MicroHorror

“It needs something here. A semi-colon, I think. Maybe a period. You know, to make it stand out. To make it more forceful.”

She rambles on, drones on, mumbles on, not knowing what she’s saying, not caring what she’s missing, only looking at the little blips and smudges–punctuation marks, she calls them–scattered throughout the manuscript and seeing if they measure up to some eighth grade standard she was taught long ago, treating them as if they were the reason for the story in the first place, which they never were, but she can’t see that because she’s too busy fussing over the smudgey things and where exactly on the page they ought to go and what kind of words they ought to get hung next to or on or under or after and the like.

“And your sentences…” she says, leaving the words hanging out there like that, all on their own, filling up the room with their grammatical wisdom, as though that alone–the mere uttering of the words–ought to be enough to set me on the straight and narrow or whatever it is she’s trying to set me on, and I find myself beginning to wonder if her sphincter muscle has maybe had this massive convulsive contraction, the waves of which have travelled all the way up her spine, where they are at this very moment, pinching off what’s left of her brain.

“What about my sentences?” I ask.

“Well, they’re too long. They’re run-on.”

The way she says the words, it’s like they were passed on down to her in a vision by noneother than god himself, who as it turns out, likes to appear in visions from time to time when he’s not too busy creating universes or teaching grammar, and she insists in the politest of catholic school girl ways that, by the way, he’s the kind of god who would always spell his name with a capital letter, when what she really means is that she thinks I should be using that kind of spelling–the capital letter kind–when I spell god instead of the little letter spelling I like better because it makes him seem more human somehow, and she ends up missing the point of the novel entirely, but then she wouldn’t know literary genius if it bit her on the nose, which is something I’m tempted to do, except that it wouldn’t do any good.

So instead, I pull out this piece I’m packing and blast her between the eyes, and her blood comes squirting out of the hole the bullet makes, and it lands in little drip-drop droplets all over my manuscript, making it look like the thing is ruined entirely, except that when I go to pick it up, I notice that it’s now punctuated with all the proper little smudgey things she likes so much, and I wish to hell I’d shot her in the arm or someplace like that that wasn’t quite so fatal ’cause now I gotta go find me a new editor to shoot so I can finish punctuating my literary masterpiece.

In a way–in a vengeful, depraved, vindictive sort of way–it seemed like old times the way Johnny Wodzinski struggled with the bow. Trying to get it just right. He never had been very good at wrapping presents.

“It’s the thought that counts,” he would say whenever he handed Annie a little token of his affection. And the two of them would be sitting on the porch swing at her daddy’s house, and Annie would hold up the package Johnny had given her and say something silly about how the paper was all crinkled on one side or how the tape was sticking out past the corner. And Annie would start to giggle in that schoolgirl way of hers that he found so appealing, and Johnny would tell her again about how it was the thought that counted, and Annie would get to feeling bad that maybe she’d hurt his feelings, and so she would kiss him on the cheek, which is what Johnny wanted all along, and then the two of them would cuddle in each other’s arms and gaze all goofy-eyed up at the moon until Annie’s daddy came out and shooed the boy on home.

But alas, Johnny’s world was a world of trinkets and baubles and dime-store friendship rings, and their love, such as it was, was doomed from the start. For Annie–Annie of the mansion and the riding stables and the charity balls–was slowly drifting away from him, and all the tape and shiny gold wrapping paper in the world couldn’t hold the two of them together any more.

Still, she had agreed to see him this one last time, and Johnny Wodzinski had never been the type to give in without a fight.

He held up the package and inspected it. It didn’t look too bad. Of course, the paper was wrinkled, and there was a little tear on one side, and tape was sticking out past the corners. “Perfect,” he said aloud to himself. “After all, it’s the thought that counts.”

And then he remembered–because in his excitement of going to see Annie again, Johnny had almost forgotten–to poke some air holes under the bow where they wouldn’t be noticed so the scorpion inside wouldn’t suffocate.

“What did you do with the words, Janet?”

The big man had a big voice, and when James was angry, truly angry, the windows rattled in their frames.

Writer’s block was always her fault somehow. He tried to explain it to her once, but it didn’t take. It had something to do with this thing he called a muse, and how it lived in the old Underwood, and how she should never, not under any circumstances, use his typewriter. Especially not for some mundane purpose like writing a letter to her mother. Not that she would ever send her mother something as impersonal as a typed letter, of course, but it was always the example he used.

