Amelia Gray - Gutshot - Stories

The man sat at the table and gestured for her to join him. The lantern played shadows on their faces. The air felt cold and pure, like inside the case at a flower shop. The man lit his pipe and leaned back.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Swale said. She took in the room. “How do you survive?”

The man shrugged. “I was minding my own when this big girl rolled up and swallowed me whole. Fortunately she took a few provisions with her as well. It’s not so bad, really.”

A sound like the rustling of wet paper drew Swale’s attention toward the townspeople. The snake’s skin had begun to regenerate, stitching together and closing the gap. She saw one of the engineers reach out tentatively and draw back.

“I ought to go,” Swale said.

“You might stay for dinner.” The farmer dug into a box at his feet and pulled out a tin of trout, placing it between them like a jewel. He pulled on the hair at the back of his neck as he watched for her response. He seemed kind, really, and she hadn’t eaten in some days. The sound of the townspeople ceased as the scales sealed up around them.

“All right, then,” Swale said.

The snake began its slow progress out of town. The monumental shifting motion, a silent quaking of the earth, set the dogs to howling. The bank walls trembled and the schoolhouse awning crashed to the earth. On the outskirts, the orchard men woke from their drugged sleep to find the snake had taken out a series of apple trees before it found the road. Its tail lashed against the church, crushing the façade and leaving a trail of glowing scales like fireflies in the young night. It was only then, after the hazard was gone, that the people of the town saw the deep divide it had carved between them.

I think it’s a whale’s heart. I saw one in science class on a video, and I asked Miss Prichard if there was any kind of animal bigger than a whale and she said there was nothing bigger than a blue whale, so I figure that’s what it is, a blue whale’s heart, here in the living room, as wide as a car. One of the kids at school says You would be cool if you weren’t so stupid, and I think like Yeah, this heart is the same way. We came downstairs one morning and there it was, and Dad said whatever kind of heart it was, we needed to get rid of it.

These days when I get home from school, I get into the drawer in the kitchen, where our three knives wait in a shoebox lid. The knife he chose for me has a thin blade and I’ve got a good technique on it now. I take up one of the buckets and head for the living room.

My brother pretty much only gets a knife so he can feel like he’s helping. Me and Dad would get to work — Dad and I — and then Applebee would cry, even when Dad told him that boys in kindergarten do not cry. So we gave him a butter knife and told him to go for it. It calmed him down, and though he isn’t making much headway and doesn’t really need a bucket at all, he is happy and so we are happy, the three of us, working on the heart. Dad tells stories about hunting and describes different techniques of cleaning animals, which he says he used to do more of, like maybe every month.

Slicing into it gets worse every afternoon. In the first few days it was really bleeding and smelled like the trash behind the grocery store, which is to say not good, but then it dried up and the smell went away or maybe we got used to it. Then it got rubbery, and it was like cutting into a milk jug, and even Dad was having trouble and he had the big hunting knife that he once used on bucks. Sometimes he would be going at it and he would say Damn it, and then we would all kind of stop and he would say Sorry. He says it’s there because of Mom and I figure when we get it cut down enough she’ll be inside or at least we’ll get some clue about how to find her.

Dad rinses out Applebee’s lunch box and we take up our work without too much talk. He passes us our knives handle-side out, for safety, though it’s worth mentioning again that there is no way my brother can hurt anything or even himself. He would do more damage with a spoon, but he seems happy, so whatever. It’s good to work without having to talk about school. Nobody really cares what Applebee made in Crafternoon and he seems to be okay with that.

I have figured out a technique against the heart where I glide the knife in sideways like I’m cutting a fish open. I do this a few times and then there’s a dipped bit where Dad can come in and peel off the chunk that’s too high for me to reach.

We slice and drop. Once a bucket is full, we take it to the can behind the house and try to not make a big production about it if there’s a neighbor looking.

The heart is cold and dry on the outside but grows warmer the more we cut into it. It seeps a little onto the carpet, not blood but something else, thicker. As it heats up, it starts to really stink like a pile of dead centipedes after rain. Dad and I tie bandannas around our faces and I try to help Applebee put his on, too, but he’s a baby about it, which is totally expected, and then he steps in the stuff on the carpet and tries to walk into the kitchen and Dad tells him to not track a mess and then he cries for a while and Dad and I just stand there, staring at the heart in front of us, with these bandannas on like we’re wild hunters, like we’re waiting for a massive buck to walk into the living room and allow us to climb on from the couch and then carry us on his back over the horizon line and I say that I miss my mom and Dad says Sure.

I take Applebee upstairs and help him wash his feet in the tub. There aren’t any clean towels, so I dry him off with my shirtsleeve and then he gets his jams on and I tuck him in and turn off the light and he cries a little more and I sit with him for a while in the dark. My hands smell like a dead whale basically. As he’s going to sleep I’m sitting there and feeling tired out from the work, and I feel stupid for wanting to go to sleep without watching any TV, but the heart is kind of blocking it. Applebee sleeps finally and I sneak out of his room and head halfway down the stairs to tell Dad that I’m going to bed, but he’s down there working on the thing still and kind of singing to himself and I figure I’ll leave him alone.

The gods decided that, once a year, they would have a weeklong contest and allow the one person who felt the most grief over the loss of a loved one to have that loved one return. They made a contest of it for their own curiosity and amusement and to boost morale in the beyond. It was a hit on the planet: Piles of flowers obscured the names on every cemetery grave and highway shrines glowed elaborate with electric light. A wealthy man held a parade for his mother, which spanned eight city blocks and included great rolling floats representing her spinach casserole and childhood home. On a flat expanse of farmland, a woman used sweaters and slacks to spell out ALAN in the event the gods passed overhead in a helicopter, as they sometimes did. Three girls scrubbed the grime from the corners of their friend’s locker and decorated it with streamers. Somebody’s grandfather placed a single rose on the pillow beside him and wept until he died, thoroughly missing the point. A child’s preserved room was filled with candy until the windows broke, spilling wrapped butterscotch and strawberry suckers into the street. Weeks later, on the third floor of an apartment building, a woman opened her door and saw that her little black cat had found his way home.

The sun beats the shit out of a dirty road called Raton Pass where the closest thing to a pair of matching earrings is a guy named Carl who punches you in the head with his fist. There’s a car on this dirty road and the car is as dirty as the road itself. It could vanish into the road because it is badass camouflage, but this car refuses to vanish. The driver of the car has taken it off-road and is spinning the shit out of its wheels, flipping endless bitches in this ugly desert.