Small Magic
Collected Flash Fiction
Copyright 2011 Aaron Polson
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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This book is dedicated to Aaron Ouellette, Jason Wollenberg, and Ken Boling, three friends who help me build many stories. Maybe too many.
Chapter 1: How to Burn a House
When it comes to actually burning the house, remember a good blaze is a work of art. It’s all about three ingredients: oxygen, fuel, and heat—the right amount of each make a fire something special. You skimp on one of the three, and the house just simmers. Rank amateur.
Before I even think about lighting up, I always open the windows so the fire has a good air supply. A few guys I know like to break windows, but I figure it’s a matter of taste. Always seems like overkill anyway, busting up the windows before the fire. Broken glass gets everywhere. Just a matter of opinion, I guess.
The house provides plenty of fuel itself, but a nice, high quality job—a masterpiece—needs a little nudge. Gasoline works great, and my Daddy’s hand-me-down metal can gives me a warm feeling like he’s right there with me. They don’t make those metal ones anymore, but a good plastic container will do. Rubber gloves are good, too. I had a little spill once that made my hands stink for a week.
If there’s a basement, start there with the gas because fire likes to travel up. For finished basements, sprinkle gas over the furniture and splash a little on the walls. Don’t waste any time with the floor if it’s tile or bare concrete. For an unfinished basement, make sure to soak the support beams and exposed wall studs—anything that will burn.
From there, douse the rest of the house, hitting the furniture first, a little on the walls, from the lower floors up. If the gas runs out before the attic, so be it, but don’t forget to save a little for the bedrooms, even if they’re on the top floor. Don’t hang around too long, of course, but make sure the bedrooms have a little boost in the fuel department. Most window dressings go up pretty well without much help, so do blankets and clothes, so use the gas sparingly on those areas. On a personal note, I make sure to dribble a little over all family photos and other personal knick-knacks. It’s a nice touch.
Make sure to save the fuel containers—especially if they’re those nice, metal kind—and grab the igniter. A fire has to have heat to get going. Matches work fine here; no need for fancy lighters or ignition devices. Some folks prefer to stay outside the house to light the fire. In this case, drop the lit matches through an open basement window or two. Personally, I like to set the match to a few spots in the basement myself, but that just because I’m a hands-on guy. Once that sucker is lit, get out and drive away—not too fast of course, but not like it’s a sight-seeing vacation or anything.
I should mention one last thing: it’s best to go back to the bedroom and check on the owners before lighting the place. Don’t look them in the eye—I’ve known guys to break down when they look them in the eye—but make sure the cable ties are still holding their hands and feet. I always use cable ties because they can’t be undone like rope or twine and they can’t be torn like tape. Of course nothing beats a good hunk of duct tape across a mouth once the hands and feet are bound. Wouldn’t want somebody hollering out and spoiling the fun before a nice, big inferno got going, would you?
Chapter 2: A Little Bit for Braz
The first victim tacked to Piecemeal’s rap sheet was missing the pinkie finger of her left hand. Three bodies later, and the police had a pattern, something to work with: a pinkie, a hand, the forearm up to the elbow joint…PK they started calling the murderer around the precincts in the city, PK for Piecemeal Killer, like a playground nickname.
Braz Butterfield worked the case all the way to both shoulder joints and a missing leg.
Five years. Fifteen victims.
He’d wondered in the past if they’d missed one of the victims, working backwards like they did from the shoulder. After years of tiny pins on a map of the city, trips into the foulest alleys and the rusted iron, faded paint parts of town, rubbing elbows with junkies and greasy, early morning fog, Braz developed a certain belief, his own act of faith, that they’d miscalculated because PK took something so small, so insignificant, the coroner’s report had been remiss. Something tiny like a fingernail.
Academic now, he reminded himself as he stood over the corpse in room 166 of the South Dells’ Motel 6. Academic.
Braz Butterfield held the unfolded portrait of PK, the only sketch anybody had been able to squeeze from a potential witness in five years. The cold meat on the bed matched as close as anybody—the loping, dangling ears, the hitch in an otherwise thin and somewhat distinguished nose, the odd spacing of the eyes, a centimeter or two away from being “just right”, the obtuse pucker of the upper lip. Braz had him.
The bullet wound and rest of the hotel room told the story: a plastic shopping bag filled with homespun collages made from snippets of truck-stop porn, the spilled bag with traces of methamphetamine, the lack of money anywhere in the room. Braz had searched of course, explored every possible crevasse and even scoured the Ford Ranger outside in the lot.
