BLACK STATIC #41 (6 page)

•••

“Know where your dad and my mom are right now?”

Tom, sitting on the edge of Peter’s bed, looked over at his friend, who was sprawled, legs spread apart, against one of the pillows. “No.”

“They’re at a hotel downtown. Know how I know that?”

Tom shook his head. Scrunched his eyebrows under his crew cut. Using his right forefinger, he secretly drew a square, with four squares inside, on Peter’s white bed sheet.

“I saw all these receipts for hotel rooms in my mom’s purse. They stay at the Hyatt Regency Columbus.” Peter watched Tom’s face absorb the information. “They get room service so they don’t have to leave their room. Last Friday, my mom got a chicken breast dinner, and your dad got a filet mignon dinner. They shared a buckeye cheesecake. Plus there are charges on the bill for porno movies.” Peter kept watching Tom’s face. “What do you think they do in that hotel room all night?”

“How would I know? I don’t work for the FBI.”

“Your dad’s putting his penis in my mom, and maybe putting it in her mouth too, like I did with your girlfriend Peggy.”

“She’s not my girlfriend anymore!”

“Maybe your dad’s even putting his penis in my mom’s butt. I heard a rumor that it feels really good to have a penis up your butt. It feels the same way peppermint candy tastes.”

“I seriously don’t think so.”

“Want to see something?”

“What?”

“The ghost that lives up in the attic? It’s been active.”

Peter led Tom back up the attic stairs, Tom’s eyes big and fearful.

Peter crooked his little finger, leading Tom behind the huge red-brick chimney in the middle of the attic, its rise slanted to one side, like the leaning tower of Pisa.

Behind the chimney, on the rough wood floor, the little brown dog that roamed the neighborhood, wagging its tail, easily tricked by putting your thumb between your ring finger and your index finger.

The dog was dead.

Head cut off. His small brown body, red rim above the shoulders, lay by the bricks, four legs curled inwards, as deflated as shrimp legs. A yard away on the wooden floor, his tall-eared head, pink tongue lolling, black eyes staring.

“The ghost did that. I discovered it when I came home for lunch.”

Tom put his hand to his mouth. “No way.”

“Yeah. I told you the ghost is an angry ghost, but now he’s gotten really angry.”

Tom looked around the attic, looked behind his back. “What’s he so angry about?”

“The ghost doesn’t like that you and your dad might be moving in here. He likes it where it’s just me and my mom. He asked me, if he did something to you and your dad, something like what he did to this puppy, would I get over it? Would I be willing to find a new friend?”

Tom looked spooked. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him, yeah, I would.” Peter leaned closer to Tom, upper arm against Tom’s upper arm. He lowered his voice to a warm whisper. “But I was lying to the ghost. I had my fingers crossed behind my back. I wouldn’t kill you. Or your dad.”

Tom was shaking.

Peter slid his arm across the back of Tom’s shoulders. “Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.”

“I can protect myself!”

“No, you can’t. Look what the ghost did to this little dog. Only I can protect you. Let’s go downstairs and get in bed together. We’ll be safer there.”

They lay together in Peter’s bed, under the blankets, in their pajamas.

Tom had never been in bed with another person before. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

“We have to hold each other. Lay in my arms.”

“No!”

“Do it, or it’ll get you, just like it got that puppy!”

Tom, scared, let Peter put his arms around him. Put his arms around Peter.

“Let me check to make sure the ghost isn’t in your pajamas. Ghosts love to play in boys’ pajamas.” Peter put his hands between the buttons of Tom’s pajama top, onto his bare chest, pinching his nipples. Slid his hands under the waistband of Tom’s pajama pants, feeling the insides of his bare thighs.

Tom swung his head around on his pillow. “I don’t like it!”

The bedside phone rang.

Peter pulled his big right hand out from under Tom’s waistband, lifted the receiver. Listened. “Okay.” Listened some more. In a high voice he said, “I love you.” He hung up. Slipped his hand back under Tom’s waistband. “That was my mom.”

“When’s she coming home?”

“She’s not. She said she’s staying over her girlfriend’s, to bake enough funeral cakes for tomorrow’s block party. But we know what she’s really doing. I think your dad had his penis inside my mom’s butt while she was talking to me.”

“I doubt it!”

“So it’s just you and me tonight.”

Tom drew square after square under the sheets. “Well, I guess we should just go to sleep now. My eyelids are really heavy.”

