Christmas Trees & Monkeys (6 page)

The woman was his unwitting shield, the first thing anyone would notice as the couple emerged from the woods. Now he sidled off three steps to her right. Swinging the rifle from his back, he raised its barrel towards the heads and backs of the human wall. Do not fire. Not until the path between your weapon and the enemy is clear. Someone grabbed his shoulder, released it just as quickly. The wall parted in screams as one then another saw the assault rifle and the blinded glow on the face of its owner.

The path was clear. Nicholas squeezed the trigger.

* * *

Go.

Kimberly stepped forward. The officer moved out of the way. He began shouting at someone behind her. Something popped and cracked. Her world filled with the ape. It no longer traveled the figure eight above the crowd, but swung its dark body by one arm and one foot around and around the tower before her. Now and then something buffeted against its body, an almost imperceptible reaction. Was someone throwing rocks?

The monkey kept swinging, around and around, lower and lower. The free arm extended away from it like the whirling spindle of a carnival ride. She was ten feet away. Eight feet. The wrinkled palm was open, more inviting than the mental images drawing her here. It offered the quilted comfort of home. As she stepped across the final distance, she opened then let fall the white dress. She moved naked onto the grass where the massive hand had just passed. She watched it circle away, knowing it would come again. An arousal, more deep and wet than in her most lurid of dreams, floated within her. She took in a breath and did not exhale. The hand came around, raced towards her above the grass.

* * *

Sullivan moved in unison with a hundred other police officers toward the gunman. He couldn’t risk firing without hitting a screaming civilian. A man with a news camera stepped in front of him. Sullivan slammed into him, then walked over both man and camera without breaking stride. He shouted for everyone to get down, but the words only saturated the air with a hundred other voices. The madman continued shooting towards the ape. From a quick glance Sullivan saw some rounds hit their mark. Most passed over the target as the creature lowered itself to ground level. The stray bullets landed in the faces of police and spectators lining the highway.

Less than two yards from the shooter Bennie Powers held his own weapon level with the man’s head, shouting as uselessly as Sullivan. Just then the absurd smile on the madman’s face twisted into a grimace of rage. Both Sullivan and Powers understood what was coming next and caution didn’t play into things anymore. The lunatic was about to fire into the crowd.

“
Wake up!” The shooter yelled. “I’ll wake y-” One side of his head exploded with the impact of Powers’ bullet. The half-decapitated body squeezed the trigger for a moment, sending three rounds into the chest of a prostrate reporter.

With the perfect timing of an hysterical crowd, everyone fell to the ground in time with the shooter’s body. Sullivan dropped to one knee, not wanting to lose his line of sight in case there was another madman waiting. It was then that he and a handful of others saw the naked woman standing at the base of the tower.

From head to knees the beast’s hand closed around the woman’s pale figure. The momentum of such a weight, plus what looked like the sudden, tight squeezing of the fingers, liquefied her body. It was the only word Sullivan could think of, either at that moment or later in his report. From every crack and orifice in the tight ball of the ape’s hand came red and cream-colored bile. The lower portion of her legs dragged across the ground in motion with the animal’s swing. One thin slipper broke free and tumbled away. As if merely squishing a bug, the ape casually wiped its now-open palm against the grass. The circular trail, wiped carefully and methodically around the tower, resembled nothing of the woman aside from the disembodied calves.

Sullivan’s finger pulled the trigger. After the second shot, others joined in. Angry and desperate from their impotence to stop the madman sooner they sent round after round into the ape. Those bullets missing the mark landed in explosions of dust in the hillside beyond. Just as quickly, the shooting stopped. The monkey had raised itself higher on its steel-girded tree.

Black hair glistening with what might have been rivulets of blood, it moved slowly, deliberately to the top of one tower. The narrow peak screamed from the sudden weight, then started to bend. Toes gripping the crisscrossed supports, the ape extended its arms in a crucifixion parody. It stood for a moment above the faces of those screaming, dying, or nervously silent. Black eyes blinked once. The ape fell forward like the Hollywood icon it would forever be associated with.

