What the #@&% Is That? Read online

  “Nothin’ to worry about, kid. You’re already beyond fucked. Good news is, my family learned acupuncture from the Chinese. Fix you right up, yes indeed.” The old man banged cupboard doors and rummaged through shelf drawers.

  Bryan mouthed the word acupuncture in horror with his cheek pressed against the tablecloth. In an act of great willpower, he lifted his head and looked over his shoulder. What he saw did not prove comforting. “Are those knitting needles?”

  “Stifle yourself. Hold real still.” Creely raised both arms and then hammered them downward.

  The twin bolts of agony ripping through Bryan’s lower back had a psychoactive effect. He departed his body. The kitchen windows transmitted a pristine white glow. White gradually dulled to rose, then crimson, then black. The blackness absorbed him. He sailed on a cosmic breeze until a pinprick of pale white radiance flickered ahead. The flickering candle flame steadied and grew. Angie and her lover fucked on a white sand beach bordered by a black gulf of water. The man glanced at him: Mandibole wearing a shiny white shirt and a huge, cruel grin. Angie turned her head—also Mandibole’s superciliously grinning face. Bryan’s eyes popped open. Returned to the shabby, dim kitchen, he tried to scream but couldn’t suck in sufficient air.

  “Huh,” Creely said. “Well, hell. Whoops, I guess.” The author’s footsteps clipped rapidly away. The front door slammed.

  Blood pooled around Bryan’s hips and dripped from the edge of the table. Enough blood that he felt as if he were partially afloat in a kiddie pool. He tried to lift himself and realized the darning needles had gone clean through the small of his back and into the wood of the table. He cried.

  Snow fell against the windows, and after a while, it grew dark.

  Light engulfed the room and gushed into his eyes.

  “Ten years! Nary a tear. But now that you’re nailed to a table, look at the waterworks. I mean, really.” Angie circled. She had dressed in white-and-black earmuffs, a white-and-black pea coat, black pants, and white Wellingtons. “What a mess, what a bloody mess. Proud to wallow in your own gore, I suppose. Really showed me, haven’t you?”

  “Please help me.”

  “Addition by subtraction. Are you ready for that, squirrel-killer?”

  “Angie. Please.” Bryan’s right arm refused to work. He feebly pawed with his left, supplicating a goddess of torment.

  “Fine. Fine, Bryan. This doesn’t mean we’re back together.” She sighed and yanked the needles free. “Oh, you asshole. This coat is ruined.”

  Air, and everything else, hissed out of him.

  * * * *

  Winter had slinked into the mountains. A warm breeze shushed through the treetops and awakened Bryan by thawing his frozen, glaciated innerscape sufficiently for a stray thought to escape the merciless grip of entropy. Pine sap, grass, and perfume tickled his nose. He opened his eyes. Angie hunkered before him, pristine but for several drops of blood on her coat and galoshes.

  “You’re in a bad way,” she said.

  He’d been stripped naked. From the blackened thighs down, his body resembled an unearthed Egyptian mummy, or one of the petrified corpses of climbers that adorn the slopes of Everest. His feet had ballooned and split at the joints. The nails were gone. Pus seeped. He felt absolutely nothing. Oh, inside he screamed unceasingly, but it didn’t hurt.

  “Call an ambulance,” he said. Barely said. His lips cracked. Possibly he’d only projected the thought at her.

  “Are you crazy? The ambulance drivers around here are surely not. They wouldn’t come within a mile of this creepy shithole for a million bucks. Nope, it’s home remedy or death. Worse than death, actually.”

  “Ambulance,” he repeated. How shiny and plastic her hair flowed in the light like mud, how shiny and plastic her lovely face seen through a muddy filter. Differently familiar, it provoked queasiness.

  “Gangrene,” she said. “On its way to your heart. My opinion is, your heart’s already rotten. Nonetheless, I’ve a filial duty as your ex-fiancée. You made me call you Daddy often enough.” Angie hefted a serrated cleaver. A relic from some Civil War surgeon’s grim bag of atrocity tools. She poked his leg. “These have to come off. That’s how you regain mobility. Give to get, sweetheart. I’ll do the first, as a favor. After that, you’re on your own.” She set the teeth of the blade against his left thigh and began sawing. His flesh made small corkscrew piles on the floor. Only a dim tugging sensation reached his brain. He screamed anyway.

