Mike Meginnis - Fat Man and Little Boy

“Barbara?” says the medium. She holds out open hands. The quills hang from her upturned arms as worms will hang from silk. “Barbara Trudeau, can you stand for me now?”

A stout woman with a kind face stands before the audience as she looks at the medium with something like love or acceptance.

“Your daughter wishes to speak to you.”

“My daughters are with me,” says Barbara. “Perhaps you mean someone else.”

“Your other daughter,” squeaks the medium. “The one you had before your marriage. The one you strangled.”

Barbara squawks. It was meant to be laughter, but no one laughs like that. She looks around herself again, begging support against the madwoman on stage.

Now the medium watches her own hands rear up and wrap themselves around her neck. They squeeze and twist like opening a bottle. The dead girl’s voice is not impeded by this grasping. It sounds as if it’s coming from a bottle. She says, “I just wanted you to know that, in spite of your faith and your prayers, not all small girls are blessed,” she drawls this last word—she drags it through the muck, “enough to live the hereafter in Heaven. It’s different than what you think. I watch you comb the others’ hair. Your new little girls, who are quiet and sweet.”

Barbara Trudeau watches the medium throttle herself and makes her face hard like a cliff. Her bosoms climb her body and fall. Her girls look up to her on either side, the younger tugging at her skirt, their hair festooned with paste costume jewels. The medium falls to her knees and thrashes in her robes as her face like the moon turns red and throbbing, as she squeezes and wrings her own neck.

“Do you ever think how it would be to do it again?” says the voice from a bottle. “When you comb, or pluck the lice from their scalps, or when there was no food, do you, did you wonder what your husband would think? Every day I try to haunt you, but I can never work out how. Now,” she says, and releases the medium’s throat. She plucks a quill from her own borrowed body. A bead of blood forms on the arm it came from, and likewise on the needle’s tip. The audience gasps as she wields it, stumbling forward on her knees and jabbing at the air.

The medium drops the quill on the stage and stands, and smooths her robes.

Barbara stands, hands made fists, squinting, grimacing, a bulwark against some coming wave. The younger girl tugs again at her skirt. Fat Man wonders, will she mount the stage?

“Sit down, madame,” says the medium, and she sits down as well.

“It isn’t true,” says Barbara, such that everyone can hear. After the whispers have stopped, and only after this, she sits down. She hugs her girls in both arms.

The medium says, coolly, “Audience members compromised by my communions with the spirits should take comfort in the knowledge that modern courts do not admit as evidence the testimony of mediums, soothsayers, or shamans of any kind.”

The medium holds her hand over the box as if to warm them. There is dead air in the auditorium. Little Boy digs his nails into his brother’s fat black-burnt palm. “What?” whispers Fat Man. Little Boy only squeezes. Fat Man shakes his head, but he feels it rising in him too—like black moss climbing his spine, like his brain becoming broth, like exploding.

The medium’s eyes open wide and her nostrils flare and the things all tangled in her hair jangle; the quills in her skin all stand on end, including, especially, the quill feather quail thing pricked between her eyes, which seems even to twist in some brief violent updraft. She looks directly into Fat Man, and then Little Boy, and then, most alarming, their joined hands.

She doesn’t say anything.

Waits.

She touches the box, and fingers the slot by which it might be opened, but does not open her box.

A man calls to the stage, “Can you hear my son?”

“Your son says to let him rest,” hisses the medium, waving him away with a flick of her arm like a lizard’s tongue. She points to another man in the audience. “Your father looks on you as a disappointment. He says your brother is the better man.” She looks to another. “Your sister is the one who makes the tree move when there is no wind.” Another: “It’s your dead mother rocks the cradle when you think it is the dog.”

She stands again and pushes back her chair so hard it falls, bouncing off the left jade pillar and clattering on the stage. She approaches the fore. Hands in fists. Quiver-chinned.

“Monsieur Blanc.”

The grotesque is erected.

“Your wife married you for your money. Knowing that, she wonders if you might not waste it all on destroying better men.”

He is a gargoyle trembling.

“That’s quite enough,” speaks Mr. Bruce.

“Leave a mourning husband be, you shrew,” says Mr. Rousseau.

“Albert,” says the Medium, her voice a bottled girl again, “I thought you would pay me more attention were I pregnant, and I convinced myself I was, but I wasn’t. Now that I’m gone, you should treat your wife better. And get your fucking feet off of the table.”

Handsome Albert grunts. Francine taps the ground with her heels.

The medium coughs into her hands. So much wet comes out of her mouth, hanging in strings and ribbons from her hands. She is shaking her hands, and some hits the audience, and some now are standing to leave, tripping over others’ feet, excusing themselves, all harrumph-harrumphing.

Fat Man feels a fart like the sun inside him. He tries to hold himself shut.

The medium wipes the rest of the wet on her robes, leaving vertical streaks. She sniffs back more. “Mr. Bruce,” she says, and both the thin one and the short one stand to show themselves. “Your father asks you to remember your prayers.”

The medium settles on Fat Man and Little Boy as if at the end of a long journey. Goosebumps form thick as shingles on them. She kneels at the fore, offering a hand to the audience.

“Fat Man. Little Boy. Come here. Let me see you.”

Fat Man looks to Little Boy.

“Don’t be shy,” says the medium.

Little Boy takes to his feet. He pulls up Fat Man by hand and elbow.

Francine bites her lip. “Don’t go up there,” she whispers, in English, so both the boys can understand. “She’ll tell awful lies about you.”

“It’s just a show,” says Fat Man.

“She’ll say it either way,” says Little Boy.

They walk the aisle. Fat Man hoists Little Boy onto the stage and pulls himself up after, huffing and puffing. He wipes his head dry with his sleeve. No one can see the manic way he clenches his fat sphincter to keep the gas giant inside.

“My name is Matthew,” says Fat Man, in French.

“I’m John,” says Little Boy, in English.

“Are you sure it’s not the other way around?” asks the medium, who weaves between French and English now and for the rest of her time on the stage, assuming each accent with only the slightest slurring transition, then returning, so that everyone who cares to follow can do so. Little Boy and Fat Man look to each other and wonder if the medium is right—they wonder if they’ve switched.

“I mean he’s John,” says Fat Man.

“And he’s Matthew.”

“Oh well then that’s different,” says the medium. She prods the Fat Man’s gut. “Women, guard your wombs. This man and this boy are haunted, haunted by tens of thousands. They killed them all, ladies.” She stomps the stage. “Now those people and children follow them wherever they go, jostling for a chance to be born again near them, whether as infants or livestock or rot. Do you want a ghost in your belly?” She sculpts a gut like a dome in the air before her own gut to demonstrate the concept. “If not, then leave—their collected haunts worm their way up inside you even now, and will soon demand nutrition from your unknowing bodies, which will give and give, indiscriminate. You and your daughters. Lucky Rosie, lucky barren Rosie. I see them coax your flesh but they cannot. They all speak to me at once. A gibbering chorus. What do you have to say for yourselves?”