“Dad always liked you best,” he says.
“That’s because I always listened to him when he was trying to teach us something,” I say.
“I’m willing to learn now.” He shows me his palms, both blood-red, as if he expects a hug. “Whatever you say, we’ll do, Brother Sid. Deal?”
I shake my head. “I’m a family man now. I have to think of Suzette and Duane.”
He smiles, but his teeth don’t show. His head starts bobbing up and down, a nervous tick that Dad used to have when he was frustrated. “I knew you’d say that. How about this? If you don’t partner up with me like in the old days, I’ll kill your precious family.” He produces a large hunting knife from behind the corpse. It is red, and it is Dad’s. It’s the same blade that took Stan’s finger when we were kids.
“Come on, Brother Stan. You don’t mean that.”
“I do, Brother Sidney. I was at least paying attention to one of Dad’s sermons. ‘Always stick with your brother. No one else is going to understand what you need to do.’ Remember?”
I do, but something tells me Dad never saw this moment coming. Anger burns the chilly night air from my skin, and I say, “What if I just kill you?”
Stan laughs. “You couldn’t do that. You like me too much.”
Which is true. The anger dissipates, and I look away from my twin brother’s eyes.
I open my mouth to apologize when I hear a feminine voice say, “I would. I don’t like you at all.”
I look up from my feet, and there is Suzette, holding her own knife, which she has just drawn across Stan’s throat. I had not heard her come in, and judging from Stan’s wide eyes and open windpipe, he had not either.
I’d taught her well.
Stan flails around for a while, but all he can breathe at this point is his own blood, so it doesn’t take long for him to drop to the floor. Suzette steps around him and hugs me.
“I thought I told you to stop hanging out with your loser brother.” She talks into my flannelled chest, so her words are muffled. But I’ve heard this before.
“I didn’t invite him,” I say. “He just stopped over, looking for help.”
“I heard what he’d said about me and Duane.”
I look at Stan’s dribbling throat. “I kind of figured.”
She pulls away, then stands on tip-toes to kiss me. “I’m sorry I killed your brother, Sid, but he was too dangerous.”
I kiss her back. “I know.”
“Mom! Dad! Look at me!”
We turn toward our son. Duane has cut his uncle’s nose and mustache off, and he’s taped them to his glasses as if it is a phony Groucho get-up. He waves his grandpa’s knife around as he laughs. “I’m Uncle Stan!”
Suzette exchanges a glance with me, and I raise an eyebrow. The hint of a smile dances on her lips. We’ve taught Duane a lot, but he still has a long way to go.
“All right, kiddo,” she says. “You’ve had enough fun for one night. It’s bedtime. Take your uncle’s face off.”
“But Mom!”
She forces him upstairs, and I open his trick-or-treat bag next to the mayor’s daughter on the kitchen table. A clump of body parts comes out, and I start counting the fingers, ears, eyeballs, and noses. When I’m done, Suzette walks in.
“Not a bad haul,” I say.
Suzette ignores me. She looks at the two bodies and grimaces, her hands on her hips. “What are we going to do about this?”
I hug her from behind and kiss her on the neck. “Don’t worry about it. I’m the brains of the operation.”
WE RUN RACES WITH GOBLIN TROOPERS
by Lee Thompson
November 9th
In the War he took the intestines of your enemies and made dolls for the village children. They weren’t much more than sock puppets, but he was good with his hands and he told stories that made children smile.
Until recently he worked as an auto mechanic.
In the War he held and shushed children, and they trusted him because he had the saddest eyes they’d ever seen. The kids felt sorry for him, even though you’d just murdered their parents and left behind broken homes, while he told them, “It was all a horrible accident, understand? But you can build a fire and eat the dolls in a day or two.”
Jim was always spinning twisted metaphors from flesh and blood.
He taught the children how to be cannibals so they didn’t starve once your platoon moved on to their next objective.
YOU OPEN THE FRIDGE.
He smirks.
He whispers, Two days it’s going to be Veteran’s Day, boy. Two days and the skies will blaze with fire and smoke like they used to.
You set the rifle, the shotgun, and the .45 on a drab green mattress. The room is bare the way people are when they’re isolated and have nothing to accompany them but reflection and hindsight. Your parents were proud of you throughout school, fought like hell to keep you from becoming a soldier because soldiers die in faraway places and leave behind nothing more than thin sheets of metal, worn boots, and fading memories.
You’ve seen death and tasted its hot kiss when the heart lights with fire and smoke fills the sky behind you. When your tour was complete, you sat at their kitchen table again nursing a cup of coffee. They hovered close by, nearly ghosts, and asked you if you were okay. You never answered. You were still running races with goblin troopers. And you hear them in the trees late at night, and behind the walls as you drift to sleep. Their eyes are pure white, their tongues black, and they whisper gunfire into the caverns of your mind.
The apartment is on the third floor. From the bedroom window you see the city sprawled like some fallen and pummeled giant, buildings like bones ripped from concrete flesh.
Everything is gray, you tell yourself.
It helps you remember the night Jim taught you about pain.
JIM HELD A GIRL face down on a green mattress. He chopped her arms off and babbled about how the war was over, but there was another one building. He sent you into the other room to give her children cookies. But you stayed by the door for a moment and listened to her cry against her gag, watched her face spasm in pain, maybe expecting him to ram himself into her any moment while she bled to death, but Jim wasn’t like that. He didn’t give a shit about violating anyone. He needed them to create art so children might see that the world was cruel and indifferent. People didn’t care, and they wouldn’t stop you, and he smiled at you sometimes when you gave the kids milk and Oreos, like he wanted you to remember that the lesson was for everyone.
From the doorway you watched the light flee her remaining eye. She offered one final shiver before Jim gutted her and took a hacksaw to her legs. You shivered too but not in terror, nor in excitement, but simply because Jim had shown you something important at the expense of someone else. Not everyone can be this happy and sad at the same time, you thought. Jim glared over his shoulder while the kids in the living room watched Sponge Bob pursue an adventure in Rock Bottom. You thought, I’ve always been trapped there, but Jim’s trying to show me the way back to the surface. You helped him because you wanted to know what it was like to stare into dead eyes again, thinking maybe then you’d learn to appreciate your own life.
But Jim had another lesson planned to teach you that.