That’s where he found the suitcase. That’s how he really knew, even more than the artist’s sketch. Braz found the missing parts in the suitcase, each sealed like leftovers in vacuum-tight plastic bags. He didn’t bother to count and verify the fifteen victims’ missing bits or even search for the suspected sixteenth. No. That was for crime scene. He’d make that call soon enough.
Maybe.
The corpse held him for the present. PK captured the last five years of Braz Butterfield’s life. PK ended Braz’s marriage. PK added fifteen pounds to Braz’s midsection and took a few inches from his hairline. PK made him miss his son’s last football game, but nothing kept Braz from the funeral after the boy wrapped his Honda around an oak on spring break.
No, PK had captured so much of him, Braz might as well be missing pieces, too.
The fingers of Braz’s left hand played at his pocket, feeling the outline of Toby’s Boy Scout knife. Remembering. Planning.
Go on.
The voice startled him at first, but Braz knelt next to the bed, praying at the altar of the monster who’d taken so much, piece by piece, little pieces adding to something bigger than Braz’s world. He fished the knife from his pocket and unfolded the smallest blade.
Go on.
With a trembling hand, Braz lifted PK’s left and separated the pinkie from the other fingers. He pushed the blade under the nail, pushed until it wouldn’t go any further. There was a dark line, but no blood came—it had already pooled at PK’s back. Braz twisted the knife, prying until the yellowed nail broke free of the skin. He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger, savoring the smoothness and thickness of it before stashing it in his pocket with the folded knife. He’d grab a box of plastic bags on the way home.
When he walked out of the room, Braz couldn’t help but smile, his eyes lingering on the left pinkie, wondering how long it will take the next detective to make the connection, piece by tiny little piece.
Chapter 3: Inheritance
When Magomu reaches the platform, he hurries to his brother’s rope. His hands ache, raw and strained from the climb, but he works quickly, struggling against the dullness of his knife. It is an old knife, but not as old as his father's. Not as valuable.
He closes his eyes as the last strands fray and pop. With his eyes closed, he sees his brother's body, broken on the packed earth below, and imagines holding his inheritance to the sun, the blade glittering, while the crowd cheers his name.
Chapter 4: Gary Sump’s Hidden City
That guy over there, the skinny one with the big glasses and pinched nose, sitting alone at Java Stop and drinking a tall regular, his name is Gary. He has a miniature city in his backyard. I live next door, and I’ve watched him from my second-story window. Gary is dull—plain yogurt without sweetener—except for the secret city.
It started simply, just buildings made of spare wood and a couple of bricks he had lying around his yard. Maybe he’s lonely. I don’t know. I never see the guy on the phone, and he doesn’t go out except for a tall regular at Java Stop. I’ve watched him since before his wife bailed six months ago.
Anyway, he made roads, parks, and a lake in his backyard—just like The Sims. You remember The Sims, right? Scott played for hours back in the dorm; probably why he dropped out. Well, the people came later. Little critters—they look just like you and me, wearing clothing and everything.
No, they aren’t dolls or action figures.
They move around.
They live in the little buildings.
They’re alive.
After a while, I started watching them instead of Gary. I hooked up a camera which looked over their city so I could watch what happened while I was at work. Eight hours of video zipped by in about twenty minutes on high speed. They work, too. The little people cook, create art, worship. They rearranged some of Gary’s buildings, made one of them into a kind of church. I don’t know if he ever noticed.
Gary goes to work at eight in the morning, returns at five-thirty, and turns off his television at ten. He’s an accountant or something. Dullsville. On Saturdays he comes down here, has a cup of coffee, and reads the paper. Not a lot of variation.
I’ve seen him in his bedroom, sobbing like a baby. One time I saw him look at the label on a bottle of pills—an orange one. Maybe Gary was pondering the undiscovered country.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he goes outside, tilts a house on its side, snatches a few of the people, and squeezes their heads until they swell and burst. Poof—little red cloud. After killing two or three this way, he slumps onto his porch steps and sobs, kind of like that night in his bedroom. He tosses the stained bodies into the city. After a while, he goes inside, slamming the door.
They hold funerals. They dig holes and plant the headless in a section of dirt near Gary’s begonias. Kind of creepy, really—they have this whole funeral procession thing and play sappy music. I’ve watched these people do everything: Work, play, swim in the lake, even have sex in their fenced-in backyards, but I only feel like a sleazebag when I watch one of their funerals.
