Hindered Souls: Dark Tales for Dark Nights, page 3
Another tequila pull was a struggle as I tipped the bottle on the desk, leaning sideways and allowing it to run across my gums. The gold fluid magnified a tape recorder at the corner of the desk. I reached for it, thumbing the recorder across the desk and onto my lap. I kicked the desk, sending myself rolling backwards into the bar. It was a clean roll without obstacles. Right in between all the high-top. I couldn’t have done that better had I tried. Then my forearm acted as an aircraft carrier’s arresting wires, bringing me to a halt.
I stood up, giving the forearm a World Cup penalty kick. Following through with the kick, my foot landed against the base of the high-top next to me. My ankle cracked on the metal base and echoed throughout the pub. Across the floor, my foot—now dislodged from my body— joined my gloved hand from earlier, spinning slowly to a stop. It was covered in dust. How long would it take for any of my parts to become ashen? I stepped back, surprised, falling drunkenly to the ground.
I thumbed the snow-wet pant leg up, exposing the bare ankle. The joint, wrapped in papier–mâchéd tendons and skin. All veins ceasing function, no blood to be lost. Angered frustration the common denominators this night. I stamped at the floor with my bare ankle, cracking and snapping reverberated up to my knee, all the way through my thigh, abdomen, and chest, ending in between my missing ears. I lift my leg, noticing as my lower wiggles freely within the pant leg.
Another drink was in order.
I crawled over to the bar area, panting my way behind the bar. Top shelf liquor no longer an option as I don’t have neither the energy nor sufficient limbs to lift myself. I reach for the well gin, pulling on it until I gagged. I never liked gin, but when in pieces, do whatever.
I depressed the red dotted button on the tape recorder, deciding to leave some sort of statement. Not a suicide recording, but a record of—a record of my—I can’t think clearly anymore. My mind is forsaking me. Old timers have it easier tracking their thoughts than I do right now. My body and mind patchy; my degeneration is nearly complete.
That’s what I was talking about. My degeneration.
My brain is failing. Degenerating. What a way to go. To have your first or second life end. Falling apart. Falling to pieces. Bit by bit. Just your fingertips, or ear, or man junk, just random appendages falling to the ground or wriggling down the length of your pants before flopping out next to your feet.
This well vodka is pathetic. I pitchfork my way up to my good leg, hopping over to the top shelf vodka which is ironically kept on the lower shelf. The slender vodka bottle has a quarter left. This makes it easy to claw upwards and take a pull. Maybe my final pull. Here we go. Why are my fingers missing? I need a drink.
Why does my whole abdomen feel warm? Flood-like? Why is the vodka leaking out from my belly? And from my voided knee? Why’s this recorder on? I can’t remember what I was doing.
****
The sound of the vodka pouring out from his crevices was like a flooded urinal. His three fingered hand lost its grip on the bottle, crashing to the floor. The man moaned. His moan bubbled into a whiny gurgle. Something strained and stretched as a broken branch. The snapping of his remaining leg was thunderous beneath the weight from his remaining body. His body hit the liquor soaked floor, sounding as a wet cardboard box thrown against a wall.
The only sounds remaining were the whines of the recorder and the vodka trickling into the floor drain. The vodka ran dry, leaving a sticky film on the tile. Golden rays assaulted the darkened pub through its front tinted windows. The sun created distorted shadowed replicas of the muted neon signs across the shelved liquor bottles that remained intact. The shadows stretched downward, becoming misshapen, crawling eerily over the register and countertop, then down the cooler doors.
The man’s dusty leg twisted beside him, mangled. The other ended at the knee. His coat’s sleeve flaccid, the arm missing, strewn across the floor in fragments. The hand lying next to the man’s dislodged foot. The humerus on a bar stool. The forearm a shattered ceramic piece on the floor.
The man laid there, earless, noseless. His head twisted backward, the neck’s skin pale and tearing as if it had a serrated edge. His chest and abdomen heaving pregnantly. His third life coming into existence.
