Muriel Gray - Furnace

Josh lowered his voice and spoke quietly, never taking his eyes off those of the man opposite him. He was glad he was burdened with the child. It would be harder for him to hit Josh when he heard what was coming.

‘My name is Josh Spiller.’ He paused, and when he spoke again Josh’s shame was apparent in his voice. At least to him. ‘Are you Amy’s father?’

Some things happened to his face. Strange things, as if a dial had been implanted that could be turned to a variety of different emotions, and someone was spinning it. His eyes were a mixed carousel of grief, confusion, anger, and most perplexingly, fear.

‘Yeah.’

There was no rise in the intonation of the word that would have made it a question. Inexplicably, Josh wanted to touch the man, wanted to reach out his hand and hold his arm, to tell him it was okay and he understood. Instead he savaged him with his words.

‘I was driving the truck.’

The eyes that had registered that abnormal mix of emotions now became cold, opaque and unreadable.

‘What you want?’

Josh looked at the baby and then back up at that hard face.

‘To say sorry.’

The man took a step back into his house, shaking his head like Josh had drawn a gun.

‘You git off. You fuckin’ git off now. Right now.’

Josh lowered his eyes and stood still almost as though he were going to pray. In truth he was wondering feverishly why he was here. What lunacy was gripping him, making him behave so irrationally?

He could hear the man panting as he turned and made to leave. A babble burst from the figure in the doorway and Josh turned back towards him.

‘It was her fault for fuck’s sakes. The kid was seven days old. You hear that? Seven fuckin’ days old. I says to her to watch it, I says to her, but shit, she never listen to nothin’, that dumb bitch. Never listen. And it ain’t goin’ to be okay. I knows it ain’t.’

He started to cry. A horrible sound, all high and whining like his child.

‘She was so beautiful, my little darlin’. I sees her bein’ born. I ain’t done that with the other six. But I sees Amy come right here into the world and I tells her that everythin’s goin’ to be okay. But it ain’t. I couldn’t do what I had to do. Couldn’t do it. Maybe I’m not man enough, maybe I’m too much of a man. I just couldn’t. She was so little, know how I mean? I don’t know what she was thinkin’. She knows it ain’t goin’ to be safe. I don’t know nothin’ no more.’

He let his whining develop naturally into full-scale weeping, while Josh watched, horrified and baffled. The man was senseless, and the babbling insanity of his outburst was far more terrifying than the violent retribution that Josh had anticipated, and perhaps secretly desired. Still facing him, Josh breathed that he was sorry again, although this time it was more an expression of sympathy with the man’s hysterical condition than remorse for his actions. He backed off down the steps and walked crab-like over the lawn. The sideways walk became a canter, and as he turned his head away from the crying, ranting man at the door Josh broke into a loping run.

He kept running until he was three blocks away, where he stopped, bent over and put his hands on his thighs to regain his breath. The purpose of the visit had been unclear to Josh, an order that was impossible to disobey from some despotic part of his subconscious. But if its secret agenda was to free his head from the maze of craziness, then it had failed spectacularly.

What had he learned? Nothing. At least nothing except a heap more stuff that didn’t make sense. The baby was from a big family. The parents weren’t married. They looked poor and undereducated but they lived in a house a surgeon or a lawyer might be proud of. And the father. The father didn’t blame Josh the way any redneck mountain-bred man would, regardless of circumstance. He blamed the mother of his children.

Josh was sweating from his ludicrous, panicking run and he wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. Reality. Familiarity. Normality. There was only one place where those precious things resided. He had to get back to Jezebel.

She’d taken the call calmly, although there was a suppressed fury in her voice that seldom surfaced, a fury the man on the other end of the line recognized and silently prayed would be contained. But there was no time for displays of personal anger. There was work to be done.

A 10A scalpel blade had always been her favourite. Straight edge and not too short. She turned it over in her hand for a moment, feeling its weight, the coolness of the handle, and then positioned it delicately between thumb and forefinger ready to cut. As the blade pierced the skin, the subtle drag on the metal parting those tiny cells told her how sharp this instrument was. She sighed.

The waste. The infernal waste. The potency was not inexhaustible, and to remove a part now for such an unnecessary task was shambolic in the extreme. She used her left hand to steady the rest of the tiny corpse as she made the second incision. Too much. The blade had gone too far. She put the scalpel down carefully and picked up the engraved copper rule. It confirmed her mistake. The second incision was a fraction over seven inches. No matter. The two short cuts that would complete the skinny rectangle would redress the inaccuracy.

Seven inches by seven sixteenths exactly. It would dry smaller, but it had to be cut precisely. She picked up the scalpel and held it alongside the rule, running the blade down the straight edge, and with a steady hand made the final two cuts. This was where the 10A held its own.

A curved blade was useless at prising the skin from the flesh, but with the accuracy of such a straight point she could easily slice away the precious shell from its red fruit without tearing.

At last she allowed herself a smile. It was perfect. It would need washing and drying of course, but she had already prepared the solution. In only a few hours it would be completely ready.

The thud of a ball hitting the back yard wall near her window made her look up and stay still like a thing hunted. She waited on her side of the closed Venetian blinds, senses keen and on standby for action. The children’s voices were full of laughter and sunshine.

‘Oh my God. The window. You nearly hit the window.’

‘Get the ball, you jerk.’

‘Get it yourself.’

She waited. They were laughing, those young high-pitched yelps, growing faint as they receded to some distant part of the yard where their game was in progress, and mentally she ticked off the faces she knew matched the voices, counting how many there were, listening for the tiny dangers of playful curiosity or insubordination.

Then, certain it was safe, she put down her tools and lifted the strip of skin to the light. The light shone through its pinkness and she smoothed it between her fingers, assessing how much time it would take to dry. They didn’t have long. Maybe these few hours were not enough.

She took a deep breath at that alarming thought, then walked to the high table and began the ritual. She pulled the skin over the stone, pinning it at either end with the copper pins, and lit the candles. It was a time to concentrate, not to concern herself about the tasks of others, and so she closed her eyes and pressed a thumb to her forehead.

As she practised the words inside her head before they were spoken and could never be corrected or retracted, a fly circled the room clumsily and came to rest on its target.

Once there, with the only person in the room who would shoo it away deep in meditation, it crawled freely over the remains of a terry towelling babysuit stiffened with blood, and made ready to feast on the shining new rectangular strip of exposed flesh.