Yet mostly, I feel sorry for Gary. The guy made a whole city and still isn’t happy.
Chapter 5: Enough
Barry Garner craved positive feedback like a fire lusted for oxygen. That’s why he walked to the post office with the tiny package. He was ready to keep going, bit by bit, until the feedback loop switched back to green. That’s why he made a trip to the post office almost every day for a year, rain or shine, dropping one person’s garage sale junk into the mail for another person who found it as treasure on eBay. All the positive feedback a guy could want, even if he took a hit on shipping or the occasional refund for a dissatisfied curmudgeon. The record had been clean, 100% positive, until the camera. Until that bitch in South Carolina.
His teachers did it to him, really. Back in school. They were the ones who started with the gold foil stickers and the “nice job” scribbled in the upper margin of his Big Chief Tablet papers. They were the ones with the pats on the back or the high fives when he cranked out a double during recess kickball. A drug. That’s what it was for Barry. Pure and simple. One smiley face in red pen and he was hooked.
Heh. Red pen. Not really irony—Barry understood that much—but still funny.
The world of online auctions became his paradise on Earth. His Valhalla. His Nirvana. His Heaven. A dingy back room filled with the opium haze of positive promises and a bright, digital star next to his screen name. BG_Luv1975. Barry felt a twitch crawl across his neck thinking of the old handle. BG_Luv1975. He glanced at the tiny box in his hands. Her name was on it again. The third package he’d shipped to her. He rubbed one thumb across the series of stamps on the corner. Enough. Hopefully enough. He flinched to imagine the box returning with a mark of insufficient postage. Negative feedback. But his Paypal account had been suspended, too, and he couldn’t buy postage online anymore. He had no choice but to use the stamps.
He should have checked the god-damned camera better.
It was the battery door. Corroded shut, she wrote. He promised a full refund. She didn’t want a refund. She wanted to ruin Barry’s perfect score. Crush his 100% positive into less than perfect. Tear the gold foil stars from his eyes and stomp on them with her digital boot. What did she want? What would make her satisfied? She stopped responding to the messages. He found her real name: Cheryl. Cheryl Santus. What did Cheryl want, his blood?
Well, he sent some for her in a tiny little vial. But even that wasn’t enough. Court orders. Investigations. Suspension of his account online. The psychiatrist.
Barry shoved his left hand in the coat pocket as he entered the post office. No need for anyone to see his hand. Not yet. Later maybe. After they know. After he shows them how far he would go for positive feedback. Barry flinched, his eyes darting around the post office lobby. The blood was his, after all. They’d shown that much at least. It’s not that he hurt anyone, really. He was making a point. An object lesson in red. Like ink. Heh. But now, now he’d given her a little more. Maybe eBay would reinstate his account. Maybe he could wash BG_Luv1975’s slate clean.
“Can I help you?” The postal clerk wouldn’t smile.
Barry pushed his package onto the counter. “I-is it enough?” His eyes wouldn’t leave the box.
The clerk dropped the small, brown wrapped box onto the scales. “Yes. Actually you’ve put a little extra…sir?”
Barry couldn’t stifle the giggle. “I did good?”
“No additional postage needed. Thank you.” The clerk’s eyes moved toward the end of the line. “Next.”
Barry felt the rush. He’d done well. More than enough postage. As he walked toward the post office door, he imagined the look of surprise on Cheryl’s face. Would it be enough? Maybe. Another spasm shot through his back. He remembered the pain—it wasn’t much. Not as much as he’d expected when he slipped his left pinkie finger into the kitchen shears and closed the blades until the bone snapped. Plenty of blood, red like ink. Cheryl would have a really nice surprise indeed.
Chapter 6: Faith
She doesn’t flinch as the counterfeits in white aprons—her co-conspirators—arrange the raw seafood on her skin. Pink and white, tuna and squid, their hands drop the squares in circles, sweeping the meat in spirals over her stomach, her breasts, extending down her legs. The men’s hands shake slightly, but they continue the work. She doesn’t squirm even though the meat is icy on her skin.
Nyotaimori is an art, but the counterfeits have been trained. Like other expensive dishes, this one is best served cold. Five years she has waited.
Her eyes lock on the ceiling as they wheel her across a tiled hallway and through the aluminum doors. In the club room, the voices are brash, too loud, already drunk. When the cart comes to a stop, one of the men mutters something and laugher crawls up the walls. She doesn’t close her eyes, but waits for the probing violation, the jabs and explorations with chopsticks as they begin to eat. Layers peel away, and her skin chills.