The door leading to the merchandise dock swung open. A woman entered, humming a tune with the birds outside. The tune came to a halt as she noticed the turbulent state of the bar. Each step sticking to the floor, crunching glass shards, all of the sounds documented by the recorder.
“Oh my god… what has happ—”
She stopped as the hand and foot embracing each other on the floor came into view. Her hands raised to her mouth, a muffled choking recorded.
She shuffled away sideways towards the bar, her eyes locked on the foot and hand, her hands welded over her mouth. Her eyes glossy with tears, she was startled as her feet crunched across the forearm. Her shriek broke through her palms, blaring onto the recorder.
She raced towards the back of the bar—dragging her hand over white pellets that littered the countertop—intent on phoning the authorities. She stopped, screaming as the man’s mangled body was in her way.
She stood there, motionless, her heartbeat reverberating between her ears. She recognized the man’s face, earless and all. She cautiously stepped towards to his side, leaning down. Her ear graced his chest, listening for the heartbeat that was no longer there. But something else was.
There was a ruffling within the man’s carcass. A pawing and scratching. Her eyes tightened, listening intensely. Behind the scratches was a tiny whimper. Not a cry, but the whimper one mourns a hangover with.
The recorder capturing the sounds, hearing as the woman giggle.
She leaned back onto her knees, slapping at the man’s attached femur.
“Well you lucky dog! A second degeneration! A third life! Well, can’t not help you, now.”
She tugged at his coat, opening the lapels. Reaching to the counter, she pulled a garnish knife and gets his t-shirt torn open.
“Okay, never done this before. Just—need—to—”
She caressed his torso with her ear, listening for a safe spot. As she neared his beltline, she sat upright, lining the knife below his belly button. With a deep breath, she bit her bottom lip and impaled the knife.
To her surprise, there was no blood. No struggle. It was like puncturing a piñata. She removes the knife, seeing it dusty with skin fragments. Then she resumed her sawing as if slicing a holiday turkey.
Dropping the knife to her side, she shoved her hand into the cavity, expecting to feel intestines and such, instead finding flaky mush. Wrist deep, her fingers came across a tiny foot. She palmed it, feeling its tiny digits. She gave it a thumbs up, then pressed upward through the man’s belly. She removed her hand from the cavity.
She inserted her light-pink pasty fingers through the hole she had just made. Grunting, she cracked open his chest cavity as a birthday package. With both her hands, forces it wide open. The rib cage exploding open, his head tumbling away from the torso. Dust covered her lap as she stared blankly into the chest. A newborn baby kicked and cawed. Its third birth, second degeneration, first to ever do it.
She waved the dust away, staring at the baby’s uncoordinated movements. The baby looked to be lathered in a lumpy, filthy lotion. She hooked her hands under its armpits, lifting it to her chest. The baby’s cries now blaring for the recorder to hear. Each tear streaking down its filthy white face. Chalky paste had begun to build up near its tear ducts. It reeked of many liquors.
“Aww, baby. Don’t cry.” She smeared away the dust clots from its eyes, nose, mouth and ears. With one arm, she pulled free the dust covered coat from the man, covering the third-born. “I guess I can’t call you by your real name, anymore. They’re going to give you a whole new identity. For the third time, you rascal.”
She pulled herself up by the countertop. As she stepped slowly towards the rear door she had entered from, she wrapped the baby tighter, covering its ears down to its pasty toes.
Just before exiting, the recorder hears her say, “We need to get you over to the Regeneration Facilities in a hurry. Who knows, little guy, maybe third time really is a charm.”
The door shut, its rubber seals banging more softly with each swing before giving way to reborn silence. The silence disturbed only by the whine of the recorder.
Damaged Goods
by Marie Anderson
Woodrow Chambles' insomnia began after he retired from teaching composition to untalented and godless teenagers. Sleeping pills put him asleep, but triggered brutal headaches and dizziness the following day.
He wrote a poem about his headaches.
Buzzards jazz my skull,
drilling flesh and bone until their bloodied beaks
plunder the treasure they seek.
They ravage my brain until nothing remains
but pain.
He stopped the pills (insomnia was more tolerable than headaches), submitted his poem to a journal, and at age sixty found himself not only finally published but also paid: twenty-five dollars and a year's subscription to the poetry journal.