  The femur cracked. Sweat dripped from the tip of her nose as she made several final strokes, gesticulating with the frenetic grace of a concert violinist. “Done!” Angie shoved the severed limb aside and wiped her brow. “Easy-peasy. You’re a total dipshit with tools, I know, I know. Just . . . Do your best.” She pressed the cleaver into his hands and, despite his cries of protest, assisted with getting a groove started. “Keep going, Bry. That gangrene will eat your innards if you fail. Ciao, stumpy.”

  He persisted, albeit sloppily, after she kissed his forehead and left. His hands, both of them swollen and plum dark, operated independent of his delirious mind. There was something childishly compelling about the repetitive action of sawing—almost akin to the morbid pleasure in shooting a woodland critter or dismembering a bug, except he was the woodland creature in this instance; he was the bug. Amputation would free him from the trap, this sundew house.

  Plop went the right leg onto the deck. Birds twittered encouragement.

  Yes, this seemed a slight improvement. He dragged himself, hand over hand, inside and through the kitchen into the parlor. His body felt light, although the journey took several days if the rotating carousel of sun and moon could be trusted as a guide. He left a red trail through the parlor and to the box television. He clicked the television on and then rested. Some kernel within his dimming soul craved information from the outside world. It yearned for even the sterile contact of cathode rays. He crawled to the couch and lifted himself onto its bleached flower-pattern cushions. The TV played in jittery black and white. Static snarled. Davey and Goliath. The Muppet Show. Mr. Rogers. Lamb Chop. The actors spoke in Russian or Spanish or Slavic or the click-click buzz of hunting insects.

  A dark-haired toddler pedaled a red tricycle into the room. The child wheeled close to the couch and stopped. His shiny hair and plastic features glowed with roly-poly good health.

  “I know you,” Bryan said in a perfectly clear voice. His breathing came easily. Still woozy, still full of pustulant anxiety (and pus), yet he grudgingly admitted that the compulsory mutilation had alleviated the worst symptoms of whatever disease gripped him. “Yes, you were there. I know you.”

  “As I know you,” the child said.

  “Wait. Who are you?”

  “But you know. Feel better?”

  “Yes. It’s a miracle.”

  “Leeching is good for the soul. You aren’t really better. Daddy said it’s only temporary. You’ve got the gang-green.”

  The putrefaction of Bryan’s hands had corrupted his arms to the elbows. He’d done his best to ignore this latest incursion of rot and enjoy the cartoons. Now the meddling kid had ruined everything. “What am I supposed to do? It’s in my arms, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Everything must go.” The boy rolled over to the couch and handed Bryan a serrated penknife. “Daddy says to do a good job. Bye!”

  The sky darkened and clotted and the windows became opaque with purple. Bryan sniffled bitter tears. He gripped the toy knife between his thumb and index finger and made the first, tiny cut. Better still.

  Months oozed past. Years. Once his traitorous limb was severed, he dropped the knife and took a few breaths. Yes, better. Lighter. Addition by subtraction made increasing sense with a come-to-Jesus shock of epiphany. The next stage presented a challenge to his transcendence. Not wildly intelligent, but plenty clever, went Bryan’s family motto as mumbled by drunk Dad.

  He raised his remaining bicep to his mouth and bit in. Angel food cake, food of the gods.
/>   * * * *

  “I am impressed. Truly.” Mandibole retrieved Bryan’s severed arms and studied them. “My grandfather trapped wolves along the Yukon. Leg-hold traps with nasty teeth. Those wolves, ah my. Rebellious critters chomped their own legs to get free. Humans really are animals with a fancy operating system, aren’t you?”

  Bryan concentrated on Sesame Street. He frowned when Mandibole clicked the screen dead.

  The man dressed in a soot-tarnished three-piece suit. His profile could have been Bryan’s father’s during his prime belt-buckle-swinging days. He clucked his tongue at the filth and grime: the holes in the ceiling, the windows melted to slag with age, mushroom beds where carpet once spread, the wasp nests, and termite-riddled beams.

  “This joint sure went to seed,” Mandibole said. “Stupid me. You’re Bryan the Amazing Torso. I can hardly expect you to push a broom. You can’t even wipe your own ass. Entropy. There’s a secret to life. Entropy. Our dads are the gods of our puny universes, and yet even they are powerless beneath the cloddish tread of enervation and heat death.”

