MicroHorror

Chris sat on the back porch watching Jill play with her dolls in Sandra’s big yard. He took another slug of his beer and saw Sandra coming out with a tray of sandwiches.

“Is that what you’re going to do all day?” she asked. “Sit around knocking back beers?”

“My first beer,” he said. “It’s hot here.” He’d drunk only Dr Pepper on the way from Las Vegas to Flagstaff, half to keep cool, half to keep awake.

Sandra raised her eyebrows and set the tray on the patio table. “So, how’s Rita?”

“Yeah, well, Rita.” Chris didn’t need to say more. Sandra had told him from the beginning what would happen with Rita.

Chris had arrived late last night, leaving Vegas right after work. He’d snuck around the side of the dark property to the small poolhouse where he stayed whenever he came. He’d been woken early by his little girl pounding on the door. When he’d asked her how she’d gotten through the pool gate she’d just smiled, then asked him to come help look for her dolls.

He picked up a sandwich. “You know I had to cut all of Jill’s dolls down from the trees this morning,” he said. “Eddie had strung them up with baling twine like a lynching.” Eddie was Jill’s half-brother, nine years older than her, born when Sandra was barely twenty, long before Chris had known her.

“Eddie’s having a tough time…” Sandra said.

Jill came running up the lawn, dropped a doll on the table, took a sandwich, hugged Chris, then ran inside.

“She still has the eyes,” Sandra said.

“She doesn’t have ‘the eyes.’ She’s just little. Blended family, too many…”

“Go on,” Sandra said. “Go on, say it.”

Chris sighed and tossed back another mouthful of beer. “There’s nothing fierce about her eyes.”

Sandra had a sandwich. “You could sleep inside the house, you know.” She reached out and put her hand on his.

Chris was about to answer, unsure what he’d say.

“She misses you,” Sandra said.

“Yeah, well, I miss here.”

“Miss… here? Miss her?”

“Uh… both, I guess.” This was already his fourth time back to Flagstaff this year and though the winters were Arctic compared to Vegas, the pace was much kinder.

“She’s growing up,” Sandra said. “Smart. I caught her with Greg’s power drill the other day.”

Greg had been the fourth husband, dispatched over a year ago.

“Huh?” Chris sat up. “What was she doing?”

“It was fine. She’d removed the bit and put in a screwdriver tip, and she was fixing the busted hinge in the bathroom.”

“That one you asked me to fix? Last time?”

“The time before that.”

Jill came back out, carrying a jug of watered-down Powerade. “Thirsty dolls,” she said. She bent over to hug Chris again, then went on down the steps to the lawn, eyes ablaze. Chris’s nose wrinkled. Something stank, something volatile.

“She’ll be five in a few months,” Sandra said. “Starting school.”

“I could move back, I guess.” Vegas was working out okay, but the speed of things was overwhelming.

“You could go back to the observatory.”

“Go back to school.” Why did the smell bother him?

“If you sold your place in Nevada you’d have some cash.”

He nodded. An escape from Vegas heat. “I could bunk in the pool house while I thought things over.” Kerosene, he thought, not watered-down Powerade.

“While we thought things over.”

“Oh.”

There was a hollow sound from down in the trees, like a big animal suddenly exhaling. Chris jumped to his feet and saw the flames, heard someone screaming.

Eddie was on fire, stumbling up the yard bellowing. Chris launched himself off the deck. He knocked Eddie down and rolled him across the grass to kill the flames

“He was playing with matches,” Jill said watching. “So I taught him a lesson.”

Chris looked up and saw that Sandra was right about his little girl’s ferocious eyes.

• Copyright: © 2009 Sean Monaghan