Abigail is narcotically swollen inside a hospital gown. Her feet are covered in thick strings of blue veins, which I can see through her green paper shoes. The flesh of her face hangs in bags, as if fishing weights have been sewn under her skin.
“Gruh!” goes Abigail Burger. “Gruh!”
The most purely FRUSTRATED sound I have ever heard. Her breath is as sweet as baby food. She reaches for me. So strong. The nurse struggles to keep her in check.
“No soda machine up here,” the nurse says. “You want the caf.”
I double down the corridor into the neonatal ward. I carefully set Celeste in a plastic tub. Pluck stray peanuts off her blanket. To the tub I affix a note:
FORGIVE ME.
I pull into the horseshoe driveway of my employer’s cottage. The moon stands upon its exact reflection on the lake. Hours ago he called:
“Je… uuuuuurt suh— suh…”
Then the phone line went dead.
I open the cabin door. All is very quiet. Except a cupboard rattles under the kitchen sink. I open it. The dreadlocked one, Parkhurst, has squirmed underneath. His body is bent round the gooseneck projection of plumbing pipe. His face appears ovencharred, but no: only blood dried to a glaze.
I shut the cupboard.
In the viewing chamber, the casement windows open upon a starless sky. A squirming mass the size of a medicine ball occupies my employers’ wheelchair. On the floor beside it are empty bandage casings that still hold the strange shapes of whatever they once encased.
Inside the box is something holding the exact shape of my employer. Its skin is grey yet gleaming, silvery, shifting in the insubstantial light the way campfire embers will brighten in the wind. But as I watch, its flesh is paling to match the colour of my own. Its eyes are blobs of mercury in creased sockets. With one fingertip the thing traces the box where each pane meets.
“Whoever built this did a very adequate job.”
It opens its mouth against the glass. Puffs its cheeks like a blowfish. Deep down in its craw, little half-seen things are thrashing. It has no nostrils. But the quivering ball in the wheelchair has two slit-like dilations, side by each, fluttering in the manner of fish gills. They are the only feature it has, anymore.
“Are you scared of me?” the thing in the box asks.
I say: “I do not know what I am.”
“If it makes you feel any better, neither do I.”
It yawns. Blood emits from my nose.
“Eat the hearts of the innocent,” it says. “Is that what you think I’ll do?”
I say: “What will you do?”
“Go to Disneyland?”
“What are you?”
“Some call me demon, some say alien. Demon as it fits a ready-made definition, I guess. Alien as I don’t match any categorized flora or fauna on earth. I wish I knew what I was. You are lucky to be part of a species.”
It stretches, catlike. Snaps its jaws.
“Want to hear something funny? Although I don’t know if it is. That whole concept is lost on me.”
“Me, too.”
“Your species finds it impossible to envision an alien entity lacking the body structure, appendages in some arrangement, of organisms found on your planet. Your most common alien representation? The “Grey Man.” Big globe-like eyes. Legs, arms, fingers, toes. Or if not human-shaped, then spiderlegged. Or tentacle armed. Still legs, still arms. Or exactly the same bodily specifics as you, except furry. All with eyes and mouths: only more or fewer than you, or smaller or larger. Your imaginations can only conceive of organisms here, on this planet, reconfigured. Do you understand the mammothness of the universe? That there must be life hieing to no forms found here on Earth? Creatures without heads, or eyes, or organs. Only human beings are self-absorbed enough to believe all life in the universe must resemble them.”
Tiny openings appear in the nasal shelf above its top lip. The ball in the wheelchair is now utterly featureless. It bulges convulsively. Then it stops quivering. The thing points to the still ball.
“I promise you I am no better or worse than he was. It’s a one-to-one exchange.” The gesture it makes invites my acceptance. “If that is a fact, then tell me: how can your world be any worse with me in it?”
I wipe my nose. Then I ask:
“How would I do it?”
“Just say the words. Hey!”
“There’s something under the kitchen sink.”
“Oh, you can leave that to me.” The thing performs a jack-legged dance round its box. “Hey! Hey!”
I back out of the chamber. Blood is squeezing out of my pores. I close the front door. Almost. I press my mouth to that slit of darkness and whisper:
“I set you free.”
One year Teddy and I missed Halloween. Chickenpox. Mama made us costumes. Teddy, a teddy bear. “My cuddly Teddsy-weddsy,” said Mama, nuzzling him. I went as “Boxcar Jeffy,” a hobo. Mama painted my beard with an eyeliner pencil. My bindle was filled with tube socks. By the time we got over the contagion it was November 2nd. Mama dressed us up to take us out anyway.
“Why should it matter?” she told Cappy. “Surely our neighbours have leftover candy.”
On a cold night we went trick-or-treating. No jack-o-lanterns, except those that had been smashed by vandals or were decaying in trash cans. Mama knocked on doors around Sarah Court. Philip Nanavatti wasn’t confident he had any candy. The holiday having passed, you see. Mama had not ordered the Nanavatti’s squirrel shot yet.
“Come now, Phil,” said Mama. “Surely your daughter could part with a few candy bars from her stash. For my boys’ sake.”
Philip dutifully rummaged up a few granola bars. Not all neighbours were so obliging.
“Tell the belligerent bitch to take a hike,” came Frank Saberhagen’s voice from the family room when his wife answered Mama’s knock.
But Mama was persistent; we returned home with our plastic pumpkins full. I felt something indefinable for Mama. For what she had done. Was it LOVE? I could not say.
Cappy, speaking of Mama: “Like the moon, she’s got her phases. When she’s waxing, her LOVE’s the purest, truest thing. But when she’s on the wane…”
Squirrels gave every child on our block parasitic seatworms. Mama had “a bird” watching Teddy or me claw at our anuses. She ordered: “Don’t flush!”, then checked our leavings. At Shoppers Drugmart Mama bought a kit: Colonix Cleanse. Insisted upon administering it herself. Teddy, myself: naked on plastic sheets in the bathroom. Clutching our privates. We pried our buttocks open. Mama lubricated the plastic wand with flaxseed oil.
“Hold it, darlings. Hold it up there.”
Cappy quarrelled with her over this.
“You force them to hold two pictures of you in their heads. One’s this woman who feeds and houses them. The other’s an ass-invading bitch-wolf.”
“They can’t give themselves bloody enemas, William.”
“You’re half devil, Clara. I swear. Three quarters, some days.”
She envisioned a world where she was everyone’s Mama. She sought to hurt her darlings as only a child can be hurt by its mother.
From my employer’s I drive to hers.
Mama is in bed. Her sleep apnea machine hums. Mama removes the mask. Gulping inhales. Her eyes too round. Words mushed up. She cannot see the latex gloves on my hands.
She tells me a police officer named Mulligan barged in today.
“Investigating computer malfeasance. A ring of kids teased some poor youngster into a suicide attempt.” Suside ta-tempt. “But I don’t know my ass from my elbow with computers — do I, darling?” She nibbled her bottom lip. “He took your lovely gift away. As evidence. As if I’d even hurt a fly. He said my parole officer hasn’t even been born yet. That’s how long I’d be in jail.”