Sheep and Wolves (8 page)

My mentor, he looked at me with those terrible eyes, grinning, like he’d never lost a fight a day in his life.

Now I’m the one with horrors for eyes.

Now, finally, it’s my turn.

“She wants to kill you,” I say.

“She’s not like that,” Salmon says.

“They’re all the same!” I say. “Kill her! Now!”

Salmon doesn’t.

He’s the sort of kid you want to beat into shape.

You know the type.

He’s your son, your student, your slave.

I hold the dog close to Salmon’s face, and he pushes her away. He also pushes out some of those precious feelings aching to come out.

The dog yelps, hard. Her flesh sizzles where Salmon touched her and only a hairless handprint of smoking tissue remains.

She doesn’t trust me anymore.

I squeeze her tight.

“Let her go,” Salmon says.

“Kill her,” I say.

Once again, he doesn’t. Instead, he does what I couldn’t when I faced my dog in the cave. He holds back.

I take a step backward.

Part of me wants to lock him in a glass cage, and leave him out in the sun to die. The other part of me wants to win.

I throw the dog at him, and Salmon jumps out of the way. He doesn’t chase after the dog. He doesn’t rip her apart with the memory of his parents’ death.

He picks up my sword.

He approaches me.

“The dog’s that way,” I say, and point.

But he doesn’t turn around. Everything inside him should be screaming, “Dog!” but he’s pointing the sword at me.

“Why was the sword under the table?” Salmon says.

I look around for a table, but don’t see any.

Then I remember that Salmon’s not really here. He’s still in the dining room with his dying parents, and that’s where he’ll always be.

“You put the sword under the table,” Salmon says.

“It’s my sword,” I say.

“You didn’t have it when you came in,” he says. “You put it there before. You knew what was going to happen.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You killed them.”

“Fuck you.”

Salmon swings the sword at me and drives me back toward the wall. His arm doesn’t know the first thing about sword-fighting, but it doesn’t matter. He’ll win.

Of course he’ll win.

This is government-funded power in his little hands, and that’s all it takes.

The power always wins.

I tell Salmon something about how he’s like the son I never had. Something about pity.

Somehow, he doesn’t care.

Parasite

The tick sucks you out of me in a matter of minutes, but it takes three months before you’re born again.

During the waiting period, I scribble down ideas, diagrams, even snippets of dialogue. I fill an entire notebook with jagged letters and little holes where my pencils puncture the paper.

Finally, I’m standing over the tick, biting my fingernails, watching him push the embryonic sack out his tiny ass.

“Does that hurt?” I say.

“Yeah, a little,” the tick says. “But it’s worth the $500.”

“What do you need with $500 anyway?”

“What do you need with a little man?”

You emerge, and cut your way out of the sack, coated with green pus.

“Where did he get the knife?” I say.

“It must be made of calcium deposits,” the tick says.

You’re still disoriented, swinging at the air, shouting something about the army. I stick you in the black bag.

At dinner, my wife tells me about some non-profit organization, and I pretend to care. She ends up crying—I’m not sure why. Maybe I laughed when I should’ve frowned.

Later that night, I’m inside the garage, looking into the gerbil cage. The black bag isn’t moving, and I’m terrified you’re dead.

But then, when I dump you out, you get up and yell, “What the fuck did you do?”

“This isn’t about me anymore,” I say. Well, recite. “You always made everything about me, but it was always about you. Now you’re gonna pay for what you did to me. And mom.”

You point your knife at me. “Let me go, or I’m gonna fucking kill you.”

I laugh. I laugh at your stupid little knife and your stupid little voice. I used to be so afraid of those eyes, but now they’re mine to play with.

So I open my notebook. “You can forget begging for mercy. I have to do this.”

“You could’ve let me stay dead,” you say.

You’re right, of course. I shouldn’t be here right now. I should be in bed, holding my wife in my arms, dreaming this nightmare instead of living it.

But it’s too late now.

I reach for the ant farm.

