Tim Curran - Resurrection

Craig swallowed.

He knew what that was all about. It was some kind of tragedy, all right. Lily had herself a twin sister named Marlene who, it was said, wasn’t much more than a barfly living off the state. Once she’d been married to some rich guy over in Elmwood Hills, some real estate mogul named Bittner. Even had a kid out there somewhere. Swam with the uppity-ups. But that was ancient history. Story was, her husband decided he liked men better than girls and Marlene started hitting the sauce and spreading her legs for anything with a dick and that was that.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E, as Tammy said.

Since then, nothing but booze and drugs and all the wrong sort of men. Went right down hill. People said she’d been institutionalized more than once and that was just a damn shame because her sister Lily was just the salt of the earth. But that’s the way it ran with twins sometimes, just like on TV: one good and the other…well, not so good. Like maybe there’d only been enough eggs to make one really good omelet and the other was kind of runny, wouldn’t set right. Marlene had cracked up for good, though, laid open her wrists with a paring knife and then called 911. Word had it that when the cops got there, they found her on the back porch in a rocking chair, covered in her own blood, just as dead as dogshit. Word had it she was still warm, that the rocking chair was still moving when the boys in blue stepped up onto that porch. Some said she was smiling, too.

Craig sucked something into himself and knocked on the door. Lily answered right away. She was looking thin and her eyes were just vacant.

“Mitch went to find Chrissy. He hasn’t come back yet. Have you seen Chrissy?”

Chrissy. Sure, that was Lily’s kid, Mitch’s stepdaughter. Truth was, Craig had not seen her in some time. She was a teenager now, fifteen or sixteen, he figured. Sometimes, in his job, you could just about mark a kid’s age by the magazines they got. Ranger Rick, My Big Backyard, and Highlights gave over to Mad magazine, Game Player, and American Girl, depending on the gender. Soon enough those were replaced by Sports Illustrated for the boys and Seventeen for the girls. So, yeah, Craig was picturing Chrissy closing on sixteen or so. Course, it was the same with parents. At first, they subscribed to everything under the sun. But soon enough, as the kids got older, the subs to Family Fun and Parenting ran out as they just wanted to pretend they didn’t have children.

“No,” Craig finally said, “haven’t seen her. You better stay inside, though, Lily. They’ll be back anytime now.”

The door shut and Craig, who was at times not the most sympathetic creature in the world, felt something inside him sink without a trace. Christ, Lily was a wreck. She had been, up to a few weeks before, the most outgoing person in the world. And now she had not only crawled back into her shell, she had closed the lid after her.

Craig started down the rainswept walk, noticing offhand that the rain itself had lightened up a bit.

He passed two vacant houses, was glad to see that he had no mail for the Darin’s because Lou Darrin, who happened to be the district school superintendent, was probably the biggest dickhead on his route. Craig wasn’t alone in his thinking. Mitch Barron had once described Lou Darrin as a prick wrapped in an asshole and then dipped in a cunt. Which was a very colorful way of saying that most pit bulls had warmer personalities.

Craig scratched his nose with his middle finger as a tribute to Lou Darrin.

Only one more house on Kneale Street and that belonged to Cindy Lee Mayhew, who was just as prime a peach as a man could imagine picking. And Craig was certain of this because he’d done an awful lot of imagining about Cindy Lee Mayhew. She was maybe 24 or 25 with legs up to her neck and high, sleek tits like cruise missiles anxious to bust out of their silos. Her house was flanked by Kneale Street and Court Avenue and the ladies on the block often called her the Countess of Court Avenue, that being “Countess” spelled without an O. No matter, she had long dark hair and flashing blue eyes and she flirted shamelessly with anything that had a dick, knowing as she had since her thirteenth year and her garden had bloomed, the wonderful magic she could work upon the opposite sex.

Cindy Lee had a little red Dodge Probe that she liked to tease Craig about. As in, Oh, I just love the feel of my shiny red Probe or a girl can’t get quite enough of a Probe like that. In the summer, she liked to wash her Probe in the driveway wearing jean shorts cut off almost to her crotch so you could get an eyeful of those long, muscular tanned legs. She completed the picture in a halter that barely held her bountiful charms in place, her hard and flat belly on luscious display. When she did that, she knew and knew damn well that every set of male eyes in the neighborhood were watching just as she knew that every set of female eyes were hating.

Yesterday, when Craig brought up her mail, she’d looked him dead in the eye, said, “Oh, you always deliver things wet like this?”

Oh, Jesus, it had been almost too much.

Today, unfortunately, she was not home. At least she didn’t come to the door as usual and this was a great disappointment for Craig. But his testosterone-charged imagination stepped in and saved the day. It showed him that, yes, Cindy Lee was home. In fact, she was in there lying on the couch, just as naked as naked could get, oiled up, tits glistening, one leg thrown over the back of the couch, busily sliding a finger into herself as she waited wet and ready for a certain postman to come and deliver the mail.

Craig stepped off the porch, keeping his letter bag in front of his crotch because he’d just popped a boner hard and straight as a walking stick. He was so preoccupied that he didn’t even notice that the rain had diminished to a drizzle or that the sky had taken on a weird ochre haze.

He rounded the wild rose bushes on the Court Avenue side of Cindy Lee’s house, studying those windows and hoping for a glimpse of her. When that sparkling yellow rain began to fall, he was caught out in the open. The first drops hit him like scalding water that he recoiled from and the next were like acid.

He dropped his bag almost instantly and looked up in the sky, thinking for one crazy moment that he was being drowned in lemonade.

But that was about all he had time to think, as that most peculiar and very corrosive rain ate holes in his face and hands and he tried to scream as his lips went to sauce. Steaming and making a gurgling sound in his throat, he stumbled over Cindy Lee’s rosebushes and fell dead on the other side. As he did so, one hand that had been covering his face pulled away and dropped to his side. Most of his face came with it. The rain stopped almost as soon as it had started and Craig laid there, his flesh oozing off the bones beneath like hot tallow.

He was the only one on Kneale Street who was caught in it.

Even Arland Mattson had gone in five minutes before it fell.

Given his essential curiosity, Craig died wondering what the hell it was all about. But that was one question he never did get an answer to.

When Tommy Kastle pulled his Dodge Ram into the Barron driveway, Mitch felt something grow inside him, spread out in his belly and take hold of him like it never wanted to let him go. He could have labeled it as fear or unease or a real ugly case of the whammy-jammies, but the truth was, although he felt it just fine, he could not necessarily put a name to it. Just a nasty sensation like needles growing in his guts that told him that not only would the worst things happen now, they would happen with a frightening regularity. And you had to be ready.

“You okay, Mitch?” Tommy said.