BLACK STATIC #41 (4 page)

I walk around the side of the building, continue down the front sidewalk, and a few moments later, I draw near the Dumpster. There’s a fluorescent light on a metal pole next to it to keep it lit at night. I suppose so people don’t get any nasty surprises when they take out their trash in the dark.

It’s rather anticlimactic, really. I walk to the fenced-in enclosure, slide the metal side door open with an unavoidable grinding sound, and without really looking at what else is in there, I lob the head inside as it it’s nothing more than a child’s ball topped with strands of brown hair. I slide the door shut with the same grating sound, then I turn and walk out of the enclosure.

Renee is standing there. She’s wearing a light blue night gown that’s sheer enough that I can see her breasts, their dark nipples, and the shadowy smudge of her pubic hair. She is, of course, still headless.

“Why did you take it in the first place, Pete?” she asks.

I don’t answer. I can’t.

“Were you so lonely that a plastic head seemed like good company? Or did it seem like good company
because
it was plastic? Unmoving, unthinking, unspeaking, and most important of all,
unfeeling
. It wouldn’t want anything from you. Wouldn’t
need.
Not like a wife. Or a daughter.”

She starts toward me now, walking on bare feet that are surprisingly small. Like a little girl’s.

“But even that was too much for you, wasn’t it? So you snuck out in the middle of the night to throw it away again.”

When she reaches me she stops and places her hands on my cheeks.

“Poor Pete. I know how to help you…if you’ll trust me.”

Tears well in my eyes, my throat tightens, and I nod once.

Her hands move from my chest to my neck and then to my jaw. She takes a firm grip and pulls. It hurts, but not as much as I expect. When my head’s free of my body, she carries it toward the Dumpster. I’m facing backward, and I see my now headless body standing there, motionless at first, but then it turns around to face the Dumpster. It raises a hand, as if to say goodbye.

Renee enters the Dumpster’s enclosure then, cutting off my view of my body. She slides open the Dumpster’s side door, and then she takes hold of me with both hands and lifts me up to her nonexistent face as if to look at me one more time. She tosses me into the Dumpster, grinds the side door shut, and then she’s gone. I imagine her walking back to my headless body, which reaches out to take her hand, and then they depart – together.

It’s dark inside the Dumpster, it’s uncomfortable, and it smells of sour-sweet rot. But at least I’m alone now. No one—

I hear the first whispers then, and I think the other head – the one I threw back in here – is talking to me. But then I hear another voice whispering, and another, and another. An image comes to me then, of a Dumpster filled with cast-off heads, dozens of them. I listen to the whispers for a long time, and then, hesitantly, I open my mouth.

•••••

Tim Waggoner’s latest releases are the novel
Night Terrors
and the novella
Deep Like the River
. You can find him on the web at
www.timwaggoner.com
.

CAUL

VAJRA CHANDRASEKERA

I only love girls who love to swim, but I don’t like to see them in the water. I like the sea just fine with nobody swimming in it and me with dry sand under me and a cold beer in my hand. They tell me I’m missing something, but I won’t budge. Maybe that’s why they don’t come back.

•••

Ma said I was born with a caul over my face. She dried it and put it in the hollow of an antique smoky-glass rolling pin, painted in flaking white with old-fashioned sailing ships. Too cloudy to see inside, lid screwed tight. She said it was a good-luck charm.

“This was your granma’s when she was young,” Ma said when she gave it to me. “She was born with a caul, too.”

I was old enough then to have refused to learn to swim, and Ma thought it was because I was afraid. “Sailor’s charm against drowning,” Ma insisted, but she wouldn’t tell me if granma died of drowning. Granma went away, is all she would say, and at the time I thought she just meant that granma died.

I took the gift but it didn’t work because I still wouldn’t swim. Ma sighed and gave up, her thousand-yard stare already too far gone. That was the last time she tried. The glass rolling pin went into the back of my closet.

•••

I can’t swim, is the problem. Tried just once, when I was a kid. All I remember is the awful dragging weight of the water, the cold feeling like I’d never come back up. The sea doesn’t like letting anybody go. I think it thinks we were wrong to leave, even if it’s been a million years. I still haven’t forgiven Ma for leaving, so I understand carrying a grudge.

Girls who love to swim always offer to teach me.

“What if you fall off a boat,” they say. They all blur together in my head, pale and dark, tall and short, curly and straight. I don’t have a type, except that they have to love the water.

“Won’t ever get on a boat,” I tell them. “So won’t never fall off.”

•••

My dreams smell like brine.

•••

Every now and then some girl finds the glass rolling pin in my apartment somewhere. Never knew what to do with it so it’s followed me from closet to closet along with all my life’s flotsam after Ma left.

