Tiny Nightmares Page 5

  She walked around and sat on the floor across from my mom, with her son sitting in between them. She looked at that two-and-a-half-year-old boy who still wobbled when he walked, and she told him, “You’re gonna have to choose. You want to go to me or her? You fucking choose who you love more. You hear me? You go to who you love more!”

  “Susan, stop it. This is sick,” my mom demanded.

  I crawled up onto the chair and curled my knees to my chest.

  “You better choose right, boy,” she told him menacingly. “Now, call him.” My mom sighed deeply and a sorrowful look took over her face. She shook her head and remained silent. “Come here!” Susan shouted. “You better get over here, boy! Come to your fucking momma!” Susan was screaming at this point, so, of course, the child was terrified, and even though she wasn’t even calling him, he went as fast as he could back into my mother’s arms.

  And then Susan stood, grabbed the toddler by his arm, and gave him three very hard smacks in the face. My mother screamed at her and reached for the boy, but Susan quickly grabbed him by his hair and began dragging him out of the living room and down the hall toward the bedroom, as he screamed for his life.

  I can still see him. It’s like a short video that goes in a loop whenever I think of it. I can see his face twisted up in anguish, his feet barely touching the ground, facing me with his hair tangled in his mother’s fist, as she dragged him behind her down the brown-carpeted hallway so she could lock herself in the bedroom with him and beat him all she liked, until he “learned to love her more.”

  My mom leaped to her feet, sprinted down the hallway, and got to Susan before she reached the bedroom. They began scuffling and my mother beat Susan back into the living room with a series of shoves and punches, taking a couple of hard smacks to the face herself. The boy was left in the hallway, crying.

  “Calm the fuck down!” my mom screamed at Susan as she shoved her so hard that she toppled backward, landing on the couch. My mother turned, scooped me up, and took off running down the hallway with me. Susan got up from the couch and came after us, shouting curses as she came. My mom let me down and told me to run to the bedroom, so she could scoop up Susan’s young son. “Run, Sissy, run! she shouted as she ran fast behind me with the boy in her arms. We made it into the bedroom and my mom slammed the door closed just as Susan landed on it and began slamming her full body into it. “He’s my son, you bitch,” Susan screamed. “I’ll kill you, you little bitch. I’ll fucking kill you when I get my hands on you.” She kept pounding on the door and screaming about the horrible things she wanted to do to us.

  Mom got on the bed with us and took the boy. I curled up beside her, against the bedframe, covered one ear with the palm of my hand, and pressed my other ear to the paranormal metal headboard. I heard a man lift a hammer and bring it down, and someone wail, as a machine creaked out its ghastly work. I heard people pounding on the walls to be let out of the dungeons, and imagined what crimes they were being punished for, and who would escape, and who would perish in the flames of coal fire. I heard a young couple whispering their final goodbyes, as the wooden racks they were tied to were lifted and poured into the pit of flame, and reveled in the creek and pop of the metal and wood and flesh and bone as it was eaten by the fire. I stayed there like that, curled next to my mother, my ear pressed against the bedpost, drowning out Susan’s screaming and threatening with the entrancing and oddly comforting sounds of that subterranean torture chamber.

  The Owner

  WHITNEY COLLINS

  Nina and her husband, Harry, got a good deal on the house. It was a charming, bone-colored Cape Cod that seemed to have an agreement with the elements. All over, it was tilted and weathered but also sturdy—petrified almost. They never met the owner. “He’s in Florida now,” the Realtor said, unprompted, twice during the closing. She said it in a plain, firm way that Nina and her husband did not question. She said it like Florida meant Mars or Hell.

  On the first night in the house, Nina dreamed of the owner. He sat in a canvas chair in the desert. To his left was a stunted palm tree. To his right, a beach ball that didn’t roll away. He gazed out over an expanse of red sand. He wore a gas mask, but Nina could still hear what he said. “I left you something. Did you find it?”

