Unquiet Dreams Read online

  The Eleventh Commandment

  She should never have said it, not even silently. And after the police and the confusion and the onlookers were gone, she could only berate herself over and over—and look at the small life in her arms and dully wonder where her son was now.

  If only he hadn't been so fussy and cranky today—why today? Errands to run, grocery shopping (still not done) and then there was the whole brain-wracking about what to get Auntie Ruth; on any other day, she might not have lost her temper, might not have wished—

  But what good did it do? He was gone. All the fuss and fluster was for nothing. A little man with eyes the color of a storm brewing gazed up at her, silently smirking. She wanted to dash him against the hard black pavement to wipe that knowing smile off his face. But that would just confirm what the police and the manager and the women who had been so concerned, at first, believed; that she was crazy, that she was a danger to her baby boy, that some kind of authorities ought to be called.

  She argued, of course. All the time the officers were asking her for identification, she tried to explain what had happened, holding the hideous thing aloft, until she caught sight of their reflection in the display window. It was Bobby. At once she drew in the child; no, it was not. She turned him to the window. It was Bobby. But only in the glass. "Bobby?" she had whispered uncertainly, the hope and understanding gone from her voice.

  "Are you okay now, ma'am?" the officer had asked, wanting to get onto the next crisis and away from this unmotherly woman. She had nodded, unsure as to what she should do but finally aware that no one else saw what she did. A sudden blush rose up her cheeks, displacing the blotchy rash of terror. She turned away, cradling the child as distantly as possible, her steps gradually quickening. Certainly that was Muriel Peake in the back by the Romance section (of course). Undoubtedly the other members of the Unitarian Ladies' Bridge Club would feast on the tale this afternoon, including her own mother. She nearly bumped into an elderly woman in her rush to go out the front door, which forced her to hug the thing closer to her and to smell at once its sharp, woodsy breath. It smiled. The old woman smiled. She too attempted to stretch her lips into an approximation of a smile. "What a lovely baby," the elderly lady cooed. She fled into the lot.

  After she had strapped the thing into the car-seat with instinctive care, she sat thoughtfully, fingering the hole in the arm of her sweater. What on earth should she do? How could she get Bobby back and this repulsive thing away? How did it happen anyway? Things like this just don't happen? A wish—only a wish; what was that they say—be careful what you wish for, because you may get it. But she hadn't meant it! It wasn't really a wish, just that momentary irritation that surely all mothers feel sometimes, even the very best of mothers. If only she hadn't overslept, if only she hadn't burnt the toast, if only she called the hardware store before she left and found out they didn't have the gaskets in the size she needed, if only she hadn't decided Auntie Ruth would probably love an Indian cookbook—but it was no good reciting a novena of "if-onlys." The day had been cursed and she along with it. She did come to the bookstore, she did have to change him, he was crabby and cross and she did wish—was it even out-loud?—that trolls would come and take him away.

  But she felt a gaze upon her, and not just the gruesome child-thing's, so she turned the key and backed out of the space, her jaw set, her eyes clouding. The drive home was only seven blocks. As her trusty old Honda chugged along, though, the moment played over and over and over: the wish, the glance down to pick up the diaper, and the change. The tiny sense of wonder was immediately supplanted by her shock and anger. She did not even realize she was screaming until the other women gathered round her in the big bathroom stall, crows to the scene of alarm. At first they were so kind; mothers all, in one way or another. But as she hiccupped the story out through her tears, concern gave way to horror and repulsion not toward the grotesque little troll lying there, but toward her. "I am not psychotic," she muttered, turning up into the driveway to her building, but in the back of her brain grew a cold filament of fear.

  She stopped, her hand still on the key, and looked at the ugly creature strapped into her baby's seat. She felt only blame and a bruising self-hatred. It should really be the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not wish for things you don't really want. The being's evil sneer stretched almost imperceptibly. She hated it. Just as surely, she knew she loved her Bobby and that she would not let the trolls take him away from her, and even if it was her own fault, well, then it was her duty to get him back. She pulled down the blanket to shield the ghastly grinning face from her view and turned the key in the ignition once more. She had to go back, back to the Baby Changing Station.