One time this curly-haired girl opens up my closet to find a Phillips-head screwdriver or spare rubber washers for the leaky tap in the kitchen or something. She finds the pin instead, and when she wipes it for dust another white sailing ship flakes away.

“It’s my birth caul inside,” I tell her.

“Ew,” she says, coolly. “Why do you have this?”

So I tell her the whole story, and she googles it.

“Did you know,” she says, in that wondering tone she gets after when she’s googled up something weird, “people used to buy these things during World War I because they were afraid of U-boats?”

“Maybe that’s how my granma had one,” I say. “She was a kid back then.” Maybe granma couldn’t swim either.

That was the best reaction any of the girls had to the glass rolling pin and the thing inside it. The others stopped at “ew”, and I had to catch it when it fell from their hands.

•••

When I take a girl to the beach, this is how it goes. I find a spot to sit with my beer. She heads straight for the water and dives like a porpoise, her spine bending in ways that I can’t fathom.

Sometimes she comes back, wet and gone somewhere in her head like the water reminded her of something she lost. Mostly they don’t come back. That’s how it is, when you love women who love the water.

•••

They say birth cauls are a sign of changelings. I’d have liked that to be true, but I know there’s nothing fey about me. Maybe that’s why I like my girls with their thousand-yard stares and their unexplained tears, their tendency to vanish into the ocean. When I plant my bare feet in hot sand I know I belong there, but they run for the water as if they were standing on knives.

One time I’m seeing this straight-haired girl. She’s otherworldly even for me. She loves to swim, sure, but she also likes to cast horoscopes for people. Tarot cards or something. She never gets anything for me. She says I come up blank.

“You’re too there,” she says. “Too much earth, no magic in you.”

Even before I take her to the beach I know she’s gonna be one of those who don’t come back. Sometimes you can just tell.

•••

Ma was disappointed when I never learned to swim, but also maybe relieved. “Thought for sure you’d take to the water,” she said. “But maybe it’s better this way.”

Maybe she took the sea out of me when she put my secret skin in a bottle. But I don’t say that, because I can’t bear her ocean stare.

•••

It’s long years before there’s a girl I love so much I listen when she wants me to go in the water with her.

“You won’t drown,” she says. Smiling but she has the starkest thousand-yard stare I’ve ever seen. When she looks into my eyes it’s terrifying and exhilarating, like looking down from a cliff into the ocean banging into rocks far, far below and I can hear gulls.

“Got your granma’s sailor charm,” she says.

“At home in my closet,” I say. “I don’t think it’s got jurisdiction.”

“Got it here,” she says, and sure enough, she pulls it from her bag and wedges it into the sand next to me. “You got nothing to be afraid of.”

And she runs to the water, like they always do.

•••

I make it down to the waterline. Wade in knee-deep and hands shaking so much I can barely hold on to the rolling pin. The glass is wet with spray and slippery. The water’s cold, and the shivers hit me from the breastbone inward.

Can see my girl’s head break the water like a seal, can’t tell how far away she is.

Lid is stiff after decades. I open it but I don’t take the caul out. Don’t want to see it, my factory seal skin, the mask I was born wearing. I throw the whole thing, caul and all, as hard and far as I can. When it hits water it seems to be moving faster than it should, as if pulled down by the sea’s gravity, and I’m wading forward, and I’m wading forward, and the sea reaches up like a birth canal and hauls me back into her undertow, and when my eyes open at last under water, I can see a thousand yards deep.

•••••

Vajra Chandrasekera lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka. His work has previously appeared here in
Black Static
and is forthcoming in
Lightspeed
and
Shimmer
, among others. You can find more stories by him at
vajra.me
.

RALPH ROBERT MOORE

ILLUSTRATED BY JOACHIM LUETKE

“Want me to show you something?”

The two boys were up on the hill behind their houses, at the edge of the forest, getting to know each other.

Tom and his dad had been pulling boxes out of the moving van when Peter and his mom walked across the green lawn. Peter’s mom holding a plate of chocolate chip cookies. “Could you men use a break?” She laughed, putting a hand on her hip. “I’m Lisa. Welcome to the neighborhood!”

Tom, fourteen, tall and thin, sitting on the forest floor, face noncommittal under his crew cut, shrugged.

Peter, a year younger, a head shorter, but more muscular, standing in front of Tom, raised his big-nosed face, flop of brown hair across his forehead. “You have to swear you won’t tell your dad or my mom I showed it to you. Swear?”

Tom looked down the hill, where, in his new driveway, his dad and Peter’s mom were still talking to each other. “Yeah.”

“Say I swear.”

“I swear.”

“I need a handkerchief to show you what I have.” Peter pulled one out of his pants pocket. Laid it carefully on the forest floor. Spread its whiteness into a square. “Did you and your dad get a good deal on the house?”