She becomes a puzzle broken into pieces with nothing beneath. Naked, but motionless. Hiding. These men cannot know. Her faith keeps her still.
Blood pounds inside her head, and after a few minutes she can no longer hear their voices. She remembers though—she remembers the cold eyes of these men, puppets of the regime wearing the masks of the national guard. She remembers when they took her mother—their voices locked behind stupid, empty grins. Her jaw locks as chopsticks poke and prod bare patches of flesh. Her fingers curl when one set of utensils snap tight on an uncovered nipple. There is laughter, but she doesn’t hear. The men are just shapes moving in the periphery. Shadows. Memories.
Her breath comes in small, measured amounts. In and out. Calm. Even naked, lying on the stainless tray beneath the banquet lights, she will not break. She broke before, five years ago, after they found her mother and the others face down in the sewer ditch near the woods.
She thinks of the chefs bound with tight knots and hidden in the scullery. She knows her co-conspirators have shed their aprons and wait behind the hotel. She knows the poison cannot be adsorbed through her skin, only the stomach lining of those giggling pigs, and it will work quickly and quietly. She has faith that her mother’s ghost will be sated and her thirst for revenge, quenched.
Chapter 7: Manning Up
Evan started coming apart because of the dare. Because of Ben, the kid with a weasel nose and surly eyes. Because he said he could do real magic, and Ben said it was bullshit. Caleb told him it was a bad idea—a stupid idea, but Ben stoked the fire.
“Dare you,” Ben said.
“Maybe it will hurt,” Caleb said.
“Who says you can come back together?” Ben asked. “Who says you can even come apart in the first place? I double-dare you.”
Evan was Evan. Big E. The kid who took every challenge and peeked around every corner without thought to what might be snarling on the other side. He started small: a fingernail. Eyes closed. A grunt.
“See, not even a hint of blood.” Evan flicked his nail to the floor of Ben’s tree fort.
Caleb flinched.
Ben crossed his arms and scowled. “Big effing deal. My cousin Tim lost his nail when he slammed his hand in a car door two years ago. Anybody can lose a freaking nail. Just some magic trick, that’s all.”
Big E never shied from an affront to his twelve-year-old manhood. Big E showed them. He showed them how he could wiggle the pinkie finger back and forth until it popped off with a slick snap.
“Not even a drop of blood,” Evan said again, wagging the three remaining fingers and thumb in the air. “Not even a drop.”
Ben’s scowl flickered. “I saw that one at the carnival. In the sideshow.”
Caleb swallowed hard and used his mother for an excuse then—the excuse he was looking for to get out of the tree house and descend to the rest of the world. Ben had his layer of “bullshit” armor, but Caleb was twelve. A believer. He’d seen what he’d seen and wanted a piece of the real world, the world which still made sense and boys’ fingers stayed on their hands.
“She’s expecting me. Dinner. I gotta go.” He stumbled toward the stairs, backpedaling away from Big E’s big ego and Ben’s crosshairs, fearing the dare would drift toward him. What can you do to top that, Caleb? Top nothing—even for Big E, pulling off a finger was weird.
“See you later, wuss,” Evan called. His four fingered hand opened and shut in a wave.
Caleb scampered home with thoughts of “Humpty-Dumpty” bouncing inside his skull. Sure it was only a finger, and a pinkie finger at that. Magic. No blood. Ben’s scowl and a sour dare. He never liked Evan much, anyway. Always manning up and playing alpha dog and bitching when he’d lose at Madden. The thought of Evan’s pinkie-less paw clasped on to his X-Box controller made his stomach do a few jumping jacks.
“What’s wrong?” his mother asked at dinner.
“Nothing,” he muttered, firing off a lie as big as a brick through the big plate glass china hutch in their living room. Bits of glass tinkled to the floor in his mind, joining pieces of Big E in a disorderly pile. …couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Caleb being Caleb, he didn’t sleep easily that night, nursery rhymes jingling and detached fingers writhing toward him each time he closed his eyes. It was nearly midnight when something hit his window, something heavy enough to rattle him from a light, fitful sleep, but soft enough to bounce off the glass without a crack. Caleb hopped from bed and peered at a figure in the dark yard.
Whoever it was balanced on one leg like a black flamingo. Caleb pushed the window open.
“I need help,” Big E cried. “I can’t stop.”
Caleb swallowed, knowing in his twelve-year-old heart to what, exactly, “can’t stop” was referring. He slipped on his tennis shoes and took the back stairs, sliding out of the kitchen door with only a tiny squeak of the old hinges.
