Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

“You’ll have to excuse my house,” Lenora said as they pulled in the driveway. “It’s pretty messy.”

The headlights from Ready’s car shone right at the front door, right into the house. “It’s also open,” she said, pointing. “I think you’ve been robbed.”

Lenora and Ready got out of the car. They approached the house warily. Inside the front door, Lenora turned on the foyer lights. She handed an umbrella to Ready for protection. She took another for herself.

“I don’t see anything odd,” Ready said.

Lenora looked around the front hall. She peered into the tiny living room, the tiny kitchen. Both were her-messy, but not thief-messy. “Excuse me,” she said. “I need to check on those shoes. In the dryer.”

Out in the garage, Lenora found the trash can toppled. The lid had rolled into a corner. The two bricks had broken in half. The prairie skirt was off to one side, wrinkled and unknotted. The hearts were nowhere to be found.

Lenora ran back into the house. She flew through the kitchen and the living room, past Ready and into the bedroom. On the floor was the fishbowl, shattered. On the rug, a circle of damp pink. Lenora got down on her knees and looked under the bed. She stood and tore back the sheets. She went to the dresser and pulled out its drawers. She felt something inside her break free and rise—a scream that came out and brought Ready to her.

“What is it?” Ready appeared in the bedroom doorway. “Tell me what’s happening.”

Lenora fell to her knees and put her face in her hands. “My heart,” she said. “It’s gone. It was right here when I left, but now it’s gone.”

Ready reached out a hand to Lenora. “Let me help you up.”

Lenora shook her head. “You don’t understand. All the other hearts did something to it. They stole it,” she sobbed. “They took it. They took my one good heart away from me.”

Lenora cried into her hands. She thought of the sacrifices she had made to the twelve demanding hearts. She thought of the first heart’s selflessness, its unconditional nature.

“Wait here,” Ready said.

Lenora looked up. She watched Ready leave. Eventually, Lenora went out into the living room and sat in the dark. Outside, she could see the beam of a flashlight bounce up and down. Ready was walking the yard in careful lines, down and back, left and right. Lenora went to the window and watched. She grew still and serene. After a while, something returned and settled inside her, like a heart dropped into a bowl. Lenora went to the open front door and stood. “Ready,” she called out. “It’s okay. You can stop. You don’t have to look anymore.”

Ready paused as if making sure she had heard Lenora right. Ready and Lenora both stood still and quiet. Finally, Lenora waved and Ready waved back. And then Ready turned off the flashlight and headed back to the house in the dark, her footsteps thumping, thumping, thumping to where Lenora stood waiting.

TO BE FAIR, the kid was asking for it. The moment he stumbled into Holbrook College’s cooperative dorm with his archaic set of yam-colored suitcases and big Midwestern smile, he might as well have passed around engraved invitations to his own ass-kicking. He arrived at the Collective during a rowdy dinner of wine and lentil loaf, and as he stood grinning in the dining room doorway, the late August sun made a nimbus of his prairie-colored hair.

“Hello, folks!” he said, breathless with innocence. “I’m Leonard Salts from Illinois. You can call me Leonard or Lee or Leo or Leon—whatever floats your boat.”

Leonard’s earnestness was palpable. It brought all forty Collectives—their banter and scraping of tin plates—to a hush.

“Looks like I got the last room on campus, but I figure that’s what happens when you can’t make up your mind between New Hampshire and Ohio.” Leonard shook his head like he was an utter fool. “Ohio, New Hampshire. New Hampshire, Ohio. Finally, I just looked in the bathroom mirror and said to myself, ‘Leonard, you nut! You bona fide coconut! Ohio? You know Ohio. It’s just like Illinois but with less corn and more porn.’” The kid lowered his voice like he was letting everyone in on a family secret. “At least that’s what my dad, Walter Salts, says. I know, I know. Walter Salts, Walter Salts. My grandmother was a poet and she didn’t even know it. Or maybe, just maybe, she did.”

Leonard gave a little snort and addressed his suitcases. Two were tucked under his arms and two he held by their silver handles. Like a bellhop, he stacked them in a pile on the dining room floor from biggest to smallest. On top was a squat and square ladies’ cosmetic case that the whole room seemed to consider at once. Leonard, unburdened, went on. “But, back to the why and how. In the end, New Hampshire picked me and I picked New Hampshire and the administration picked this place for me to live. Well, not picked actually, because it was the only room left. But here I am and nice to meet you all. Again: Leonard Salts from Ursula, Illinois. Probably never heard of it, but now you have and you can no longer say you haven’t.”

Leonard gave a little bow. There was a quiet chortle or two, followed by a low whistle from the rear of the room. It seemed for a moment that no one knew what to say. The Collectives in their designer love beads and imported leather sandals looked at one another, this way and that, as if they were being pranked and one of them was responsible. At long last, Teddy Yates, the Collective’s president, stood and lifted his coffee mug of wine.

“Well, I say welcome!” Teddy’s voice took on the showman’s tone that his dorm mates had come to expect, a tone Leonard mistook as genuine. “The Collective is exactly that: a collection of all sorts and all types. I think you’ll find yourself right at home here. In fact, ten minutes from now, I bet you the farm you won’t miss Nebraska at all.”

Leonard’s smile fell a bit. He corrected Teddy with an “Illinois,” but his state of origin went unheard in the roar of applause for Teddy. The next thing Leonard knew, he was being pushed down into a dining chair and up to a table where someone slid him a tin plate of lentil loaf and a full mug of wine. Leonard, in the chaos, tried to insist he could partake of neither—one because of his weak stomach, the other because of his morals—but the Collectives collectively pouted as if the whole bunch of them might burst into tears, and after much cheering and jeering, Leonard choked down what was in front of him before promptly regurgitating all of it back onto the table. The applause that followed was so deafening and lengthy, that Leonard, pale and clammy, eventually gave a weak smile in spite of himself. Then Teddy yanked him up by the armpits and clapped him on the back and showed him to his third-floor room.

“Welcome home, Nebraska,” Teddy said, gesturing at the concrete walls and iron bed. “You’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Leonard opened his mouth and closed it. “Right,” he said meekly. “Thanks.”

Teddy wasn’t sure why he started in on Leonard, but he felt compelled to. When he woke the next day and saw Leonard sitting in the dining room with a tall glass of milk, he recalled a horse he’d once seen broken. Teddy’s sister had once been into the equestrian world out on Long Island, and one summer Teddy had tagged along to see how people went about training a show horse. A woman had put a rust-colored horse with flared nostrils on a long leash and trotted it in a circle for a good hour. First clockwise and then counterclockwise. The woman explained to Teddy and his sister that she held a whip, just in case, but she rarely needed to use it. She maintained that repetition was stronger than violence, and Teddy remembered this as he watched Leonard take a long pull from his milk and forget to wipe his upper lip. Teddy could see it clearly; the world would devour Leonard if someone didn’t show him the ropes, so Teddy decided that a few times a day, he’d take it upon himself to get out the ropes and dangle them in front of Leonard’s angelic corn-fed face. Never mind if this behavior wasn’t in keeping with the Collective’s original mission of love and let love, live and let live. It was for Leonard’s own good.