  Nina woke with a jolt. Beside her, Harry breathed serenely. She rose and went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. She wanted an aspirin, but all she found was a Band-Aid tin—the vintage, metal kind—and inside of that, a single white bead. Nina inspected the bead. It was the size of a large pea with a tidy, drilled hole. She put the bead back into the tin and the tin back into the cabinet. She drank from the faucet. When she returned to bed, she could not sleep. She kept seeing the gas mask, the stunted palm. She kept trying to move the beach ball with her thoughts.

  In the morning, while Nina stood in front of the toaster, Harry came up behind her and kissed the nape of her neck. When she turned around, he wasn’t there. “Harry?” she called. “Was that you?” Harry didn’t answer, even when she called out again. Nina stood, frowning, until her toast popped up. In that short time, to her surprise, she was able to recall every argument she and Harry had ever had. There had been problems with money and romance, fertility and drinking. Right after they’d first married, there’d also been a woman. A neighbor named Pearl who visited three or four times a week with something from her garden: profane-looking cucumbers, swollen purple tomatoes, fistfuls of fragrant basil. She was good-natured about everything and everyone. There was always a ladybug in her hair. Nina had never seen Harry so happy. He accepted everything Pearl brought without once looking down at what Pearl brought. “You look at her too much,” Nina had said. “Maybe you could learn a thing or two,” Harry had said back.

  Nina hadn’t thought of Pearl in a long time. She was filled with a sudden sadness. She left the toast in the toaster to grow stale. She went back to the bedroom and curled on the bed. This time, when she dreamed of the owner, he had two gas masks—one on his face and one that he held out for Nina. The beach ball was still in the same place. The palm tree was nearly dead. When Nina woke up, she discovered two more white beads on the floor, side by side.

  Every day, in an unexpected place, Nina found another bead. She found one in the lint screen of the dryer. One in the soil of a cactus she repotted. One at the bottom of a bowl of tomato soup. One day, she coughed a single cough and a bead appeared on her tongue. Nina kept all the beads. She stored them in the Band-Aid tin. Sometimes she shook the tin to hear the noise it made. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, it said.

  Nina and Harry weren’t happy in the new house; they bickered all the time. The only thing that brought Nina hope were the beads and the dreams, though neither of those made any real sense to her. She slept excessively. Harry came home later and later in the evenings smelling of beer, cigars, perfume. When he slept, he no longer breathed serenely. Instead, he snored, causing Nina’s dreams to take an urgent turn. There was a loud, new factory in the desert, churning out clouds of navy smoke, and she and the owner would sit in his canvas chairs wearing gas masks looking at it.

  “What are they making?” she’d ask him.

  “It’s not what you think,” he’d say.

  Then Nina would wake up and drink from the faucet and discover another bead. Maybe pressed into the soft, pink meat of her heel. Maybe near the sink drain, in the tiny groove that kept it from drowning.

  When Nina had forty beads, she spread them on the kitchen table after Harry had gone to work. She put twenty in one row, then twenty in a row below it. She pretended they were teeth. While she arranged the beads, someone came and kissed her on the nape of her neck, but this time she did not turn to see who it was. That night, Harry was the latest he had ever been.

  “Where have you been?” Nina asked.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said.

  Harry swayed at the foot of the bed. Nina felt her hands begin to shake. “I don’t like this house,” she said. “I wish we’d ne
ver bought it.”

  Harry shook his head. “I knew this would happen.”

  Nina’s eyes filled with tears. She lay back in bed. She heard Harry leave the room and then the house. Then she let herself cry until she was there, in the desert with the owner, reaching out for the gas mask and putting it on.

  “What happened to the palm tree?” Nina asked.

  “It died,” said the owner.

  “And the beach ball?”

  “It rolled away.”

  Nina didn’t want to sit in the canvas chair. “Let’s walk to the factory,” she said. “Let’s see what they make.”

  The owner said nothing, but he got up and off they went, across the red sand together. The factory was larger and louder than life and made of black glass. When they got up to it, Nina pressed her face against it but couldn’t see inside. All she could see was her own reflection, her face in its gas mask, and the owner standing behind her, his face in his.