“Jesus, Evan.”
The part-boy in front of him was missing a hand—the aforementioned object which struck the window—one leg, and part of an ear.
“I can’t stop.” Big E was little now. Tiny. Afraid.
Caleb switched from one foot to the other. “Ben. Ben can help,” he said.
The one-legged broken-boy thing which used to be Evan limped along with Caleb’s help, and five minutes later, Ben leaned against the wall of his tree house in his pajamas, rubbing his sleep sullied eyes with a frown tacked on his face.
“You guys pulling my leg?” he muttered.
“Ben.” Caleb’s voice rattled. “Take back the dare. We gotta help put him back together.”
“Stop faking. It’s late. Humpty Dumpty here can put himself back together.” Ben rubbed his eyes. “Stupid bullshit magic trick.”
Tears started in Caleb’s eyes just then, the boy in the twelve-year-old outpacing the desire to be a man. “He’s n-not faking.” He thought of a rubbery hand on the grass outside of his bedroom window.
“Humpty Dumpty and crybaby. Boo h—”
Caleb’s tears turned into a fist, and that fist caught Ben in the side of the head. Ben thumped to the floor.
“Jesus, Caleb.” He rubbed the side of his face. “I’m…gonna—”
But he never finished what he was “gonna.” The Big E broken boy-thing let out a grunt just before its—his—jaw wiggled to one side and plopped to the floor of the tree house with a thunk. Both eyes popped like thumb-fired marbles, and the rest tumbled to the floor. No blood of course, but plenty of parts. Caleb caught the wall to steady himself. Ben melted from sour to terrified and started to cry. It was Caleb who manned up then, took what was left of Evan home, wrapped the parts in old tissue paper his mother saved from Christmas presents and birthdays, and stuffed them under his bed.
Chapter 8: Bad Poetry
A young officer drops a plastic evidence bag on Detective Talbot’s desk. The detective flinches and scoots back.
“Jeezus, Pendergast. What’s that?”
“Vegetable peeler.”
Talbot nods. “I can see that, but the dark stuff—is that blood?”
“Yes.”
“Found this
at the Gardner house, didn’t they?”
“Yes. Looks like this sicko used it to scrape the skin off her body.”
“Her name was Rose, wasn’t it?” Talbot pulls at his lip. “Roses are red…” He jumps up from the desk. “Get a phonebook.”
“What?”
“I need to
know the location of all the women named Violet in town. Find out
which one’s have freezers big enough for to hold a body. I think I
know where he's going next...”
Chapter 9: Full Count
Harry holds his id badge in front of him like a shield as he approaches the gate. Two guards—men young enough not to remember day zero—rise to greet him. The wider one, the one with a pudgy face and ring of baby fat, lifts his rifle. He doesn’t point it at Harry, but close enough. Ready.
“At ease,” Harry says. “I’m on the council.” He waves the badge slightly as if to prove it to the men. Boys, really. The fat one can’t be a day over sixteen.
Two pairs of eyes exchange a glance.
Harry takes a deep breath while the boys sweat it out. Being a council member has privileges, special perks like the right to leave the gate when he wanted. Whenever he wanted.
The taller guard nods. “Yes, sir. Just checking. Nobody really goes outside much. Not at night. It’s our—”
“Job.” Harry nods. His hand slides into the pocket of his jacket and finds the grip of his pistol. “I understand soldier. I’m quite capable of taking care of myself.” He pulls out the gun and shows them.
The fat guard hasn’t lowered his weapon, but the other unlatches the gate and pulls it forward. The gate squeaks as it swings, the song of rusty metal. The fat guard coughs. Harry holds his breath.
“Good evening, sir. Just signal when you want back in.”
Harry’s boots tap a few paces on the broken asphalt. He stops, turns, and nods. “Of course.”
The pistol isn’t loaded, but neither guard knows. A gun is a gun. Harry walks down the snaking ruin of a road, just far enough to turn the corner and leave the glow of the compound behind. A chill breeze, the coming winter, rattles leaves like the breath of the dying. He steps into the thick grass and wades toward the tree line. His boy’s bat waits in the hollow of an ancient oak. It’s an aluminum bat, the logo on the shaft scarred and stained beyond recognition as a logo. The manufacturer wouldn’t exist anymore, anyway. Moonlight burns on the shiny surface. Memories smolder when Harry touches the handle.
He sees his son, Grant, standing at the little league plate. An eighteen-year-old memory.
