Sometimes Broken Things

The deer were out there gathered in the field again. I told Emily about them but she didn’t seem interested. “Deer are always out there,” she said. “So what? Who fucking cares?”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.” I turned away from the window and went into the kitchen. I pulled another beer from the fridge and took a long drink.

“Did you hear anything from Sandra?” I asked as I came back into the living room.

Emily didn’t look up from her phone. “No,” she said. “I think she’s avoiding me.”

I sat down on the couch and took another drink from my beer. The beer was good and cold going down my throat. I heard Emily laughing about something on her phone but she didn’t say anything. I pulled out my phone and checked my emails. I didn’t have anything important so I deleted the new messages before finishing the rest of my beer. I went and got me another one and Emily kept playing on her phone. I was going to ask her something else but decided against it. Instead, I looked up the name of an actress I used to watch on an old TV show because I wanted to know what had happened to her and if she was still around.

“Hey,” Emily said, startling me after sitting for so long in the silence. “What was the name of that place we went to last week?”

“Hmm. You mean the place where we ate?”

“No. Shit. That antique place.”

“Oh,” I said. “Um, emporium something. Uh, Captain Bill’s Emporium.”

“Yes,” said Emily. “I got that lamp that doesn’t work.”

“Yeah,” I said. I took one more drink and emptied the bottle. “We could probably take it somewhere and get it fixed.”

“Maybe,” she said.

I got up and headed to the kitchen for another beer. I stopped next to Emily’s chair and looked at her.

“What are you doing?” She said.

I leaned toward her trying to keep my balance, holding the empty bottle in my hand. I kissed Emily and she laughed.

“You goofball,” she said.

I went into the kitchen and tossed the empty in the trash. The bottle hit against the other ones that were already in there and the sound it made seemed louder than it should have been. I opened the fridge and found one last beer sitting there on the shelf. I looked over at Emily and saw she was on her phone again. I reached for the bottle and slowly pulled it from the fridge before shutting the door and watching the light go out.

After the Meteor Shower

We set the collapsible table up in the garage. Our house was 175 years old and the garage was a cave of pink insulation and fifty pound salt bags (for the water softener).  It was haphazardly connected to the slat board shack where we slept and fought.  The night before the picnic, dad moved the Buick, our two rabbits and the tractor so we could sweep the place out.  We were so busy we missed the meteor shower.

The next day it was ugly hot, air so damp like breathing water.  I was sweating in my party suit.  Why did I wear this?

When I went to stir the bean dip, there was this enormous cockroach looking bug that was the typical color… like super-tanned hide, with a waxy sheen. Then, another thing appeared: a combination slug/turtle with the same exoskeleton.  It surfaced, shell first, in the chilé con queso, tilted back revealing its soft underbelly, and, from its behind, sprayed a viscous yellow fluid across the gingham table cloth.

Neither mom nor dad were anywhere to be found.  All the people arriving, that I thought I knew, were strangers of the most simple and needy variety.

As I prepared to start gathering things up, dulled by the lame horror creeping in my synapses and the doddering party attendees, I saw the “insects” outside: through the window in the garage.  Fat, pulsing larvae with wet green eyes and veined wings.  They swarmed in clouds clicking against the siding like sleet, splattering kamikaze on the windows.  There were so many of them, they snuffed the sun.  Now they were flying in, pinging off the guests, falling in the baked beans, dying in the Jello Pudding.  I was distracted by something else at that point.  I kept thinking, I need to immediately throw away all this food because there was no salvaging it; the creatures were dying, squirting and multiplying among the pot luck offerings faster than I could stumble across the oil-stained garage floor.

What is everyone going to eat?  A picnic isn’t a picnic without food.

I slipped on the nasty things three times, almost hitting my head on the picnic table bench as I scurried, responding to the conditions and questions from people I no longer recognized yet who seemed to know everything.  That is, everything except for where my parents where.

Overwhelmed, I ran around trying to act normal as possible while trying desperately to distract everyone from the increasingly grotesque environment. I belted an acapella version of One Direction’s ‘Bring Me Down’ while I dumped uneaten food, crockery and all, into the trash can.  As the fourth Pyrex dish of vermin riddled picnic food disappeared with a thud and a sharp crack into the plastic container, I noticed several homunculoid creatures (also with waxen flesh. but more ostensibly human) shivering in out-of-the-way places… as if they were consciously hiding, waiting for their opportunity to do… whatever.  One in particular was a larger half-formed ‘male’ dragging his misshapen torso and impotent legs around using heavily veined and sinewed arms.  The abomination was maybe a foot and a half long, its face a shrunken-head-mask consumed by grin: the hands claws.  When it moved, it left jellied blood streaks on the pavement.  When it noticed me noticing it with its one pus filled eye, it shambled under our tool bench at the far end of the garage as quickly as it could.  Which wasn’t very quickly at all.

I thought, “I have to kill these things.  I can kill the ones that have heads, and even the ones that don’t, by hitting them with a shovel.”  The shovel is always the go-to answer, isn’t it?   The best way to kill any slow-moving or maimed thing in the garage or backyard.  Shovel or hoe.  To avoid the splatter and mess, my solution was to open the rear door.  It was insane, considering this allowed more of the things to enter that way.  Nothing was leaving; the space was filling.  But, in my disordered thinking, maybe the chaos of the garage would be too much and, at least, the larger things would seek escape outside.  Then, I could follow and relentlessly smash… as many of them as I could… to death.