Authors: Borne Wilder
Alice shook off the chill that kept trying to crawl up her
spine and scraped up every ounce of bravery she could muster. “Go away, Nolte.
The power of Christ compels you!” she yelled, hoping to drive the Nolte demon
away.
Nolte burst out laughing in the wheezing cough he’d always
tried to pass off as laughter. “A two-pound bag of dog shit has more sense than
you. Did you even try to understand that movie?” he punctuated the question
with a final wheeze and quite possibly a chunk of lung.
“The power of Christ compels you!” Alice shouted, holding
her fingers out toward Nolte in a makeshift crucifix. Though it only appeared
to work about ten percent of the time in the movies, it made her feel like she
had God on her side.
“What in the hell are you still doing home?” Nolte asked,
ignoring her makeshift crucifix as he patted around his diaper, searching for a
lighter. “I thought for sure, both of you dummies would be tearing through my
shit by now. Your sister, greedy cunt that she is, is having a conniption fit
looking for my cash stash. That thieving bitch took five hundred dollars out of
my wallet before Elvis had even left the building. Can you believe that shit?”
Nolte smoothed his forearms with a quick glance at each bicep as if he were
admiring his ‘guns’. “You might want to give her a ring on yer smart phone
there, Dummy. Let her know you’re wise to her thieving ways.”
Nolte raised his arms, palms up and gave
Alice an exaggerated shrug, “Well? Do I have to get the fucking beer myself?”
Nolte planted both hands on the table in front of him and
groaned loudly as he helped himself to stand, his diaper made a tearing sound
as it peeled off of something sticky on the chair. “I guess you have to watch
where you sit, as well as where you step in this shithole.” Taking care not to
step in the cat shit again, he dance-walked across the kitchen. He swung one of
his arms behind his back in an exaggerated fashion as if he were fanning a
fart. Alice kept her finger crucifix trained on him like a loaded gun, as he
moved closer.
He opened the fridge and squatted to get a better look at
the contents within, his knees crackled and popped and complained. Nolte shook
his head and blew air across his teeth, a sound he had always tried to pass off
as a whistle, as he invaded the sanctity of the Frigidaire. “You need to be
careful what you eat out of this sonofabitch, huh? Some of this shit looks
pretty fucking iffy,” he smugly noted, as he helped himself to a beer. Still
squatting, he turned his head to the side, just enough to show Alice he still
had a cigarette clenched in his teeth. “Gotta light, Dummy?
N
olte had been watching the shadow for
days. The dark smudge paced deliberately in his kitchen, dragging itself from
one wall to another. He watched it from the corner of his eye. The corner of
his eye was how he watched all the things that made him nervous. The shadow
would pass from one end of the room to the other and then retrace its path,
defying the angle of the sun, or whatever light source happened to be present.
His first attempt to explain away the shadow was when the
smudge had peeled itself from the back of the door and slithered across the kitchen
floor. His first thought was that his imagination had high-centered. But any
notions concerning imagination had to be quickly dismissed, Nolte would be the
first to admit, that he had no imagination. He didn’t have a creative bone in
his body. His next rationale was the chemo was messing with his mind, but his
knowledge of drugs was limited to mescal and beer and the doctor had said
nothing of hallucinations. Maybe it was outside, the cause of his shadow, some
kid’s kite stuck in a tree, a breeze fanning the kite ghost along the side of
his house and through the window, but there was no kite.
He had lived in this particular house for years. He knew how
the light worked on the walls of his castle, inside and out. Nolte paid
attention because paying attention was his thing. Nothing escaped his scrutiny.
He was wide awake and aware and he knew the shadow didn’t
belong.
Nolte took notice of all things in his domain, great and
small. Lazy toothpicks slouching in the toothpick holder would receive his instant
attention; the uneven edges of a carelessly folded hand towel would be
immediately remedied under his watchful command. ‘A place for everything, and
everything in its place.’ In a chaotic world, tidiness kept the crazy away.
Nolte had always formulated regularities, surveyed strict
borders and manufactured constants in his life; he liked to be squared away.
