Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

My concern now was that, by being early so as to be sure not to miss anything, I was also insuring that my feet would be awake by 2:49, and I’d be standing in the same waking level or depth I was standing in every other day.

At 2:43, the skin on the outside of each of my feet started to tingle and pinprick. I hotfooted it back and forth without thinking, then just stood there looking down at what was happening. Circulation. It was ruining everything.

I could gamble that it didn’t matter what my blood was doing, and whether that blood was somehow connected to my brain in a way that nudged my vision over just enough, or… I did it, I sat down right there and tied my legs off one more time, tighter than before, and pulled the rope between my teeth instead of knotting it like last time.

This time, it hurt. I think it was because all the blood that had just got to go back where it was supposed to have been, it had only been starting to make the turn, suck back up to my heart, but now I was shutting it off again. It felt like my feet were balloons. When they weren’t supposed to feel like anything.

I pulled tighter, closing my eyes, leaning back to do it, and then jerked forward when our dog Chuckhead brushed my bare back with his mangy, matted coat.

An instant after that, I remembered that Chuckhead hadn’t come with us down here. He was living on the streets now, was trying to put on fat for winter, or else becoming fat for one of the bigger dogs.

Meaning?

I twisted around, letting the jump rope sling past my mouth, the handle taking a chunk of lipmeat with it, but I was alone. It wasn’t the air conditioner or the fan, either. Mom kept the fan in her room mostly, and the air conditioner parasited onto the back window behind the TV was rusted shut.

I stood, forgetting I was supposed to be watching for some wavery version of headlights in front of the house.

Had it been a feather that brushed the skin of my back? The ermine cuff of a fancy moccasin? The lightest brush of a porcupine quill from a bustle?

Had my dad reached down with his fingertips to touch the back of his oldest son, because that was the most he could do?

I reached my hand as far around as I could.

Another thing I’d learned at school, it was “canteen kiss.” It’s when you drink after a girl you like, or she drinks after you.

This was like that, I guess.

If my dad had touched me, then there was some kind of countdown where I could touch where he’d touched, and it would matter.

It was two-fifty. Then it was three. I had school the next morning.

I policed my area, being sure there was no evidence of my nocturnal activities—no explanation would cover me out here, mostly naked with a jump rope and a prayer—and walked the uncreaky parts of the floor back to my room, stopping to check on Dino for good measure.

He was spasming in his bed.

It wasn’t the first time.

Mom swore she’d not had a drop of anything while carrying him, but still, and lately more and worse, he was kind of… It was like there was something in his head not quite making a complete connection. Like the way he wasn’t learning his numbers or his letters when, by the third grade, he definitely should have. The school had him on some special learning plan already, but there was talk of special classes now, and special teachers that talk so soft and nice it’s terrifying, like they’re about to eat you.

At the bus stop, if I didn’t stop it, the other kids would push him back and forth between them like playing pinball. And Dino didn’t mind. He liked being part of the game, I think.

The last month or two, though, he’d started zoning out in the middle of meals, or while watching a game show, or just while standing looking out a window.

And now this.

“Mom,” I called out, just loud enough to wake her, not loud enough that she’d hurt herself trying to crash down the hall, “Dino’s having another seizure.”

This would be his fifth or sixth. That we knew about.

By the time Mom got there with the warm rag she was sure helped, I had the leg of one of Dino’s superhero action figures between his teeth. In the Western movies, they always use a belt or a wallet in the mouth. It’s never for a seizure, it’s usually for a bullet, but the principle’s the same, I figured.

After a few minutes of it, Dino settled down.

I stood to go to bed.

“What were you doing up with that?” Mom said.

I looked down to the jump rope evidently still hanging around my neck.

“Water,” I lied, like that was any kind of explanation, and then made good on that lie, felt my way to the sink.

On the way back across the linoleum of the kitchen, my bare foot kicked something that rocketed away. Something light and plastic and round.

My heart registered it the moment it hit the wall under the table, and then my hands reacted just about the exact instant it tapped against the roulette wheel of the heater vent in the floor.

My mouth named it while it was still falling down that ductwork: “Bead.”

One single bead.

It was as big as the whole rest of the world.

After school, I held Dino’s hand as soon as the bus pulled far enough away. If anybody saw, it wouldn’t help his cause any, I didn’t think. Probably not mine either, but I at least had the idea—mostly from action movies—that I could go wolverine, fight my way out of any dogpile of bodies.

This is something all Indians think, I think: that, yeah, we got colonized, yeah, we got all our lands stolen, yeah yeah yeah, all that usual stuff. But still, inside us, hiding—no, hibernating, waiting, curled up, is some Crazy Horse kind of fighter. Some killer who’s smart and wily and wears a secret medicine shirt that actually works.

Just, if you say this to anybody, you kill that Crazy Horse you’re hiding inside.

So, you walk around with this knowledge that he’s there if you ever need him.

But, also, you try not to need him. You wait till the bus is a plume of dust before taking your little brother’s hand in yours while you both walk past the neighbor’s house. It’s a ramshackle affair that might have been a tack shed originally, or maybe a camper with the wheels buried. There’s chainlink all around the property, and that’s usually high enough to keep his four dogs in. Dino walking in his jerky way, though, that activates whatever predator instincts those dogs still have, and they come at the chainlink hard, sometimes even bloody their face on it.

Me holding his hand, it was keeping his jerkiness under wraps, so the dogs just barked, didn’t gear down into killer-snarl mode.

Again, we made it, and, to prove to Dino that we’re not complete wimps, right at the end of the chainlink, I started making a hurt-rabbit sound in my throat, so that my mouth didn’t move—so that anybody in that ramshackle tar-paper house with the three galvanized chimneys wouldn’t see that I’m doing anything.

But the dogs knew.

They exploded against the fence but it was taller at the corner, from the remains of what had probably been a chicken coop back in 1910, and that was all they could do: bark. If they knew to double back, they could have cleared the fence, hamstrung us halfway to our porch, have a midafternoon kidmeat feast. But dogs are stupid.

Anyway, it was Mom who hamstrung us.

She was waiting, wasn’t at work.

She ran out to scoop us up, was enough of a surprise in the middle of the day that I had to swallow that hurt-rabbit sound and kind of go limp, let her pack us into the back seat of our big heavy car.

What happened, she explained, driving and smoking, it was that in the breakroom at her work, one of the other mom’s kids had turned up sick at school, so he was at work with her, was wrapped in a blanket watching cartoons. The first thing this meant was Mom couldn’t catch the last fifteen minutes of the soap opera she claimed not to care about, really. The second thing this meant was that, tapping ashes into the big brass ashtray of the breakroom, she was now watching a whole new set of commercials. Ones targeted at an audience into robots and dinosaurs and fighter planes, not vitamins and hygiene and vacations.