Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

“The worst was when I had to turn around from where I was at to face the baby’s parents back on the beach. I just turned and held up my empty hands and before long the helicopters came and the lifeguards came and everybody lined up on the beach waiting like the queen was coming in on a boat.” The girl let a little whistle escape through her crooked teeth. “The baby’s mother was something else. She turned into a monster right then and there in front of everyone. She crawled back and forth on the sand like a dog. She even foamed at the mouth.”

The orange horse slowed to a trot and Jarrod got off and the girl stayed on and Jarrod grabbed the horse’s reins and brought the horse to a walk. He led the horse to a long, white dune, and at the top of it Jarrod and the girl looked out over the seafloor. There were bleached white skeletal shipwrecks and biplanes, there were white arching temple bones of blue whales, there were giant white conch shells and lost white shipping containers, tipped on their sides to spill white, flaking rubbish. There were old fishing masts like fossilized spines and anchors made of talc and off to the side there was the baby—a white plaster garden cherub covered in barnacles. Jarrod pointed to it and the girl nodded and Jarrod walked the horse out to the baby. When Jarrod got to it, he touched it with his toe and the baby crumbled into a pile of powder that the breeze picked up and scattered like ashes.

“Thank you,” the girl whispered.

Jarrod put his head against the girl’s warm stomach. She put her hand on the back of his head and ran her fingers through his hair.

“I’ve missed a lot of sleep thinking about what happened to that baby,” the girl said. “I’ve had me some terrible dreams. That the baby’s in a fishing net somewhere getting slapped by big silver fish. Or that it’s just bobbing around like a plastic doll. Sometimes I stay in the tub too long and my feet wrinkle up all soft and white and I imagine the baby maybe just melted away. Like tissue paper left out in the rain.”

Jarrod opened his eyes. He turned to look at the girl.

“There it is!” she said with a sudden smile. “I felt it take inside! I think we made a baby!” She hugged her knees closer and Jarrod reached out gentle to her face. “You don’t have to come back no more. We did what we set out to do.”

Jarrod felt something in him give way just as the sand on the dune had as the horse descended. A whole shelf of something broke loose in him and he couldn’t gather it back up. “We better make sure,” he said. “I’ll come back again.”

The girl let her knees down and turned off the horse lamp. “That ain’t necessary,” she said. “Now I’m going to take a nap and let the baby cook.”

“What’s your name?” Jarrod asked in the cold dark.

“Marie,” the girl said.

Then Jarrod rose and dressed in the darkness. He stood for a while in the cold room and listened to the girl breathe. Then he let himself out of the house.

That night, the moonlight came through Jarrod’s window as bright as sunlight. He couldn’t sleep, so he got up and found a hammer and some nails and nailed up a quilt over his window. But still, the light came in around the corners, so Jarrod rose a second time and found a roll of duct tape, and he taped the quilt to the wall as best he could, but still, the light found a way in through the quilt’s stitching. Jarrod lay on his back and squeezed his eyes closed. He and the girl were on the orange horse, but the horse had turned from a real horse back into a ceramic one and he and the girl were sliding, sliding off its slick back.

In the morning, Jarrod went to his first service call. While he adjusted the satellite, he saw himself pulling weeds from the perimeter of the girl’s rental. He saw himself kneeling at the girl’s feet, painting her toes the same tangerine color of the horse lamp. After Jarrod got the satellite working, he called in sick for the rest of the day and drove himself to the girl’s house. On the stoop, he felt weak and out of sorts from the heat and lack of sleep, but he knocked and knocked until a long-haired guy, shirtless and sleepy-eyed, opened the door.

“You better not be selling anything,” the guy said. “I got enough cookies and God.” Behind the guy, Oreo rose with some struggle. He staggered to the door and peeked through the guy’s knees and thumped his tail when he saw Jarrod.

“I’m friends with your roommate,” Jarrod said. “I came to talk to her.”

“Penny’s not here,” he said. “She’s gone.”

“I’m not looking for Penny,” Jarrod said. “I’m looking for Marie.”

The guy raised one foot and bent his knee and pushed backwards on Oreo’s snout with his heel. “No Marie lives here,” he said. “You got the wrong place.”

Jarrod said nothing. He watched Oreo retreat from the foyer and lie down, hard and fast like he’d been shot. “She had red hair,” Jarrod finally said. “Crooked teeth.”

The guy nodded. “That’s Penny,” he said. “The liar. You can come in and see for yourself that she ain’t here.”

The guy opened the door and motioned inside and Jarrod came in. Oreo got up in pained loyalty and nosed Jarrod in the crotch. “She even left her goddamn dog,” the guy said. “What am I going to do with a goddamn dog?”

Jarrod felt more sand fall away from the dune inside him. Shelf after shelf broke free. He went down the long, narrow hall with the guy and the dog at his heels and when he got to the door, he paused with his hand on the plastic gold doorknob and squeezed his eyes shut and he saw nothing.

“Go on,” the guy said. “I don’t have all day.” Jarrod took a deep breath and turned the knob. “I mean, I do have all day,” the guy said. “But this ain’t how I planned on spending it.”

Inside, the room was as bright as a cathedral. The sun poured in the single window and the walls were so drenched in light they didn’t even look pink. On the floor, the mattress was bare. The clothes were gone and the towels were gone and the foil-wrapped TV was gone. All that remained was the little horse lamp and Jarrod went over to it and kneeled.

“Penny was a mess,” the guy said. “Always will be.”

Jarrod clicked the lamp on and clicked the lamp off. In the bright white of the day, he couldn’t tell a difference between the two. He unplugged the lamp and wrapped the cord around it and stood.

“Take it,” the guy said. “It’s yours.”

Jarrod clutched the lamp to his chest and pushed past the guy and past the thumping dog and ran out into the day. In the van, he sat for a long while, panting, working to catch his breath, working to convince himself that he didn’t have a problem, but that he’d solved one. On the dashboard, more pollen had collected like blown sand. When he could finally breathe normally, Jarrod took the horse lamp off his lap and placed it next to him on the bench seat. He put it right in the middle, like a child placed between the two people who had made it.

BY THE TIME Bianca turned twelve, there had been twelve doctors in total. If Bianca’s mother had had her way, there would have been twelve hundred. The only reason her mother stopped with the doctor train was because Bianca’s father threatened to leave, with his wallet, if she continued. Still, Bianca’s cyst was her mother’s whole life, and Bianca’s mother’s obsession with the cyst was Bianca’s whole childhood.

The cyst protruded from Bianca’s forehead in a way that was hardly noticeable to most people but caught the light in a way that was always noticeable to Bianca’s mother.

“It looks like you’ve run into a door,” her mother would say, squinting at Bianca’s hairline. “Like you’ve given yourself a goose egg. I’m afraid people think you’re clumsy.”