“Maybe not just yet.”

“Did you say something? I was asleep.”

“Lift your rear end. I want to slide this plastic sheet underneath your body.”

Tom lifted his rear end. “Why do you want to do that?”

“Are you kidding? Ghosts hate plastic. You didn’t know that? Seriously? Ghosts are really old-fashioned. Plastic is too modern.”

“I may have read it somewhere, but I wasn’t sure it was proven.”

“Oh, it is. I’m going to put my knife blade against your throat, but that’s only to protect you, so I can cut the ghost if it tries to climb in your mouth.”

Tom rolled his head back, panicking. “It hurts! It hurts!”

“That’s something about my mom, huh? She pays for the hotel room? She eats chicken, while your dad gets to eat filet mignon? She’s pretty fucking desperate, huh?”

Tom rolled his head further back on his pillow, sucking air through his nostrils, to keep his throat off the sharp line of the blade. His eyes bugged. “Is that your penis? Why is it so sticky?”

Peter came back from his own thoughts. “I rubbed some unguent on it. That’s how the ghost tries to control you, by touching your penis. The unguent makes your penis slippery, so its hands slide off.”

Eyes squeezed shut, Tom started to blubber. “Will you take the knife blade away from my throat? Please? Please?”

“Maybe not just yet. She’s kind of a cunt, huh?”

“Please!”

Peter looked at his bedside clock. It wasn’t even nine yet.

He glanced up at the white ceiling. “Oh, no!”

“What? What?”

And hours and hours and hours left before his mom came home.

•••••

This is Ralph Robert Moore’s third appearance in
Black Static
. Recently published stories of his can be found in the anthologies
Shadows & Tall Trees 2014
,
Journeys into Darkness
,
Of Devils & Deviants
, and forthcoming in
Darkest Minds
. His website SENTENCE at
ralphrobertmoore.com
features a wide selection of his writings, and includes purchase information on his novel
As Dead As Me
plus short story collections
Remove the Eyes
and
I Smell Blood
. Rob lives with his wife Mary in Dallas, Texas.

EQUILIBRIUM

CAROLE JOHNSTONE

I just want to feel. It’s as though I’ve forgotten how; as though my skin has become shrunken and ossified, my internal organs indurate, my thoughts polished marble. I sit and I breathe, I sip warm water from the plastic jug by the bed, I hold his hand, and I can feel none of it.

“How is he today?” I ask the nurse through numb lips, and there are no vibrations inside my chest, my throat when I speak.

Her smile is kind, wary, distracted. “He’s comfortable.”

I stand up and look down at his paper thin skin and the slow, blue blood beneath it. I stroke the hard/soft curve of his bald skull and pretend that I can feel it: the warmth, the downy fuzz that is nearly white. He once had beautiful dark hair that was silky smooth to the touch, long enough to grab inside fists.

“You’re going already?”

I try to smile at the nurse, but am not certain I succeed. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I say.

•••

It’s very quiet at home. Sometimes I start to believe that I can no longer hear either, but I know it’s not true. My stony heart thuds slow inside my ears. I make myself eat some dry toast before I turn on the computer again, though I have no appetite. Mostly I forget to eat; other times I cram my belly full of everything and anything until I’m sick, and only then do I remember to stop.

I log onto the site, but I don’t check my profile. I go straight to his. His photo smiles with straight, white teeth, and he’s standing on top of a daisy-sprung hill, his dark hair blown over his forehead. Immediately, his name pops up in the small window at the bottom of the screen. ManlyBeardMan. The first time he made contact, the name made me laugh when I thought nothing ever would again.

♂
Hey! Where u been?

♀
Sorry

♂
Bad day?

I look at his picture again. I’m so wary, always so wary of getting it wrong.

♀
Just tired

There is too long a pause, too long. I try to ignore my panic because it doesn’t help, but I stare at the blinking cursor inside that small window at the bottom of the screen. I wait for the electronic beep of severed contact. Sometimes it comes out of the blue, when I’m smiling and mid-flow and nearly sensate again; other times hours pass in kind or funny or even flirty exchange until I forget to be cautious. There is no pattern, no learning curve for my mistakes. I always vow not to be the one to give way to these silences, but my need for connection, my need to
feel
again is too great, and so I nearly always do. The silence presses in around me until I can’t even hear my stony heart.

♀
I want to hear your voice

Am I allowed to say that? Allowed to ask it? I don’t know. But I need to hear something, I need to hear him. And my vision has grown blurry; I can hardly see his smiling face anymore.

