Amelia Gray - Museum of the Weird

We watched Mary from the kitchen window. She held her palm serenely against the possibility of vultures. The blue tassels at the edges of the rug flicked around in the wind. Toby had arranged pillar candles and small statues. The pillar candles had blue and green wax and depicted the Stations of the Cross, and a big white one was set in the center for the resurrection.

“It was so kind,” Mrs. Merkel said. “He wants me to call him if they come back down. I’m making meatloaf.”

She was wearing an faded yellow dress with a wide, white belt. Her hair was out of curlers and she had it pulled back. She was stirring a pitcher of Tang. “I feel like a million bucks,” she said.

“It’s not very Methodist, is it?”

She tapped the spoon on the pitcher. “It’s more Methodist than shooting them, which is what Mr. Dobbs was doing.”

* * *

Toby was smiling in his sleep. He had my satin eye pillow strapped to his face. I crawled into bed and lay my arm over him, kissing the back of his neck. When the sun came in through the windows and it got too warm, I pointed the fan towards the bed.

On the kitchen table was Toby’s stack of receipts, for groceries mostly. On the top was one from the Christian Supply. It was deducted from his total debt, refigured and circled, “$1,103.38,” in red pen.

Brenda ordered a crab cake at lunch. “How’s the inventor?” she asked.

“He’s still working on it.”

“Any day now,” she said. “You stick with a man like that, he’ll hit on something soon enough.”

“I’m starting to wonder how long I have to stick, is all.” Brenda’s crab cake arrived and she stabbed at it with her fork. “Brit had to go to the vet,” she said. “I mean, the doctor. The cat had to go to the vet.”

“What’s wrong with Brittney?”

“She stuck a ball of paper in her ear. I don’t know why she did that. They had to use long tweezers, actually. Cost me twenty dollars.”

My chicken salad came in a lump on lettuce leaves. “Why did you have a baby so young, anyway?”

Brenda speared the crab cake and lifted up the corner of it, turning the piece over with her fork.

“Were you scared of the retardation thing?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. She took a bite.

“What’s wrong with the cat?” I asked.

“Put it to sleep,” she said.

* * *

The meteorologist interrupted his weekend forecast. “It’s a dark world out there,” he said, tapping the sensor in his hand and changing the seven-day on the green screen to a picture of a vulture. “We’ve had a lot of calls and letters.” The picture faded and changed to one of a group of vultures closing in on a family. “Keep walking when you leave your house, don’t stop for anything. Carry your children and keep your pets on a short leash. Protect your backyard by putting up a chicken wire net.”

Brenda stayed five hours past close, hanging a plastic net over the daycare’s backyard. She tried to crimp the wires with her hands and ended up in the clinic for tetanus shots. After that, she refused to leave her bed until the vultures left. I had to lead classes. We fingerpainted vultures and made vulture sculptures with popsicle sticks. We drew plans in crayon detailing how to safely trap and release vultures. Robert drew his baby brother as bait. After show-and-tell, I told a story about vultures.

* * *

Once upon a time, there was a kind princess who lived in a castle protected with spiked walls and lava moats and knights. She had a beautiful garden and a stable full of prize horses but she could never leave the castle because of the killer birds circling day and night. They avoided the spiked walls and flew over the lava moat to stay warm. The knights couldn’t reach them with their swords and the situation grew desperate until one of the knights had the brilliant idea to kill one of the smaller horses and fill it with quicklime. The vultures swooped down, gorged themselves and fell dead, and the knights had the whole mess cleaned up before the princess came out for her evening walk.

* * *

Toby bought fifty golf umbrellas from a wholesaler for his vulture project. He handed me the recalculated debt when I walked in the door.

“I wanted panels of aluminum and fabric glue,” he said, “but it was impossible to cut the panels correctly. I ended up buying jumbo rolls of aluminum foil and stapling them to the nylon. That’s itemized on the second receipt.”

“The second receipt.”

“Under the first one. These will sell,” he said. A single prototype lay finished between us. “My old manager at the range said he was very interested, and all I showed him was the model.” He pointed at the mess of foil and fabric. The staples had snagged on the support poles and ripped the fabric, and he had lined the exposed rips with tape and rows of staples and more foil.

I didn’t even want to touch it. “Perhaps the model would benefit from another layer of nylon?”

“I’m doing this for us,” he said, carefully examining his work.

“I don’t need any help. Thank you, though. I would prefer to do this one for us.” He opened the umbrella, and closed it again to keep the top layers of foil intact.

“You could have bought a reflective nylon. Something that wouldn’t split so easily.”

“You’re profiting from this,” he said. “I was different before, but I’m helping us now. I’m using my intelligence, and I’m really starting something for us. Don’t shut me down already, when you haven’t even seen what I can do.”

“Listen,” I said. “I want to forgive your debt.”

Toby picked up his box of forty-nine compact golf umbrellas, his jumbo roll of aluminum foil, both staplers and three cans of spray adhesive, and walked out.

After he left, I turned on the television. The news had a camera following the meteorologist, who made a camouflage tent and camped among the nests in protest of the hunters. The Methodists were holding nightly prayer meetings and when the TV cameras arrived, they played an electric guitar. At the corner store, the shelves of bread and milk were cleaned out. The hunters were taking practice aim at the magpies in the parking lot. The meteorologist took over the camera and was speaking urgently about buckshot and environmental activism. I didn’t answer the phone when it rang and Mrs. Merkel cried from the machine that the vultures had gathered on her clothesline and weighed it down towards the candles. Her Virgin Mary rug had been burning for hours.

“Nothing can be done,” she cried.

I turned up the volume on the TV, thinking that rug must look like a miracle.

EXT. A GRAVEL PIT — DAY

The sun rises over what looks to be a gravel quarry. The bleak landscape stretches as far as the eye can see, dotted occasionally by a few wandering people dressed in slightly mussed business attire.

NARRATOR (V.O.)

In the near future, increasing global

tensions sparked a war among

nations spanning years. The

worldwide destruction multiplied,

spreading until the world and most

of its inhabitants were

annihilated, ground into dust by a

faceless war machine.

Close in on two men, DAVE and SAM, standing in the gravel pit. They appear to be disheveled but healthy. In different circumstances, it would look like they were waiting for a bus.

NARRATOR (V.O.) (CONT’D)

Years passed. Those that survived

had to be strong of heart and mind,

tougher than the friends and

neighbors they left gasping in the

dust. These brave men and women

found a way to survive against all

odds and emerged as the unlikely

authors of their own existence.

The men fidget, bored. DAVE checks his watch, examines it, flicks at it.