Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

My wife went into the hall closet and took out our bucket of tools. I asked her what she was doing. She rummaged around and pulled out a socket wrench.

“Wait,” I said, but it was too late. She was down on all fours, bashing the skull as hard as she could. She hit and she hit and she hit, and when she was done, there were fragments of bone everywhere. She looked at me with wild eyes.

“Quick,” she said. “Help.”

I was brushing the pieces into a pile, trying to collect all of them together. If we weren’t diligent now, we’d never be rid of this thing. Months from now we’d still be finding tiny shards. What if we got a bone splinter? What if there were bone particles in the air and we breathed them in? She got out the broom and swept as thoroughly as she could and then told me to do the same. Then we wiped the floors with wet paper towels.

“I feel funny,” she said. “Something’s not right.”

She looked like she was bracing for a sneeze but the sneeze wouldn’t come. I gave her a Kleenex and advised her to blow her nose. Then I blew mine. We weren’t hungry anymore. I threw out the soup. We went to bed early. The next morning neither of us mentioned what had happened, but I saw her scanning the floor while we ate breakfast, and also later at lunch. That night I had another dream. I was pregnant again, but in this one whatever was growing in my belly could talk. It had a smooth voice, baritone, vaguely southern, muffled by my flesh, and it called me a coward. It called me a wretch. It spoke with the power of all the saints in heaven. It called me names I don’t even remember but still feel.

I told my wife about it in the shower.

“No skull to blame for it now,” she said. “That’s just your own inner weirdness.”

I worried that the voice in the dream had been my own.

After that we rarely talked about the skull, except as an anecdote at dinners and parties. Oh, yes, I’d say, she was wild-eyed when she destroyed it. Well, you should have seen him , my wife would say, he was such a baby. We’d make ourselves sound silly. We made ourselves sound temporarily insane. That always got big laughs. The more we told the story, the stranger we seemed. We told it until the people in the story were barely recognizable versions of ourselves.

Years later we sold the house and bought a newer one on the other side of town, in a better school district. We were unloading all our mixing bowls in the new kitchen when I saw it at the bottom of the box: the tooth, gray and small. Nothing had changed. We hadn’t changed.

“You know what we have to do,” my wife said. “So we might as well get it over with.”

We drove over to the old house. We hadn’t yet handed over the keys. Standing there one last time under those beautiful high ceilings, the floorboards creaking under our feet, I thought about how soon we’d be just another footnote in our neighbor’s pamphlet. My wife moved to toss the tooth into the fireplace ash but I stopped her. What if what was required was a little pageantry?

“Such as?”

I led us up to the attic, where we had, perhaps unkindly, left behind a few boxes of our junk and trash. We didn’t have any candles, so I jabbed the tooth into an ugly old teddy bear’s mouth, which made the bear look country-poor and sad and creepy. I placed it in the attic eaves alongside the daguerreotype. It felt right to unite them. I don’t mind admitting now that I performed a little farewell dance as I backed toward the door, where my wife waited with her arms crossed.

“You think that’s necessary?” she asked.

I shrugged: What was the harm? Just after pulling the light cord and leaving the attic forever I even whispered a few quick words into the darkness. When I turned, my wife had her eyes closed and hands clasped. A little prayer, she called it later, in the car, joking, though we both knew that’s exactly what it had been.

In his aisle seat near the front of the plane, Felix concentrates unsuccessfully on a crossword in the airline magazine, half finished by a previous flier. All the easy clues have already been answered and now he needs a six-letter word for a muzzle-loading tool. The third letter is m . He stares at that m , a bit dazed, doing his best not to think about what happens when they land in Atlanta. Rattling the ice in her cup, Laura leans over his magazine and peers down at the puzzle. “Ergo,” she says, and points at 27 Down. “Ramrod,” she says, and points at his m , and then, pointing somewhere else, “Pandora.”

He looks at that particular clue. First woman. “You think it’s Pandora? I was thinking it might be Evelynn. Eve was just a nickname, right?”

“Adam and Evelynn, a lovely couple, we really need to have them over for dinner some night soon. I hear Adam’s a terrific gardener. I hear Evelynn likes apple pie.”

Felix closes the inflight magazine and tucks it into the seat pocket. He looks around for a new distraction. On the television show Felix works for, Pets! , Gonuts the CGI Hamster has this thing he is always saying before climbing onto his metal wheel and running mindlessly. “Don’t get so stressed. You got to wheel it out.” Felix provides the voice for Gonuts. He doesn’t love recording different iterations of the same phrase week after week, but he has to admit the little furball is onto something in this case: life is not easy and without distractions you can make yourself crazy.

He munches on some dried apricots and asks Laura to close the blinds since the sun is so bright and hot across their laps. Her jean shorts are wedged high and her pale knees glow like two beautiful snowy peaks, the crease of her legs a tight valley. If he wanted, with the aid and cover of a blanket, he could walk his hand right up that valley. Would she resist? Probably. Not that she always insists on decency. There was the time in the changing room at Nordstrom’s. There was the night in the chair on the roof of their apartment building. But he won’t slide his hand between her legs. A Neanderthalic impulse, his mother would have called it. The fasten-your-seat-belt light blinks. The overhead bins rattle.

“I’m not going to finish this drink,” he announces, his whiskey and soda hovering near his lips. He has Laura’s attention. That’s all he wanted anyway. She watches him, amused, as he tips back the cup, the ice crashing into his teeth, the liquid draining out. “I’m not going to push this,” he says, and pushes the overhead button for the stewardess. “I’m not going to order another drink and fall down drunk on the tarmac like an idiot.”

“Tell me more about these red tights,” she says, and crosses her arms. “Does Hank wear them to bed too? I don’t get it. When does Bet wash them?”

Felix shrugs. “I don’t think he lets her wash them. That’s part of the problem. They’re stinky, I’m sure.” Hank, Felix’s four-year-old son, is obsessed with a pair of red tights from last year’s Halloween costume when he dressed up as a strawberry. In a few weeks he will start kindergarten, and Bet, his mother, is concerned about what the other kids might say. “Did you ever do weird stuff like this when you were a kid?” Bet has asked Felix on the phone. “I’ll bet you did. Hank is funny — just like you. The other day I found gravel in his juice cup. I asked him why and he said he likes his juice on the rocks. Can you believe that? Where do you think he got that from? When you get here, be sure to ask him about the sprinkler and the frog. It’s his best bit. You won’t regret it.” Bet is always doing this, insisting that Hank is funny, as if otherwise Felix would stop believing the boy was his.