“Yeah. My dad said it was a good deal.”

“Really! Do you know why you got such a good deal?”

Tom tried to remember. “My dad said it had to do with something that happened to the people who lived in the house before us. He said it wasn’t important. He said the seller repainted the bedroom walls, and some of the ceilings. And replaced the carpets. Are there any girls on the block?”

Peter put a small rock on each corner of the handkerchief, holding it down. “They all have diseases. That girl across the street who was watching you unload? That you kept looking at? Peggy?”

Tom blushed. “She looks pretty.”

“Yeah, well, there’s something wrong with her. She has a disease. If she stands in one place too long, stuff drips out from under her dress, dropping on the sidewalk between her shoes. It’s gross.”

“I didn’t see her dripping.”

“Where’s your mom?”

Tom rubbed his knee. “She decided to leave us. She said she didn’t sign up for this.”

“Didn’t sign up for what?”

“I don’t think she said what. Where’s your dad?”

“He fell down some stairs. His forehead split open. His eyes fell out.”

“I’m sorry your dad died.”

“See that big gray house over there?”

Tom obediently looked where Peter was pointing.

“Don’t cut through his front yard. The guy tries to chase you. He gets red in the face. I keep hoping he’ll have a heart attack and die on his lawn while the sprinklers are going. That’d be like a scene in a comedy movie. There’s a puppy that shows up on the sidewalks sometimes. It’s a little brown dog. It wags its tail a lot. If you stick your thumb between your index finger and your middle finger and wriggle it, he’ll come over.”

Tom looked down at his right hand. “Which fingers?”

Peter touched two of Tom’s fingers. “Jesus, you don’t know anything.”

“Shut up, stupid-head.” Tom’s eyes got red.

“You gonna cry, cry baby?”

Tom rubbed his nose. “My dad said I should make some friends. I thought maybe you could be my friend.”

Peter kept quiet a moment, studying Tom’s averted gaze. “That house with the big Maple tree in the front yard? The guy there likes to talk a lot. He’s got really good candy. He doesn’t snitch if you eat it. He can put both his ankles behind his head. Can you do that?”

Tom looked away, shy. “I don’t think so. I never tried.”

Peter finally got the handkerchief the way he wanted it. “Want me to show you what I have?”

“Well sure, you’re making such a big deal about it.”

Peter reached down inside the front waistband of his tight blue jeans. “Remember, you swore!” Pulled out a pen knife. Opened it.

Every boy knows a knife is something powerful. “Can I hold it?”

“Yeah. Let me show you how.” Peter’s big warm hands molded around the backs of Tom’s hands, showing him how to grasp the younger boy’s knife by its handle.

Once Peter drew his hands away, Tom was surprised by the weight. It felt like it weighed as much as a gun.

“See that square handkerchief? The game is to throw the knife at the handkerchief, and get it to stab the handkerchief. The knife doesn’t have to stand up. Just make sure you stab it.”

Tom hefted the knife, slow eyes looking at the white square. “Okay.”

He threw the knife down. It landed sideways, outside the white handkerchief square, spuming up dirt.

“That’s okay.” Peter sat down behind Tom, got his legs around the outside of Tom’s legs. He wrapped his hands around the knuckled backs of Tom’s hands. Tom could feel Peter’s breath on the nape of his neck. The smell of oranges. Peter, holding the outsides of Tom’s fingers, raised Tom’s hands. His right fingers took control of Tom’s right fingers, caused them to flick forward.

The steel knife, revolving handle over blade, chunked down in the middle of the handkerchief, stabbing through white cotton.

“Okay! You did it!”

“Yeah!”

“Want to make the game even better?”

Tom, holding the knife, wetting his lips, looking at that square handkerchief, nodded.

“When you throw the knife this time, pretend you’re stabbing a lady’s breast.”

“What?”

Peter, still sitting behind Tom, rested his chin on Tom’s right shoulder. “Try it! It’s really fun!”

“No, I don’t want to.”

“Here. Watch me.” Peter stood up, walked over to the other side of the white handkerchief. Squatted down. Reached across the handkerchief, forcibly snatching the knife away from Tom’s fingers. Threw the knife down, violently. The blade stuck in, all the way down to the handle. He raised his big-nosed face, happy. “I stabbed her breast. I got the blade to slice right down the center of her nipple. Look at the blood!”

Tom put his hands under his rear end. “I don’t want to play this game!”

“Sissy!”

“Too bad.”

“Pussy.”

“I’m not a pussy.”

“Yes you are.” Peter slapped Tom across his nose.

“Hey!”

“Hey what?”

“Don’t slap me!”

“I didn’t slap you! The ghost did.”

Tom pulled his face back. “What ghost?”

“The ghost that lives in my attic. My mom doesn’t believe me, but it’s up there. He’s really angry. And violent. He sits on the attic floor and counts backwards.”

