Mike Meginnis - Fat Man and Little Boy

“Mhm,” says Claire.

“You’re breathless,” says Matthew.

“You know the word breathless.”

“Let’s find a new cabin.”

Perhaps emboldened by the chase, perhaps knowing how it would sting her lungs to find the air to object, he leads her by the hand. His hands are smaller than hers. She is taller than he. Once inside the cabin, Matthew pushes the table against the wall and stacks the chairs on its top as in the previous secret cabin, which still has their bikes. Claire pushes the sofa against the opposite wall, moving one end and then the other in several seesaw motions.

When they’re done they sit in the center of the room, legs folded, and wait for their air to come back, really breathing for the first time in what might be an hour. Claire coughs harshly. Matthew closes his eyes and raises his arms almost parallel to his shoulders, feeling the air.

Feeling the quiet.

A long while later they can speak again.

“See how good it feels?” he asks her.

Claire’s been tormented by every second of silence. She hated it. Couldn’t he tell? Some of us may not have a lot to say but some of us have ideas. He kisses her. She laughs. He takes it all wrong. She shakes her head no and kisses him. It’s fine. They touch each other. She rubs him through his shirt. He touches what there is of her breasts. He’s terrifically hungry in his kissing, in his feeling. After every kiss she has the urge to ask him is this what he’s wanted—is this why he’s pushed her? His breath tastes like fried egg white. He’s got gas inside him, waiting to push out, she can tell. Little belches between kisses, facing away. She doesn’t mind so much. It can be that way for her too, though today she’s almost calm, perhaps because she knows he’ll do everything she wants and nothing she doesn’t. He runs his hands over her sides. She feels her ribs resist his fingers. She reaches between his legs. Squeezes, her fingers beneath, cupping, her thumb above, pressing.

Soft.

He’s soft. Like a slug.

“Don’t.”

She curls her fingers more tightly.

“Don’t,” he shouts, and pushes her away. Too hard. She raises her hand to slap him. He cowers. She reaches out for him again. He scoots away, beginning to cry. “I can’t. I never, ever can. Don’t,” he heaves. “I can’t.”

When she tries to ask him what he means he tells her to shut up.

She leaves him there. Walks home, in the dark, her bike trapped behind the door of one in a hundred anonymous, identical cabins. All the wives and husbands are indoors—she can feel them on the sticky air, working to conceive.

Days later, when Peter’s flu has left him and his strength is back, he comes to see her at night, while her mother is out on one of her dates. He comes to her and they kiss. He is becoming a man. His back has grown broad, his arms muscled, and, when she touches it, when she grasps it in her hand, his prick is hard. They breathe into each other’s mouths. His breath is like a heavy bread. They are both waiting until the day, the inevitable moment, where she will flick her tongue across the cleft of his upper lip.

He asks her what she is thinking. He kisses her earlobe, bumping foreheads painfully. They both ignore the impact. That happens sometimes, like the gas-bloat of a stressed stomach. She doesn’t answer. She is thinking how Matthew doesn’t like all the things they like. This, for instance. Matthew doesn’t like this.

Fat Man sees their car first. Short Mr. Bruce and thin Mr. Rousseau, the police from up north, investigators of the Blanc death, or, as they see it, murder by abortion. The car is a nice one, white, with shining wheels and a quiet little engine. It wears its roof like a hat. It isn’t obviously a police car or not a police car. The other guests, the husbands and wives—some now mothers, bumping babies on their knees or feeding them with newly-swollen breasts—wave at Mr. Bruce and Mr. Rousseau as they approach, assuming them to be new guests, potential friends. Mr. Bruce smiles in the passenger seat. Mr. Rousseau scowls as he drives—the car does not come to him naturally.

Fat Man ducks into the kitchen. “They’ve come,” he says to no one. The cabin is empty. There are many dirty pots and pans he has been meaning to wash. There is a boy who comes down to wash them in the evening, when he’s freed from chores at home. He doesn’t come long enough to do it all though, and he’s all Rosie is willing to hire. She brought on a full-time maid, as Little Boy has failed to keep pace with the growing needs of the guests, but she didn’t like doing it, and often mentions the new expense to Little Boy, though the hotel is thriving now thanks to the medium’s cult.

Fat Man scrubs the pots and pans. He begins with a heavy black one. Its bottom has a scorched rind, a mottle of orange and carbon. He spoons it into the garbage can, scooping divots in the sauce. He turns the pan sideways and digs deeper, pushing more into the can. A mold is growing on the rind. He scrapes away the mold as well, cursing, wiping sweat from his eyes.

Meanwhile the other pots and pans grow differently colored molds, plants, and flowers. A little tree buds in a cup lined with cream; a lily in a pan littered with stale scraps of cornbread; a fat mushroom cap atop a thin, twisting stem in a bowl full of decomposing fruit. The growth ripples outward from Fat Man through the cabin, those things closest growing most quickly.

This, he thinks, is surely evidence against him. It explains everything. It reveals him. He empties all he can into the garbage, shaking scum, flower, weed, little tree, seed, fungus—all of which grow as he shakes them loose, and as he adds to the waste it becomes one solid mass, ingrown, a bin full of tumor, teeming, brimming. When they open the door he pushes the mass down with his hands. It writhes.

Mr. Bruce and Mr. Rousseau stand in the doorway.

“Chores?” says Mr. Bruce.

“I’m a cook,” says Fat Man. “It happens. People make messes.”

“People clean them up,” says Mr. Bruce. He takes Fat Man’s elbow. Mr. Rousseau takes the other.

“We’d like to rent a room a couple days,” says Mr. Rousseau. “Use it as a home base.”

“The widow handles all of that,” says Fat Man.

“Why don’t you go ahead and unlock one of them for us to start with, and we’ll settle up with her later,” says Mr. Rousseau, twisting the end of his mustache.

They lead the fat man out the door.

“We’ve got this thing sewn up,” says Mr. Rousseau. They sit across the table in the cabin for which they promise they’ll pay later. “Soon we’ll lock you away for good.”

Fat Man palms his face. “You still think I killed the Blanc woman?”

Mr. Bruce taps a fingernail repeatedly against his shirt’s highest button. “Not just Mrs. Blanc. We think there are others. You’ve killed more girls than I’ve had. Does it make you feel like a big man to know you’ve killed more girls than I’ve had?”

“I already told you that I never even met Mrs. Blanc. I couldn’t pick her out of a crowd.”

“You said a lot of things,” says Mr. Rousseau.

“You seemed ambivalent ,” says Mr. Bruce.

“I didn’t do anything to those women.”

“What about Adrienne Defoe?” asks Mr. Rousseau. “Paris, three years ago. Cut open with a long, serrated blade, perhaps a bread knife. Do you like bread?”

“Denise Desmarais? Paris, died two years back in a back-alley abortion. Bled out on the cobblestones.”

“Danielle Morel,” suggests Mr. Rousseau. “Strasbourg. Five years ago. At the time we thought she was a suicide. Slit wrists, found long dead in the bathtub. Blue skin, red water.”