Exigencies Page 3

  She imagined that the others sometimes looked at her sideways, never directly. Krista wasn’t sure if she was exaggerating their glances—her mother said that she tended to suspect dislike where it wasn’t present. You were always a fussy, fearful child, she’d said during her latest visit, after Krista had explained what had happened at her job, with her boss, how she had been shamed into leaving, how he had never called her again. I’m sure it would have blown over if you’d just waited. If you’d just been a little more goddamn calm about it.

  Being fearful makes people want to hurt you, her mother had said. When you shrink away, people want to give you a reason to shrink.

  Krista tried to breathe deeply to calm herself. She opened her bag and took out her book. She had read only one half-sentence (Wild animals added danger to the American wilderness and here, too, the element of the unknown intensified feelings) before she felt her stomach tighten. She had the urge to stretch out on the floor until the sickness passed, but she couldn’t. She put her book away and rose. As she stood up, the blonde, now sitting with her head between her hands, the empty pizza box occupying the seat next to her, turned to watch.

  Are you sick or something? The woman looked at Krista, though she kept her head in her hands.

  I’m ok, Krista said. Just had too much water.

  Her mother had always called her period her monthly friend, and Krista had been encouraged to adopt similar euphemisms for bodily functions. Going number two. Making water. Making wind. She couldn’t imagine answering the woman’s question truthfully.

  The woman pursed her lips and nodded, but turned to Krista again, her face still blank. Sure you didn’t pick up something from outside? You went farther out than any of us. As she said this, the woman weeping on her bleeding child’s blonde head looked up.

  Did you drink out of the water fountain? Did you get something from outside on the fountain?

  Krista shook her head, rising again. No, no. I have my own water. I swear, there’s nothing wrong with me. Nothing was wrong outside when I was out there. She looked at the two women, both staring at her, their mouths hardened, their teeth not showing.

  Excuse me, she told them, as if ducking away from a dinner party. I have to use the restroom.

  In the bathroom, Krista leaned her warm forehead against the bathroom stall, then thought better of it and pulled away. She didn’t know it was safe to touch. Maybe she was getting poison on everything she touched. The woman’s fear was convincing.

  In the stall, she knelt and rested her head in her hands. Her head ached dully. She couldn’t take one of the Tylenol she’d brought in her carry-on bags—she didn’t have any water left in her bottle. She knelt until the sickness passed. But she had to go back. She couldn’t hide.

  Before she left the bathroom, she caught a flash of light in the small window above her eye level. They were just outside, the men in masks. Krista wondered if she could see anything—maybe something she could tell the others about, gain their favor with—through the small, rectangular window in the bathroom. She turned over the bathroom’s metal trash can and climbed on it, holding the wall for balance, until she could see outside.

  The window looked out onto the front law of the airport. She saw three figures in jumpsuits gliding their flashlights along the lawn. One seemed to be examining the grass. Another seemed to be looking at the edge of the building, where the foundation met the ground. Another was farther off, sweeping his light in the little stand of trees between the airport and the industrial complex. Their motions seemed cursory, almost mocking, as if they were only putting on a show of searching, and not even a very convincing one.

  Looking for someone you know? A man’s voice surprised her, and Krista turned on the trash can, almost falling. It was the blonde’s husband. He wasn’t wearing his baseball cap and his reddish, curly hair was flat and greasy against his head like a stack of smashed bread.

  You scared me, she said, not sure how to understand the man’s presence in the women’s room. Is something wrong with the men’s room?

  The man shook his head. I just came to make sure you were all right. You were taking so long. His voice was wrong; it didn’t match his words. He smiled at Krista and motioned for her to join him.

  Come on back out here. We’ve all got some questions.

  Krista nodded, though she didn’t understand what he was saying. Questions for her? When she entered the waiting room, she saw that her baggage had been opened. The Eddie Bauer man had her book in his hands. He wore rubber gloves. Krista wondered where he had gotten them—did he pack rubber gloves whenever he traveled?

  What are you doing?

  The people around him looked up at her. They had all let him do this, she could see. They all approved.

  We found this, the blonde said, pointing at Krista’s seat. The red seat was stained black in a neat, tea saucer-sized circle. You’re bleeding. Why didn’t you tell us?

  They think I’m sick, she thought. It isn’t— she began, but the woman with the many pockets interrupted her.

  You haven’t spoken, and you’re traveling here alone, she said. You go outside right before the attack. You visit the restroom five or six times after. You don’t call anyone to let them know what happened. You don’t ask any questions, and you don’t seem to be phased by what’s happening here. The woman held her hands up, palms to the sky. What are we supposed to think?

  Listening to the woman, Krista almost felt convinced of her own suspicious behavior. She was vaguely afraid that they would find her out. But there’s nothing to find, she soothed herself, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m only alone. There’s nothing wrong with that.

  You can’t do this to me, she said instead, the words surprising her. How dare you do this to me? The words seemed familiar, like something she had seen on television, and they made her feel powerful. She wanted to hit the Eddie Bauer man and take back her book. She wanted to make the blonde stop smiling or smirking or whatever she was doing with her mouth.