He used some of the money to buy a smallish plastic crucifix which he planted on the grave of Quayle Shanerd.
Quayle had been one of his students, a lisping stick of a boy who wrote clumsy essays about homosexuality and atheism.
Woodrow had never graded Quayle's papers higher than a C+, except for the last paper Quayle had written. Woodrow had liked Quayle's images of buzzards jazzing his heart and had given him an A.
Though Woodrow had also written on Quayle's paper: Buzzards are nature's cleansers. They devour what is rotten. Accept true manhood, embrace the Higher Power, and the buzzards will fly away.
A week later, just before Christmas break in Woodrow's final year of teaching, Woodrow attended Quayle's wake. The boy had hanged himself from basement rafters. Woodrow stood near the casket, silently composing a poem about how suicide was a lazy, cowardly way to cure an aberration.
A skeletal girl approached. She stared at Woodrow from dark eyes ringed with black eyeliner.
"Mr. Chambles," she lisped. A black garment, more robe than dress, covered her from neck to ankles.
"And you are?" Woodrow already knew. She resembled the unfortunate Quayle, from her beakish nose to her feathery black hair.
"My brother's twin." She pointed a finger, the nail curved like a talon and polished black. "He wanted to be a writer. Writing would've saved him. You killed his dream. With your red ink and bad grades."
"I'm sorry for your loss," Woodrow said. "But you can't blame the messenger. Your brother was damaged goods. Now he's at peace. Perhaps."
She swiveled her head on her long, thin neck. "Mr. Chambles," she lisped. "This is war." She stalked away. Woodrow retired from teaching the following spring without seeing her again.
Until December, a year after Quayle's death.
It was just before the schools would release their hooligans for Christmas break. He awoke from a fitful sleep to a sound like a door closing. He peeked through the blinds covering his bedroom window.
Snow had fallen. The street lamp illuminated a skeletal figure crossing the empty street in front of his house. A girl. She gripped a box by a handle. The box was about the size and shape of a small pet carrier.
"The twin sister," Woodrow murmured.
She wore a dark garment more robe than coat. Long feathery black hair fluttered like wings around her head. He watched until she turned a corner and disappeared from view.
"Damaged goods," he muttered. He sighed and returned to bed.
Early the next morning, when Woodrow stepped out to fetch his morning paper, he saw footsteps marring the fresh cream of snow. They trailed from his front door, down his steps, until they disappeared into the street where plows had shoveled away all traces of snow, cars, and feet.
Woodrow searched his house until he found where she'd invaded: the window over the laundry tub in his basement. The lock had been broken for years. Now the window had been pushed up. Paint flakes, wood splinters, and melting snow covered the ledge.
He shut the window and checked every room.
The only thing she'd attacked was his first floor toilet. It was filled with blood, feathers, and the journal that contained his poem.
How had she known about the poem? Maybe he'd been unwise to have the library display a copy of the journal on its local author's shelf.
After breakfast, he went to his attic, found his grandfather's old steel bear trap. He lugged it to the basement, arranged it on the floor in front of the laundry tub, and set the trap.
That night, he held his bottle of sleeping pills for a long time without taking any. Would she return tonight? Would she ever return? Perhaps her little invasion had satisfied her sick little spirit. He marveled that he felt no fear. After all, she was only a girl. She'd trespassed into his home. He had every right to defend himself. The law would be on his side.
He took a double dose of sleeping pills. He did not want to hear the trap's snap, or the screams of the trapped creature.
The next morning, he stumbled down the basement stairs, dizzy and wobbly from the pills. A headache raged. An odd sound grew louder as he reached the bottom of the stairs.
Roo-koo-wak-wak-roo-koo-wak-wak
His heart quickened. He took a deep breath and stepped into his basement.
The window over the laundry tub was open. A plastic crucifix posed in a flower pot on the window's ledge.
The bear trap had not been sprung.
He squinted at the crucifix. It looked like the one he'd planted on the boy's grave.
