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

What this meant was that she ended up tracking the movements of an action figure on screen, and that cued up last night for her, Dino’s seizure in his bed, and then she was leaving her cigarette curling up smoke from the ashtray. She didn’t even clock out, just raced straight home to wait on the porch for us.

Because she knew.

I’m not saying she was the perfect mom, but she would always pick us over whatever else there was. When we left the reservation, it was for me and Dino. Not for her. Unlike Dad, she wasn’t still living her high school years five years after high school. But she did have her own sisters, and one brother still alive, and aunts and uncles and cousins and the rest, kind of like a net she could fall back into, if she ever needed them all.

But she cashed all that in. Because, she said, she didn’t want either one of us drowning in water we didn’t have to drown in, someday.

Only, now, one of us, he was malfunctioning. And she was the only one who could run him to the doctor in the middle of the day.

We had to sit in the waiting room nearly until dinner, but the emergency room finally took Dino back to X-ray his third-grade body. Not for whatever misfire was making him zone out and seize up—that had to be in his head—but for the superhero foot Mom knew would be there. In the breakroom at work, she’d flashed on the action figure I’d had him bite down on. It was lying beside him in bed once he calmed down. And it had been missing one red boot.

In the breakroom, I spent all three of the dollars Mom had left, ate two honey buns and one hot chocolate from the coffee machine. I sprinkled grainy sugar from the coffee table onto the second honey bun, then, hours later, walking across the parking lot holding Mom’s hand, I threw up right in front of a parked ambulance and couldn’t understand what was going on.

Mom tried to pull me away from the vomit—puley honey-bun paste, runneled through with dark chocolate veins—but I pulled back, studied it, trying to make a deal: I would throw up that superhero boot for Dino. Please. It was my fault, anyway.

That’s not how the world works.

Dino was supposed to just keep eating like normal and wait to find that piece of plastic in the toilet. We didn’t have to watch for it, though. We could, the doctor had said, but really, the sign that it had hung up somewhere, it would be Dino’s appetite fading.

Except—what if his appetite started to go away because of whatever was happening in his head, to keep him from learning his numbers?

Mom was out of cigarettes, so she held on to the steering wheel with both hands and didn’t look into the back seat, even with the mirror.

After lights out, still trying to make deals, I snuck Dino’s one-footed superhero from his dresser, walked it into the kitchen and pried the vent up, dropped it down into that darkness, and then I tried to wait up for Dad, crossing the kitchen again, but fell asleep in the corner under the table and didn’t wake until Mom draped a blanket over me in the morning.

The whole next week was nothing. Dino kept eating as much as ever, Mom got another carton of cigarettes, and I started digging up what I told myself wasn’t a car from the front pasture, but a truck. The truck. Because ghosts need anchors in the physical, living world, don’t they? What might have happened was that, up on the reservation, Dad runs a truck too hard, throws a rod, so that truck gets left behind. But someone else picks it up, drags it down here with plans of using it for a parts truck, or maybe they have an engine from a car that’ll mate with the transmission.

What happens instead is that the truck gets left behind, and a landlord wants the place to look clean, so he scoops a hole in the ground with a tractor, then nudges that truck over in the hole, such that only one tire is sticking up, like the last hand of a drowning person. Give the sun and snow a couple years at that tire, though, and it’s down to steel belts, then nothing. Just a rusted old rim some stupid kid can bark his shin against one day and then remember later, once the dead start walking.

I dug for the whole afternoon, and what I had convinced myself was an axle housing spearing out from that rusted wheel, it turned out to be a pipe welded to it, with a single chainlink tacked to the top of the pipe buried twelve feet behind me. I’d seen a link of chain tacked to a pipe like that before, at my old school. This was someone’s old tetherball pole.

I stood it up. It rocked back and forth, settled, like waiting for what was next.

I had no idea what was next.

I looked to the house, to make sure Dino wasn’t sneaking off the porch, and the curtain in the window was just falling back into place.

I went cold inside.

Mom was at work.

I took a single step backward, just instinct, and then I was running for the porch and then up the front of the porch, not the steps, and through the door, into the darkness inside.

Dino was seizing in front of his favorite cartoon, and—I remember this as clear as anything in my life—getting across the living room to him, even though it was only ten feet, it was all slow motion, it was like the carpet was tall or I was small, and I was having to wade through, fight my way over, reach ahead because this was all taking so long.

There was spittle frothed all on Dino’s lips and his eyes were mostly back to the whites, and his fingers were going past double-jointed, his elbows pulling in, his pants hot with pee.

I forced my finger between his teeth, gave him that to bite on, and held him until the shaking stopped.

He came back in stages, like usual. By the end of it he was watching the next cartoon, hadn’t even realized yet that his pants were wet, I don’t think.

“Hey, man,” I said. “You see what I found out there?”

He looked over to me like just realizing I was there.

“Out where?” he said.

I tilted my head out front.

He looked back to his cartoon, like being sure this was a moment in the story he could walk away from, and then he stood with his bag of chips, and—this was what I was testing—he didn’t go to the window to look out front. He went to the front door, hauled it open, studied the pasture through the storm door.

“It’s a flagpole,” I told him.

By the time Mom made it home, we had a home-drawn pirate flag up there in the wind, more or less. Because we didn’t have enough black marker to make the pale yellow towel from the bathroom look scary, we’d used one of Mom’s last two black dish towels. The face and bones were masking tape.

I thought we were going to get swatted, but instead, we ate sloppy joes on the porch and watched the pirate flag whip in the wind and finally break free of its knot, lift into the sky, come down on the wrong side of the neighbor’s chainlink.

The dogs were on it right when it touched down. It probably tasted like a hundred and fifty dinners all at once.

“Hated that towel anyways,” Mom said, and leaned back in her chair, blew smoke up into the dusk for a long time, and for the first time, I think, I was happy to be living right where we were.

The feeling didn’t last.

That night—I want to say it was a dream, but I’ve never remembered my dreams. Or maybe I walk through them.

Nothing happened. That I knew of.

I just slept even though I hadn’t meant to, and woke in my bed, my feet not dirty or anything.

If Dino seizured in the night, he didn’t bite his tongue or hurt himself.

Everything was so good, really, that I figured it kind of compelled me to keep my end of a deal I was only just now suspecting.

“Dad’s back,” I said over cereal, through the hustle and bustle and cussing of a weekday before school.