Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

Helen 15 saw this happen. Helen 79 felt it happen. But the two Helens in between sparred, oblivious and hateful. Helen 15 nodded at Helen 79, and Helen 79 nodded back. They knew the time had come to turn back time, to be born again by never being born at all. Helen 15 climbed onto Helen 29. She stood on her thin and brittle shoulders until Helen 29 had no choice but to succumb and climb back inside Helen 15, from where she had originated, until all that remained was one ballerina foot emerging.

Helen 45 watched in horror. “Oh, no,” she said. “Not this.”

But Helen 79 was already on her knees, small and spry, crawling under Helen 45 and up inside her before 45 could resist. “Looks like it,” Helen 15 said.

Helen 15 and Helen 45, each with an older version of herself inside, stood and faced one another. Below, the she-wolf nursed her wounds and resigned herself to growing whatever sort of seed took. She could feel it inside her already, a thorn in her fur. It grew at a rapid pace. The two Helens could see the wolf’s belly expand before their eyes.

“We can do this the hard way,” Helen 15 said.

“Or the right way,” Helen 45 sighed.

The two Helens stepped forward and embraced. They held each other as the she-wolf went into labor. It was the most difficult of all the labors. More than 15 birthing 29. More than 29 birthing 45. More than 45 birthing 79. More than 79 birthing the pup. The wolf howled and paced. She made a bed of leaves and circled through them in one direction and then another.

The Helens didn’t dare look to see what might emerge, another wolf or another Helen. At last Helen 45 dropped to her knees and crawled inside Helen 15, and Helen 15 was all alone on the cloud, her three other selves stacked within her, unborn, once again. She watched as the dark slit beneath the she-wolf’s tail gave way to dark blood. The she-wolf birthed neither wolf nor woman, but parts. Male parts that hung and swung. Organs that didn’t invite or entice, but commanded, demanded.

“Thatta girl.” Helen 15 nodded in approval. “Now you’re thinking.”

Then, like a thrown stone, Helen 15 plummeted back to earth. She fell right into Collier’s Glen, past the sunlit birches and onto the plaid blanket. She looked and saw: there was the portable CD player. There was the Rumple Minze. There she was in her red hooded sweatshirt and soccer shorts. Inside her pocket, she felt the fresh plastic edge of her learner’s permit. Helen cocked her head and listened. Far off, there was rustling. It was heading in her direction. It might be Dustin Mulhouse coming to take all she had to give. But Helen hoped it was the he-wolf, hunting her down. The sixth version of herself could shred her and all the Helens inside to bits. He could scatter everything they had once been all over the forest. Their pleasure and power and purpose, their pearls and emeralds, their dumb ideas and blind faith. Helen was nearly in ecstasy at the thought. She lay back and waited, breathless. She would be her own lover, her own killer. She would be her own man.

HALFWAY BETWEEN CLIFTON and Merona, the sun breaks through the colorless sky like a circle of light in an operating room. It bleaches the empty highway, exposing Lawrence’s car, which moves hot and solitary down the road, a loose ember blown. Here is where the gray lint of Spanish moss chokes the trees, where the soil fades from red to pink, where Lawrence knows he is most trapped, dead center, equally removed from his home and Susan’s. Here is the merciless heat, the Florida farmland where livestock move as if in quicksand, as if already stew meat.

On the roadside, a fence is being built. The workers, oily with sweat, set posts with shovels and hands instead of machines. Lawrence imagines a posthole, a man stumbling into it, a femur snapped in two. He imagines a tumbleweed of barbed wire, palms lacerated, flies swarming. He imagines flies, their larvae, multiplying by the billions, teeming dunes of white rice.

As he imagines this, Lawrence recalls something from his childhood. How once his father, on a rare day he was not on call, took Lawrence quail hunting. It was after Lawrence’s mother’s death and neither had anything to say, so they walked the Georgia pinewoods in silence. They had no luck with quail, but they came across a wild pig, a dead one, sliced from throat to tail by a hunter’s knife and left to rot. Its insides crawled with white worms so numerous and frothing that Lawrence thought at first the hog had been sprayed with a fire extinguisher or filled with shaving cream.

“Well,” his father said plainly. “There’s nature for you.”

His father found a stick and opened up the pig, angering the worms, horrifying Lawrence. He named the organs he could name. Liver, lung, pancreas . Lawrence hugged a tree to stay standing, eventually bent over and was sick, and his father pretended to notice none of it. They returned to the pickup truck the long way, his father calmly pointing out lichens and songbirds on the walk back. His father took his time, as if purposely prolonging Lawrence’s pain.

This, Lawrence had forgotten. And now, in remembering, he has lost track of where he is. His eyes have been in the old Georgia woods, on the pig, the worms, but here he is: back on the hot, white Florida highway. And there is the horse. Standing in the middle of the road, as if a movie backdrop has fallen, a looming, dun-colored roadblock coming up fast. For an instant, Lawrence thinks it must be a mirage, his imagination finally getting the best of him, and it’s then he barrels into it—a warm boulder dropped from the heavens. The car lurches like a seesaw. Lawrence pitches into the steering wheel. He pitches back against the headrest and glimpses the horse’s hide up close as it’s vaulted over the hood and windshield, a sudden show of wiry mane and golden dust released. Then there is a sound Lawrence knows he will never forget. A groan both mechanical and animal. It radiates to his core, as if his spine is a metal string, plucked by fate’s unforgiving finger.

Lawrence’s daughter, Susan, calls to let him know she is having a party. The baby will be circumcised and his presence is requested.

“Don’t bring a gift. Just yourself,” she says. “That is, if you’re up to traveling. Are you getting out much?”

“In public?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says. “Are you at least going to church?”

“Not me public,” he clarifies. “The baby public. He’ll have this done to him in front of people?”

“Well,” his daughter says with a laugh that’s both diffusive and defensive. “In our living room. However public you consider that.”

Lawrence doesn’t respond. He knows his silence is mistaken for an opinion on Susan’s new faith, but imagining the scalpel, the penis, he is speechless. Where will the foreskin go, Lawrence wonders? Will it be displayed on a sterling saucer for the guests to admire? Will it be sealed in a baggie and thrown into the kitchen garbage like a vegetable paring? Will there be a place where Lawrence can go lie down if he needs to go lie down? Moreover: Will Susan’s new family serve food that too closely resembles the animal it came from? What, he frets, do Jews eat at circumcisions? Will there be a fish with its head still on? A large salmon with a milky eye? A cod whose exposed gills still gape from suffocation? It occurs to Lawrence that there may be a dish of nuts, unshelled macadamias perhaps, alongside an heirloom nutcracker. If this is the case, Lawrence feels certain he will imagine the nutcracker clamped around an actual testicle, while the in-laws ask him how his hollyhocks are.

“Still growing hollyhocks, Larry?” one of them will ask.