Si les dieux ne font rien d’inconvenant, c’est alors qu’ils ne sont plus dieux du tout
THE DEAD THING
Paul Tremblay
It’s Thursday and instead of walking with Stacey to the skate park (it’s next to the high school so it isn’t a good place for people (especially seventh grade people (especially seventh grade girls people)) who aren’t in high school to go to unless you like the smell of weed, rape jokes, and getting cigarette filters and lit matches thrown at you), and instead of walking down the train tracks behind the driving school and to the combo gas station Honey Dew Donuts that this late in the day only has plain bagels and stale donut holes left, I decide to go straight home. I feel like I have to go even if I don’t want to because I worry something bad (or worse (worse than the bad that is everyday)) has happened or will happen to Owen, because the elementary school gets out fifteen minutes before the middle school and Owen is probably home and sitting on the couch and burning through another bag of sunflower seeds (eating seeds is how Owen deals with everything and he deals with a lot because he’s too young to know anything or understand like I do so he eats seeds because Dad figured out if Owen had a mouthful of seeds he couldn’t ask about Mom or cry as much so, yeah, sunflower seeds, the ones baseball players eat and spit, and Owen eats so many seeds most days he’s not hungry for dinner or breakfast or whatever food you try to put in front of him, and the kid is getting smaller instead of growing bigger, I swear), and what if Owen is watching TV and he accidentally swallows some of the seed shells (I’ve seen him swallow and scratch at his throat like he was dying and then be okay two seconds later and back with a mouth of seeds, my baby brother the world’s saddest gerbil) instead of spitting the shells into a cup or an empty (or half-empty) can of soda and he’s choking for real, and Dad is passed out next to him on the couch or maybe he didn’t even make it to the couch today, so I’m going home because that feeling of something worse is stuck down in me. Stacey wants to come with me but I told her she can’t and it’s this joke between us how she never gets to go to my house when I go to hers all the time. She only jokes about it with me, which is why she’s the only one I’m totally honest with. I’ve told her why she can’t come. She says she gets it but I don’t think she totally gets it, and it’s not her fault because she hasn’t seen the house, and I mean the inside of the house because her parents have dropped me off so they’ve all seen the outside which is bad (blue paint is fine but the window frames’ white paint is coming apart and the yard is all overgrown) but like a normal bad. Maybe I should let her come home with me once and I can give her a tour and I’d start with the kitchen and tell her, hey, yeah, that’s the sink full of nasty dishes and flies as big as grapes and I keep two bowls (one for me and one for Owen) clean in my room, and don’t open the fridge, you won’t like it, but then I’d point at the walls, which is what she’d probably see first anyway, and using a fancy tour voice tell her that this is where Mom tore all the wallpaper off the walls because she was drunk or high or both, and Dad tried to stop her but she told him, don’t worry, I’ll put up new wallpaper and it’ll be great, and she said that to him while standing on the stained and splintery plywood, which would be the same plywood we’re standing on during the tour because a few months before she ripped down the wallpaper she jacked up all the linoleum tile because home improvement, right?, it was going to be a big project and make our kitchen look like the ones they show on those home improvement shows, and while in tour mode I’d whisper so no one else could hear me that Mom was super-drunk or high or both (and I could tell because her eyes would be red and big and she’d breathe only out of her mouth so it sounded like she was laughing and puking at the same time, and she looked like that when I saw her for the last time or the most recent last time because I don’t know yet if it’s a forever last time), so yeah, it was makeover time for the kitchen, and Dad was drunk or high or both (and I can tell with him because his face and body sags like he’s a human beanbag chair and he huffs more than speaks so the words come out of his nose) and Dad tried (not very hard, in fact, he sucked at trying) to stop Mom from buzzing through the floor tile but she told him to shut his assy mouth (that’s a direct quote) and that she’d put in the new laminate flooring herself and without his worthless assy ass because he was too lazy to do it, and I wouldn’t yell like they yelled while on the tour but I could do perfect impersonations of them fighting if I wanted to. I don’t know if Stacey would make it past the kitchen on the tour so it’s easier just to tell her that she can’t come over today, that I have to help Owen with something and I say something like it’s two different words (some thing) and we both laugh even though it’s kind of stupid and she says okay and tells me to FaceTime her after dinner and I can do that when I’m in my room because my room is like a bomb shelter of regular clean in a nuked house. So I walk home by myself listening to music on my phone and I like to pretend that dressed all in black I’m a shadow or a blur or like a smudge of someone that when you drive by you don’t really see them. I get home and I can hear the TV through the open front windows (no screens) and it sounds super-loud, louder than normal, and I panic because it sounds too loud and that has to mean something’s wrong, or some thing is wrong, so I run inside and drop my backpack and it bass drums on the kitchen floor, and I obstacle course past sagging garbage bags in the hallway to the TV room and Dad is on the couch asleep, passed out, whatever, and sports talking heads are shouting on the TV, but Owen isn’t there, maybe he’s already in his bedroom. I think about asking Dad where Owen is and I think again. I try to turn down the volume without the remote (because when I got close to the couch Dad grumbled something and there were black dots of seeds and shells all over the cushions and I didn’t want him to wake up and blame-yell at me about it) and I can’t find the stupid volume buttons on the side of the TV. The back slider off the kitchen crashes open so Owen must’ve been in the backyard and I somehow didn’t see him out there when I got home. I run back down the hallway and I want to yell, where’ve you been?, and say things to make him cry but I also know that’s not me so I swallow all that down to deal with later (I don’t eat sunflower seeds but I record messages on my phone and write things down and that’s how I deal) and I find him (and I always think that I’m finding him, like he’s lost) closing the slider real careful and slow with his foot, which is poked through the screen at the bottom and he shouldn’t be doing that because he’s making the rip in the screen bigger and we’ll get bugs (more bugs) and mice (more mice) in the house, but then I zoom in on what he’s carrying. Not that I can see it yet because his back is to me and he’s curled around and over whatever it is he’s carrying.
Owen, what do you have?
Nothing.
Seriously. Tell me.