  “Look what I have,” he said. He held up something small and square and gave it a shake. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Nina froze, petrified. She watched as the owner opened the tin and brought out the beads. All forty were now on a string, and he placed them around her neck, stopping to kiss her nape, before he fastened them. Nina placed one palm on the factory’s black glass, the other at the hollow of her throat. As the necklace grew tighter, the factory grew louder. She thought to call for Harry, but she could not speak, could not breathe. She could only see the image of her masked face and that of the owner’s looking back at her. Her vision began to dim but not before she saw: a final bead—a red one—on the lens of the owner’s mask. Moving, gently. A ladybug.

  The Resplendence of Disappearing

  IVÁN PARRA GARCIA

  TRANSLATED BY ALLANA C. NOYES

  He pulled the wooden church door shut and looked up to the sky. Those black birds were still at it, flying circles around the sun in an orderly fashion, with a precision even, never losing the measured distance between themselves. It’d been more than three weeks since they showed up, and still no one knew where they came from, what they wanted, where they were going. He’d spent all day in the church’s doorway, watching them through his solar-filtered telescope.

  He started off on the dirt road toward town, the afternoon sun beating down on the half-naked crown of his head as he walked ponderously, his shoulders stiff as bricks under his white shirt, collar unbuttoned. He ruminated on the lack of rain these last few months, about the news, the suffocating September heat, but mostly he thought about the birds.

  As he walked along the highway, he turned back to look at the church. For the first time in his fifty years serving Christ, there was doubt in his heart. As if something more powerful than God Himself had come to stay in Texarkana.

  He walked on, wishing he were at home in his rocking chair. The diabetes had left his heels cracked and covered in blisters, and his feet were aflame. Hip to toe his legs ached. The doctor had forbidden him from extended periods of standing, but he hadn’t paid him any mind.

  Stopping in front of a plot of land, he looked northerly through the barbed wire where a coyote was stalking a young deer just a few meters from where he stood. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, licked his lips, and with a quick slap, obliterated a mosquito on his neck. Lifting the barbed wire, he crossed to the other side one leg at a time. From there he watched the coyote’s eyes track the unsuspecting deer, which stood still as a statue, hidden among the dry branches. He lifted a rock and with the little strength he had threw it toward the predator. The rock thumped in the grass and the deer shot off running, while the startled coyote panicked, scampering away through the bramble.

  Reverend Vargas trudged through the field. In twenty minutes, he found the dirt road again and walked on it the rest of the way to town.

  He stopped in the doorway of José Peloponeso’s cigarette shop, where José’s daughter was sitting on a white plastic chair with the Friday paper’s crossword and a mango Popsicle. She was thirty, with a dark complexion, broad shoulders, and deep, coal-black eyes.

  “You see them flying lately?” asked Reverend Vargas, gesturing up toward the firmament. “They look different, like something else.”

  Milena gnawed at the Popsicle as it began to melt.

  “They’re just birds, Reverend,” she answered, with the crossword splayed across her lap, Popsicle in one hand, pencil in the other. She seemed annoyed.

  “Something strange about it. I’ve kept my eye on them all day. Sometimes seems like the light bounces off them like a mirror. As if they’re flying closer to the sun than they are to us.”

  Milena looked at him, confused and incredulous, then surprised.

  “If they were flying close to the sun, they would’ve burned up.” She slurped at the Popsicle.

  “You have Pepsi?”

  Milena rose, leaving the paper on her chair. She went into the store and came back with a can. He began to speak again as she handed it to him.

  “You believe there’s such things as nonhuman forces?” he continued, his gaze fixed on the sky, one hand cupping his forehead to shield his eyes from the light.

  “You mean God?”

  “No.”

  This time Milena looked at him suspiciously, wearily, as if trying to decide whether he was putting her faith to the test. He went on:

  “All the ones who disappeared these last few weeks came back traumatized. But none can say where they went, why they disappeared, never mind why they keep offing themselves once they’re back.”

