BLACK STATIC #41 (7 page)

He laughs, but I see straight away that it isn’t at me because his cheeks colour red. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It was an old photo.”

“No,” I say. “You look the same.”

“You’re very beautiful,” he says, and he doesn’t even look at the burns on my neck, the deep gouges that knives and teeth have left in my skin. When he touches my arm, it tickles. When he kisses my cheek, I feel it from the roots of my hair to the ends of my toes. When he smiles, I feel my own stretching wide, warming every part of me that I’d forgotten had ever existed.

•••••

Carole has appeared in
Black Static
several times since we published her debut story in issue #3. One of those stories, ‘Signs of the Times’, has been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award.

THE DRIVEWAY

LEAH THOMAS

She held her child’s severed hands behind her back. Bloodied water dripped from his wriggling fingertips down to her flowered apron, but she did not loosen her grip.

“You’re being punished for good reason.”

“Please, Mom.” The sound that emanated from him was as much of a gargle as a voice. From the highchair he waved his arms – two chicken drumsticks. “I’m sorry!”

“Never try to run past me again. You are never to leave this room. Understand?” His hands snapped and squelched. Had she not been wearing rubber gloves, popsicle-stick fingers jutting from chicken breast palms may have riddled her with splinters. “Lift your arms, Dearheart.”

“Why do you call me that? It’s not my name.”

“That’s what my mother called me. And don’t change the subject. You scared me half to death.” She jabbed his hands into the meat of his arms and twisted them into place.

“I just wanted to go outside.”

“Why?” She gestured to the aging country kitchen, a spacious room coated with pear-patterned wallpaper and bottomed by peach-colored linoleum floors. Overhead, the blue ceiling had been spotted with painted puffs of white clouds. Between a battered old fridge and the highchair was a wooden toy chest, a family heirloom that spilled over with washable toys, hairless teddies and plastic soldiers. “You have as much to play with in here as any kid could want. As much as I had.”

“Other kids play outside.” Two marble eyes gleamed from deep inside pig-skull eye-sockets.

“What would you know about other kids?”

“I see them out there sometimes.”

She glanced out the room’s only window, which overlooked an unkempt lawn shadowed by the forest. A disused dirt driveway, overwhelmed by encroaching ferns, disappeared between the pines. “You saw kids
here
?”

“They were swinging a very long string…like your knitting wool, but thicker. And taking turns hopping over it.”

“Jumping rope, that’s called.” She pulled the curtains shut.

“Can I try jumping rope?”

“Maybe, if you behave.”

“Outside?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Please, Mom.”

He stood on pig-hoofed tiptoe on the arms of the chair. Most children could not have climbed out of the highchair, but Dearheart’s sausage-legs could bend any way he willed them; she had animated each mismatched part of him in full. He clasped his hands together as best he could. Melting ice slipped down his meat appendages. She would say his expression was pleading, but pig-skulls really have only one expression.

“Let me out. I’m not afraid!”

“Bedtime. You’re defrosting.”

Dearheart hissed when she hoisted him up. He twisted his limbs backwards in protest when she placed him in the freezer atop a bag of frozen peas.

“Enough fussing.”

“When I’m as tall as you, can I go out?”

She did not say
You will never grow. You are made of dead things
.

She closed the freezer, trapping his unhappy sniffling within it. She filled the kitchen sink with warm water and a tablespoon of bleach and scrubbed every corner of the room before hanging her apron to dry. Upon leaving, she padlocked the kitchen door.

•••

His arms were crossed the next time she opened the freezer to wake him. She pulled him out and stood him up by the window.

“There are some squirrels gathering acorns on the lawn this afternoon. Look!”

He swiveled his skull around all the way to look at her. “Where are the kids?”

“Enough of that, now.” She peered out at barren branches bitten by autumn frost. “I’ve never seen anyone out there.”

He sat down hard, clunking against the floor. She remembered tantrums in which his hands and feet had scrabbled away from the rest of him to hide in cupboard corners, and angry fits when his head had rolled off his shoulders. She leaned over to hug him and hold him together.

“I have something for you.”

Every day they played together, pushing matchbox trucks across the tiles or walking soldiers up and down the highchair tray like it was some runway. Sometimes they pretended the floor was lava (after she explained lava to him), and sometimes they simply played House (he always insisted on being Mommy). Today she had brought him a length of twine that was knotted at both ends.

“It’s a jump rope.”

“It’s not.” He tried to kick the twine away, but it stuck to his freezer-burned foot.

She peeled it off of him. “It will work. Trust me.”

“Can’t you go out and find a real one?”

“We can just play something else.”

“I’m tired, Mom.” His head sunk down from misshapen steak shoulders, all but touching his feet.

She said she loved him, but he turned his back on her before she closed the freezer.

Before leaving, she laid the length of twine on the countertop.

•••

That night she propped herself up on her mother’s old pillows and retrieved the family cookbook from among the battered books on the nightstand.

Some children in the book were close to eternal. There were children made from metal and clay and glass that would not decay for ages. Those pages were untouched. One recipe was dog-eared:

A Somewhat Child (a provisional option)

She tapped her finger down the list of ingredients, squinted at the fine print that recommended using a higher proportion of pork than any other substance (because pigs were not so far from human, when it came right down to it). She peered at yellowing pages that diagrammed how to make simple armatures from household items such as wicker chairs and hangers and nail files and yes, popsicle sticks.

Nowhere did the recipe tell her how to stop Dearheart from leaving.

If she read the recipe to him during story time, maybe he could understand why he could not play in the driveway. All children had to find out where they came from one day, after all. She often wished her mother had been the one to tell her such things, back when she was growing up.

•••

Because she carried the cookbook into the kitchen with her, her hands failed to catch her when she fell.