♂
Next time

•••

“He had a bad night,” the nurse says, looking at me carefully. She doesn’t know what to make of me; none of them do.

I sit carefully down next to the bed. He’s connected to new bags, new machines. The crooks of his elbows are punctured purple and framed a sallow yellow. Micropore wraps around the needle in the back of his hand, but it can’t hide the dark, congealed blood between cannula and gauze. His arms and wrists are still big, still covered in dark hair, but underneath pale and translucent, running with that slow, blue blood. I kiss his temple and his eyes open, dark and shot through with crimson thin threads. His face is swollen with steroids, nearly as unrecognisable as mine.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” I say, letting his dry fingers curl around mine because I can’t feel their squeeze. “Are you in any pain?”

He tries to smile, but soon gives up, dry lips trembling. “No.”

It strikes me suddenly how different we’ve become. He seeks only anaesthesia, while I long for the return of pain, of any kind of feeling at all. “I’m glad.”

His eyes become momentarily sharp. As do mine; long enough, at least, to see it.

“Are you?”

•••

“It’s very weird hearing your voice,” he says, and I strain to hear his chuckle.

“I don’t sound like you thought I would?”

“You sound softer, more Welsh.”

I stretch out the hand that isn’t holding my phone. I squeeze it in and out of a fist, pressing my nails into the numb skin of my palm, the shallow lines of my head, my heart, my life, my fate. My stony heart is beating too hard. “You knew I was Welsh.”

No chuckle this time, though he can no longer wield a threatening cursor. He still has silence; the roaring deafness in my ears.

I close my eyes, give in first. “I knew exactly how you’d sound.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m talking to you.”

Another chuckle. “No, I mean, what are you doing? Where are you sitting, what are you wearing? We men need visuals, you know.”

I pretend to myself that I’m relaxed, though I’m not. “I’m sitting on my sofa with my feet up. It’s leather,” I add unnecessarily, in the wake of another pause. “I’m wearing jeans and a jumper.”

Through the roar of fresh silence, I think I hear the far off drone of an ambulance siren. “Did you want me to lie?”

He laughs loud and long, and it makes me jump, nearly curse. “No,” he finally says, “of course not.”

I stand up because I can no longer bear to sit. I stagger a little as I go into the kitchen. My sense of balance is no longer very good, though I’m never certain why: if it’s timidity, or what has been done to me, or just forgetting again to eat.

“What are you doing now?” The question is sharp, nearly accusatory, and I wonder at it, because I can’t hear a single thing that he is or isn’t doing at all.

“I’m pouring a glass of wine,” I say, though it’s more of a tumbler.

“Maybe I’ll join you.”

I carefully carry both it and me back to the sofa. We talk about wine, about living rooms, about nothing, and when I get up again to bring the bottle back from the kitchen, I hardly stagger at all.

“Don’t you want to know what I’m wearing?” he eventually asks, and when I say yes, he describes a black latex suit with strategically placed holes. I try to smile, and it nearly works.

•••

The doctor stands while I sit. He frowns at me from under giant, grey brows.

“He’s signed a DNR. It means that—”

“I know what it means,” I say. I clasp my fingers together. My nails are longer, but their press is no sharper. I stare down at the purple half-moons that they leave across my knuckles.

“His brain tumour is very advanced; his cognitive abilities are questionable.” The doctor clears his throat, looks out of the window. “You can contest it,” he says. “If you want to.”

I look out of the window too. I realise that it’s nearly dark: heavy darts of rain fall through the red-amber glow of stuttering streetlights. I wonder what time it is, I wonder what day it is. I have no sense of any of it at all, as if my body’s rhythms no longer have a clock, a sense of biological purpose. My numbness is only partly to blame for that. I can no longer work; I have no routine at all beyond coming here and going home. Days and nights blur, coalesce, and I forget what my life used to be like: its order and its cadence; its cosy certainties and terrors. I look up at the doctor.

“Why would I want to?”

•••

“I’m very drunk,” I say, because it’s true.

He chuckles that chuckle, although this time it’s different: low and rumbling. “Will you touch yourself for me?”

I stretch out on the sofa, gripping the phone in my numb fingers. “I want you to touch me.”

“I will be touching you,” he says. “When you do it.”

A silence that this time I’m not afraid of, because I’m more afraid of what he might ask of me next.

