Unseaming (31 page)

The gift: a silvery folding knife with molded black grips and a ten-pound spring that causes it to flip open and lock with the speed of a switchblade when she depresses a button with her thumb. Hardly an assurance of even odds—Clive owns guns. And there’s Francene’s body, still living somehow without its head. She can’t comprehend how something like that is possible, can’t deal with it in any rational way, so she just doesn’t.

All the neighborhood’s cookie-cutter houses gleam ghostly in the lamplight. The street is empty. Somewhere down the cross-street, a kid shouts, a basketball bounces on a driveway.

Upstairs, to her right, in the room where Denise slept, the curtain moves. A face glimpsed.

Francene? Francene’s head?

She watches her finger push the doorbell as if she’s dreaming. Footsteps on the other side, but no one answers.

She hears Clive call. It’s open.

She hasn’t set foot in this house in years. Hasn’t dared.

As promised, the door’s unlocked. Inside the house is pristine as ever, shoes arranged neat as soldiers on the split-level landing, a wooden plaque carved with the words Our Lovely Home mounted above the short stairwell to the basement, and to the side, above another plaque that reads Home Is Family, hangs a huge photo of the family in their younger years, Denise in her softball uniform, Shaun in glasses and an Izod shirt, Clive in a sweater and Francene in a pink blouse with puffy sleeves.

Maria regards them all, their phony smiles. Clive, what the hell is going on?

No answer.

Clive?

A noise from downstairs, a creak, something banging on a metal surface, and a wet sound she can’t quite place.

As she descends the stairs, more homilies await on the walls. God bless this house. Home is where the heart is. Forgive us our trespasses.

The door to the utility room stands ajar. That odd, wet flopping sound wafts through it. She contemplates pulling out the knife, decides against it.

Through the door, past the furnace, and at first she’s puzzled by what she sees hanging from the short clothesline attached to the ceiling beams.

Her mind translates it as a large, shapeless sack of untanned leather, with a swarm of something inside it, making it twitch and ripple up and down its length in a truly disgusting way. Insects? Mice? The creaks come from the clothesline cord as the thing’s weight tugs and shifts, the bangs occur when the cord snaps up against a metal air duct.

When she steps closer, the sack shivers even more violently. Her stomach knots as she notices the thing is leaking, a thick, foamy, snot-like string dripping out a hole at its tapered bottom. A hole that looks disturbingly like a mouth. With lips that stretch and contract.

She can make out more features. Nostrils. Ears. There are eyes. Rolling to stare at her as the drooling mouth shapes words.

She recoils, and bumps into someone standing right behind her.

A warm envelope of red, glistening flesh engulfs her head. A bear hug crushes her arms to her sides, and what feels like another arm crooks around her neck. She kicks, kicks, kicks as she’s dragged upstairs.

one stitch loosens

A voice, louder than the others.
Not her.

tenth square

Her struggle ends when she’s hurled like a Barbie doll thrown in a tantrum. She lands on a mattress.

Maria wants to laugh. She’s in the master bedroom, sprawled on Clive and Francene’s king-size bed, with its layers upon layers of floral comforters, its pillows color-coordinated to anal-retentive perfection.

The ceiling is riddled with bullet holes.

Shaun bars the way between her and the doorway, eyes bulged, teeth bared in an extraordinary grimace. Tears slick his cheeks. Snot globs his vestigial mustache. He’s panting so hard, it’s like his whole body is pulsing.

She scrambles away from him, to the opposite corner, between Francene’s delicate white dresser and an immense oak wardrobe.

The boy thumps his chest with a fist. You belong in here.

No I don’t, she says. What the fuck’s wrong with you?

Everything, he says, his voice breaking.

She’s on her feet in the narrow space between bed and wall, wardrobe and dresser. He’s crossing by the foot of the bed, moving toward her as he claws at his throat with both hands, his lips stretched in an agonized rictus.

Stay away, she says, and flicks the knife open.

He looses a sob, and steps closer.

stitching, undone

You’re a forlorn cry of despair, echoing and echoing down through the spirals of flesh and darkness.

You’re an ant atop a mountain crawling with severed and recombined horrors, the mountain itself built on layers of half-mad, half-alive remains. You’re battling against other fanged and pincered mites as the entire mass beneath you begins to move.

As legs kick. As arms scrabble. As skin inches and bunches and slithers. The coils of the tapestry plunge deep, deeper than anything remembers, so many strata crushed one onto the other, all sewn together with the darkest magic, all alive.

You are the cork shaking loose above a building geyser of hunger. A thin membrane that swells, ruptures, leaks.

You are staring at the parasite who drained your father’s love away, your husband’s sperm away, and as you reach for your thronging faerie beads, your black magic buttons, your ultimate drug of choice, other fingers pluck at yours, other wills rip at yours, other longings disrupt yours, and the bright motes slip into the cracks inside you and scuttle the wrong way.

Your father’s voice, cutting against the grain of yours. Not her.

And other heads lift inside the coils of this endless, overloaded patchwork of stolen sin and severed lives. Uncounted mouths cry out, even as voices both yours and not yours hiss in your ear.

Not her.

Somewhere inside you a little girl wails.

And you’re in a fight to keep your own mind intact as a multitude strains for freedom, pushing and pulling in all directions from their places in the quilt. The only thing these fragments have in common is appetite.