Sounds of a hundred sudden gasps. Perceived weight falling into the throes of tripping, squirming bodies. Then nothing. No nightmare monkey. One moment it existed in their world, the next it did not. It simply disappeared. The only impact was the silent acknowledgment that nothing more would happen that night.

* * *

Tom stared at the bed. The light from the living room fell across rumpled, vacant sheets. Behind him, the news anchor repeated his report of the mysterious woman, her death, and the sudden disappearance of the monkey on the towers.

Tom turned, walked past the computer, and sat slowly on the couch. A discarded candy wrapper crinkled beneath him. He felt the wrapper through his pants, saw with slowly emerging clarity the disarray of his house. Alone. The reality, the inevitable truth of his wife’s death sank into him, like a lost treasure over the side of the boat.

— — — — —

About “Feed The Birds”

We come now to the first original story in this collection.
Original
meaning it was newly written and previously unpublished when this collection originally was published in print. I had to save it from a year-long wait in the slush pile of an anthology so I could include it here.

I can’t say a lot about this story without giving too much away, except that I came up with it while standing in the kitchen looking across the house to the bird feeders we’d established outside the windows. Seeing the happy birdies flutter about, I wondered... well, when you read the story you’ll know what I wondered.

No, I don’t know why I think these things sometimes. I really don’t.

But, between you and me, I’m really glad I do.

Feed the Birds

As usual for a Friday, Doctor John and Doctor Regina arrive home within minutes of each other.

Regina waits beside the garage, tries to concentrate. John ducks below the lowering door and embraces his wife. Regina pulls away, pecks her husband’s cheek. The weight of the past five days wears her down. He knows it, feels it himself. Both see in the other’s eyes their lassitude reflected. They turn, hands loosely clasped, and walk into the Tudor’s side entrance.

Regina whispers, "We have to feed the birds."

Empty plastic bird feeders swing in the breeze beside the row of hemlock lining the driveway. The feeders knock lightly against the house front, calling those inside, wanting to be filled. In the green of the trees beyond, one or two birds have alighted, lost from sight among the leaves. They sing songs and wait. It is not yet time.

The kitchen is large. Dark wood beams soar over contrasting white walls. As Regina walks across the room her eyes scan the counter, toaster, microwave, never resting long on any object. She is distracted and tired. Her briefcase stands on the breakfast table. The coffeemaker hisses and coughs. Half decaf, half regular, the timer set that morning to be ready for them when they arrived. Black steam welcomes senses which are crinkling at the edges, chipping like old paint. Regina inhales deeply, knowing she cannot drink even when it is done.

Minutes later, husband and wife hold coffee mugs with both hands as if warming fingers on a cold day. John lifts the cup to his face. Steam fills his nostrils. He wants to drink its hot, cleansing pain. Not yet. The birds need to be fed, and he isn’t yet hungry. The coffee mug is lowered. John stares across the kitchen and sees the past week’s faces - crying, screaming, laughing, silent. They parade by, revolving on an invisible spindle.

Eight Years Old, remembers Doctor John. What had the boy seen? Parents whispering, muffled crying, when Eight Year Old pushed open their door, "but my head was being pulled back, down the hall, like a rope coming out of my neck." The boy was describing his instincts taking over as he opened the door, knowing at a base level what he’d see in his parents’ room. Something monstrous laid out before him. "Wet and splashy," Eight Year Old says. The boy occasionally devises alternative words to describe the contents of that room. When this happens, John usually finds himself wishing for "wet and splashy".

Each session John takes upon himself these images, holds them close until they no longer threaten the child. Eight Year Old always feels better, while John’s stomach burns with their pain. The heat soon fades, only to flare again on Friday afternoons.

Husband and wife, now lost in their memories, sit at the table. The kitchen is silent save an occasional sigh of a shoe against tile.