“Reach under your top,” he whispers. “Squeeze your breasts.”

I acquiesce before realising that he will hardly know it. My nipples are tight, hard; I feel nothing at all.

“Does it feel good? Is this okay? Tell me what it feels like.”

I stare up at ugly swirls of ceiling and draw my fingers into a numb fist. “It feels good,” I whisper back.

“Are you wet?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to touch yourself there? Do you want to slide your fingers through all that hot wetness, push them inside?”

And I can’t bear it, not any of it. I feel sick and scared and lonely and entirely frigid, entirely numb. I don’t even feel the lump at my throat, though I know that it’s there.

“I want to feel your fingers inside me, not mine,” I say.

“Then do it, do it,” he says, and his breathing is choppy, his self-restraint spooling loose like magnetic tape.

And I only obey because obey is what I do, but in that instant some memory of what it felt like to feel returns; it burns at my face, pricks tears in my eyes.

“Fuck me,” I whisper. “Get on top of me and hold me down and fuck me.”

This time the silence is not silent. I can hear his ragged breath, I can nearly hear what he is doing somewhere else; somewhere I’ve only ever half tried to imagine.

“Hurt me,” I whisper, though I am no longer touching myself at all. “Choke me.”

“God.”

I think of his too white teeth, his dark hair caught inside a breeze, his big arms, the squeeze of his fists. “Bite me,” I whisper, listening to his faraway groans. “Fuck me so hard that it’s all we can hear.”

When he comes in a choked roar, I press End Call and drop the phone. I shiver and shake; for a while I forget how to see or hear or think. When I wake up again it’s light outside. And I still can’t feel anything at all.

•••

This time the hospital phones me before I’ve showered and changed and prepared myself to go back.

“You should come now,” the nurse says. “It won’t be long.”

When I arrive, there are more people, more careful stares. I struggle to focus, I struggle to balance; a nurse has to steer me back to my bedside vigil. There are even more machines, but their beeps and slow clicks are muted metronomes. I don’t hear them any more than I hear anything else, anyone else.

I hold his hand, though neither of us feels it. I squint, trying to see those blue slow veins under his skin. His big arms, his big hands have become mottled, sluggish. When he finally opens his eyes, they are crusted yellow.

He smiles; I think he smiles. As though he could, quite literally, return me to my senses. Though I know he won’t. I know now that all these hours and weeks and months of waiting are for nothing.

He grips my fingers suddenly hard enough to almost hurt. His voice is ragged, unrecognisable as his own. I can’t smell his breath, his skin. “We were happy once, weren’t we?”

I don’t let him see my phantom tears – not even then. I try to speak: to shout and snarl and snipe, but I can’t. I stroke his skin, it’s dry and scaled and friable; I feel it under my nails, and shudder. And I try to think of any time that we were.

The doctor has to prise our hands apart. Has to whisper a “he’s gone” before I realise that it’s true.

When I finally get up to leave, the nurse has me wait in the corridor while she goes off to get his personal effects, though, of course, I don’t want them.

The prison officer standing next to the door clears his throat, tries not to look at my scars. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs Barton.”

“We’re getting divorced,” I whisper, willing the nurse to return.

And he nods a quickly embarrassed
of course
, even though he’s right. Even though it’s still my name.

•••

“I’m sorry,” he says, even though it was all my fault; even though I was the one who spoke the words. “I don’t want you to think—”

“It’s okay,” I say, but my voice is too cold, it betrays my lie too quickly. I think about hanging up again.

“I think you’re very pretty,” he says.

I close my eyes. “I’m not.”

He pauses. I hear him swallow. And I want to ask him to do it all again – and this time properly. To hurt me, defile me, debase me. To make me
feel
. To spit in my face and tell me that this is what I’m worth, this is what I’m good for.

But still I don’t dare, not even now.

“This isn’t enough,” he says.

I hold my breath behind my tongue. I hold it alongside the things I don’t dare to say.

“Meet me,” he says, and his voice his flat, its threat inflectionless.

•••

It’s been a very long time since I was in a bar. I perch awkwardly on a fake leather stool, sipping my wine in shaking fingers, trying not to look at my reflection in the dark, wet window. I want to leave, and yet I’m too afraid to move. I’m too afraid to go home, to sit on my sofa, to remember that I have nothing else left to do.

“Hello.”

I turn too quickly. Close my eyes and then open them again. His hair is blond, his beard very far from manly.