Amelia Gray: Gutshot: Stories

“Remove these demons,” she cried, terribly hoarse.

The doctor glanced at her file and put it down. “I’m not sure how to begin,” he said, producing an otoscope to examine our ears. “Your record notes a rash and hair loss, but I wouldn’t jump to any conclusion that involves a demon or demons.”

“These boys—” she said, before Morris touched her with a gentle hand and removed her ability to speak. She jabbed at us, and we focused our thoughts until the blackness on her nail spread. Finger and nail dropped onto the floor like a crust of bread. The sick spread from her finger to her arm and she watched it, weeping in pantomime. The doctor began testing our reflexes with a rubber mallet and marveling at the transference of reflex.

“I wonder sometimes what it would be like to have a sons,” the kind doctor said. We laughed and laughed!

Your boyfriend’s dad taught us how to explode mosquitoes. All you needed to do, he explained, was flex your arm and some mechanism would lock the insect to expand until it burst. Your boyfriend’s dad was a contractor who worked on places in the neighborhood and lived on a street lined with unfinished homes. He said that all we’ve got is our minds and our muscle and so we ought to know how to use both. He would jab at your arm and say Isn’t that right, Joshua? And you would laugh and rub the back of your neck and agree that he was right.

The neighborhood was the type where all the houses went up at once, so fast that their wood all surely came from the same trees, sheetrock from the same stone. You let me tag along with you and your boyfriend and sometimes he gave me ten dollars to get us some cheeseburgers.

We tried the thing with the mosquitoes for months, skipping the sprays and creams that might ward them off. We never saw them get us. We were pocked with welts that stung under tanning oil. I remember running across unfinished rooftops, jumping from house to house, but that wasn’t right. It was your boyfriend’s dad who did that and only once, striding a gap onto a garage extension to avoid climbing down and climbing back up. He was strong and cocksure, and seemed fairly confident in his own immortality. I’m still attracted to any man who can whistle.

Your boyfriend was all right. He played the violin. The three of us were lying on a roof once and he said that after death your consciousness snaps out and that’s all. I thought he had fallen asleep. You said that when you died you wanted your ashes cast into marbles and distributed to your family. I would get the one that looked most like a galaxy, and your boyfriend would get the second. If anyone died, you said, it wouldn’t be one of us. He shrugged and said it didn’t matter either way. We climbed down and looked at the beams where one of the guys had drawn maybe one thousand separate pairs of tits. I was reading a book in school about a girl who folded paper cranes and so this made sense.

* * *

The three of us rode our bikes to the community pool and watched the girls playing tennis. I always found three or four spokey dokes for my bike in the playground by the court, the plastic nibs half buried like they had grown there. We once broke a ramp constructed at the base of a hill for our red wagon and that was the worst thing that happened to any of us, as far as I knew or cared. The idea that everything was fine laid the delicate foundation of my life.

You figured out the mosquito trick right at the end of the summer, before you went to high school and I stayed with the little kids. It was the sweet spot of August and almost my birthday. We were sitting in a half-finished house at the time, drawing in the wood dust on the concrete, when you called my name and I saw it was stuck in your arm, at the prime point of your bicep, placid and feeding, swelling like a tick. Once it burst we shouted with joy. We spread its mess around with our fingers. Afterward I would wonder why the mosquito didn’t fight harder against your skin, why it didn’t strain to free itself, if it maybe knew how special you were.

The doctor chewed on his lower lip as he worked. “That explains it,” he said.

Mark and the doctor looked into the metal pan together, in which a lump of bloody tissue rested, plain as the afternoon and free from Mark’s anesthetized shoulder.

“I don’t see it,” Mark said.

“There it is.”

They leaned in close. The tissue was perforated by white flecks and a ribbon of darker stuff.

“There’s a nearly functional endocrine system here.” The doctor ticked up a tag of flesh. “Explains your mood swings. There’s a little heart, right there. And look,” he said, coming away with one of the white flecks balanced on his blade. He held it up to the light.

“A tooth,” Mark said.

The doctor clapped him on the back. “After all that, a goddammed resorption. Never thought I’d see one outside a book.” He gave the pan a gentle shake, revealing a rib cage as delicate as a bird’s.

“Can I keep it?” Mark asked.

“Her,” said the doctor, snapping off his surgical glove. “I mean, technically. I’ll get you a jar.”

* * *

Mark tried buckling the jar into the passenger seat but it slipped too much against the belt. It rolled too loose in the glove compartment against the car-care manuals, and so he held it between his legs as he drove, snug against his jean’s crotch.

At home, he cradled the jar. The doctor had filled it with a fluid that suspended the mass without dissolving it. Observing the contents, Mark was reminded of a time he went fishing and found himself sitting close to a slop bucket of fins and eyes.

He called his mother. “When you were pregnant with me, did they say you were going to have twins?”

“Of all the items you could have addressed,” she replied and hung up.

Though he was proud of it, he didn’t want to display the jar on the mantel like a trophy buck. Instead, he placed it on the sill in his kitchen. On fine mornings he enjoyed standing at this window and observing the sparrows on the rail, and now he had a companion.

The afternoon sun caught the curves of glass and sent an array of soft light through the jar and into the room, making both the jar and the room beautiful. It seemed wrong to leave the contents unnamed, as a mass of tissue or a fetus, but equally wrong to give them a kind of birth name, for they had not been born in any traditional sense.

“But you were birthed,” Mark said. “I birthed you, and you came to include a jar and an amount of liquid. And so I will call all of you Katherine, after my mother.” The cloudy fluid revealed a section of spinal cord floating like a salt-stained twig. Outside, one of the sparrows flung itself into the snow and died.

* * *

The winter sun had been kind to Katherine, but the warmth of spring was too aggressive. Mark touched her one morning and found she was warm indeed, enough to be in danger, and so he moved her to his bedside table. She was kept in good company there, alongside his favorite books and that sweet sparrow he had taken immediately to be preserved, wings spread, tipped slightly groundward in the spirit of its final flight. The sparrow’s body, elevated on a copper pike, served as a protector of Katherine.

Mark sat up in bed, reading aloud to Katherine and the sparrow. “The poet parted the crowd to approach the loudest man, a worker who had raised his voice out of a professional concern,” he said. “The poet clapped his hands on the man’s shoulders.”

The sparrow’s pushpin eyes followed along with the words.

“You go ahead,” Mark said.

The sparrow was silent for a moment and then spoke: Raise high the cathedral walls with oak and pine. Make a church that becomes an ark when turned. Load the ark with men and women and set it to sail. Paint our city in blue and yellow. Paint it to face the sun and sky, paint it to greet the bay.