  “The police—”

  “The police haven’t found a thing, not one clue,” the reverend interrupted. “Look”—he pointed—“it’s like they’re from another world. Flying without flapping their wings, they look like perfect triangles, silver-coated, as if they were made of titanium or tin.

  Milena sat down again, focusing her attention on the crossword.

  Reverend Vargas cracked open his Pepsi and turned to look across the street. A boy, maybe six years old, blew bubbles with a soapy wand in the shade of a nearby building. He looked up the street, down the street. A group of people gathered in front of the Bienestar Bank were talking about it too. One of them held the paper while the others read over his shoulder. They were arguing, as if they couldn’t come to a conclusion about what it meant. One man with a long goatee looked up at the sky. A couple who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old apiece looked over at the reverend, a flicker of hope in their eyes.

  “I wish I could help,” he murmured, “but this is out of God’s hands.”

  “Heron! Finally,” Milena shouted, scrawling in the last word. “You say something, Reverend?”

  But he’d already walked out of the store, continuing down the main road.

  On his way back, not far from home, he was walking along the scrub-brush-covered train tracks when he heard a noise that seemed to come from underground. He paused, looking up and down the tracks, but saw only one abandoned coal car. The sound was coming from behind it, a sharp, high-pitched yip, like a chirp. He approached the car, and amid the brush he spotted a brownish yellow cat, curled up into a tight ball of fur. As he bent down to pet it, he saw the deep wound carved into its right flank. Blood was pouring out. Placing two fingers behind its front leg, he felt for its heartbeat, which was slow and deep. It could barely breathe. On the ground next to it lay a bloody pocketknife, an empty bottle of whiskey, a pack of smokes. The reverend looked up and saw two drunks fleeing down the tracks. He yelled after them, but they didn’t stop. He felt as if he wanted to chase them, but didn’t. Instead, he scooped up the cat, cradling it against his chest as he carried it home.

  By the time he arrived, the cat was gasping for air, meowing mournfully. A chill seemed to emanate from its skin. He quickly pushed open the door with his shoulder and set the animal down on his armchair. He filled a dish with water and set it down in front of the cat, but it wouldn’t lift its head. Heading back to the kitchen, h
e flipped on the TV, listening distractedly to the news for a moment before rushing to the bathroom for gauze and Merthiolate, then back to the living room. He crouched in front of the animal, soaking the gauze and dabbing it on the wound. The cat let out a muffled meow. He went back to the kitchen and stood watching the Channel Four news: another disappearance last week, back on Friday night, self-inflicted death Sunday morning.

  Leaning both hands on the edge of the sink, he observed the world through the window. The sun had fallen in the sky and glowed reddish against the earth. He knew those birds weren’t birds. They weren’t of this world. They were something much more powerful, something not even his faith could explain. He watched as a car sped down the road, leaving a cloud of dust behind it, abandoning Texarkana. The cat’s labored meowing punctuated the overwhelming silence. He ran back to the living room and saw the awful hemorrhage that spread over the animal’s body. In his more than fifty years of existence, he’d seen men and women cross that dark threshold into emptiness, oblivion. A bolt of lightning slick as ice ran through his heart; he could feel it growing, the fulminating hatred for those people he’d seen on the tracks.

  Reverend Vargas carried the inert feline body to the field in front of his house, tenderly placing it next to the garden. Returning to the porch, he slipped off his shoes and sat in the wicker rocker, contemplating the end of yet another day.

  The Wheat Woman

  THERESA HOTTEL

  Graham County, Oklahoma, 1998

  As the noon light bounces brilliantly off the kitchen tile and outside the tractor roars—it’s summertime, it never stops—this mother stares at her daughter and feels an almost violent distance. She feels cold. She feels that her ten-year-old daughter, fidgeting by the dishwasher, is a small, dangerous animal that sneaks through the farmhouse and plans secret attacks. Her daughter looks unkind and white.