  What, do you think you are some kind of important person? That you’re better than the rest of us? This was from the blonde. She crossed her arms over her chest. Krista imagined that this was the way she stood when scolding her children.

  I am important, she told them, not sure what she was trying to say. Tell them about your monthly friend, she told herself and almost laughed out loud. I’m as important as—

  She stopped when the lights went out. A few of the children screamed and the mothers hissed words of comfort. Krista didn’t move. It seemed safer to stay where she was. No need to drag it out. No need to make things harder on everyone. Though it was dark, she could hear the rustle of someone moving toward her.

  letitia trent

  ’s books include echo lake (dark house press) and almost dark (out in 2015 from chizine publications) as well as the poetry collections one perfect bird (sundress publications) and you aren’t in this movie (dancing girl press). her poetry and prose have appeared in black warrior review, fence, sou’wester, psychopomp, and smokelong quarterly, among others, and her non-fiction has been published by the daily beast, the nervous breakdown, and bright wall/dark room. she has received fellowships from the macdowell colony and the vermont studio center. trent currently lives in colorado with her husband, son, and three black cats.

  MONSTER

  SEASON

  JOSHUA BLAIR

  My brother showed me how to make a tattoo gun before I be­came the only son my parent’s friends know about. During that short window between statutory rape and aggravated assault, he said to start with the plainest toothbrush you can find. None of this stuff with angled necks or soft rubber grips. What you want is just a stick with bristles at one end.

  He said you cut off the head of it, so all you have is about six inches of straight plastic.

  He held his old toothbrush, which he hadn’t used for the last six to twelve months, in the light that shone through the open kitchen windows. The fingers of his other hand, wr
apped around the knife’s handle, looked like an old man’s. Long. Bony. Veins crisscrossing under the skin like a map of Los Angeles freeways. Mine would look the same by the time I grew to be nineteen.

  If your eyes traced a straight line down from his fingers, you’d see the slow build of thin black patterns that followed him home from prison. They started with spider webs in the elbows.

  He would tell you, “Your elbows are nothing but a thin layer of skin over bone. That’s why it hurts so much there. That’s why so many people get them done.”

  He’d say, “Tattoos on your elbows are a way of telling everyone else that you’re some kind of monster.”

  This was back when you didn’t need to be a millionaire to have a real backyard in California. This was back when peo­ple didn’t mind having linoleum floors or shit-brown carpet. It was around the same time that people started repainting their homes, because of a rumor that said Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, only killed people who lived in yellow houses.

  My brother worked the knife back and forth, sawing the head off his old toothbrush. He said, “If none of your buddies have kitchen duty, you could bite through the plastic, but it takes some time and could leave your mouth cut up for a few weeks.”

  He tossed the bristles into the trashcan under the sink.

  This was during that one summer when, no matter how hot it got outside, everybody slept with their windows locked shut. The same summer that the girl who cut my hair leaned over me and whispered, “One of the women I work with, her neighbors were killed a few days ago.”

  She brushed away the little wet shards of hair that were stuck beside my ear, saying, “The Night Stalker cut out the husband’s eyes so he could have sex with the empty sockets.”

  That Saturday, my dad and my uncle were out renting a paint sprayer.

  My brother pulled a lighter out of the small pocket of his jeans and then sparked a flame a few inches beneath the toothbrush. Thin wisps of white smoke floated away from the plastic, with a smell that reminded me of burning tires. When the plastic started bubbling tan at the middle of the brush, he stopped to roll it against the tile countertop. He bent it ninety degrees, then watched it flex almost all the way back to normal as it cooled.

  He said, “Right now what we’re making is the body. What holds everything all together.”

  Then he heated it again, to the very edge of boiling, and then rolled it against the counter. Each time it left a little more plastic melted to Mom’s tile. He said, “You’re done when it’s a right angle, like the number seven, and it doesn’t bend back when it cools.”

  You could hear Mom at the front of the house, holding swatch­es of color to the stucco walls. Holding different colors to the wooden trim. Her voice wafted in over the hot summer breeze while she and my aunt discussed paint schemes that wouldn’t get us all murdered.

  Even further out, where you should have been able to hear little kids yelling and playing, there was just wind and leaves. The wet summer heat was pressure-cooking us inside our houses.

  I think my brother was the only person in our neighborhood who would go outside alone at night, and I only knew he left because he would wake me up. His face was just a shadow in the night outside our window. “Close it,” he said, “and make sure you lock it.”

  I asked where he was going, once, and he only smiled. I didn’t do the math until a couple years later, when I realized that the first night he left was on Lucy’s eighteenth birthday. The night she stopped being a felony.

  “Grab me your tape player.”

  I went to my room and brought back my Walkman. It was a big red clunky thing with blue buttons. Yellow head­phones. The colors of my Superman pajamas.

  He took it in one hand and slipped the blade of the knife deep into the seam between the body’s two halves. One quick twist and mystery bits of the machine tinkled to the linoleum. He walked over to the kitchen table and worked at pulling it all apart with his hands.

