Celestial Inventories (18 page)

Little Poucet had neglected to plan what they all should do when they arrived back at their parents’ apartment, and before he could make a suggestion his brothers had beaten down the door and poured into the grand bedroom shouting, “Here we are! Here we are!”

Little Poucet ran in behind his brothers, and was not surprised to see that Brother Eight had taken his place in their mother’s bed and now nestled his quivering form at his mother’s pale breasts. The giant father stared at Little Poucet then left the bed. His mother opened her arms then and he and his brothers stripped off their travelling clothes and disappeared into her embrace.

Only two nights had passed before Little Poucet’s father had exhausted his recent earnings and there was no food again. During those two nights their father and Brother Eight were gone from the apartment, returning fatter on the third. As his mother and father crashed together that night with even greater clamour than before, Little Poucet again overheard their conversation:

“No food no room no peace no food no good good good . . .” his father chanted in a low growl. After his parents were asleep Little Poucet again slipped up to his mother’s bed table and stole more of the black cookies with the dazzling white centres.

On the next night their mother dressed them again, kissing each of them goodbye with tears on her fat cheeks as their father took them out exploring. Little Poucet planted a bag of cookies each on Jean Paul and Maurice, but this time letting those two—the oldest of his brothers—in on the details of his plan.

This night their father took them even deeper into the dark valley that was at the city’s centre, where there was no air for the stench, and no lights at all other than the shining whites of their small eyes. Half the time they couldn’t see their father at all—so dull and oily was his outfit, his skin—so it came as no surprise at all to suddenly find him gone.

They stared at each other: at the whites of their eyes, at the bright fillings of the two remaining cookies Little Poucet held in his hands. “Don’t worry, my brothers. I’ve been making a trail as I did last time.”

But then Pierre opened his mouth to laugh, and his tongue and teeth were dazzlingly white with the thick, gooey fillings from the cookies Little Poucet had planted all along the way.

“Hmmmm . . .” Pierre sighed.

Little Poucet shook his head. “You’ve killed us, my brother.”

Little Poucet led his brothers on a snaky trip through the cold night of stone and damp asphalt, but nothing was familiar. Everywhere the walls towered above them, stinking of garbage and the press of generations of sweating, dying bodies, so dark they blended and became indistinguishable from the night sky around and above. Now and then they would stumble over some form or other, sleeping or dead on the greasy pavement. Hands with long, slick fingers clutched at their ankles and trousers, slipped inside their cuffs to creep toward their thighs and groins. Maurice tittered and Little Poucet told him to hush. Some of the bodies in the dark leaked fluids and they gave these a wide berth.

When the others complained of hunger Little Poucet warned them not to stray from the path he was reimagining for them, so they kissed Pierre’s sticky teeth and lips with their open mouths and tongues, sharing in the last bits of the sweet white goo, filling their bellies with the dazzling light that permitted them to continue through such darkness.

Muffled cries and howls floated just as slowly down from the dim windows high above, fixed there like distant, complaining stars. When they shuffled past the darker mouths of night, they could hear teeth rubbing, tongues lapping at the gritty stones.

At some point in the night it rained, but the night air had grown so thick they barely felt the drops.

“Where are you taking us?” Pierre whined.

“Home,” Little Poucet replied, less and less sure of himself. “Wait here.” He climbed a scarred and deadened lamp post and twisted his body round and round its head searching for distant signs of life. Once upon a time he would have been able to fit his entire body on the head of such a lamp. He was surprised at how much larger he had grown. And how much his skin now smelled of adult garbage.

Down a distant corridor walled by two different shades of black, he saw a distant glimmer of light low to the horizon like a ground floor window. Thinking of warm kitchens and broad beds and small boxes flickering he slid down and led his brothers off in that direction. They complained that they could see nothing in that direction, but they had become used to following him so they did.

Often he lost all sense of direction and led them down into holes and wet places where invisible, spongy flesh rubbed against them. But eventually they came to the glowing window set beside a rough grey door in the back recesses of an alley stacked high with soggy cardboard cases of rotting meat.