Harry walks at night because he likes the feeling of night air on his skin. He likes the way the trees look, how the shadows live in the breeze. He knows they are out there, waiting in the cold, dark forest, afraid of the sun. Those still moving after so many years are weak, and the sun burns them, dries out their dead flesh. Harry almost thinks the word “alive” rather than “moving”, but that would be wrong.
They aren’t alive.
He walks to get away from the compound, the village, and his wife. She’s a good woman, but he knows she never forgave him for what happened to Grant—for how Grant died, eyes bulging like the swollen throats of bullfrogs, the near-human terror clamping its teeth on his neck. Harry’s grip tightens on the bat until the knuckles whiten and numb in the chilly air. He spits on the ground and yells—not a word, but a raw, barbaric yawp.
The echo fades.
There are no other sounds.
Harry starts walking again. Each night, he walks further down the stretch of forgotten road. The uneven earth and weeds have reclaimed much of the highway, but he can walk in the open, under the night sky when the moon hangs full and fat like a bloated belly ready to burst. Eventually, a groan—an almost human sound—rises above the thud of his boots.
He freezes.
The thing is pitiful, if Harry still owned pity. Broken, jangling, and staggering like a ruined marionette. It looks black, like a piece of the shadows broken off and blown toward Harry by the wind. Its mouth hole flaps open. It tries to make words.
Harry raises the bat. His heart bumps his ribs. There is fear, but Harry carries something more than fear in his bat.
“Come on, you sorry bastard…”
The thing used to be a woman. It lunges, and Harry sidesteps, swinging the bat at the back of its rotten skull. The sound is dull and almost soft. Harry’s stomach curdles at the smell. Memory holds onto smell as well as anything. He remembers the smell in Grant’s room after they killed the thing and the smell when they had to kill what was left of Grant.
“Pathetic,” Harry says.
The monster turns on its spindle-legs and lurches.
Harry dodges, catches a foot on a bit of asphalt. He fall, scraping away a layer of skin from one elbow. The air is cool on fresh blood. Harry smiles. Pain is good. Feeling anything is good. The thing gnaws on his boot with a rotten, toothless mouth. It must be very old. Harry kicks with his free boot and scrambles to his feet.
There hasn’t been a fresh outbreak in years. All of them are similar: Ancient, toothless, rotten beyond the point of being much threat to the living. The bat finishes the work, and Harry wipes off the black sludge in the grass before walking home.
Home.
Two terrified guards with rifles will greet him, kids younger than Grant would be had he lived. Kids who’ve only known a world filled with monsters—even if the monsters are little more than memories.
Chapter 10: Chaos and the Creative Process
Chaos rumbles into the bar with a hammer in one hand. He roars. He kicks over a chair or two. The patrons tremble and cower.
All except one. The Creative Process sits alone in a corner booth, sipping a Midori Sour.
Chaos turns to a window and hurls his hammer. It tumbles end over end toward the glass, strikes it dead center, and sends spiderweb cracks skittering to the corners. He roars again.
"Always breakin' stuff." The Creative Process leaves her booth and ambles over to Chaos. "Always breakin' stuff and making it look so pretty. Just look at those lines. Such a focal point...such raw energy." She points at the broken glass.
Chaos's lower lip quivers. His eyes droop.
"There, there," The Creative Process pats him on the back, "I'll buy you a drink. You'll feel better."
Chapter 11: Billy Boy
Billy found the keys in his dad’s truck one day, shortly after they shuttered the kitchen store and the place that once sold bargain books. His dad had changed light fixtures, mended walls, and tightened pipes for five years, but without the tenants, the building no longer needed maintenance. Searching for work at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, he didn’t miss the keys. Not until later.
So the mall was abandoned, a playground in which our imaginations touched other places.
We rode our bikes after school and stashed them out back, in the high grass just off the trail near the railroad tracks behind the building. Billy was always eager to go on nights his mom worked late. We first entered the dark spaces while the world shed her summer greens for the browns and tans of fall, the dingy grey of winter lurking behind the turn of the calendar.
The game was Billy’s idea.
We built a circular wall of boxes in the storeroom of one of the anchors to the mall, the largest building on the south end. In our circle, our sanctuary, we told stories, we pushed our imaginations to the blackened corners to flirt with spiders and dust. Our stories grew arms and legs, fingers and eyes; they flickered just past our musty cardboard fortress. Our flashlights inspired stacks of empty boxes to cast shadows of strange cities on the walls. Games of chicken hung on who could bear the darkness the longest, who could leave his flashlight off in the dead, empty space.
