Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

“None of this matters anyway,” Mary said. “I broke up with him. I didn’t love him. I barely even liked him.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Mary sighed. “I did some things I’m not proud of.”

“What sort of things ?”

“He liked to — this is embarrassing — make movies.”

“Oh, Mary.”

“I know. It only happened once. He says he taped over it — but still.”

“Don’t provoke this man,” her mother said, meaning what? Provoke him how?

“Just don’t do anything you’ll regret,” her mother said. She thought the best and wisest course was for Mary to let it go. To move forward with her life. To just forget the tape.

• • •

He is halfway in a dream when his sister announces that it’s time for another escape attempt. The dream is about fishhooks. Well, not about fishhooks, but it involves them. He is looking for one in the bottom of a tackle box. Brooks hasn’t gone fishing in more than a year, probably not since his last trip to Nicaragua. His company, which he started with a friend a decade ago, manufactures medical devices and has a factory outside Managua. The last time he was down there, Brooks took a few extra days and chartered a deep-sea fishing boat out of San Juan del Sur. He caught a striped marlin, though it was the captain who did the hard work, setting up the rod, finding the right spot. All Brooks did was wait and take orders, reel when the captain yelled to reel. Going deep-sea fishing is, actually, kind of like how he lives now. Sure, he can fry a few eggs, but only if there is someone there to help him, to keep him on task, to clean up the mess when his hands fail him, to calm him down when he loses his temper, to reel him in.

“You have gunk on your face,” Mary says, and wipes it away with a wet thumb. “I think it’s old soy sauce.”

“Are you sure we should go for it again?” he asks. “How long will the owners be away? We could survive in here for days.”

“No,” she says. “I got us into this mess. I’ll get us out.”

Brooks knows this is the truth, that his sister is to blame, but he can’t let go of the feeling that he should be masterminding the escape. After all, he’s the big brother. He’s always taken care of her. That’s just how it is. His former self, the Old Brooks, up there somewhere, would know exactly what to do in this situation. Old Brooks sees a solution, surely, but he’s keeping quiet about it. He’s enjoying all this confusion. “Try not to think about who you were before the accident,” Dr. Groom has said, “and concentrate on who you want to be now. Accept the new you.” Sometimes Brooks wants to toss Dr. Groom out the window.

Mary opens the pantry doors and peeks out into the hall. “I don’t see anything,” she says. “Maybe they’ve gone upstairs.”

He follows her to the kitchen entrance. She turns, a finger to her lips, but he has not made any sound. He watches her inch into the kitchen. To his right is a refrigerator. Photographs and appointment cards attached to its white side with magnets. In one of the photographs are two children, an older boy and a tiny girl, on a seesaw. Across the bottom someone has written, What goes up…

“Stop moving,” Mary whispers, at least forty feet of tiled floor left between her and the exit.

But Brooks sees something on the wall, something that might help them: a cordless phone. Mary can just call her friend and get the safe command, and all this will be over. He reaches out for the black phone with the glowing blue screen, unhooks it from its cradle. When he turns to show it off to Mary, he realizes that she has come to a full stop at the entrance to the living room. “Easy,” she says.

Through the door he sees them, the dogs, heads low, tails stiff, coarse black fur Mohawked up along their backs. Is it possible that the dogs have set an elaborate trap for them?

Mary inches backward. The dogs growl. “Baa, baa, black sheep,” she whispers. “Bibi Netanyahu.”

Brooks could probably make it safely back to the pantry. But not Mary. She’s too close to the dogs, too far from the pantry. Behind him, on the stove, is a grimy cast-iron skillet. He grabs that. “Top of the fridge,” he says.

“What?” Mary sneaks a look over her right shoulder. The dogs come at her with their clicking nails and soggy growls. She lunges at the fridge. She tries to use the ice dispenser as a foothold, but the freezer door swings open. She slams it and scrambles up onto the soapstone counter, knocking aside cookbooks and an old Mr. Coffee pot that shatters across the tiled floor. From there she pulls herself up onto the fridge. Brooks is two steps behind his sister. Phone in hand, he flings himself onto the counter, belly first. He feels like a spider with all its legs ripped out. He reaches for a cabinet knob. One of the dogs locks on to his ankle, and he screams. He writhes, swinging the phone back and forth. When the phone connects with the dog’s head, he loses his grip on it and it goes clattering to the floor. But he’s free now. He’s able to clamber up beside his sister.

They have to crouch on the dusty fridge-top or else their heads will touch the ceiling.

“You’re bleeding,” Mary says, bending down to his ankle.

“Don’t bother with it now.” He looks down at the dogs, at their giant stinking faces. One dog is on the floor whimpering, and the other is pogo-ing up and down the front of the fridge, knocking loose all the photos and appointment cards. Its back paws come down on the phone and launch it sideways.

“I dropped it,” Brooks says. “The phone. Sorry. We could have called your friend.”

Mary is prodding at his ankle unscientifically. “Don’t worry about it. That wouldn’t have worked anyways.”

“Why, he’s out of the country or something?”

“Well—”

“He doesn’t know we’re here,” Brooks says, surprising even himself.

His sister looks at him as if she were the one with the dog bite.

• • •

The night Wynn first brought out his video camera they were in Myrtle Beach at his family’s beach house. Mary listened to the waves through the open window as Wynn fiddled with a tape. Then he told her to start playing with herself. Already she could anticipate the regret. Maybe that was part of the fun. Her friends had warned her about Wynn. They’d heard strange things about him. Perverted things. According to a guy who used to work with him, he cheated on his wife constantly. He’d been with a hundred women. Probably his dick was contaminated, her friends joked. At least make him wear a condom, they said.

Did she enjoy making the video? A little bit, sure. For the newness of it. But not for the sex itself. It didn’t even feel much like sex to her. It was like something else. She was a planet, way out in space, out of its orbit, and he was an unmanned spaceship, taking measurements of the atmosphere. She was not suitable for habitation. The pillowcase smelled like potato chips and sweat. She wondered if he’d even washed them, if maybe this was one of the kids’ bedrooms. He smacked her bottom, and she almost laughed. It wasn’t risqué, it was silly.

She broke off the affair a few weeks later when he proposed a new video, this one in his bathroom at home. His wife was at work and the kids were at school. He already had the camera out.

“Do you ever watch these later?” she asked.

“Not really,” he said. “It’s not about that. Making them is what’s fun. It’s fun, isn’t it?”

She was in a white towel, examining the shower. There was blond hair swirled around the drain. His wife’s, no doubt. One of the drawers was halfway open, and she could see hair products and cotton swabs and a box of tampons. She opened the medicine cabinet and found three different kinds of antidepressants.