Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

He jerked the glasses off and threw them across the room. When he turned, he could hear the footsteps in an adjacent room. Far too many footsteps.

At the next room he opened the heavy door (heavy as stone the door to his home) and was greeted by a shower of children’s shoes: high-tops, sneakers, black patent leathers, flip-flops, leather sandals, Buster Browns, Oxfords, Minnie Mouse slippers, skates, tap shoes—as they fell from upended shelves and splintered apple crates. He screamed a not very sackman-like scream as the shoes tumbled over his head and shoulders, soles slapping a staccato as if in footless dance. Yet even as he screamed he could still hear the high hysterical giggles of sung accompaniment gradually fading into the rooms beyond.

The sackman kicked his way through the knee-high piles of shoes into the disarray of the next room (crude children’s drawings of knifings, stranglings, and decapitations littering the floor like gigantic leaves), and then the next (piles of naked dolls, dark bruises and red tears painted on their faces), and the next (volumes of candid photographs of dead children, taken immediately before and after their last moments in this loathsome world, ripped and torn and tossed up into the cold drafts like confetti).

“Enough! Enough!” he cried, feeling uncomfortably like a timid schoolmaster who’s lost control of his class. “It’s fairytale time! You like fairytales don’t you?”

“Oh yes oh yes,” she murmured from not so far away.

He turned his head and staggered in fatigue, suddenly feeling old again. He was alarmed to find that he could not quite catch his breath. “Just let me… let me catch my breath… please…”

“No! I want my storyyyyyyy!” The little girl appeared at the end of the hall swathed in sheets stained maroon from dried blood (she’s been in my private bedroom!) and started running toward him. Startled, the sackman lost his balance and fell to the floor. As her laughter reached for an ever higher pitch he lifted his huge, child-killer hands to protect his face.

She pulled a round, flat object—larger than a dinner plate—out of the bloody sheet and threw it at him much in the manner of a Frisbee. He recognized it as a trophy he had made for himself many years ago. It broke into pieces on his arms, cutting and (gnawing) into his tender old flesh. He groped for the pieces on the floor and came up with handfuls of his children’s precious baby teeth which had been glued on to the trophy as decoration, and finally the larger pieces—part of what had once been a beautiful lily glued together from thousands of such teeth.

“You little bitch!” He scrambled to his feet and lunged toward her ghostly form. She backed away and backed away, tittering and chuckling, the snot running from her nose as she grew more hysterical. He almost had her within his grasp when she turned and ran. He lunged again, pulled the rotting sheet from her body, and crashed through the next door, huge splinters piercing his face, ramming through the loose flesh on his arms, hammering through knuckles and the webbing by each thumb, working themselves deep into his belly as if conscious and determinedly murderous.

They were in his secret bedroom (my heart!). The little girl in the tattered red dress jumped up and down on his bed, picking up the old blood-stained covers and tossing them into the far corners of the room. Oh, she’s found my secret heart!

“Can’t catch me now can’t catch me now…” she chanted breathlessly. The sackman could see that she had smeared herself with the rancid fluids of corruption from his bottle collection underneath the bed (even he would not have done such a thing—for him it was always enough just to know they were there beneath his reclining form). She stuck out her tongue demonically.

He tried to get up off the floor but each movement brought the sharp splinters deeper into his body. He knew she had done real damage to him because he had a vague sensation of soft, secret things tearing away inside him. But strangely enough all his rage had fled him. He felt too old for such anger. His mission, as always, was most important now. “Child… sweet child,” he implored weakly. “It is time for your story. Surely you want your story? Hurry! While I still have the strength…”

“I love stories,” she said quietly, but not looking at him. Instead she looked around at his bedroom. She was the only person besides him ever to be in his bedroom.

“All children love stories,” he replied. “Especially bedtime stories.” But still she wouldn’t look at him, intent on the walls of his bedroom, walls decorated with all the collages of his universe he had constructed over the years:

Along the bottoms of the walls were countless pictures of children, but with heads, arms, legs removed, eyes cut from their sockets, genitalia snipped and glued to their foreheads, ears and eyes glued over small, immature breasts, tongues affixed to the bottoms of tiny feet. The children were stacked and piled until they made a terrible weight at the bottom of each collage, where sometimes the paper was cut, and passages were made to other collages which were even more crowded with segmented children. Brown and red offal and old excrement had been smeared in and out of these segments for this was the world, this was the everyday ground human beings walked on, slept on, rutted and conducted their commerce on.

Arranged at eye level were various upright figures: roaches and mayflies and lizards and centipedes and dark birds. These were built from shapes outlined in charcoal, cut out, then arranged to construct the desired form, or sometimes they were photographs of world leaders—Stalin, Reagan, Thatcher, De Gaulle—with bits cut away until the hidden creature had been uncovered. Each held a knife or an axe or a sack or a pair of scissors, for these were the harvesters. Here and there their barbed legs or wings reached down into the collages below to snare a child and free it from its own corporeal filth.

But above eye level, further than a child could reach on his or her own, was heaven, where the walls had been scrubbed until they were practically no color at all. There the sackman had pasted small bits of paper. And on each piece of paper was scribbled the final words of a child he had personally harvested, liberated, discorporated, sent back. All the no please momma stop daddy yes I’ll be good your eyes why your hands can’t why Why WHYs, and prayers far more obscure than he had ever heard.

“You’re a bad man,” the little girl said, and grinned. A stare into the brilliance of the little girl’s grin and the sackman felt bathed in ice.

“No. No, honey. I’m the very best of men. You’ll understand that after I’ve told you your story.”

Then he grabbed her by one scuffed tennis shoe and began pulling her off the bed and into his bloody, splintered embrace. The little girl squealed as if it were a game. The sackman began to relax, because it was a game, the most important game she would ever play.

“This is a story about a little girl in a red dress,” he whispered from bloody lips.

“And you’re making it lots more redder,” she said moistly into his ear.

“Who never wanted to grow up,” he continued.

“I wouldn’t want to be like you!” She giggled.

“Stop interrupting,” he said firmly, and she snuggled closer to him, soaking herself completely in the blood seeping from his enormous lap. “Now that might sound strange to some people, not wanting to grow up, but this little girl was very smart, you see…”

“Very smart,” she interrupted, but he ignored her.

“…because she’d known lots of grownups in her time, and she’d learned what awful beasts grownups could be. They’d forgotten what it had been like to be a child, how very hard it had been, and it was this absent mindedness that had turned all the grownups into scaly, putrid monsters!”