She awoke with a cracking headache and peeled her face from the linoleum. Her eyes scanned the length of her body until she caught sight of the twine pulled taut across the kitchen entrance, the door closed beyond it. Gray light seeped through the window; evening had not yet arrived. She stood, wincing at her bruised knees and pounding skull, and stumbled to the refrigerator. She tore open the top-hatch to find it empty apart from the peas.

She ran to the window. Dearheart stood at the head of the driveway, farther away from her than he had ever been, dead leaves stuck to his legs. She made for the door. The doorknob rattled but had been locked from the outside. If he could hear her when she pounded on the glass of the window, he did not show it. He stood on tiptoe once more, vibrant crimson and pink against the colorless trees and sky. He was peering down the long driveway, neck elongated as each piece of him shifted upwards to raise his line of sight higher.

When he took another tottering step forward, she hollered. Fighting a sob, she upended his toy chest and braced it against her diaphragm like a battering ram.

Every time she slammed the chest against the window she thought he was about to vanish between the trees forever.

No one had replaced the window since her grandmother had lived there, and the ancient wood cracked and gave out when the glass shattered. She left her house slippers behind and shards scraped her sleeves and legs as she crawled outside. Her skirt tore on the window frame. She sprinted across the lawn, ignoring the acorns that jabbed into her bare feet.

He was already around the bend when she closed her arms around him.

“What on earth are you thinking?” The chill autumn wind blurred her vision, made her chest tighten. “How can I look after you if you leave?”

“The children ran away from me.” He was trembling, unusually warm and damp under her hands. “Can I follow them?”

She was already pulling him back towards the house, eyes fixed on the front door.

“Are you going to take my legs away this time?”

She did not answer. They were almost back, almost safe.

•••

She rinsed the dirt and pine needles from his appendages while his head and torso cooled down. After she put him to bed in jittering portions, she tweezered glass from her skin and bandaged her cuts. She cleared the remnants of broken glass from the ground. Removing piles of canned goods from the pantry, she yanked two wooden shelves from their pegs. From a rusted toolbox beneath the sink she retrieved a hammer and nails.

Dusk made long fingers of the branches’ shadows, and she swore those fingers were scrabbling at her back as she boarded the kitchen window from outside. Her own breath weighed heavy in her ears and sweat beaded on her forehead. At one point she became convinced that Dearheart’s kids were watching her from the driveway, but when she looked over her shoulder, of course no one was there.

She dropped the second board, and didn’t catch her breath until she was inside with the door bolted behind her.

•••

When Dearheart started growing, she did her best not to notice.

In the months after she chased him down the driveway, she watched him stand on tiptoe to stare out the window through the gaping crack she had left between the boards, heedless of the wintry drafts that whistled there. Later, when he could gaze out while standing flatfooted – on feet that looked less and less like hooves – she pretended he had never needed to stand on tiptoe after all. She turned a blind eye when he began to pull open the freezer door by himself, with fingers far too jointed to be popsicle sticks, and smiled whenever she barely squeezed him into his highchair.

As he grew, the separate meats of his body stretched to make him humanoid. Countless new sinews merged on his multi-hammed chest and his arms grew to three times longer than any chicken’s legs. His mouth became fully articulated soon after the front of his pig skull caved inward, deforming itself into a functioning jaw where once that gargling hole had been. Playtime toys were swallowed in his flesh. His teeth were formed from the wheels of his matchbox cars, his fingernails from the toy soldiers’ broken base-plates. Sometimes when she looked at him, she didn’t know him.

“Do you want to play?”

“Maybe I’m too old for it, Mom.”

He asked her for crayons and paper and wrote imitation letters for hours on end. They were nonsensical, comprised of random, curling scrawlings. He would never say who he was writing to, but he occasionally got up to look out the window.

She referenced the recipe nightly. Over and over she read a scribbled note in familiar penmanship that suggested a Somewhat Child could be cured into jerky and last almost indefinitely. But at no point had she hung Dearheart in a smokehouse, and no jerky she knew of could grow a mandible of its own accord.

She wondered if all parents felt this helpless when their children grew up.

“Dearheart,” she said, when he wiggled toes at her for the first time, “please stop this. Stop growing!”

He blinked at her with new, sausage-skin eyelids. “How? Did you stop, Mom?”

•••

On a midwinter afternoon she opened the freezer to discover that there was simply no possible way Dearheart could fit inside it any longer. She wiped her running nose on her arm and gently tugged away one of his arms, intending to shove him in piecemeal, but he screamed in frustration and pulled the drumstick from her hands.

“Why are you doing this to me?” His eyes, more soulful than marbles now, seemed almost capable of weeping. He backed up into the boarded window, clutching his arm to his chest, knocking snow from the sill. “I just wanna sleep in a bed, like you.”

“I’m sorry, Dearheart. Maybe we could have a big freezer delivered here. Someone can stop by, just like the grocery man.”

She put her hand on his cheek, but he withdrew.

“You’ll have to
talk
to someone, though.”

She removed all the shelves from the fridge and tried manipulating him into the fetal position. That felt unnatural to him, so instead he wrapped his arms around his chest and grudgingly allowed her to detach his legs from the knees down so she could shove them separately into the freezer. She managed to force the doors shut.

She picked up the telephone. Her hands shook.

•••

The major appliance man at the door smelled of sweat, and his truck in the driveway reeked of exhaust. She averted her eyes and directed him to the kitchen. He wheeled the long freezer in. She asked him to install it in the center of the room.

While he worked, she stood by the old fridge and coughed every time Dearheart scratched at the door. The man said he could transfer her goods to her new freezer at no additional cost, but she shook her head. When he asked whether she wanted to order a new window from another department (because that winter draft was cold and she was sure to get sick), she shoved a check from her mother’s savings account into his hand and showed him out.