There was a certain comfort to be found in repetitive actions and self-imposed
limitations. He lived safely within the boundaries of these carefully
implemented constraints and procedures, always mindful not to color outside the
lines. Anything that developed suddenly, or outside the uniformity of Nolte’s
little world, was akin to a rogue wave on an otherwise tranquil sea. Don’t rock
the boat. Loose lips, sink ships.
The predictability of his tried and true methods gave him a
cozy sense of security. Redundancies allowed him to concentrate his attentions
on his independence and privacy.
Privacy was very important. Mommy, a very private person
herself, had always told him to do his own laundry with the utmost care and
strict attention to detail; keeping unsightly stains to himself and above all
else, never hang it out to dry where the world could see it. It was sound
advice, especially where Nolte was concerned, there were things about his
privacy that would, should they become public, seriously affect his freedom.
Now his privacy was being invaded by a shadow.
In truth, though he fancied himself fearless, the shadow
scared Nolte; as did anything he couldn’t understand. Not only could it travel
against the light, but it didn’t appear to be cast from anything. No shadow is
uncaused, as far as Nolte knew. When it came to things scientific, he knew he
wasn’t the fullest beaker in the lab, but light, whether it was sunlight, bulb
light or a candle in the wind light, all light needed an object in order to
cast a shadow and said shadow, had to obey its source. Piss don’t flow uphill
and the piss from his shadow was definitely flowing uphill. Though Nolte could not
correlate the piss/shadow relationship, he knew it to be a fact that piss
always went downhill and any carved in stone fact, would bolster his guesses at
the characteristics of light.
‘He’s afraid of his own shadow.’ The words popped into his
head, probably from the little coward who lived in there, though he hadn’t
really sensed the little guy’s presence since the shadow had climbed down off
the door. Nolte figured the little turd had gone deep into hiding. ‘He’s afraid
of his own shadow.’ As a boy, Nolte would flinch at any movement, whatsoever,
in his peripheral view. He’d developed this ‘tick/survival instinct’, because
of Mommy. Living with Mommy, one had to be prepared to duck ashtrays and shoes,
at any given moment. Mommy had a temper. A dust mote on a still damp, cherry
red fingernail could send all manner of things flying across the room. Mommy
had a temper and she hated to do things twice.
Nolte, on the other hand, seemed doomed to repeat things.
Kids at school would offer Nolte their hand, yet, when he went to shake it,
they would jerk their hand quickly to their head, pretending to smooth their
hair. Leaving him ‘hanging’ was embarrassing enough, but this would also
produce an involuntary duck and fluttering eyelashes from Nolte. A flinch, a social
crime punishable by a sharp slug to the upper arm and humiliating finger
pointing. It would also produce peals of laughter from the other kids. Nolte
was a natural sucker. For some reason, he never wised up to the kids and was
always lured into the handshake trap. He’d hated those fucking kids. Nolte
would bet a sixteen-dollar bill, that not one of those laughing losers had ever
run across a shadow of this nature. Fuck Peter Pan, Nolte’s shadow was
dangerous, or at the very least, chancy. He wished those assholes were here
now, he’d see who was scared of shadows.
Nolte’s shadow had a presence; he could actually feel it
watching him. He could feel its vibe. The thing also affected the hair on the
back of his neck, a sure sign that the ‘motherfucker’ was up to no good. Nolte
always obeyed the hair on the back of his neck. Neck hair was an extremely
reliable early warning system; neck hair alerted him to undesirables and
unwelcome situations before they had a chance to become problematic.
The creepy feeling, he would get, the moment before he’d
turn to catch someone staring at him, was neck hair alerting him to unwanted
attention. It was better than radar. Although they would nervously divert their
eyes and pretended to be looking for something other than him, Nolte knew the
truth, his neck hair never lied. Neck hair saw through deceptive behavior. Neck
hair knew when people were watching and people were watching Nolte, of that, he
was absolutely sure. People always watched him. Nolte and his neck hair were of
the opinion, that people needed to mind their own fucking business.
Sometimes, in crowded places when the hair on the back of
his neck was particularly active, or he was particularly drunk, he’d shout.