  “I’m at peace.” Bryan’s belly distended with a feast of his own muscle and marrow. Perfectly sated for the coming ages and divested of humdrum, mortal concerns such as fear and happiness.

  Mandibole threw back his head and laughed. His helmet hair didn’t stir, nor did his eyelashes flicker. “Not so fast, chum. Are you blind? The rot is in your chest. It’s creeping toward your brain. We must act fast, else you’re a goner. Or worse.”

  Bryan waggled his stumps with bewilderment. His serenity evaporated, replaced by petulant misery. “What do you expect of me, Dad? I can’t chew my own damned throat.”

  “A bit more commitment would be nice. No matter.” Mandibole leaned over and retrieved the rusty penknife. “I used to tie your shoes. In for a penny.”

  “Wait,” Bryan said, too late. Despite years of accreted cynicism, he was profoundly surprised at how much blood remained, albeit momentarily, in his body.

  Mandibole finished the job by twisting Bryan’s skull until it popped free. He whistled as he carried his trophy into a lush garden amok with brambles and bushes. He offered Bryan’s head to the dark and ominous tree that lorded it over the smaller plants of the kingdom. The tips of its thorny branches pierced Bryan’s ears and lifted him until he hung like a piece of bleeding pomegranate, a gaping manikin skull.

  Constellations drifted and the sky became green. The house went under the burgeoning jungle. Heat and steam and green, endless green. The pomegranates in the great tree possessed distorted faces. The newer heads, raw and brash, could speak at first. A wrinkled and ruddy soul dangling next to Bryan said, “Ezra Tooms, goddamn you cretins! Ezra Malachi Tooms! I’m a rich man! A powerful man!”

  A howler monkey descended from its leafy berth and plucked that shouting fruit-head and promptly chewed it to gushing smithereens. Such were the risks of making a scene in paradise. Not that it mattered. Sooner or later, the animal would crap, the seeds would grow, and in a hundred years or so, Mr. Tooms would again blossom on the vine, on this tree or another, sadder and infinitely wiser.

  Later, as happened every epoch or two, the sun divided and a vast, Godlike hand extended with greedy eagerness. The monkeys gibbered and screamed and fled in all directions while the hand made itself a claw and tore loose swathes of canopy. Hundreds of monkeys, and squirrels, and bright-plumed birds tumbled toward the sky and became tiny silhouettes inhaled by the sticky maw of a child leaning over the colossal handlebars of his trike.

  Bryan could do nothing except exult in this recurring terror. Tears of red juice trickled from his bulging eyes. He was gravid with seeds and they stifled his mindless protest. Whenever he screamed, red seeds dripped from his mouth, splattered upon the soil, and found purchase.

  Over time, inconceivably deep geological time, the sentient fruit of his tree and the trees of the surrounding jungle multiplied. Each became a perfect version of himself, howling and gibbering in a mute, eternal chorus. Eventually, he grew to accept it. His multiplicities spread inexorably across the infinite and took root everywhere.

  —For Michael Cisco

  FOSSIL HEART

  AMANDA DOWNUM

  Nan Walker doesn’t mean to fall asleep. She never does. But tonight the creak of the ceiling fan lulls her. Evie curls warm against her side, one long leg thrown over hers. Nan’s eyes sag, her fingers relax, and her worn paperback slides onto the bed. Sleep strokes gentle hands across her eyes.

  The nightmare waits, constant, unchanging: muddy water, stale wet air. The car shudders in the torrent as the flood rushes past outside. Debris scrapes the doors and windows. Chelsea’s hand clutches hers, cool and clammy, already starting to slip. A child’s fear paralyzes her, warring with the adult knowledge that she has to change it, change anything, but she’s already too late—

  The dream—the memory—slips and shatters. Eyes flash in the darkness—the monsters coming for her.

  Nan wakes to thunder, to the hot press of flesh and a weight on her chest that steals her breath. Her spine is full of razor wire. She thrashes, trapped and tangled, and strikes fur with one flailing hand. Evie’s fat white cat murrs indignantly and leaps away, digging a parting claw into Nan’s stomach.

  Nan swallows nausea. Her pulse pounds in her throat. Only a moment’s inattention, but the night is different, deeper. Rain drums the roof and Evie has rolled to the far side of the bed, taking the covers with her. Nan fumbles for the clock; her novel slides to the floor with a muffled thump. The clock face is black, the ceiling fan still; the power is out. Rainlight and storm-shadows shift across the ceiling.

