Haven Kimmel - Something Rising

She slowed. The thing in the middle of the road was about the size of a three-year-old boy and was picking at the stringy remains of something, raising and lowering its head. It was mostly in her lane. A turkey buzzard. She was getting closer to it, and she would be damned if she would swerve. She thought she’d go ahead and speed up, she’d go ahead and get thick into events with this bird. She didn’t care what they did or how foul they were, they could ravage all the carcasses of her county. But they weren’t going to boss her around in terms of driving. She was twenty feet from the bird and it didn’t move, and she was ten feet from it, a hot day and both her windows down, and just as she moved over—she did move at the last minute—the buzzard decided to take flight, and took flight. It spread its wings like an enormous black kite, and as Cassie passed it, the wind moving through the cab of the truck pulled the bird in through her window. For a single moment its lizard-skinned claws, its breast and face, were on her, one claw caught her forearm and tore it. She slammed on her brakes, and the bird tumbled out. It took flight with an awkward turn and then a terrible, fluid ease.

Cassie parked the truck at the side of the road and got out, doubling over in the heat. That, Cassie decided, was what a nightmare would smell like; the unbelievably dense odor of decay, layer after layer, no end to it. Her forearm was bleeding, and she could still smell the bird on her clothes, and in her hair. She gasped, kept her head down. Beneath her the pavement shimmered.

“Where are the groceries?” Belle asked.

“I didn’t get to the grocery store,” Cassie said from the mudroom, taking off her work boots, her jeans.

“Why not? Oh my God, what is that smell, don’t even think you’re coming in here. What happened, what is that smell? Where are the groceries?”

“Get me some clean clothes, Belle.”

“You smell like. Not a morgue, not a cemetery, not a funeral home. None of those places smell. A slaughterhouse, no, I don’t know. A war crime. That’s what you smell like.” Belle picked at a scab on the back of her hand, under which there was an imaginary blackberry thorn that she had been trying to remove for a couple of years. She was wearing Laura’s shoes; every time she took a step, her feet slid out.

Cassie remembered the poem in the pocket of her jeans, removed it, and put the jeans in the washing machine. “I could use some clean clothes here, Belle.”

“Did you, have you, did you roll in something?”

“And a towel. I’ll shower in the basement.”

“Please don’t go down there, Cassie, those stairs don’t have any backs on them, and I don’t like the way that bare bulb is, the way that bulb is. And I remember that shower, it’s just a nozzle sticking out of the wall, and you just stand there in the middle of the room, no stall or anything, there could be all sorts of, I think you should come on in.”

“In my room, Belle, clean clothes and underwear, a towel.”

“What is that, what’s on your arm? What happened to your arm?”

“I had a run-in with a buzzard.”

“Oh God. You’re going to get septus, septu-something, I can’t remember the rest, like a cat scratch, how did it happen, a buzzard? Did you say a buzzard, like a vulture, you mean?” For a long time Belle’s hair had been blond, but lately it had turned toward brown and was dry, she tucked it compulsively behind her ears. She was thin, thinner than Laura, her grocery lists always said: yogurt, celery, ice. Laura added: cigarettes, butane fluid, corn flakes. One of the scabs on Belle’s upper arm was bleeding, and a piece of toilet paper was stuck to it.

“It was squatting in the road like a three-year-old boy.”

Belle swallowed, picked now at her left arm. “A three-year-old boy?”

“Or a midget dressed all in black.”

Belle said nothing, looked away.

“It was picking at the strings of a rabbit.”

“A rabbit?”

“I passed it too close with my windows down, I thought it would fly away before I reached it.”

“So you were in a bit of a contest. With the vulture.”

“Sort of.”

“And you lost.”

“It would appear.” Cassie stood in the mudroom in her boxer shorts and sports bra, her arm throbbing. She remembered the grocery list, retrieved it from the jeans. Put them back in the washer.

“Should I get Laura?”

“No, you should get the things I asked for, along with some iodine and a bandage. I need to get this washed out and medicine on it.

“Should I call Poppy or Edwin Meyer?”

“No. You should think about the iodine, it’s in the upstairs bathroom, and a bandage, and some clothes and a towel for me.”

Belle nodded, then looked down and studied one of the imaginary thorns under her skin. “A little boy, you say? Or a dwarf?” She would write these phrases, Belle would, on slips of paper and save them.

“That’s right. I’ll shower, then go to the grocery store, then I’m going to Emmy’s. And bring me my cowboy boots, they’re next to my bedroom door. The ones with the two holes over the left ankle.”

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