You are the head torn almost free, dangling by a shred of flesh no thicker than a thread.

You are the pattern that can no longer hold.

eleventh square

Through the gap in his throat something bulges, another mouth, whispering not her not her not her…

Shaun screams and lurches forward another step.

Even his eyes split, another pair bubbling up behind them.

Backed up against the wall, Maria has forgotten to breathe. Forgotten she has a heartbeat. Forgotten she has a weapon.

Beneath his clothes, beneath his skin, Shaun’s flesh is swelling.

Just as with his face, his forearms begin to split.

Inside his left arm, there’s another mouth, and it starts screaming too. In Patsy’s voice. Run, Maria! He can’t control it!

The thing that was Shaun gasps NO! and stumbles closer.

Get away, she says, but she can’t even hear her own voice over the many, many others that join Patsy’s, yammering over top of her. Run run help me not her help me RUN…

Worst of all, she hears the ear-shredding screams of a terrified little girl.

Folds of skin slide out from underneath Shaun’s shirt, from inside his sleeves, pour out like foam from an overflowing cup.

His face is a shattered nesting doll, a peeling onion of mouths and eyes. His arms, too, peeling back like corn husks as he reaches toward her, his soft shell rolling back to reveal clots of squirming fingers, gobs of knotted flesh between them mushrooming out into even more faces, the empty eye sockets abruptly filling with eyes, bright mites flowing through the creases between the tumorous blooms.

He’s filling the space between wardrobe and bed, sealing her in. She peels herself out of her paralysis, stabs him in what’s left of his face.

The knife sticks in his molting forehead as if plunged in a grapefruit. It draws no blood. Above and below it, his head yawns apart. The knife slips into the widening hole and vanishes somewhere inside him.

She scrambles onto the bed, flailing pillows out of the way as every bit of Shaun’s mutating body begins to unwind.

He comes undone, a thing made of unreeling tapestries, every panel sewn together from writhing, bleating human remains, every single tortured sheet unrolling.

You belong here. The words waft out of his partitioning face before the length of his body splits and yawns wide open.

One of the thousand voices she hears screaming must be her own.

What had been a body, however chimerical, is now a tunnel gaping down into another space, a spiraling channel into somewhere completely outside the confines of reality, its walls formed of peeling patches of skin knitted and merged in suppurating layers, of thrashing limbs, of lolling heads, of flopping genitals, of twisting intestines and latticed bone, all fused in brain-bending Picasso distortion.

She could laugh. She does laugh. The thing fills half the room, every part of it like a window shade flapping open, like fleshy tongues of carpet unrolling, speeding to a blur, every new fractalling tendril opening out and uncoiling, spewing even more patchworks of flesh. The babble of voices echoing out of that otherwordly tunnel of fused-together body parts has reached such a crescendo that she can no longer make out any individual one.

Somehow she’s crawled backward onto the floor by the bedroom door, as a curtain of swarming skin covers the ceiling in a single motion like the tossing of a sheet, as a twisting tendril of flesh slithers out from beneath the bed, its tip opening in a polyp of arms that rises to embrace her.

She scrambles backward into the hall. The tendril formed of grasping arms lashes at her like a striking snake. Her cries have moved beyond words.

She’s up and running, down the hall, down the stairs, out the door, into the night.

twelfth square

Outside, the bright streetlights cast the neighborhood in friendly amber. In the distance, Maria hears traffic. Closer, the springboard sound of a basketball hitting a backboard, the game she heard before continuing into the night, in someone’s floodlit driveway.

From the house behind her, not a sound.

A pickup truck turns onto the street, pulls up to the curb by the first house on the right, engine idling. The headlights momentarily blind her—she steps hesitantly out of Clive and Francene’s yard, feeling as if she just woke from a nightmare to discover she’s been sleepwalking.

She can see redhead Jillian and her peach-fuzz bearded boyfriend, necking in the cab of the truck right where Jillian’s grandma could see her if she chose to look.

She wants to warn them but her mind can’t wrap around what to warn them about. What did she see in that house? Did she see anything at all? Her heart could be sprinting in place.

She turns.

The house stands silent, front door sensibly shut, lights on behind the dark curtains in the windows.

A rustling catches her ear, and she backpedals to the road until she can see its source. Clive and Francene have a juniper beside their house that they’ve allowed to grow up until its crown crops just beneath their bedroom window. The branches are waving back and forth, ever so slightly—but even as her heart attempts to leap into her mouth, she can feel the quickening breeze.

A new flicker of motion makes her glance back up at the living room window, on the second floor, on the left side of the house, above a neatly trimmed hedge of cedars, black boxes in the night illumination. Again, the curtain in that window moves. Is moving.

Maria peers closer. The way the fabric is moving.

What she sees in the window, illuminated by the truck headlights, is a continuous glistening sheet, sliding up the glass. It flexes and expands until the window goes black.

Maria backs away as the rustling in the trees grows louder, joined by new noises from the back yard, as something starts moving in the hedges that shield the basement windows.

An exit plan is forming in her head. Get back to her house, grab her keys, get to her car, roar as far away from this place as possible, pausing only to pick up Davey from his father’s apartment. She’ll take him by force if she has to, somehow. And then just keep driving. What’s one waitress job? She can always get another. And she’s blessed enough that she can always find a place to live, even if it means shacking up with someone disposable for a while.