Little Poucet reached as high as he could and pounded his fist against the door. After a few minutes a frail, worried looking woman with stringy yellow hair answered.

“What do you children want at this time of night?” she demanded. “If it’s stealing you’re thinking about I warn you my husband is not a forgiving man.”

“Food, ma’am,” Pierre spoke up. “We’re
so
hungry!”

She jittered her eyes from one face to the next, finally resting on Little Poucet’s diminutive form. “Looks like someone has already eaten the best part of this one.” She paused, considering. “Very well. Come in then and I’ll toss you an old fruit or two before sending you back to your parents, if you should have any.”

Inside the dusty building Little Poucet tugged on her skirt. “We’re lost, ma’am. Perhaps you could call the authorities?”

“Authorities?”

“The police? Social services?”

The withered little woman began laughing. “The
police
? Oh, my husband would dearly love that!” Then she laughed some more and Little Poucet could see that when she laughed she looked even thinner, her skinny arms flapping and beating her narrow torso, the loose material of her dress lifting away from her tight skin and pressing against it again, so that he found himself thinking of his mother, because this woman was the complete reverse of his enormous mother and in that was a kind of a negative twin, a sister to her.

“Perhaps just a bit of food, then,” Little Poucet said softly, and the woman started laughing even louder than before. Little Poucet was embarrassed, and gazed down at his feet.

Just then the scrawny woman’s head shot up, her neck stretching like a startled chicken’s. “You hear? It’s him, my man come home! You hear? Oh, you poor children—he’ll be murdering you for sure! Here . . . here . . .” She stretched out her arms and legs and gathered the seven brothers to her, and despite her resemblance to a gigantic praying mantis then, Little Poucet allowed himself to be gathered with the others. “Here, here . . . let Auntie hide you. Auntie won’t let bad old Otto get to you!”

She rushed them into the back of the building with desperate pattings and
shoo
ings of her long-fingered hands, pushing them past greasy piles of old clothing, dusty collections of children’s shoes, children’s toys, through passageways littered with dirt and what appeared to be yellowed animal bones, dried chicken skin, and a scattering of tiny teeth—Little Poucet figured dog, cat, badger. Pierre was sniveling, but there was no time to comfort him as she practically lifted them up to the first landing of the back stairs whispering hoarsely: “First room on the left. Get under the bed there. But don’t wake my daughters if you know what’s good for you! Get under the bed there. I can’t think of a better place to hide you.”

Little Poucet waited until his brothers were all safely tucked away under the bed before joining them there. As he rolled under the bed he looked at the bed on the opposite side of the room, and one great bloodshot eye peering over.

His brothers huddled together silently, staring at him. He could hear the sound of a bearlike voice downstairs, much like his father’s. He heard a slap, then crying. His eyes now adjusted to the dim light under the bed, he looked around him and his brothers: several small skulls, a rib cage that might have housed the tiniest of birds, leg bones and arm bones, a tiny skeletal hand with a small child’s ring on one of the fingers. Tiny teeth marks on all the bones, aimlessly crisscrossing the tops of the skulls, like the tracks of some small animal, like a tattoo. Downstairs more bellowing, and a breaking of furniture.

“But I can
smell
them, dammit!” And suddenly Little Poucet heard the thunder move to the stairs. Another eye joined the first atop the bed across the way, equally bloodshot, then the long dirty blonde hair, the high cheeks, the sharp nose and thin lips and teeth filed to points like knitting needles. The chin stained dark.

The thunder was right outside the door now. Little Poucet could hear the lightning strike, the torrents of rain as Auntie wailed for the seven brothers to run, but Little Poucet knew of nowhere to run. Six more identical heads joined the first on the other bed. The heads leaned over the edge and smiled down at him, their long tongues slipping over their chins. They leaned forward some more and he could see that they had no clothes on. They rubbed their tiny breasts (in two or three only one had begun its development) and made a sound like swarming moths.

Otto burst through the door, and at first Little Poucet thought indeed that it was their father who had followed them here. He had the size (like a wall, a dark and heavy wall) and the voice, and the way of wrinkling his nose as if he were always smelling a bad smell. And the large, broken teeth.