A Long Metal Sigh

It’s Jordon’s turn to feed Aunt Laura while she strokes his face with the furry nubs at the end of her arms, but he’s dead. And not the kind of dead that keeps you guessing. No, “Is he chatting up Benjamin Franklin in a golden café in the sky?” No, “Will he visit me in my dreams and haunt me with cryptic messages that will ultimately save my life?” This is the kind of dead you can’t take back.

A ten year old boy struck him in the back of the head at my nephew’s birthday party. Candy didn’t erupt from the wound. The birthday clown offered to perform CPR, but when no one said anything, he walked into the house and closed the door.

The parents of the boy told their son that Jordon moved to Africa. So says my father. He also insists that the parents said, “Lies are cheaper than therapy.” My father laughs when he tells me this, disgusted, angry.

I say, let the boy live with a song in his heart for a few more years, though I don’t say this out loud.

Anyway, I would feed Aunt Laura myself, but I’m being held hostage by a very small man with a very small pistol and mustache.

Like you, I doubted the significance of this weapon. That is, until the demonstration on my pet chinchilla.

I hold the bleeding ball of fuzz in my arms. He’s so new that he doesn’t have a name yet, but I feel a part of me evaporating, drifting and funneling into the little man.

I want to kill him, the way I’d kill the boy if he were a monster. Not so monstrous that I wouldn’t recognize the human in him.

Just monstrous enough.

The chinchilla kicks and startles me. I drop him.

“He’s still alive,” I say.

“Kill him then,” the tiny man says. “I’m not wasting any more bullets.”

I scoot the chinchilla under my bed. On the way, I name him Franklin.

“Bring out the photographs,” the little man says.

“What photographs?”

“Family photographs! What do you think?” He paces back and forth on the dresser. For the first time, or maybe the second time and I forgot, I notice the man’s lack of reflection in the mirror behind him.

I almost ask him if he’s a vampire. However, I’m too busy pissing myself and saying, “I don’t think I have any photographs.”

“Everyone has photographs!” he says, and scratches at his mustache.

My Aunt Laura waddles in. She says, “Would you be a dear and feed me my stuffing?”

The little man points his gun at her. “What the hell is that?”

“She’s my aunt,” I say. What I don’t say is that she’s also a teddy bear. Or at least as close to a teddy bear a person could possible be, with hair transplants, amputations, and a mad swarm of cosmetic surgeries. Not to mention two dead parents and a substantial inheritance.

“Please let her go,” I say. “She’s harmless.”

“She’s not going anywhere,” the man says. “She could call the police.”

“She doesn’t have hands.”

“How do I know she doesn’t have a specially made phone she can use?”

“She doesn’t.”

“So says the guy with the gun pointed at his family. Where are those photographs?” He aims the gun at my face. “Get on it! Now!”

“Who’s your little friend?” my aunt says. She fiddles with the perky ears of living flesh attached to the top of her head and steps closer to him. “You look just like a little doll.”

“Stay back,” the man says.

“Why don’t you sit on my bed for a while?” I say. “I need to do something, then we can go eat dinner.”

Or maybe I’m not saying this. Maybe I’m not brave enough to say a few damn words, and I watch as my aunt holds out her hands to pick up the little man and press him against her hairy chest.

Before she can lay a hand on him, he shoots her. The miniscule pellet whizzes past the layer of brown fur which cost her more than a bullet proof vest.

She wanted to be lovable. Cuddly. She wanted to light up the faces of children when she entered a room.

Maybe three weeks before he died, Jordon told me over a couple bowls of steaming chili that he was thinking about quitting the caretaking job. He told me that he cried for Aunt Laura almost every night. He said people hugged her less than they used to, before the transformation. We finished the chili.

After this conversation, Jordon didn’t make an effort to hug her more often.

Neither did I.

I think about rolling Aunt Laura under my bed with the teddy bear I outgrew but never threw away.

When she opens her mouth, I think she’s going to tell me the meaning of life. Blood gushes out instead.

I open another drawer and toss out the innards.

“For god’s sake,” the man says. “They’re in the chest!”

So I open the chest, and find the photographs.

“Here,” I say, and hold out the cluster of memories.

“I don’t want them,” the man says, and I think I detect a hint of sorrow in his voice. A sour sort of sorrow.

“I want you to eat them,” he says.