We made monsters, and Billy was the best.
Maybe his father was the inspiration: the rasping, liquor tainted voice, scuffed knuckles, and glassy glare. Maybe Billy saw something different through the bruises around his eyes. Maybe he found something in the worry lining his mother’s face. Billy’s beasts crawled out of the darkness and ran their stunted claws over the cardboard boxes on the outer ring of that wall, sending a twist of delightful terror into my bones. Gabe’s expression echoed mine, both of us pale and contorted, hanging on Billy’s voice.
A tiny voice, really.
Lost and afraid.
We heard the sirens, Gabe and I, one night just after supper. We met in the street, both of us all wide eyes and whispering mouths. My guts could have been ice, frozen and scooped by the shovel load from my aching chest. The sirens came from three blocks down, police and ambulance, together.
“You think it’s Billy’s place?” Gabe asked, breathless.
“Let’s go.”
We planned to meet again that night, all three of us, and perfect our tales. We planned to go together into the darkness of the old mall, flashlights in hand, creeping through the silence, lonesomeness of the place. Billy promised mystery that night.
At his house, lights from the police cruisers and ambulance chopped the night into tiny bits. Billy’s dad leaned face down on a police cruiser, hands cuffed behind him. The paramedics wheeled another body down the concrete steps, thump, thump, thump. I searched the crowd for our friend.
Gabe looked at me.
I nodded.
The October air numbed my cheeks and my hands, frosting my heart while it hammered against my ribs. I felt every bump, every jostle of the pocked asphalt in the streets, the grass that snapped against my legs as we arrived behind the building. We rode through the dark at other times, but never with so much fire, so much recklessness.
Panting, Gabe and I found one service entrance open, the key still in the lock. Neither of us brought a light.
We staggered into the darkness, the abyss, Billy’s world, groping against the painted cinderblock walls. We stumbled toward the end of the line, the big storeroom, our ring fortress of empty cardboard and stories. A single, stationary light reflected on the ceiling, casting square shadows in looming distortion.
“Billy?” Gabe’s voice was a tiny thing, prey swallowed by the predator darkness.
No answer.
I followed the glow and found Billy’s flashlight on the floor next to a crumpled pile of his clothes. Our friend was gone, naked and alone into the other places. We knew. On his words, the shadows had swallowed him. He joined them.
Billy’s face was printed in the paper, and they spoke of him on the evening news for weeks.
The smaller minds called him a runaway, just another missing boy. All too common.
Gabe and I knew the truth. We had heard the tap of claws on cardboard and tasted the frosty air from Billy’s words. We lived his world in that dark, lonesome place.
Chapter 12: Soul Marbles
Mom had already been crying when she found me sitting on the concrete floor of the garage with a hammer in my hand. I’d been smashing marbles. All of them—the clear ones with the sparkly centers that I won from Zane Bibble in a game of chicken on the monkey bars at recess. I hammered them all to powder in the middle of the floor, right where Dad’s car should have been.
Almost everybody in the 3rd grade hated Zane. Once day at lunch, he poked Inez McIntosh with his thumbnail so hard she bled all over the table. There was the time he jabbed a stick—a stick he’d sharpened to a point by rubbing it against the playground slab—into all of Mrs. Wilson’s rubber four-square balls. Mom helped organize a bake sale at the school carnival to help buy new balls for the class, but Zane rode his bike over and tipped our card table, sending brownies and sugar cookies to the ground in a heap. We hated Zane.
So naturally, the day he brought the bag of marbles—the special marbles from his dad sent from halfway around the world—naturally I wanted them. A jerk like Zane shouldn’t have marbles like that. During lunch, I fantasized about stealing them when we had afternoon reading group. I was no Zane Bibble, though. The best I could muster was a game of chicken.
“On the monkey bars,” I told him. “First one down loses.”
“What do I get,” he said. “These are special. My dad said all the men he’s killed are trapped inside.”
I didn’t really believe him because he was a compulsive liar—that’s what my mom said anyway, but those marbles did sparkle in a cool way, like little stars trapped in glass. I wanted them, souls or no souls.
“My new Power Ranger, the black one with light up face that says ‘Tranformation Go!’ when you push his belt.”
He narrowed his eyes.
“I brought it for show and tell last week.”
