I began to think of myself as Shabbie. I told myself that my clothes and the pallor of my skin were beginning to resemble theirs, that when I spoke to them they were no longer merely words but part of that deeper, hushed language the Shabbies used themselves, that when Mona’s thousand needle-points had pierced me just before her departure, she had passed some of that essence into me.
But the Shabbies could not understand me and I could not understand them. And when I was hungry I had to buy something to eat—at first with my dwindling supply of ready cash, and when that was gone, with money I could squeeze from the people on the streets above me. The Shabbies merely disappeared—only a few at a time—and would return gorged, the stripped limbs of lesser creatures dangling limp from their hands.
One very cold October morning they began to migrate. I followed them as they marched toward lower Michigan Avenue, feeling the tug of the oily strands that brushed and bathed me, anointed me and, finally, held me back as the Shabbies began to disperse before my eyes, spreading out as weightless globules of amber fluid, scattering into smaller and smaller droplets until they were no more than a mist.
When it seemed I was all alone I turned and saw one last Shabbie, a young woman who looked not much difference than Mona had on her first day. I called her Mona but she did not respond. I could already see the frayed threads of her clothes pulling apart, waving like the cilia of smaller and smaller drifting organisms, her transparent flesh and the tissues underneath softening for the final diffusion.
I leaped at her, crying out. I caught a hot wave of the sweet smelling flesh and felt it rupture and collapse around and upon me. I fell to the street, sobbing out that name over and over again.
When I finally gathered myself and trudged toward the nearest stairway, I thought about my apartment, wondering whether I had been gone so long that it had been rented out from under me, whether I could even remember enough about the world up there to reintegrate myself into even the margins in which I had lived my life.
I made it to the top of the stairs and scanned the passing crowds. I breathed in the October city gases and felt the cold winds slap and sting at my dry, brittle flesh and the whispers of bitter cold darkness that seeped in toward my shabby soul.
THE UGLY FILE
by Ed Gorman
The cold rain didn’t improve the looks of the housing development, one of those sprawling valleys of pastel-colored tract houses that had sprung from the loins of greedy contractors right at the end of WW II, fresh as flowers during that exultant time but now dead and faded.
I spent fifteen minutes trying to find the right address. Houses and streets formed a blinding maze of sameness.
I got lucky by taking what I feared was a wrong turn. A few minutes later I pulled my new station wagon up to the curb, got out, tugged my hat and raincoat on snugly, and then started unloading.
Usually, Merle, my assistant, is on most shoots. He unloads and sets up all the lighting, unloads and sets up all the photographic umbrellas, and unloads and sets up all the electric sensors that trip the strobe lights. But Merle went on this kind of shoot once before and he said never again, “not even if you fire my ass.” He was too good an assistant to give up so now I did these particular jobs alone.
My name is Roy Hubbard. I picked up my profession of photography in Nam, where I was on the staff of a captain whose greatest thrill was taking photos of bloody and dismembered bodies. He didn’t care if the bodies belonged to us or them just as long as they had been somehow disfigured or dismembered.
In an odd way, I suppose, being the captain’s assistant prepared me for the client I was working for today, and had been working for, on and off, for the past two months. The best-paying client I’ve ever had, I should mention here. I don’t want you to think that I take any special pleasure, or get any special kick, out of gigs like this. I don’t. But when you’ve got a family to feed, and you live in a city with as many competing photography firms as this one has, you pretty much take what’s offered you.
The air smelled of wet dark earth turning from winter to spring. Another four or five weeks and you’d see cardinals and jays sitting on the blooming green branches of trees.
The house was shabby even by the standards of the neighborhood, the brown grass littered with bright cheap forgotten plastic toys and empty Diet Pepsi cans and wild rain-sodden scraps of newspaper inserts. The small picture window to the right of the front door was taped lengthwise from some long ago crack, and the white siding ran with rust from the drain spouts. The front door was missing its top glass panel. Cardboard had been set in there.
I knocked, ducking beneath the slight overhang of the roof to escape the rain.
The woman who answered was probably no older than twenty-five but her eyes and the sag of her shoulders said that her age should not be measured by calendar years alone.
“Mrs. Cunningham?”
“Hi,” she said, and her tiny white hands fluttered about like doves. “I didn’t get to clean the place up very good.”
“That’s fine.”
“And the two oldest kids have the flu so they’re still in their pajamas and—”
“Everything’ll be fine, Mrs. Cunningham.” When you’re a photographer who deals a lot with mothers and children, you have to learn a certain calm, doctorly manner.
She opened the door and I went inside.
The living room, and what I could see of the dining room, was basically a continuation of the front yard—a mine field of cheap toys scattered everywhere, and inexpensive furniture of the sort you buy by the room instead of the piece strewn with magazines and pieces of the newspaper and the odd piece of children’s clothing.
Over all was a sour smell, one part the rain-sodden wood of the exterior house, one part the lunch she had just fixed, one part the house cleaning this place hadn’t had in a good long while.
The two kids with the flu, boy and girl respectively, were parked in a corner of the long, stained couch. Even from here I knew that one of them had diapers in need of changing. They showed no interest in me or my equipment. Out of dirty faces and dead blue eyes they watched one cartoon character beat another with a hammer on a TV whose sound dial was turned very near the top.
“Cindy’s in her room,” Mrs. Cunningham explained.
Her dark hair was in a pert little pony tail. The rest of her chunky self was packed into a faded blue sweat shirt and sweat pants. In high school she had probably been nice and trim. But high school was an eternity behind her now.
I carried my gear and followed her down a short hallway. We passed two messy bedrooms and a bathroom and finally we came to a door that was closed.
“Have you ever seen anybody like Cindy before?”
“I guess not, Mrs. Cunningham.”
“Well, it’s kind of shocking. Some people can’t really look at her at all. They just sort of glance at her and look away real quick. You know?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I mean, it doesn’t offend me when people don’t want to look at her. If she wasn’t my daughter, I probably wouldn’t want to look at her, either. Being perfectly honest, I mean.”
“I’m ready, Mrs. Cunningham.”
She watched me a moment and said, “You have kids?”
“Two little girls.”
“And they’re both fine?”
“We were lucky.”
For a moment, I thought she might cry. “You don’t know how lucky, Mr. Hubbard.”
She opened the door and we went into the bedroom.
It was a small room, painted a fresh, lively pink. The furnishings in here—the bassinet, the bureau, the rocking horse in the corner—were more expensive than the stuff in the rest of the house. And the smell was better. Johnson’s Baby Oil and Johnson’s Baby Powder are always pleasant on the nose. There was a reverence in the appointments of this room, as if the Cunninghams had consciously decided to let the yard and the rest of the house go to hell. But his room—