She heard a sound. A faint groan of bedsprings coming through the ceiling. The thought that Wayne was having an affair flickered briefly through her mind, but it inspired no real anger. He wasn’t interested. He had his box. Sometimes she imagined him fucking it, creasing its corners as he pushed himself against its velvety, ragged cardboard. She imagined it was full of his dried secretions, a milky lake concealed in total darkness, hiding its true purpose. Slowly, she moved toward the stairs.
The noise grew as she reached the second floor. Someone had drawn all the curtains, and the hall was gray and dark. She could hear the bed’s headboard thumping against the wall of her and Wayne’s bedroom. The box is open, she thought. She opened the bedroom door. The noise grew louder. Clearer.
It was dark in the bedroom. As Monica’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw something moving on the bed. Her first thought was that Wanye was having a seizure. Limbs thrashed under tangled sheets. There was a sound as of someone trying to inhale in the midst of an allergic reaction, an awful sucking, thin and desperate. The silhouette was wrong. Monica stepped closer. Her heart pounded like a drumbeat in her chest.
“Wayne?” she whispered. “Wayne, honey?”
The shape convulsed. There was a tinny rattle as something caught hold of the blackout curtains beside the bed and yanked them out of position. A blazing swath of sunlight lit the room, and Monica saw Casey. She was on top of Wayne. Straddling, thought Monica, grasping for the filthiest words she knew. She’s straddling him. He’s inside her. She made him do this.
Casey turned to face her, shoulders heaving, breasts and stomach slick with sweat. There was a division in her lower jaw, a gap between its left and right halves, and a thick secretion dripped from it. Monica could see her daughter’s teeth right back to her molars. Her inner forearms were open, too, and glistening tendrils of opaque white tissue spilled from the parted lips to coil around Wayne’s neck and penetrate his mouth, his ears, his tear ducts. He moaned, one eye twitching in Monica’s direction. Casey’s jaw sealed itself shut. Her tendrils began to withdraw as the flaps of skin along her arms fluttered and closed.
“Mom,” she breathed, her voice crackling.
Monica turned and ran. She screamed as she sprinted out into the hall, banging her shoulder hard against the far wall, clawing along the wallpaper toward the stairs. She screamed as she tore down the steps, slipping on the second to last and banging her chin on the hardwood floor. Rapid footsteps on the stairs behind her. A weight on her back, crushing her as she tried to scramble to her feet. “No,” she wailed. She could feel her mind beginning to break. “No, no, no.”
“Don’t be afraid,” said the thing that looked like Casey from where it knelt astride her spine. “It’s okay. Hey. Hey.” It touched her cheek. “I’ve got you.” It pressed her flat against the floor, its palm on the back of her head. Monica whimpered. Her bladder released, soaking through her panties and nylons and the front of her skirt. The Casey-thing kissed her just behind the ear. She could feel the slippery parts of its mouth shifting against her skin. “Are you going to be good?” it whispered.
“Please,” sobbed Monica, not knowing what she was begging for, not knowing if she was alive or dead and in Hell, if Christ had abandoned her, abandoned all the world, because how else could something like this happen? He was gone. He had left them all to rot. “Please, please.”
As easily as a man lifting a child, the thing flipped her over onto her back and punched her twice, breaking her nose and cracking something in her eye socket. As she struggled to draw breath, it sat down backward on her stomach, took her right leg in its hands, and hauled back on it, unbearable pressure mounting in her calf, her muscles knotting, cramping, and then the sickly snap of her tibia breaking. Her ears rang. The pain was like frozen lightning in her flesh. She stared at the thing as it rose and took hold of her arms. It dragged her down the hall and through the dining room into the den, where Stevie sat crouched in the far corner facing the wall and I Love Lucy played silently on TV Land, washing the room in black and white. “What did you do to him?” groaned Monica. “Stevie. Stevie! It’s Mommy. Can you hear me, sweetheart?”
“Yes,” he whispered, not turning.
The Casey-thing pulled her to the couch and dragged her up and onto it. Pain lanced up and down Monica’s broken leg. She could hardly think. Lucy and Ethel were stuffing bonbons in their brassieres and into one another’s mouths in an effort to manage a conveyor belt in a chocolate shop. She’d always hated that gag. So obscene. The Casey-thing stepped between her and the television. Its eyes were very dark. Almost black, with only a faint hint of sclera. It smiled. “Have you heard the good news?”