“Deal.” Zane had only one sort-of friend in class, Luke Gilmore, and that was only because Luke was a rotten kid who smelled like poop all the time. Nobody liked Luke either, mostly because he picked his boogers and stuck them to the underside of his desk. True story—I crawled under there during indoor recess once and saw the whole, grey-brown clump. So Zane let Luke hold the bag while we mounted the monkey bars.
The metal bars were cold on a cloudy October afternoon, so cold they burned my hands as I started to swing toward Zane. We met in the middle, neither one conceding until I wrapped my legs around his waist like a pincer and pulled. His face turned red like the water after Mom boiled her garden beets. When his hands slipped off, he made a little sound like the McIntosh’s dog did when Dad accidently hit him with the car after having “another big fight” with Mom.
The other kids roared.
Luke might have been a smelly kid, but he was honest enough, and handed me the marble bag while Zane picked himself off the ground. It was heavy, that bag. Zane’s eyes burned like soul marbles, and he charged me. Wham. Flat on my back, I couldn’t fight back while he drummed on my chest with bony fists. Of course the recess monitors yanked him off and he howled and howled and spent the rest of the day in Mr. Bay’s office.
I had a bag of soul marbles and a couple of bruises.
The trouble started when I tried to go to bed. I hadn’t shown the marbles to Mom, and Dad was “working late” again. She tucked me in, her eyes red and puffy, and I lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling, thinking about how red and puffy Zane’s eyes were when we rode the bus earlier in the evening.
Then I heard them, the marbles.
Crying.
First I stuffed my head under a pillow, but the voices cut through that like there was a speaker tucked inside. I couldn’t make out what they said, but the emotion was there. Sadness. Pain. Fear. Then I realized they were crying in a foreign language, whatever language they spoke in the country where Zane’s dad killed them. My throat felt hollow and cold and hurt so much I wanted to cry, too, like tears would dissolve the hurt.
But I couldn’t.
Mom was on the phone when I tiptoed downstairs, carrying the bag of soul marbles like a wounded baby. I used Dad’s big hammer, laid out the marbles on the floor of the garage where the car would be but he was working late—later than he ever had—and started smashing. The hammer made a sweet ting when it struck concrete. Each blow stung my arm.
I guess it was the pounding that brought Mom outside. Her face was wet and red from crying—maybe she’d heard the soul marbles, too. My eyes dropped to the mess, the little piles of white dust, all that was left of Zane’s marbles.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Dad’s hammer was still in my hand.
We were alone but not alone, standing in the cold of the garage with all the ghosts I’d set free. Mom just hugged me then, wrapped me in her arms and squeezed until I thought my ribcage would snap.
Chapter 13: Luck
"There's a couple of things you're going to have to understand about this job."
Jerry nods.
"First of all," Franz speaks slowly, like he's explaining the why the sky's blue to a five-year-old, "the job has some drawbacks."
"Drawbacks. Check." A pen wiggles against a notepad in Jerry's hand.
"The temperature in here for one. Get yourself a nice coat. A jacket. Light and flexible but enough to keep the chill off."
"Jacket, check."
Franz grips a handle and walks the drawer out to full extension. A body lays between them, covered with a sheet. "Second of all, these poor sons-of-bitches smell pretty bad."
"Bad smell, check."
Franz grips the sheet at one end and pulls back enough to reveal a pair of bluish feet. A toe tag dangles on the left big toe. He bends forward, squinting at the tag. "92 years old, well..."
Jerry's pencil is motionless. "I don't get it."
Franz produces a pair of snips and slides one of the dead man's toes between its blades. He squeezes the handles together. A click echoes through the morgue, and the toe drops into Franz's waiting palm. "There's some benefits, too."
Jerry scribbles. "Benefits..."
"For one, nobody ever checks too closely after we're done with them."
"Right." Jerry pauses for a moment and frowns. "I don't get it."
"Toes, man." Franz draws the sheet over the corpse's feet and slides the drawer home with a resonate thunk. "I figure they're better than rabbits' feet, especially on some SOB that lives this long. Lot of luck in making it to 92, Jerry."
Chapter 14: Why We Decided to Use a Blender
Jack wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. “You ever read that Poe story?”
I look up, but my hands keep working. “Which one? The guy wrote tons of stuff.”
“The one with the old guy.” Jack thrusts deeper with the knife.
A spurt of crimson strikes my apron and I flinch. “Be careful, damnit.”
“So, have you read that one?”
“Jack, there’s a couple with old guys.” My knees are tired from kneeling on the tile, but the job is almost finished.
Jack stops. He looks at the bathroom light as if the answer's hiding there.