“Look away assholes! You can pretend you’re not looking at me, but I know you
are, motherfuckers!” This usually caused a stir, especially after shouting it
several times, in an attempt to flush out the culprit with the unwelcome gaze.
Then, without fail, someone, more than likely the perpetrator of the staring,
would involve the cops. And most of the time, through no fault of his own, his
'rights' would be violated and a scuffle with the police would ensue and Nolte
would end up hogtied and taken into custody. Not the assholes with the eye
problems, that couldn’t mind their own business, but him, the innocent one.
These unjust arrests were mostly due to the fact, that by
the time law enforcement usually arrived, the assholes with the invasive eyes
had had ample opportunity to scatter into the wind like chicken-shits, and cops
being too lazy to investigate, or even wonder out loud for the truth, would
slap the bracelets on Nolte. Someone was going down, or it was a wasted trip.
Nolte soon realized ‘staring violations’ were much harder to
prove in a court of law, than public intoxication, but it never stopped him
from hurling accusations of eye-rape whenever his neck hair sounded the alarm.
He had rights and he would defend those rights. Yes, neck hair had caused Nolte
some problems in the past, but to ignore the hair on the back of one’s neck
could get one killed, there are crazies everywhere you look.
By the third day, not only could he see the shadow and feel
it, but he could smell it. Sometimes, when his shadow, which no longer paced to
and fro along the walls, but now circled the kitchen as a thin, opaque cloud,
came near to the living room, it would stop and emit a stale musty odor. A
stale smell, which always had a hint of something else mixed with it, a memory
scent, as Nolte came to know them. Two distinctly separate smells came to him
in a single puff.
The musty part must be the transport smell, which the memory
scent would hitch a ride on, Nolte figured. The mustiness always stayed the
same, but the memory smell was different each and every time. The thing would
stop at the doorway and fart at him, the odors would waft to him unseen, but
the moment they hit his nose they’d conjure different memories and images from
his past. Memories Nolte didn’t at all like and images he had worked hard to
forget. Memories and images Nolte had spent years, along with a good bit of his
sanity and an unholy amount of alcohol, altering, rewriting and tucking away,
deep into far dark corners of his mind.
Nolte had never encountered odors so rich and pungent, his
corned beef and cabbage farts didn't even come close. Even the constant flow of
bottled oxygen streaming into his nose couldn’t mask or dilute the smells his
shadow produced. But the strength of the stink really didn’t matter, it only
took a hint of a whiff and the visions they triggered were immediate and
crystal clear. He had a front row seat to, The Best of the Worst of the Nolte
Show, in HD.
The shadow would twist in on itself and push and puff
quietly, it was more visual than audible. As a kid, Nolte knew these quiet
farts, as ‘SBDs’, Silent-But-Deadlies. Sometimes the trigger smell would be
pleasant, like honeysuckles, or fresh cut grass, or jalapenos, but never with
an agreeable memory. Once he smelled mint cookies, another time it was
Palmolive, another it was the Gulf of Mexico, but always with a suggestion of
something stale and rotting, something musty, like a wet dog, or damp
flatulence laden swim trunks and always, some horrible memory would flood his
mind.
Nolte could see when it was about to happen, it only took a
few times, a few punches to the nose, before he had learned the fart-cloud’s
stink-process, but it mattered little, there was still no protection from it.
He armed himself with a can of air freshener, he’d waited for the signs and the
puff and then he would unleash his Mountain Berry Blast or Summer Pinecone. He
brandished the can as if he were fending off an angry grizzly with bear mace;
yet, the smells would cut through the artificial mountain air like butter. Even
body spray, the king of odor maskers, met with the same failure, as did,
lighting faggoty-assed candles and strategically placing them around the house
for a sustained barrier. The candles did nothing but make his house stink like
a vanilla cinnamon stick. All methods were useless against the shadow cloud’s
stench. All he could do was watch and wait, and try to keep the little coward
in his head calm and safely tucked away.
There had been hundreds of these puff attacks since the
first one. The last time it was hairspray and vinegar, an odd scent that scared
him, yet, at the same time, made his crotch tingle. It reminded him of his
mommy’s panties and the scent’s memory had left him curled up in a ball,
crying. Big boys don’t cry; Mommy had always said.