Michael Collings - The Slab

“But…, ” she whimpered once. Her eyes had lost their fixed, glazed-over look. Her breathing sounded more regular. Normal color was returning to her face.

“Shhh,” Willard whispered. “Not now. It was just a bug. Don’t worry.”

She closed her eyes and allowed her head to slump against his shoulder. Then she jerked rigid again. “No, there were…”

Will, Jr., emerged from the kitchen. She saw him come through the darkened doorway, saw him move with a maddening slowness that more than anything convinced her that whatever she had seen in there-had thought she had seen in there-was no longer visible.

“…More,” she finished lamely. “There were…more.”

“Shhh.”

Burt and Suze moved closer. Burt handed Suze Catherine’s pillow-it was almost bigger than she was, and in other circumstances it would have been comic to watch her struggle with it. Burt picked up the blanket Will had dropped and began spreading it over Catherine’s legs.

“Mommy.” This was a new voice. Sams stood alone in the entry hall, one hand balled up and wiping sleepily at his heavy-lidded eyes. His voice stirred Catherine out of her shock.

“Come here,” she said, sitting up and opening her arms to all four of the children. Will stepped closer but didn’t try to get too near. Burt and Suze crowded alongside Willard, their small hands touching their mother’s legs tentatively as if to make sure she was really there, that the white screamy thing that had only sort of looked like Mommy was gone and that Mommy-the real Mommy this time-was back again, leaning on the arm of the couch and reaching out to touch their hair. Sams crawled onto the end of the couch and made his way up Catherine’s legs, as he always did when she was lying down. He couldn’t seem to get near enough to her any other way. He perched cross-legged just below her stomach and studied her, a blue-eyed, tow-headed Buddha staring innocently at her and absently sucking on the matted, stained, sour-smelling satin edging of his blanket. He didn’t speak.

No one spoke.

Finally, as if he had abruptly decided that things were somehow wrong and that only he could take the one action that would set them right, Sams moved. He took the blanket in one hand, careful to grasp it so the damp satin ribbon was folded out, and extended it toward Catherine.

“Here, Mommy,” he said slowly, in his most solemn, precise, toddler-almost-a-little-boy voice. “This will make you feel better.”

From a yard away, Willard could smell the stench of the thing; his stomach roiled with a sharp, nauseated twist that cut like a dagger thrust. No matter how often Catherine washed it, it always smelled like a dishrag wadded in a corner and left to ripen for a week. He shuddered at the image as much as at the smell. But Catherine only smiled, a weak smile to be sure, but it was a smile.

“Thanks, Sams,” she said, accepting the outstretched blanket just as solemnly as the boy had offered it. She took it and laid it, satin edging out, against her cheek. “Thanks, Sams,” she repeated. “I’m sure this will help.”

From the Tamarind Valley Times, 15 November 1989:

DISAPPEARING VALLEY BUSINESSMAN STILL A MYSTERY

A spokesman for the TVPD confirmed today that, in spite of every effort, investigators have no new leads in the disappearance of Tamarind Valley realtor Bryan Sidney, 47, who disappeared over two weeks ago. The TVPD source did reveal that Sidney’s partner, Andrew McCall is no longer considered a person of interest in the case.

According to the spokesman, “Sidney may have panicked at the prospect of facing…”

Halloween 1991-June 1992

The House in Waiting

“Chicken!”

“Am not!”

“Chicken!”

“Am not!”

“Chicken…shit.”

With that single syllable, Brady Wilton crossed the invisible line that defined the boundary of off-handed squabbling and escalated the stakes immeasurably. There was no backing out now. Kyle knew it and stood ready to face the consequences.

“Chickenshit,” Brady repeated slowly, his tongue savoring each syllable as if he were trying to infuse as much authority into his boyish treble as his big brother Frank had in his sometimes warbly, mostly teen-age bass when he used that word.

“Chickenshit.”

“Am not!” Kyle Jantzen yelled, painfully aware of how lame that retort was next to Brady’s sudden explosion into near-adult near-obscenity. Of course, Kyle could easily have spiced his own phrasing up-he heard the F-word often enough from his Dad to know that nothing, nothing could top that one. But he also knew what his mother thought of the F-word, and the fatal sounds choked in his throat when he tried to slip them in between the two words. (He knew from close scientific observation of his father’s speech patterns that the F-word worked best like that, slipped in between two other words that weren’t that bad at all).

“Am f… — am not!”

“Then ya gotta do it.” Kyle glanced up the long stretch of street bordered by glowing porch lights and dotted at irregular intervals by an assortment of juvenile ghosties and ghoulies shouting ear-splitting choruses of “Trick or Treat” at each open doorway.

He let his gaze wander further upward, finally stopping at the dark house outlined in the evening light. Then he turned his attention back to Brady, at this point in his short life bravely disguised as a gory mummy trailing shrouds of ragged, dusty, pukey mummy-stuff (otherwise known as one of Mrs. Wilton’s old white sheets ripped into long strands and stained with mud and ground-in ketchup that Kyle could smell a dozen feet away-the odor threatened to break the illusion but somehow he didn’t care).

“Now?” Kyle’s voice took on a whining pitch that contrasted with his All-American-hero’s black and silver cowboy outfit, complete with hat, holster, and twin silver six-shooters.

Brady nodded. “Now…or you’re a chickenshit for life.”

Kyle nodded in return. That was the way it would be. Once branded, always branded. It didn’t matter that Brady was Kyle’s best friend in the world, or that they had lived their entire nine years side-by-side in two of the dozen or so homes that had dotted this part of the valley before new houses started cropping up all over, covering favorite fields with asphalt and concrete and boringly tame lawns, enclosing wild bike trails and impromptu baseball fields with faceless slump stone fences, appropriating for faceless new people the scattered oak trees just made for small boys to climb on lazy, sunny, summer afternoons. Kyle and Brady lived across Bingham Boulevard from the Charter Oaks, and even though Kyle would have died for Brady and Brady would have died for Kyle-they had actually promised in blood to die for each other-Kyle knew that if he chickened out now, Brady would be honor-bound tell all the guys at school on Monday. That was the way the world went.

“Kyle wouldn’t do it,” Brady would stage-whisper to Bobby Marx or Jimmy Sanderson or one of the other kids. “He was too chicken.”

Out of deference to the decorum of school-or more likely, out of fear of Miss Robinson’s sharp hearing, capable (as most of the boys knew to their sorrow) of penetrating like radar to even the farthest corners of the schoolyard-Brady would probably leave off the offending shit, but what was left would be enough to make life a living torment for Kyle. So in spite of his hesitation, he was already dismally aware that he really had no choice at all.

In fact, Kyle knew that had already used up his quota of choices for the night when Brady suggested that they cut short their Trick-or-Treating.

“This stuff’s for babies,” Brady announced after only ten minutes of raiding outstretched bowls filled with little squares of Dubble-Bubble gum and glittering, cellophane-shrouded lollipops. “And besides, I found out where Mom hid our stuff this year.” He reached into his mummy-bindings, fumbled in a hidden jeans pocket, and pulled out a handful of paper-wrapped candies. “I got lots more in my room.”