  A Secret Place

  I live in a secret place by the river and the pines and I am dead. At least I know I can't be alive. I have seen my body many times and have watched it rot slowly in the damp darkness of the rock hollow where it lies still, only bones now.

  Some boys I know did it. I should have known they were up to something; my thoughts were softened by a five-dollar bill. My mind saw only the paperbacks I could buy at the Book Exchange, not what made that pissy Brian O'Donoghue willing to give me so much money when I knew that he hated me. And then the long walk through the woods to here. I never saw who brained me with that first rock. Probably Brian; it was his idea of course, these things always were. He didn't know that I knew he was following me home for weeks before. I was starting to think that he liked me. I was pretty stupid.

  But for some reason, I don't really feel mad at them about it. I don't know why. I should be pissed. They were always mean to me. School was awful; I couldn't wait to go home and read. If I hid up in the attic I couldn't even hear Mom and Jim fighting like they did every night. You'd think they'd get bored. I don't even think of them too much. Not like I'd miss them; but I kind of expected that I'd blame them too for me getting killed because they never looked out for me. But it doesn't matter.

  One of the boys—Kenney who used to sit behind me in class—actually comes and talks to me. Now, he feels guilty. I can tell. The first time he came here, well, actually the second time, I guess, he stood for a long time drawing in the sandy ground under the pines, just shapes and doodles. Then suddenly he dropped the stick, thrust his hands in his pockets, and mumbled, "I'm sorry, Angellica, really I am." Then he burst into tears and ran off through the ferns. Honestly, I felt like laughing. It was all kind of silly. None of it matters now. But I can't even laugh because I no longer have a mouth. But Kenney came back and he comes back a lot to tell me about school or stuff on TV and I pretty much enjoy it, though its getting harder and harder to remember what the kids in school look like or who the stars on the shows are.

  As my bones join the sand of their dark little hole, I find it harder and harder to remember what they meant to me once and what it was like to have a body and skin, to make noise and to taste and to touch the ground. I find myself following Kenney when he ambles away, almost reluctant to head home to a hot meal, not because I am lonely or because I wish to go to his house, but because I cannot remember. When we get to the edge of the woods, I always stop. It seems too bright out there. It's not exactly frightening—I can't really describe it. But everywhere is becoming too bright and I worry that soon I won't be able to see.

  So maybe, as it gets brighter everywhere, it won't seem so bad to leave the woods. One of these days when Kenney leaves and the sun's not shining too much more than the darkness of the woods, I will follow him and try to recall what I was and why. Perhaps I will find Brian and I can draw out of him the memories I need to go back, maybe from him I can get what I need to be real again and to touch and to read—I remember reading, I remember words but not what they are and why I read them and how. But I feel a longing, a desire to hold fast to something as the light tries to take me, to take from me what I was, as the rain and the sand and the bugs take my bones little by little by little, a lick at a time, tasting what I cannot feel.

 
Another Metamorphosis:

  A Moral Tale about Obsession

  for Steve Bissette

  Billy liked dinosaurs. He played dinosaurs, collected dinosaur toys, drew pictures of dinosaurs, great shambling beasts of tooth and claw, whose passing shook the jungles and whose drooling jaws devoured figures not unlike his sisters. For birthdays and holidays they came as presents from well-meaning relatives and family friends who'd say, "We know how much Billy likes his dinosaurs!" with a wink and a grin at his mom and dad and a dismissive pat on Billy's head, already a-buzz with plans for working the new models into his repertoire.

  "You like dinosaurs so much, why dontcha marry one," his older sister would taunt from the womb-like depths of her unpleasantly brown bean-bag chair.

  "Billy and a dinosaur sittin' in a tree," his younger twin sisters would chant in unison, their ghostly faces bathed in the glow of the black and white TV screen, "K-I-S-S-I-N-G! First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Billy with a baby carriage!"

  "You girls hush now," his mom would scold over her section of the newspaper, while Billy's dad would snort and try to pretend he was still awake. The scene was repeated often. Very often.