“Eat them or die,” he says with the gun.

I eat them. At first they taste sweet, then bitter, then they’re gone.

“Now the birthday cards,” the man says.

“I don’t know where—”

“They’re in a tin box under your bed.”

I find them. I also find Franklin snuggled up against my old teddy bear.

I start with a birthday card from my grandma with flowers on the cover. Flowers that look nothing like the flowers at Jordon’s funeral, but doesn’t seem to matter. I remember anyway.

Then I take the wet wad of card out of my mouth. “You do want me to eat these, right?”

“Obviously,” the man says, looking smaller all of a sudden.

It goes on like this. He commands me and I obey. I eat letters and gifts and even my teddy bear. Aunt Laura would have tried to talk me out of it if she wasn’t so dead.

I dissect my room, devouring all the vital organs. I feel sick to my stomach, the way I felt at the birthday party right after I laughed. I laughed because I knew Jordon couldn’t die. I laughed because I already imagined us laughing about it over a couple steaming bowls of chili.

“I need to shit,” I say.

“Not yet,” the little man says. “You’ve got to eat me first.”

“I don’t want to.”

He waves the gun. “It’s either you or me.”

I hold him by the arm and lift him in front of my face. After all this, I guess I expect him to be happy. Instead, he looks as afraid as I feel.

His mustache falls off. Without it, he sort of looks like me.

I can’t say that I’m surprised, but I pretend that I am, for my own benefit.

I lift him higher and he says, “Damn it!”

“What?” I say.

“I dislocated my shoulder. Never mind. Hurry up and do it.”

So I do.

As his brittle bones snap and crunch in my mouth and his sweet blood oozes down my throat, I feel like a monster. Not so monstrous that I don’t recognize the human in me.

Just monstrous enough.

As for the gun, I forgot all about it, and it pops in my mouth, blowing out not one of my teeth.

Still, it’s my turn to die. And not the kind that keeps you guessing.

The kind you can’t take back.

It’s cheaper than therapy.

Camp

My muscles tighten. My teeth clench. My irritable bowel is seriously pissed off.

I’m no good at sitting.

“Hold it together,” my dad tells me. Not physically here, of course, but why would that stop him? Hold it together—that’s easy for him to say. He’s made of steel bars and rivets and bolts. Me, I’m held together with Elmer’s glue and pushpins and chewing gum.

Memories vibrate. They fall and crack open.

A few years ago I shit my pants on this very same two and a half hour bus ride. With liquid crap trickling down my legs, I stumbled toward the bus driver. In tears. In shame.

I begged him to take me home, but he said, “Sit down!”

I told him that I was sick, and he laughed at me and said, “No kidding,” but I won’t shit my pants this time. Even if I do, I’ll handle it. I’m bigger and stronger and smarter than I used to be. My dad made sure of that.

Another memory falls off the shelf and smashes on the floor. My first memory.

In this one, I watch my neighbor’s pet rabbit kick frantically inside a blender until its legs are too mangled to even tremble anymore.

“This game sucks,” Nigel says, beside me, tapping at his phone/camera/mp3 player/game console/everything else.

“Can I play for a while?” I say.

“It doesn’t suck that much.”

I’ve never seen or spoken with Nigel outside of Camp and the bus ride to and from, but I still consider him one of my best friends. Mainly because I don’t have all that many.

Nigel’s a troublemaker and sort of a jerk, and that’s why I like him.

“You know, they’re going to confiscate that,” I say.

“Not unless I keep it in my ass,” he says. “They won’t check my ass. Not without probable cause anyway.”

“That’s sick. Would you really do that?”

“You’d have to help me.”

“You’re sick.”

“No kidding.”

*

Once again I’m stuck in the top bunk, despite the fact that I called bottom the moment Nigel and I entered the cabin. I remind him that last year I fell off the top bunk during a night terror and suffered a mild concussion. I also remind him that he promised me on the life of Katherine the Great, his pet C
hihuahua
, that this year I could have the bottom.

“She died two months ago,” he says. That’s that.

Hamilton enters the cabin, dressed in yellow and grinning like an idiot as usual. “Hello, boys. Excited about the fire tonight?”