  The inside of a tape player looks like a pulley glued to a green computer board. Take out the pulley and you’ve got a little rotary motor with a pair of wires coming out. He said the best batteries were nine-volts—the kind that would zap you if you licked one end. You touch the red wire to the simple looking terminal; touch the black wire to the crazy-looking terminal. That’s it. You have the spinning heart of a tattoo gun.

  The trick, my brother said, is converting rotary motion to the linear up-and-down motion of a tattoo needle.

  He said, “You’re going to thank me for teaching you this after you go to jail too.”

  “Yeah right. I’m not going to jail.”

  “That’s what everybody seems to think until they get thrown in.”

  The trick, he said, was jamming a piece of cork around the spin­ning part on the motor. Dead center, you jam the cork on the spin­dle, or you glue on a pencil eraser. Anything round and soft enough to poke a guitar string through, but strong enough to hold it in.

  This was during that one summer when, after sunset, our fami­ly would sit on the couch in our living room watching the evening news. We’d hear the stories of people getting slaughtered worse than animals. People like my hair-cutter’s friend’s neighbor. We’d sit there knowing that, even as we watched the stories, that guy was out there, maybe in our own neighborhood, looking for an open screen door.

  Governor Feinstein got on TV and told us how he operated. How he was a Satanist and he drew pentagrams in lipstick on the dead thighs of women he’d raped. Criminologists talked about how most killers were slowly made that way, but sometimes you got one that was pure. A monster born, rather than a monster evolved. Think of the difference between Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein.

  The news said to keep your doors and windows locked. Buy an alarm. Consider painting your house brown, with green trim.

  The voice of my mom came carried by the breeze, saying,” I think I like forest green more than eucalyptus, but I don’t think it goes as well with sandstone.”

  And my aunt’s voice came, “Don’t you think sandstone is too close to yellow anyway?”

  She said, “At night, you probably couldn’t even tell the difference.”

  My brother quietly said, “If any of these people spent a day in prison, they’d know the best security they could get would be to paint a giant pentagram on their garage doors.”

  He used electric tape to attach the Walkman motor to the bent toothbrush, arranging it so that the spindle was in line with the leg that went down. He said, “Innocence is what makes you a target.”

  If your eyes traced a line over the patterns of his skin, start­ing with his elbows, up to the part hidden under the sleeves of his shirt, they might have spotted the bottom leg of a swastika. Thin and bent like the number seven.

  After my brother got home from prison he never got out of the bathroom after taking a shower unless he was fully dressed. He never went to the pool, or to the beach, or did anything that’d let you see the marks on his body.

  He taped a nine-volt battery to the inside leg of the toothbrush thing, beneath the motor. When the wires bumped into the battery’s terminals, the little spindle twirled a hunk of cork, big around as a dime.

  He said, “Grab me a pen,” and then used his front teeth to pop off the little cap that sealed its back end. He pulled out the thin little tube of ink. He cut the tip of the pen off so the ball at its point rolled out. Dark blue stains rolled out behind it on Mom’s table.

  I got a handful of paper towels and began cleaning it while he walked into our parents’ room. He came back with his hands full of stuff he took from their bathroom - things which he arranged into a neat row on the kitchen table. Cotton balls, baby oil, mirror, shampoo, cough syrup. He added an empty coffee can from underneath the sink.

  “The ink in those pens is no good for tattoos,” he said, “so we have to make our own.”

  He soaked some cotton balls with a few drops of baby oil, set them on fire, and then dropped them into the can. He set the mirr
or facedown over the can so that the smoke would darken the glass.

  After the fire burned out, he turned over the mirror. “See all this black? That’s carbon. That’s our black.”

  He took the cap from the cough syrup bottle and turned it over on the table, then used the knife to scrape fine black powder off of the mirror and into the cap. Then he began mixing baby oil in with the soot. “To thin this out, just keep adding more oil,” he said. “Or, if you need to thicken it, add some of that shampoo.”

  He gently swirled the cap between his fingers. “I’ve seen guys mix oil and cough syrup to make red ink. I thought about trying it now, but, nah.”

  He said, “Now, grab me your guitar.”

  That summer, on the nights when my dad wasn’t home from work and my brother was out late, Mom would make me fall asleep next to her on the couch in the living room. All the shades would be drawn but all the lights would be lit. She’d have the TV on loud enough to be heard from outside. The news anchor saying, “There’s something about the summer months that draws these guys out of the woodwork. Ted Bundy. Son of Sam. The Manson murders. We’re always talking about July and August.”

  I sat on her left, because she’d be holding a hammer in her right hand. She always held it backward, so if she was attacked by the killer, she’d bury the forked part in his brain. The way my brother showed her.

  My brother, who took my guitar and started twisting the tun­ing peg of the high e-string. The lightest string on the guitar. He kept twisting until the string when slack, and then he pulled it out of the turning peg. He pulled the pin out of the bridge and the string came free.

  He said, “So have you figured out what you want me to put on you?”

  Me, all of twelve years old, I said that I wanted Superman’s “S.”

  He grabbed the knife and cut off the twisted end of the string, then pulled it through the hollowed-out pen. He bent the very tip of the guitar string to a right angle. The number seven. Then he shoved the bent part through the cork, just off of center.