He was coming down the stairs now. She could hear his heavy, exaggerated tread on the steps. He would confront her face-to-face like he always did and wave a blank piece of paper wildly in the air above his head. “See,” he would say, “see how there’s nothing on here. How it’s blank. How it’s empty. How it’s so–so wordless.”

And she would shrug her shoulders the way she always did, as if to tell him that she didn’t know why the words weren’t there, that it was not, no matter what he might think, her fault.

He wouldn’t pay her any mind, of course, for that was never his purpose to begin with. Instead he would bellow at the top of his window-rattling lungs about all the words that used to live inside the typewriter waiting for his muse to set them free, but how now they were gone. Vanished. Poofed into the thin night air. And how–and here he would give her an out because there was some part of him that still loved her–perhaps she had inadvertently dusted them away when she was cleaning this afternoon.

But she never took it, never took the out, because there wasn’t any part of her that loved him anymore. And so she would shrug her shoulders yet again and turn away and go back to fixing the big man his dinner. And soon enough, when he had finished his histrionics and the windows had ceased rattling, he would head back upstairs.

Tonight was a night like that.

And when she heard him, heard the floorboards groan and the chair creak and the typewriter keys begin to strike the platen, she knew that he was in the study again, and that the time had come for her to decide what to make him for dessert. So she crossed over to the counter and picked up the recipe box from its place next to the four-slice toaster his mother had given them as a wedding gift many years ago and began thumbing through the three-by-five index cards.

She liked the way they looked and was pleased with the work she had done. They were so much easier to read now that she had typed them. She found the one she wanted and set it on the counter. Arsenic and pecan pie.

It was all over between the two of them. Henrietta had made that quite clear.

And so Alexander went about the business of removing all traces of her from his life.

He wrapped up the faded rosebush in some butcher block paper. On his way home, he threw it in the dumpster behind Penrod’s Flower Shoppe.

The bust of Shakespeare–a gift from Henrietta on the occasion of Alexander’s thirty-fifth birthday–met a similar fate in a trash can behind the library.

The Harley–or rather what remained of the Harley, for one can only be so neat in such matters–fit tidily into one of the garbage cans down at the DMV; the eagle and flags were left at the VFW; the four-masted schooner Gaelic at the Yacht Club; the lightning bolts at the power company and so on and so on.

For the life of him, Alexander couldn’t remember when breaking up had been so much fun. It was like taking apart a jigsaw puzzle. Still, he swore this was the last time he’d get romantically involved with a tattooed lady from the circus. It was so much easier disposing of regular old, plain vanilla body parts.

Deep in the woods Robert took a moment to lean against a tree and catch his breath. Pulling the sled through the snow had been hard, exhausting work.

The wind, which had turned and begun blowing out of the west, suddenly stiffened, carrying with it the promise of more snow. Soon his tracks would be covered. If he didn’t hurry, he wouldn’t be able to find his way back to the highway.

He tightened the hood of his parka against the cold and checked his watch.

“Dammit. Do you know it’s two-thirty already?”

The lady on the sled didn’t reply.

“Well, all right, maybe we’ve time for a smoke, but try to understand, Jenny, I have to get back to the highway before dark. At my age, I just don’t see as well as I used to, you know.”

Robert snapped open his pocket and withdrew a pack of cigarettes. He offered one to the woman.

She shook her head back and forth.

“Suit yourself.” Robert lit up and took a long drag on the cigarette before continuing. “Do you remember this place, Jenny?”

The woman glared at him.

“It looks different now, doesn’t it? What, with the leaves all gone and the trees bare the way they are. The snow makes it pretty, though, I think. Look, Jenny. See how it hugs the trees and the branches, covering them on just one side. So delicate. So beautiful. It’s almost as though someone had painted them that way. Still, it’s nothing like it was last summer, is it? You do remember last summer, don’t you?”

The woman lowered her eyes.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Jenny. Did I embarrass you? Did you think I didn’t know? That I didn’t know what you and Douglas did here? How the two of you made love–wild, passionate animal love–without any respect at all for our relationship? Oh, Jenny, do you have any idea how much that hurt me?”

The woman struggled to respond, but the strip of duct tape, stretched tightly across her mouth, muffled her pleas.

Robert crouched down and took hold of the woman’s hand. He spoke in a soft, soothing voice, “Please, Jenny, don’t be afraid. They say it’s a very peaceful death, you know. Not much different than drifting off to sleep, really. After a while, when the hypothermia sets in and your body starts to grow numb, you won’t even feel the cold any more. Really, I think you’ll find the whole experience to be quite pleasant. Quite pleasant, indeed.”