  Did Billy mind? No. In fact, he hardly gave it any notice at all. Fourteen years: Billy couldn't quite concentrate on anything that wasn't about dinosaurs. His teachers despaired: his science project was inevitably "An Intimate Look at Fossils" or "The World Captured in Amber's Limbo"—when pushed, very hard, he might be persuaded to drag himself into the speculative realm of the twentieth century with "Coelacanth: The Modern Dinosaur."

  "Perhaps he will be a great paleontologist one day," Miss Bentley remarked in the Teachers' Lounge one day during Billy's trample through sixth-grade, though her voice reflected little in the way of hope.

  "Yeah," sneered Mr. Peterson, sneaking his arm around her waist because no one else was there yet, "And maybe he'll just marry a dinosaur and lay eggs." Miss Bentley hiccoughed a cute little tinny laugh.

  Billy didn't marry a dinosaur. They were extinct. He knew that. After all, he'd studied dinosaurs a long time; not that he'd ever entertained any notions of marrying a dinosaur. Love, marriage, sex: these things didn't really ever enter into Billy's calculations.

  Cars did. When Billy was fourteen, cars entered his world. He looked up one day and saw Cissy Martin's cherry red Corvair with the top down and, for the briefest span of time, dinosaurs were knocked out of his head like so many bowling pins. They came back, of course, like the homing pigeons they begat, but it was as if their temporary absence had allowed the walls of Billy's mind to breathe and settle. Somehow there was room for cars and dinosaurs. By sixteen Billy had a car of his own, a sleek—or so it seemed to him—green Impala that roared down the streets of Finleydale like a Triceratops with hotfoot. He briefly considered putting horns on the hood reminiscent of just such a beast, but the technical details were far beyond his meager artistic skills, feeble and malnourished through the years of neglect, so he settled for Magic Markers and the burning light of the U-Draw-It Project-A-Picture that belonged to his older sister Margaret, which held steady the image of a Brontosaurus while he patiently traced its intricate form on the passenger side, to be complemented later with a steely-looking Triceratops on the driver-side door. The exhibit was best viewed in bright sunlight. Billy yearned to put a raging Tyrannosaurus Rex on the hood of his green machine, but the practical difficulties of shining the great beast's likeness onto the Impala's hood proved too much for him, though he often whiled away his senior year classes with inexpertly imagined schemes involving ropes and pulleys that could somehow make his dream a reality. Alas, they were never realized.

  Finleydale High School, never a recognized center of Athenian scholarship so much as a processing plant creating the autoworkers of tomorrow, saw fit to release Billy into public life at large amongst his classmates who fell roughly into the intellectual categories of good, bad and indifferent, the latter containing Billy. Five days into the summer after Billy's graduation, a terrible thing happened. Not tragic: Tragedy requires a more complex and attractive hero than Billy Pilger; but it was indeed terrible as Billy's mom was apt to say to her sister-in-law Margaret, "just terrible."

  It happened like this: Billy tooled around town that day savoring a vague notion of freedom; a liberty that would prove to be short-lived even if events had not turned out as they did, for Billy's future inclined precipitously toward an insider's view of the auto factory undercoating process, as he was destined to be squeezed into a distinctly cushy berth at the plant by the clever manipulations of his well-placed Uncle Otto, who expected that Billy might just as well spend his waking hours contemplating dinosaurs provided he paused from time to time to advance the assembly line by the increment of one car. It would have been an enviable position.

  But as Billy drove blithely around his hometown, fate was rearing its undeniable head like a mean-spirited water-dwelling brute of a dinosaur, perhaps a cranky Brachiosaurus on a particularly bad day. Fate, that day, took the shape of VW microbus loaded down with too many of Billy's former schoolmates, themselves loaded with any number of highly questionable substances. At the stoplight where Fourth met Main, Billy hummed tunelessly a non-existent song waiting for the signal to change. Behind him, two hundred yards, the bus roared forward expelling foul smoke and the guitar stylings of Ted Nugent, its driver overcome by a giggling fit brought on by a bad joke involving urination. The two hundred yards became one; that one became fifty. Still the light did not change. As the distance between the immovable Impala and the unstoppable van slivered to a mere ten yards, the driver dimly recognized their danger and slammed on the brakes. Billy's eyes caught a indefinite blur of VW in his rearview mirror and his mouth gaped slackly. The minibus shrieked like a girl and spun slowly to its right, but before it could complete more than thirty degrees of a graceful arc, it slammed into the back of the Dino-wheels shooting them and a shocked Billy into the intersection with what remained of his trunk, the bus spraying passengers out every orifice—one or two spending their last conscious seconds wishing for a seat-belt and wondering whether their underwear was actually clean, the remainder merely whispering, "Wow," before their foggy lights were forever extinguished.

