did. This was when I first began to approve of the little dog.
When Luke tried to communicate – invented a language for it – they saw a wheedling beggar. When he brought his leash to one of them for a walk, that one would yell at the other across the house to walk the dog until they were stirred up at each other like hornets.
This went on for a few months. For a while, I believed they were being forced toward a realization, something to bring them out of their pinheaded existence, a glimmer of hope. But what they did was simply begin ignoring Luke’s less explicable behavior. They paged through a pamphlet from the breeder with a picture of a more mature replica of Luke on its cover: Your Shetland. Then they dropped the entire matter and tolerated Luke’s eccentricities the same way a man will tolerate an exp
ensive electronic device he lacks the intelligence to use. I was entertained with a comedy of errors.
Yet at some point they must have realized, distantly, vaguely, that the dog had something in his character – a certain refinement – maybe even a kind of nobility – which they did not. They began to see spite in everything he did.
Luke felt it all, and his sensitive little eyes became crumpled like those of a child about to cry.
I no longer hated going; not exactly. I did not like it, but I no longer writhed in my sheets the night before, when the walls shrank and I knew I would have to get out of the old place for a while. It was not me, anymore, the miserable, the most unhappy one. It was not even them. I am certain that the most unhappy one in that house was Luke. It fascinated me.
I watched him struggle, learning to survive. Functionally, minimally. He kept clean. He was never inclined to bark. While I sat watching television one day in the den, and Luke seemed to be watching along with me, I caught his eyeballs wandering despairingly around the room. They settled on me for a moment, the red showing in the corners, looking like those of an uncertain child who’d just done something for the first time. His eyes were quite aware of mine.
I thought of all the hours he must have spent quietly searching. I believe I saw him try to guess what sort of animal he was supposed to be, and fail.
We mostly watched each other, Luke and I, but something was there. He would look at me – my face, and the dog-mesmerizing ability of some human beings to sit still and think – and look again.
I clearly saw layers of his personality that his owners only sensed, blindly. Things more inappropriate for his new family than piss puddles or a chewed-up shoe. I watched as the pissing became a game. On Easter Sunday, I looked up from my reading when I heard the usual shouts erupt and saw Luke trotting through the formal room at the exact speed needed to keep a distance from my pursuing brother. No slower, no faster. I watched him take my brother and his wife around the doughnut-shaped course twice, then three times. Then he took an odd turn to throw them off his trail, and let them see him again, an expectant look on his face which was mistaken for fear. He had learned that they were silly people, and their seriousness wasn’t his own.
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