  Eyes flash in the darkness by the door and she’s sure the monsters have come. Then lightning splits the night open, revealing Winnie the cat. Thunder shakes the house. Nan falls back on her sweaty pillow, waiting for her heart to slow and her stomach to settle, for the pain in her back to dim to its usual nagging awareness.

  Evie stirs beside her, one hand clenching in the sheets. She mumbles something incoherent and kicks. Her foot settles against Nan’s shin and she stills again. The familiar touch steadies Nan, too. Everything’s all right, she tells herself. It’s just a storm. She leans in, pressing her shoulder gently against Evie’s, grounding herself in human warmth.

  When the pins and needles in her fingers fade, she slides out of bed and grabs her phone and cigarettes off the nightstand. Four in the morning. She lost five hours. Not so bad. Nothing, really—normal people lose more than that every night. But normal people can sleep, can rest, can dream of something besides the same moment over and over again.

  Moisture slicks her skin as she pads across the sticky floor, her own rank fear-sweat and the storm’s paper-curling miasma. The screen door creaks as she steps onto the porch. The cool autumn night laps over her and she sighs. Goosebumps crawl up her legs and her breasts tighten under her damp tank top. The power is out all down the block, no electricity but the lightning seething in the clouds. Rain pounds the roof, rattles the gutters, and rushes to the ground in shining cascades.

  It can’t wash her away. She’s safe here in this house on the hill. The water can rise but it can’t reach her. Not this time.

  She sinks onto the porch swing and lights a cigarette. Smoke clears the sleep taste from her tongue, the sour metal fear taste. She wants a drink. Water all around her, but her tongue feels swollen between her teeth. A cockroach scuttles across the weathered boards and Nan pulls up her feet to let it pass. The swing squeals softly.

  Somewhere, in some other reality, there’s a Nan who sleeps soundly. Who sleeps at all. A Nan who isn’t afraid of storms and rushing water and the constant crushing weight of failure.

  She closes her eyes to the sound of rain on shingles, the wet rattle of oak and magnolia leaves. Rain on muddy earth. The drone and buzz of insects searching for the stolen porch light. The smell of rain, of damp wood and cigarette smoke and her own salt sweat. Start with this, she tells herself. You lost five hours—take
them back.

  She was here earlier, alone on the porch. She can do this. Her pulse jumps at the thought, and she forces herself to ignore it. Ignore the rain, too; it wasn’t here. She reaches for the pain, the angry fire that licks her spine, lets it swim up from her subconscious and arc along her nerves. Her constant, her anchor.

  Colors pulse behind her eyes, spinning fractals and kaleidoscope swirls. The world unravels along invisible seams and Nan falls into the void.

  Darkness burns around her, shot through with stars. A million points of light, each one a moment, a possibility. She hangs on a precipice, tide rushing past her. The depth and vastness will swallow her if she lets them. She could float there forever, without pain, without fear. . . .

  Ananda Walker.

  The monsters are always waiting. Long, sleek beasts, all bone-sharp jaws and cutting angles, their words razors and broken glass. Thirsty. Stay. Soon.

  Teeth close into her flesh. Electric tongues spark against her skin. Nan fights a scream, searching for the right spark. A pinprick hole in the black. She reaches for it, reaches through, and pulls herself out the other side.

  She opens her eyes, muscles spasming. Her jaw snaps. Teeth graze her cheek and the taste of red and copper spools across her tongue.

  Overhead, a moth beats against the grimy globe of the porch light. Streetlamps bleed sodium halos through the sticky air. A car speeds down Locust Street, tires humming on dry asphalt.

  Nan gasps. Her cigarette snaps in a numb hand, scattering orange sparks and flecks of tobacco across the porch. Adrenaline sings through her. She did it. Five hours. The most she’s ever rewound.

  She looks at her hand, at the shadow of teeth marks already fading around her wrist. No blood, no broken skin, just chill and weakness.

  Soon. Waiting. A greater darkness flickers in the shadows below the porch, there and gone in an eyeblink. Hungry.

  The screen door opens and Evie steps out.

  Nan swallows nauseous spit; the stutter of perception makes the queasiness worse. Tension throbs in her neck and jaw. The roar of her pulse is as loud as the coming storm.