Her daughter’s face opened up like a flower, splitting into fleshy petals lined with jumbled baby teeth and dripping thick, opaque secretions. A wet red mouth gnashed mindlessly. Monica began to laugh as it tore her blouse and bent to seal itself against her breast, its tentacles cutting into her chest and collarbones, something within the raw, squirming mass of its split face fastening tight around her nipple, squeezing so hard that her laugh became a scream, a strangled hiss, fingers in her mouth and that sweet, damp taste on her tongue, and then nothing opened up beneath her, vast and wet and dark, and she fell into it.
And she was gone.
Part I TOUGH LOVE
This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.
“Don’t Mourn For Us,”
Jim Sinclair
Our Voice, volume 1, number 3, 1993
I TWO FOR FLINCHING
Manhattan, New York
1995
Shelby walked past Penn Station in the broiling August heat, hurrying so that no one would ask why she was crying. So that no one would look too close. She was sure her mothers had at least one PI sniffing around by now; they’d never go to the police, never do anything to risk their socialite friends finding out that their precious little baby boy, secured from the very best and most expensive orphanage in all of Korea, had run off to be some kind of transvestite. Shelby’s eyes darted between faces before she realized anyone tailing her wasn’t going to do her the favor of looking like a character in Dick Tracy. It would be just another sweaty nobody in the tide moving along Thirty-Fourth to the crosswalk where it bisected Eighth.
In the weeks since she’d left she had often dreamed about Stel and Ruth sliding after her through crowds. In elevators. On busy sidewalks. Once at some kind of nebulous function where everyone else wore masks and her face kept slipping off her skull so that she had to plaster it back on, only she got it wrong and when she caught sight of her reflection in the moment before their claws found her, it was a Picasso tangle of fat, twitching features. Nose snuffling upside down at her right temple. An eye staring from the circle of her puffy lips and swags of jiggling flesh hanging slack from her chin.
At the corner she gave an old bum sitting against the station’s stone wall a dollar and he smiled toothlessly at her and said, “God bless you,” and she wondered if that was how she’d look in twenty years, or thirty, or however much older he was. Wrinkled and sunken and smelling of stale cigarettes and unwashed skin. She’d tried, really tried, to convince Charlie to give her a room, but the older girl had said her age would be a problem, that it could attract too much attention from the neighbors. It’s a cathouse, honey; the pedos catch wind of you and we’ll never get rid of them. It had been Shelby’s last idea, her last desperate hope to find somewhere to live. She was sure Tyler wouldn’t want her for much longer. He was getting sick of her; she could feel it in his awkward silences, his cruel little comments.
You don’t have much of an ass, for a fat girl, he’d said while she sucked him off a few nights earlier. When she’d gone quiet he’d scoffed, told her not to be so sensitive, that it was just a joke. A lot of guys would think you’re ugly, he told her. No, not me, Jesus; I’m just saying. You think I’m that shallow?
He wouldn’t hold her hand in public. Didn’t like to go out with her at all, if he could avoid it. When his college friends came over to smoke weed and watch shitty movies he’d make sure to clear her out an hour beforehand, not to come back until an appointed time. When she did, sunburned and drained, the counters would be sticky, the linoleum dribbled with coke, the toilet seat furred with loose pubes stuck in slicks of urine. He never asked her to clean, but if she didn’t he would sulk and stomp and slam the doors and tell her nothing was wrong, to stop asking, to stop being such a bitch, and so she cleaned until the shithole sparkled. Sometimes it was two or three in the morning when she finished.
But where else could she go? She was a tick. A parasite who couldn’t survive without a body to cling to. Stel’s family had always treated her with a kind of benevolent disgust she had no reason to suspect concealed any secret fondness, and Ruth’s were all Bible psychos living on a rotting compound somewhere deep in Alabama. They probably didn’t even know she existed, not that they’d take her in if they did.
Sure, sure, just send the little faggot on down and Peepaw and the boys’ll make a man out of it, praise God.