The odd sound had stopped. The only thing he could hear was his own breathing. He scanned the room: furnace, a folded ping pong table, shelves crammed with stuff. Everything in order, unmolested.
His legs wobbled as he marched slowly toward the window. The pills had let him sleep soundly all night. Now he was paying the price with a body that felt hungover and unsteady.
Get the cross, he thought as he marched. Shut the window.
As he neared the window, he saw movement from the corner of his eye. He spun around as something hurtled from behind the furnace. It flapped around his head, screaming coo-coo-coo.
Startled, he lost his already precarious balance. He felt himself falling backwards. His head banged into the round steel disc between the trap's jaws. The trap clamped its jaws around his skull. Steel teeth drilled through skin and bone. Pain raged. He screamed until he could scream no more. Sweat drenched his skin.
A plump gray pigeon watched him from its perch on the rim of the laundry tub. The pain began to ease. It felt far away, there, like the horizon, but unreachable. He was cold. And thirsty. He watched the pigeon. His vision turned sparkly, then black.
"Damaged goods," he heard the pigeon lisp. "Rest in peace. Perhaps."
Magic Hour
by Christine Makepeace
“Magic hour.” That’s what they call it. When the sun’s light shines perfectly and everyone’s skin glows. Like angels on earth, they hover and float through the golden rays.
Magic hour is always proceeded by, and followed with, filthy yellow light.
At least in my neighborhood it is.
I walked the overgrown sidewalks—not paved, so not really sidewalks at all—kicking stones as I went. They bounced into the gutter and landed among candy wrappers and abandoned bottles. Ugly patches of weeds made the ground uneven, and I watched my feet as I went.
15 minutes left, I thought.
I had the trip from work to my front door timed down to the second. Once I passed the psychic, and the house with the tires stacked out front, it would be 10. Then I would be home. Safe inside, free to throw the deadbolt and shed my fast food worker skin. And sit. And wait. Until I did it all over again.
Even thinking about it now makes me want to cry.
The small collection of sun-bleached buildings appeared on my right, and I looked at my watch. The neon palm waved from the tarot lady’s window.
10 minutes.
The street was so dirty, always so dirty, and the heat wafted up from the ground like cartoon stink lines.
I wanted to run, but I didn’t have anywhere to go.
The highway rose up in the distance, and I could see my turn fast approaching. I gave a little nod to the human-sized stack of dead tires.
Just a building or two up sat a salon. I’ve never spoken very good Spanish, so I had no idea what it was called. It was a small structure—self-contained—more of a shed than a house. It was yellow, the same color as the sky. I tried to sound out the words on their sign, but I knew I was doing it wrong.
On the lawn of the windowless storefront sat a small pile of stuff; a piece of cardboard balanced against a lamp. I knew enough to know that it was an impromptu yard sale.
Venta meant “sale.” Or maybe window…
I was walking across the dead grass before I thought better of it. It was the microwave that caught my eye. I didn’t have one, and I was close enough to home that carrying it wouldn’t be too much of a burden. It was brown, like fake wood, and had a tinted glass door.
“This thing is ancient,” I mumbled to myself. I saw the $15 sticker and was about to turn and haul ass back to the sidewalk. I had a schedule to keep after all. A night spent adjusting the antenna of my TV awaited!
“You want the microwave?” a small voice asked my spine.
Startled, I swung back around a little too fast, ankles twisting awkwardly.
“Um, I was looking at it—It’s too much for me though.”
I started to reply before I’d fully turned. Mid-sentence I found myself staring down at a little girl. I immediately froze, never sure how to act with kids.
“It works,” she said simply.
I blurted out, “For 15 bucks I hope so!” I immediately bit my tongue, wishing for a way to replace my outburst with something more amiable.
“My dad fixes things.”
“Oh,” I answered dumbly. My body was being pulled back towards the street. I was out of orbit. I longed for the woman with a thousand shopping bags who took up the whole sidewalk, or the bicyclist that should’ve been riding in the road. Those were the types of interactions I could deal with. Not this buck-toothed little girl with shimmering waist-length hair. Her eyes were almond shaped, and they drilled into me.