Robert stood up and ground the stub of his cigarette into the sole of his boot. Tiny red embers flared brightly for a moment, then fell harmlessly upon the snow and turned to black.

“Well, my dear, I’m afraid our time is up. I really must be getting back to the car now. Douglas is preparing a very romantic dinner at home this evening. My, but he does hate it so when I’m late for his quiche.”

You want to know about Kenny? Okay, I’ll tell you what I know. It isn’t much really, though I guess that would be for you to decide, wouldn’t it? After all, you’re the one who’s the psychiatrist here.

You see, my twin sister Alice and I had always thought of our little brother Kenny as sort of a leftover. A reminder of a marriage that used to be. Mom’s third, if you’re counting. I suppose it didn’t help his case any that Kenny was the only boy, or that he was only four years old, or that he had that dumb “junior” tag on the end of his name. Like the last thing we needed was help remembering the name of the man who ran off to California with his secretary. Anyway, it was just before Christmas when he split. You know, Christmas, like in the happiest time of the year and all that, what with everybody going around singing and buying presents and decorating their houses and stuff. And what were we doing? Getting evicted, that’s what.

So Mom called Grandma–again–and just like before, she said okay, she’d take us in, even if there was one more of us than there used to be, that one more being little Kenny, who was new since the last time Mom had to move the whole family up here to South Dakota. I guess you could say that Mom wasn’t exactly the best judge of character when it came to the men in her life, huh?

Then yesterday morning, when Mom and Grammy were out shopping or something, little Kenny came downstairs all upset and crying. You see, somehow he’d gotten the idea in his head that it was always cold in South Dakota–I mean year ’round cold, not just in the winter–and that he would never be warm again. I guess you can’t blame him, though. I mean, he was only four, and the only life he’d ever known was back in Georgia, where it’s pretty much warm year ’round–’cept of course in summer when it gets downright hot.

Anyway, I think it was Alice who started it, though I can’t be sure. It might have been me. Either way, it was all innocent fun and teasing in the beginning. I suppose we could have explained to him that even up here winters don’t last forever. But the little guy looked so cute, standing there in his PJs and bawling his eyes out. So we decided to tease him, to pretend that he was right and that it really was always this cold here and that he’d never see warm weather again. Well, that did it.

Poor little Kenny started crying and screaming and throwing things. I think that’s what you call a tantrum, right? Anyway, at first we didn’t know what to do. But then Alice got this idea–or at least I think it was Alice who got it. Sometimes with twins, it’s hard to know for sure in whose brain an idea gets started, you know.

So Alice started talking to him in just the sweetest, kindest, tenderest voice you ever heard, you know, trying to calm him down and all like that. You know how little kids cry, right? How their nose runs and their shoulders heave up and down and their tummy bulges in and out so that they can’t hardly even talk none? Well, that was Kenny, bless his little heart.

But Alice really did a good job getting him to settle down. By the time we got him into the kitchen, I’d say at most maybe he was still just whimpering a little bit–that’s all. But it was still kind of irritating, you know. So we stuffed him in the oven and baked him at 375 degrees for four and a half hours.

Outside the storm is raging with the intensity of the apocalypse. Bolts of lightning. Crack of thunder. The stranger with the scarred-ugly face and the bad haircut asks for a pair of size 16 bowling shoes just to try them on, he says. Seems he wants to see if his toes have room enough to wiggle, on account of how he hates being confined, especially around the toes. Old Stoopy Bob lives up to his name and bends his body over to the lowest shelf behind the counter and obliges. He sets the shoes on the counter and asks the stranger for a dollar, all polite like, as if the stranger were in some way normal.

The stranger pulls out a handful of bones from a pocket somewhere and clunkers them down upon the counter. Keep the change, he says, and Stoopy Bob minds his manners and says thank you ’cause he doesn’t know what else to say. Not that it would have mattered anyway on account of how the stranger forgot to bring his bowling ball. So he grabs Stoopy Bob by the ears all of a sudden like and rips his head from his shoulders. He jams his fingers into Stoopy Bob’s eye sockets and stuffs his thumb into his mouth and rolls the bloody head down the alley like it was the most natural thing in the world for him to do, like he’d done it a thousand times before with a thousand different heads. Only this time he leaves the seven-ten split. He curses the too tight fit of his bowling shoes and the soul of the evil Dr. Frankenstein for not making him as perfect as he wanted to be.