Joel Arnold - Fetal Bait Apocalypse - 3 Collections in 1

No god NO!

I struck the mirror hard with my fist. It exploded in a crash of sparkling shards. Blood gushed from my knuckles. I looked at them, considered stripping the raw flesh from my fingers with my teeth.

My teeth .

I grabbed a piece of glass from the sink, the edge slicing into my palm. I opened my mouth.

This craving. This need.

I lifted the shard of glass. It gleamed like a dagger in the bathroom lights. I jabbed it into my gums. Dug into the soft pink flesh. Popped out a glistening tooth with a flick of my wrist.

I decided to cure this craving one tooth at a time.

I never boarded the plane.

My mouth still bleeds, especially when the craving is at its worst. There are times when I see the others — the little girl, the old man from the gazebo, the man from the alley. We gather at the steps of the monstrously beautiful church, longing to go inside. But our mouths are useless now. We are unable to gnash and tear, unable to satisfy our need, our primal need, to feel the warmth of flesh squish between our teeth.

We are unable to satiate the craving we share.

More have joined us. Those who believed they could remove the craving by simply removing their teeth. We laugh and cry at our stupidity. So we do what we can.

We look upon the doors of the church, strain to hear the primal rhythms of the dead, and imagine.

We imagine.

It is all we have.

This is our house. A modest three-bedroom rambler painted light blue. The backyard fences in a deck and a beautiful red maple. An ancient oak stands out front. Boxes full of petunias grace the windows like mascara, and there are several large bleeding hearts on either side of the front steps.

It’s a pleasant neighborhood. Quiet for the most part. Not a lot of kids. I mow the lawn, take out the garbage. Do the dishes, the cleaning. There’s a lot of work to be done to make this house presentable. A lot of sacrifices.

We’d been living in a one-bedroom apartment for our first two years of marriage. When Ellen learned she was pregnant, the urge to buy a house suitable for raising a family came upon her like an unstoppable freight train.

“I can’t stand it here anymore. It’s so cramped. This is no place to raise a family.” She pats her stomach, which barely shows at this point. “I want a yard. A garden.”

I look up from the evening news.

“I’m suffocating,” she says.

Saturday morning she’s up at the crack of dawn. She scrambles eggs for breakfast, brews coffee, butters toast. The real estate section from the morning newspaper lays spread out on the kitchen table. Thick red marker circles the properties she wants to see.

It’s insane. Every house we look at is sold within an hour of our arrival. Twice we find houses we’re excited about, and twice they’re bought out from under us before we even have a chance to check out the basement.

It’s like that on Sunday, too.

I suggest we wait until the market cools off.

“Are you kidding me?” Ellen snaps. “Every night I can hear the couple next door coughing and snoring, and the people stomping on the floor above us at all hours of the day. How many times have they jacked up the rent on us here? They think they can screw us over anytime they want. I can’t stand it.”

We look every day of the following week, and the results are the same. Nothing. Insanity. It’s a seller’s market.

Ellen gets grumpier each day. Short-tempered. She spends more and more time at night on the phone with her best friend Ruth Grayson, her sharp words muffled through the bedroom door.

It is two weeks later that I arrive home after work to find my wife sitting on the couch with a serene look on her face. She turns to me as I enter.

“I’ve found a home.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I mean I bought one. It’s ours.” She ignores the stupefied look on my face. “Ruth introduced me to a real estate agent yesterday.”

“Ruth?”

“The first place he showed me was perfect. I hope you don’t mind, honey, but I had to act quickly.”

“Couldn’t you have called me?”

“I told you — I had to act quickly.”

A little something about Ruth Grayson; she makes me sick. I hate the way she boasts of her conquests, of how easy it is to seduce a happily married man, the simplicity of getting him to betray his wife and children. I don’t like the way Ellen responds to this nonsense. She laughs, as if it were all some kind of joke.

Ruth once tried to seduce me. One night when Ellen was gone, she came over and asked for her.

“She’s out,” I told her. “I thought you knew that.”

“Oh, that’s right.” She laughs. Walks into our house, brushing past me. Turns and winks. “I did know that.” She unbuttons her blouse and pulls it open.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“What’s it look like I’m doing?”

She reaches over and brushes her hand over my crotch.

“It’s time for you to go.”

“Oh, come on now,” she says. “Ellen’s not here.”

“She’s your best friend.”

“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

She reaches back for my crotch. I slap her hand away. Grab her by the shoulders and turn her toward the door.

“Seriously,” I say. “Get the hell out of here.”

“Oh, come on now.”

“Out.”

“Prude.”

“Slut.”

She leaves, buttoning her blouse, laughing.

I hate her. And what’s more, part of me thinks it’s some game she’s playing with me, a game that Ellen is in on. A wager, perhaps. I can just hear her bragging to Ellen how she can seduce any married man she wants to.

And Ellen says, “Not Roger.”

And Ruth says, “Oh, no?”

“Just try it.”

“You’re on.”

And as I imagine Ellen laughing, I feel like I want to throw up.

Jealousy is a dangerous emotion. It clouds the mind. It influences us irrationally and blinds us from the truth. I become suspicious that Ellen is having an affair with our real estate agent.

“Ruth recommended this guy?” I ask.

Ellen nods. She has trouble looking directly into my eyes.

“You were lucky,” I say, testing her. “To find a place so easily with this guy, even in this current housing market.”

Ellen nods again. I try to get her to look at me, but she won’t.

“He just showed you this house. Said it’s yours if you want it?”

Ellen yawns. “I’m tired,” she says. “I had a busy day.”

“Sounds like it.”

Then she snaps. “Look, what are you trying to imply?” Her eyes flash. “I got the house fair and square. It’s a nice house, and now you’re accusing me—” She stops.

“Accusing you of what?” I ask.

Her eyes smolder. My heart races.

“You should thank me,” she says.

I leave the room.

It doesn’t matter that she is four months pregnant. All I can see is the beauty she radiates. All I can think of is how desirable she is, how another man’s eyes would smolder at the sight of her, how lurid fantasies would slink through his head.

The next day, my suspicions are reinforced. I hear a voice-mail message left for Ellen. It’s Ruth.

“ I just got off the phone with Mr. Wishlow, and he said he made you a sweet, sweet deal. God, El, I hope it was as sweet as mine. Didn’t I tell you he was the best? And it was so easy, wasn’t it Ellen dear? I’m glad you’re finally loosening up. It almost makes me want to move every week. I gotta go. Call me when you can. I want to hear all of the details. You understand, darling? All of them.”

I erase the message and say nothing. It feels like a tourniquet has been placed around my heart and Ruth’s voice tightens it with every word.