“What happens when he gets to zero?”

“I don’t know. He started with a really huge number. He hasn’t gotten to zero yet. Don’t never go up into my attic without me there to protect you.”

“I can protect myself.”

“Not from this ghost. I know him. You don’t.” Peter sprang across the white handkerchief. Slid his right forearm under Tom’s jaw, across his throat. Pulled him backwards, twisted him sideways, putting the taller boy’s face in the dirt, climbing his weight on top of Tom’s back. Peter jerked up his forearm, seeing the look of pain on Tom’s face. “You can’t protect yourself. Say unguent! Say unguent!”

Tom, a year older, a head taller, bucked Peter off his back. Pinned Peter’s elbows against the forest floor. Scooted his ass up Peter’s stomach, chest, until his thighs were splayed under Peter’s jaw, his hands holding down Peter’s wrists.

Peter, underneath Tom’s anger, scrunched his face. “Unguent! Unguent!”

Tom, confused, bore his weight down harder. “I don’t know about that! Say uncle!”

Peter’s face, pinned between Tom’s thighs, gave up. “Uncle!”

•••

Late afternoon, after school.

Tom didn’t see Peter anywhere on the street, so after sitting outside on the curb to his own house for half an hour, he went inside, up to his room.

He lifted his window overlooking the neighborhood’s street, in case he might hear Peter’s voice.

Reached under his bed, pulled out a jar of peanut butter.

Red tongue sticking out between his teeth, he unscrewed the blue plastic lid, set it down on the white carpet next to him. Reached inside the jar with his middle finger, moving the finger around the strong-smelling peanut butter until the top joint of his finger was thickly coated.

Using his left hand, he clumsily twisted the top back on the jar, so it wouldn’t make a mess if it accidently fell over.

Standing, eyes on his coated middle finger, he walked over to the closet.

Pressed the front tip of his middle finger above the top door hinge of the white closet door, leaving a light brown smear.

Put his finger in his mouth, sucking off the remainder of the peanut butter.

He stood in his quiet, white-walled bedroom, taste of peanut butter in his mouth, staring at the streak of peanut butter above the closet door’s hinge.

Through the opened window on the right, he could hear kids outside, returning to the neighborhood from after school activities, yelps and laughs rising. But none of them sounded like his new friend, Peter.

After he stared at the smear of peanut butter above the top hinge for about half an hour, pale lines slid through the dark space between the door and the jamb, just below the hinge.

Seeking in all directions, the lines lengthened on his side of the door, finally pulling through the dark vertical space a pale round head.

The spider stood perpendicular to the door below the hinge. Defying gravity. Just when it seemed the spider would remain motionless forever, the eight legs ambulated upwards, head swinging left, right.

When the front two legs stepped upwards into the peanut butter, the joints of the spindly legs bent their three knees outwards, round head lowering.

Tom watched the eight eyes, glossy dark like caviar, roll in their orbs, registering the smell. The front of the round head dipped into the smear. Tiny maw sliding sideways, feathering up the peanut butter.

He left it alone while it ate. His dad told him, never pet a dog while it’s eating. Even a dog that likes you.

When the round head finally lifted from the smear, not much of the smear consumed, the maw still working sideways, Tom reached a slow finger forward, whorled top pad touching lightly atop the spider’s head.

The eight legs lowered, multiple knees bending, as if to get out from under the petting, but the spider stayed put.

“Did you have an interesting day today, Maxwell?”

After rubbing his fingerprint across the coarse fur of the spider’s head, Tom left it alone.

The spider sucked itself back through the dark vertical space of the jamb, disappearing.

Tom lay down on his stomach by the side of his bed. Reached under the bed, into that private world, pulled out a pad of paper and a pencil.

Drew four squares on a clean sheet of paper.

In the first square he drew wavy lines going down. His mom’s hair.

In the second square he drew wavy lines going across. His mom’s smell.

In the third square he drew crossed lines. His mom’s kisses.

In the fourth square he drew parallel lines. His mom hugging him.

Tom’s dad shouted up the stairs. “Tom, you have a visitor.”

I do? Tom thought it probably wasn’t his mom, and when he came down the stairs he saw it wasn’t, but it was his friend Peter, so that was good.

“Peter’s mom and me are going out to Paisano’s. You boys can order pizza. I left some money by the phone.”

After his dad and Mrs Morris left, Peter at the wide picture window at the front of the house, watching the car shrink down the block, Peter brought Tom back to the kitchen. “We should wrestle to see who gets to call.”

Tom was surprised. “You can call.”

“Nah. We have to wrestle. Unless you’re chicken.”

“I’m not a chicken!”

“Yes you are. Want to wrestle to prove you aren’t?”

Tom shrugged.