In memory, feeling her empathy of the week solidify inside her, Regina hears the whispered confessions of Brad Renelle, 10:15 appointment Tuesday. Renelle’s hands droop between thighs, fingers interlocked then loosened, chasing each other across the chasm of his legs. His eyes downcast, staring at his shoe, one foot half-out of its loafer, lips wet. Brad Renelle, large imposing man, whispers an obscene confession of his latest fantasy, occasionally glancing up to see if Regina acknowledges his insanity. Is this simple clarity of thought, she would wonder, something good rather than depraved? Always careful is Regina, never flinching her expression. Never knowing what might set him off. Set
any
of them off.

"We need to fill the bird feeders," Regina now whispers to her husband. Her voice is paper. She licks her lips, tries to swallow. "Before it gets dark."

John lifts his head. Outside the day is still bright with the sideways slant of early summer evening. A dinner appointment tonight with Merrimack Hospital’s director of psychology, written on the refrigerator calendar. An Important Man wanting to pull an Important Couple from the warm shadows of their practices. Imprison them in a menagerie of brick and pensions. Plug them in, harness the talent they possess: Doctor John’s success rate with children deemed lost, his ability to pull them out of the pit - if only a little higher than anyone one else has been able. Doctor Regina for her papers on adult sexual discord, her radical approaches to violent patients. Men and women excessive in their debauchery, serving extended jail sentences, held far from the community’s reaching hands. Her ability to understand the darkness inside them, then extract it. Change them. Sometimes forever. Sometimes for only a week.

The successful couple trudge outside, slowly, like penitent monks with gazes lowered, heading for the feeders in the front. Husband and wife who take upon themselves the filth and pain of children and violent screamers-who-once-were-human. They help their patients secrete from deep within themselves their nightmares and fantasies, tapped like sap into the dented tin buckets of the doctors’ souls.

Come unto me all who are weak and heavy laden, and I will give you rest
, reads the sign on the wall, in a never-looked at corner of her office. She is beaten, stray dog skittish. But her patients are once again brighter and clearer of mind.

John and Regina move by instinct and routine. They smell the fresh coffee aroma drifting from the open windows, pushing them on with promises of future lightness and taste. One or the other repeats that they have to feed the birds. Zombies in elegantly disheveled business suits, stepping up the driveway onto the clipped grass lawn.

The birds chitter loudly. There are more of them, monochromatic, reds and blues, greens and yellows. Their excitement is audible, watching the couple arrive.

John thinks about Lisa who turned eleven last week. Freckled and tousle-haired, she fights with her right arm which creeps up on her at night, crawling spider-like to her throat when she dares fall asleep.

The low sun hits him in the face. John cannot see the birds but hears them. They gossip and worry. He takes one tube-shaped feeder into uncertain hands. Flashes of blue among the leaves. John fumbles to open the top, sees reds bouncing in the corner of his vision. He remembers angry-eyed Michela who kills every pet her parents bring home, and now her mother is pregnant. John’s stomach burns with their fear.

Regina lifts the second feeder from the pole. Tiny screams fall from the trees as if Autumn is early and the leaves have found a voice. The sound tightens her skin. Intense are the creatures’ wants and needs, like the bleached woman yesterday who sat in silence for twenty minutes only to skulk to the display case by the window and slam her fist through the glass. In a blink she had dragged the underside of one arm sideways, filling the small transparent box with blood. Regina’s stomach cramps with the ice of such blind rage,
their
rage, all of them. The birdsong loops through her head. Chirping, screaming, laughing among the green tree shade. Her stomach is a bag of frozen slush.

John doubles over. Fire in his stomach and throat, liquid molten pain. He thinks of the new boy who started sessions Monday, curled up on the couch and slowly gnawing his fingertips off. John feels the boy in him now, struggling to be set free. Doctor John’s mouth closes over the top of the feeder, as does his wife’s over the other. He sees her crying, but she is blurred from his vision. The boy on the couch had pulled chunks of skin free before John realized what he was up to. Now, the boy leaps forward within him, clawing higher, shouting
Let me out
.