  Billy's sudden entrance into the intersection was greeted with alarm by the driver of a blue Chevy pick-up, her considerable forward momentum trumping that of the Impala's as it sheared off most of the front end with a sound like nails on a chalkboard. Passersby cringed. Billy screamed. His dream car lay in at least three or four pieces that he could see, even without turning his rapidly-stiffening neck. It was terrible. Deafened by the pain of his loss, he did not hear the cries and shouts and gasps of the onlookers and his fellow victims; instead, over and over the shearing sound of the Chevy's assault screeched through his soul like the death-cry of Erichthonius.

  Billy stood numbly, his hands in his pockets, while the officials took stock of the damage and moved what remained of the VW's passengers to the local emergency services. "It's not so bad," the Chevy's pilot tried to tell him as two women in blue jumpsuits strapped him into a neck-brace and bundled him onto stretcher, "And anyway, the insurance will pay for it. It sure wasn't your fault." Her eyes turned with awe to the misshapen hulk of the minibus, which still sported a right arm like some crazy antenna, though two police officers were trying to work it loose. But Billy was inconsolable. His car could never be resurrected—nor could it be duplicated; his sister had sold the U-Draw-It projector at the family garage sale last year for one whole dollar. If only he had known! Billy had made over fifteen dollars that day but never even considered the possibility of such a need.

  As he lay in his bed that night after the tedious x-rays and the endless forms and the excited attentions of his family—"We saw you on TV!" his dad said, "And you looked terrible!" Stacey and Tracey crowed—Billy chewed on his tragedy as if it were cud. The dinosaurs around his room—models, statues, pictures, posters, fossils, little plastic toys and even a sq
uirt-gun—seemed to sympathize mutely with his suffering, but they could not feel his pain. Billy was not one to wax philosophic. It felt like tragedy and that's what he thought of it, trying to call to mind a tenuous reference to King Lear that he was unable to articulate. There was no hope; but he was not one to think of shuffling off his mortal coil to end the slings and arrows of an admittedly outrageous fortune, nor to experience a life-changing moment of decision and resolve. Instead he lay sleepless for an hour or so with the accident on mental instant-replay, occasionally punctuating the depiction with the single word, "tragedy," mouthed silently.

  Is it any wonder Billy woke up a dinosaur?

  One minute he was happy as the proverbial clam, the next forty years of his existence securely unionized. The next? WHAM! His dreams shattered in pieces all over the corner of Main and Fourth mixed with the blood of wasted metalheads. Not that his reaction wasn't extreme, mind you. I'm sure his family thought so. They probably would have said, "Think it over, Billy. This is a big decision. Take your time." Well, his parents at any rate would likely have said something like that. His sisters, of course, would have been characteristically blunt. But Tracey and Stacey didn't have a chance to pooh-pooh Billy's transformation. They—like their mom and dad—were crushed as a result of it. Margaret, thanks to the lure of Betty Louise's lurid stash of Playgirl and Sex Puppet magazines, owed her continuing existence to attending a "childish" (to her eighteen years of world-weary experience) slumber party on that fateful night.

  Billy awoke in the pre-dawn caress of sunlight with the certainty that something was definitely wrong. First, his neck ached like a snake-bite. He was already reaching his arm up to feel for the cause when the sad memory of his loss returned. He had scant seconds to mourn his vehicle before its image was obliterated by three painfully acute realizations. One: he was looking at the sky. Two: his arm had never reached his neck because it had somehow shortened, pawing impotently beside its mate, and had sprouted claws. Three: he smelled blood and its aroma overpowered his senses like the combined perfume of ten thousand Thanksgiving turkeys and a hundred chocolate cheesecakes.