Amelia Gray - Threats

I WILL STRIP THE BARK FROM A TREE AND MAKE YOU NEW CLOTHES. YOU WILL WEAR THESE CLOTHES AS YOU WANDER THE FOREST FOR FOURTEEN YEARS. YOUR FATHER WILL DIE WATCHING THE SKY AND YOUR MOTHER WILL FORGET YOUR NAME.

Chico stopped reading, but David could tell he was looking over it again, memorizing it. The man had no visible reaction beyond his jaw moving slightly down and to the left behind his closed mouth. It was enough for David to know that he should not have trusted either of his visitors.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” David said.

“There are more like this?”

“No,” David said. “I found it there before. I was afraid to move it.”

“I should take it with me,” Chico said, pulling on his gloves and holding one out for the threat.

“What’s happening?” Marie asked, bracing herself to stand.

“Official police business,” Chico said.

David held the threat close to his chest. “There’s no police business. I can’t let you have this.”

Chico made no initial response, but his jaw moved again within his closed mouth. He was tonguing the surface of his molars. He seemed exceptionally calm. “This could be considered evidence,” he said.

“There’s no reason why it would be. My wife was probably playing a prank on me, and she forgot about it.” David worried that he was talking too fast. Correcting the error would be simple enough but would require talking more to the man, who was probing the grooves in his teeth as if they contained an illuminating secret. “I usually don’t take sugar in my tea,” David said, slower, moderated, trying his best to sound reasonable by employing a reasonable voice, “so there was no reason for me to look here. I don’t usually take sugar.”

“This could be an important piece of evidence,” said Chico.

Marie had abandoned her teacup and stood by Chico’s side. “Goodness,” she said, replacing her thin glasses with thicker ones and reading the page. “Classic transferred umbilical addiction. ICD-10 F20. The coupled individual fears the opposing parental unit and conspires to destroy him or her.”

“There’s no reason why you wouldn’t allow us to take this,” Chico said.

“Or it’s a ruse,” Marie said.

“You’ve been nothing but helpful so far,” Chico added. “Your attitude has helped to ease my mind regarding your status in this case.”

David folded the paper in thirds. “Ease your mind.”

“You’re a person of interest, after all. That’s normal procedure. You’re only helping yourself by cooperating. But really, right now you’re getting your fingerprints all over what could be a key piece of evidence.”

“This could be something my wife wrote as a joke,” David said. “Probably years ago.”

“David,” Marie said. Her face was the color and shape of an oblong shell, a shaved almond, a cuttlefish bone on which a parakeet might smooth its beak.

David leaned forward and gently pressed his cheek against hers. It was satisfying, though she felt nothing like an almond. “I understand your concern, but I’m beginning to grow worried for the physical object,” he said, cheek to cheek with Marie. “I believe it is within my legal right to keep it.”

“I think you should come talk to me sometime,” she said, whispering, into his ear.

Chico exhaled through his nose hard enough that David felt the blast on his face. He took a step back. “It is currently within your legal right,” Chico said. “I don’t enjoy the fact that you’re making that decision, though.”

David held the wilted paper aloft. “This object has sentimental value.”

“Understood,” Chico said. “We’re going to compromise.”

“Compromise is the evidence of a civil class,” Marie said.

Chico produced a pocket camera. “May I?”

David looked first at the camera and then at Marie. He held the threat in his palms, protecting it, while Chico took his picture. Chico put his camera away and handed David a ziplock sandwich bag from his pocket.

“Keep it in there,” he said. “Do you have a stapler?”

David produced one from the junk drawer and Chico stapled the seal with three quick shots.

“We’ll head to the salon again. I’m sure we’ll find the ones that came by your home.”

They both shook David’s hand on the way out, and Marie stepped over the pile of frozen clothes on the porch. On their way to the car, Chico touched her arm once above the elbow. “It may not be wise for David to have a private session just yet,” he said.

“It would be a safe space for him.”

He opened her car door, stepped around the back, and got into the driver’s seat. “Maybe soon.” As they backed out of the driveway, Chico leveraged his arm against her seat while Marie watched the garage in front of her shrink back into the forest. The garage looked like a second house. She could see one pair of old wooden French doors propped slightly ajar by a substantial wasp’s nest that grew between the doors and held them in place.

Inside, David examined the threat. Specks of sugar had fallen to the bottom of the sandwich bag. He thought about the absolute fact that a great number of details had gone unnoticed. He reheated the pot of water, filled his empty cup with sugar. The cup was full to its brim with sugar, and he had to put it in the sink when he poured the hot water in. The sugar sank under the liquid and clouded it, and David stirred it with a small spoon and blew across the surface before sipping the murky, sweet mixture, his lips pursed, his tongue lashing forward. He was a hummingbird. He held the cup at the center of his body, over his heart, wincing as the cup’s contents splashed over the lip and onto his fingers.

THE YEARS had made Franny literal. It got to the point that when she found something funny, she would say so without laughing. David didn’t mind it. He appreciated a literal woman.

Some winter, years before, they had watched a man struggle up the icy hill in front of their home. He plunged silver picks into the ice like an Alpine climber. The man slipped and howled as he fell, digging his pick into his own hand. He slid down the ice in a bloodied mass. Franny smiled, watching. “That was funny,” she said. She always asked to see comedies when they went to the movies. He would turn toward her during the funniest parts to find her bobbing her head in agreement. It was as if the characters were explaining the concept of humor to her and she was indicating that she understood. She moved her lips at the movie theater without making a sound.

The only time she would really laugh was when David tried to compare her job to the one he had just been forced to leave. The first time he tried, they were finishing a bottle of wine, standing at the kitchen counter.

“You deal in mystery just as I did,” David said. She was laughing before he began, but he had thought it all out while taking his coffee on the porch earlier that day and was set on sharing. “At your job, you shake a woman’s hand, look at her face, she seems fine. But then you get her back, remove her makeup, shine the exam light on her, and you see everything she’s hiding. Comedones, age spots, pencil-thin lines. You bring them up and she starts apologizing. ‘I know, I should be wearing more sunscreen. I just ran out and forgot to get more.’

“It was exactly the same at my job. I would meet a perfectly nice person, maybe a spectacularly nice person, a minister or a pharmacist, the kind of person I was raised to trust. Then I’d get into his mouth and it would be a disaster. Infection swelling a gum line like a hidden pouch. Trench mouth leaving a gray film on the teeth. Ulcers full of six months’ worth of midnight snacks without even a rinse afterward. Back to bed. The guy would say, ‘Doc, you gotta understand, I brush my teeth almost every day.’ He’d have no reason to lie to me but he would lie. We’d see it all the time.”