The LIRR was mostly empty, the upholstered seats with their geometric patterns in pale blue and yellow smelling of years of soaked-in sweat. Shelby, cheek resting against the scratched plexiglass of her window, wondered as she always did if this was the car Colin Ferguson had stepped aboard in 1993, an automatic pistol tucked into the waistband of his suit pants. Did the ghosts of the six men and women who’d died that day drift moaning down the central aisle late at night when the train was out of service? Did they smear the windows with their sticky ectoplasmic fingerprints, washed away each morning before the commuters came?
She got off at Jamaica, the sultry breeze smelling of rain and fragrant garbage, and watched the train roar back into motion. Its wheels threw sparks. The platform shook. Down the iron steps, stepping around gum and pigeon shit, into the cool gloom of the underpass and then cutting through the alley behind the Citibank. Two blocks to Tyler’s building. Air conditioners dripped onto the sidewalk, puddles forming in the narrow troughs between the cracked and crumbling concrete slabs. In front of the barbershop next to the apartment, an old man sat dozing in a white plastic patio chair, his sunken chest rising and falling slowly. Silvery hairs glinted on the vee of skin left bare by his half-unbuttoned bowling shirt.
Garbage bags sat piled and stinking on the curb at the foot of the steps. She went up past them and into the cool front hall, shoving the humidity-swollen front door until the bolt clicked into place. The inner door was easier, the cut-crystal knob hot to the touch from the sun filtering in through the outer’s transom, and beyond it the stairs to the second story with their worn Oriental carpeting and the dark first-floor hall to the landlord’s apartment. Each step felt heavier than the last as she climbed toward Tyler’s landing. Her thighs were chafed, her dress dark under the arms with sweat, and her cock and balls tucked back between her legs and taped in place, a fetid swamp.
You’re fat. You’re ugly. You reek. One look and anyone could tell you’re not a real woman. He’s going to throw you out. That’s why Charlie didn’t want you, because you’re a freak. An ugly freak. Who’d pay to be with you?
Through the door and into the tiled front hall, kicking off her flats into the jumble of Tyler’s neglected shoes on the dusty rubber mat beside the doorway. He only ever wore the same ratty pair of sneakers, black Skechers with duct tape wrapped around the right one’s toe. He’d seemed so grown-up to her the first time she’d come to visit him. The way he smoked, sucking the gray cloud back in and breathing it out through his nose in lazy jets. The way he made her a whiskey sour with a shaker and crushed ice, just like Stel made cocktails at parties. He’d even cleaned before she got there, and his long arms had felt so good around her. His stubble rasping against her freshly shaven throat.
“I’m home,” she called as she hung her purse on one of the wall’s pegs. Most were empty. Tyler’s down jacket, green with pale yellow stripes along the arms. A battered Yankees cap. She lifted her right foot and twisted to look back with a hiss of disgust at the yellowish blisters on her pinky toe and heel. She’d have to pop and bandage them before Tyler saw. He hated things like that. Pimples. Zits. Boils. It practically made him turn green.
He’s going to throw you out anyway.
“Tyler?” She passed the bathroom, glancing at the creased and water-spotted Iron Maiden poster opposite its door. A withered, mummified-looking judge raising a gavel to hand down a ten-year sentence as a crowd roared in the foreground. She’d never liked the thing. It made her think of witch burnings and public hangings. The ecstasy of the crowd as the trapdoor banged open and the condemned dropped. Then there was the linen closet—her innovation—and a sharp left turn into the kitchen where Tyler was waiting.
He sat at the table, not looking at her. There were men with him. One, the younger of the two, sat on the counter with an empty glass in his hand and a milk mustache on his upper lip. The other was older, maybe forty, with wind-burned cheeks and a thick gray mustache, and wore a brown leather bomber jacket. He stood beside Tyler, resting a hand on his shoulder. For a moment Shelby thought that she’d fucked up, forgotten Tyler’s friends were over, except these weren’t cruel, grinning twentysomethings in hoodies and basketball shorts, all big ears and scrawny necks and stupid grade school secret handshakes. She’d seen them once in the line outside the AMC in Harlem. She wasn’t supposed to follow them, but she’d been so curious, and Tyler hadn’t seen her, so what was the harm?
You’re a dirty little sneak.