Otto strode over to the bed and lifted it to uncover the seven frightened brothers. “Such pretty boys . . .” he cooed. He turned to his wife. “Get them ready for bed! I’ll want them rested in the morning. No challenge otherwise.” Otto looked back down at Little Poucet. “Sweet little thing,” he said, and patted Little Poucet’s head, stroked his shoulders, felt for muscles in his arms and legs. Then Otto gently spread his great hand until it covered the whole of Little Poucet’s chest. He leaned over him, his breath sour with beer. “I can feel your heart beating,” he whispered. “I can almost taste it, too. Wait until the morning.” He massaged the boy’s rear, circled the boy’s groin with a huge, blunt forefinger. “You’ll see.”

After Otto left (Little Poucet could hear him drinking and singing downstairs), Auntie gave them a quick dinner of cold noodles and helped the seven brothers strip off their clothes. She shook her head at each naked little boy. “Oh, you’re all much too soft and tender. He likes them soft and tender.” She handed each of them a ragged, dark-stained nightshirt, then turned to leave. Her daughters began to giggle. “Hush up now!” she told them. “There’ll be time enough tomorrow for what you’re wanting. Go to sleep now!” And she left the room.

The seven little girls looked over at the seven naked little boys and whispered excitedly to each other. Then they all laughed one last time and pulled the covers over their heads.

Pierre started pulling on his nightshirt. “Stop that!” Little Poucet cried. “Can’t you see the stains, the torn places? It’s like butcher’s wrap!” He looked back over at the other bed, the seven sisters starting to snore and snarl under their covers. He pulled his brothers close to him. They snickered at his cold touch on their bare skin. “Hush up now . . . once he’s got enough drink in him to bring out the beast he’ll be back up here quickly, I think. I have an idea. Do you remember how our father trained us not to wet the bed?”

The other six nodded solemnly, their eyes pale and tight in their tiny faces.

First he gathered seven leftover noodles from the cracked plastic bowls Auntie had provided them (Pierre’s bowl, of course, had been wiped clean). A bit of thick, flour-based sauce had settled into the bottom of each one. He dipped each noodle until it was heavy in the sauce, then with great stealth crept over to the girls’ bed, pulled back the covers, and gently stuck a noodle to the sex of each one. They snarled and snapped in their sleep, but did not move off their backs. Soon, he knew, the sauce would become a paste, the paste would dry, and their disguise would be perfected. His brothers’ hair was just long enough that in the dark Otto might not suspect.

After a quiet search of the room Little Poucet found enough string to take care of all seven of them. Each brother tied one end of the string to the tip of his penis, passed the remaining string back between his legs, and gave the other end to Little Poucet (who also held the end of his own string). Little Poucet became the puppeteer: all he had to do to turn him and his seven brothers into instant females was to pull on the string and thereby tuck each of their penises back under their asses. With their soft bodies and bad teeth, and by pressing their arms close to their sides to accentuate their breasts, they became wonderful, matchless little girls. Lying there together on the bed Little Poucet really found them quite irresistible.

To no one’s surprise Otto did come up later that night, stumbling drunk, and went straight to the boys’ bed. Little Poucet jerked hard on the string causing Jean Paul and Maurice to gasp, but they drew their gasps out quickly into yawns.

Otto reached under the covers and felt for their groins. “What’s this? My daughters? I could have made a terrible mistake.” He paused for a time, smiling, gazing off into space. Finally stirring himself he said, “But no time for this,” stood up suddenly, and walked to the other bed.

He reached under the covers there and laughed. “Tiny they are, but unmistakable! Here’s one seems a little stale.” He pulled out a sharp knife and rapidly cut off the heads of his seven daughters and dropped them into a large bucket by the bed. He then proceeded to flay the bodies, making miniature vests and tiny leggings. He pulled out one of the heads and removed the skin of the face, turning it into a small mask. “This’ll be a good mask for the dog to wear when he watches TV with me,” he said, holding it up to the light coming through the window. He stared at it a time, then dropping it as if it were something truly disgusting he cried out, “Imogene!” and spun around to the other bed.