Short Story / The Visit

There was a ruckus at the airport. My father held my hand tightly and urgently and we watched the ruckus. It involved a man dressed like a clown, fighting against two police who seemed to give up one second, the next one of the police drew out a box that shot blue light between its prongs and zip!...he zapped the clown. The clown fell, bursting like a popping balloon. My dad shook his head at the clown’s antics.
        Of course I was really interested but he drew me away and we went through the tills, he depositing his quarters and dimes and nickels (he threw away pennies as a rule) while I imitated him, filling a tray with a shadow of pocket fluff.
        The security woman made a show of examining my pocket fluff before handing it back.
        He bought me a candy bar and himself a newspaper complaining all the while of airport prices, just as he had complained of the price of airport parking, just as he complained at least once per day in my hearing of fuel prices. I went busily at my candy bar while he groaned and grunted and crumpled the newspaper, uncrumpled it, read it again.
        Finally, a half hour later according to the flight screen, he rolled the newspaper (which now looked like it had been attacked by an army of wild cats) under his arm and we walked the concourse to Gate D11.
        We joined the people waiting there. There was a little girl who looked at me, and I wondered if she was calculating my age just as I calculated the ages of other children in my spare time, wondering how old were they.
I was a whopping fourteen and thought myself a good judge of ages. Her mother had her by the arm in a tight grip, holding her like she was a fish trying to get back into the water. The first people crossed through Gate D11 past the stewardess desk. There were no people crying and laughing like in the movies. Everyone moved at a sedate pace, as if leaving their kitchen.
        My aunt and uncle were the last to come from the gate, after them, the stewardess smiling and yet not really smiling, clicked a plastic rope into place. A couple who had been waiting for the plane to leave, now approached, proffering their tickets.
        I had never met my aunt and uncle, had never even heard about them until breakfast when my dad had drafted me into coming with him to get them.
Besides, they’d understand because they were my aunt and uncle. Expecting my father to talk and then introduce me after finishing off the pleasantries, I was surprised to bravely look and see that he was also looking away. I looked at my aunt and uncle’s shoes. I lifted my head and looked at them.
        My uncle wore a dark suit. He was a thin man with thinning hair that rounded his skull in a patchwork. When I looked at him he smiled and murmured something I couldn’t quite hear because of the airport noise. His lips were thick and full, when he smiled the corners fattened like a cartoon girl wearing lipstick.
        “You must be Theo,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” He cleared his throat. It sounded a little bit like a frog farting.
        My aunt didn’t smile. She was thinner than my uncle, and taller, with dark brown eyes, and she wore a long white coat tied with a sash at the waist – even though it was nearly eighty degrees. My uncle leaned down and put out his hand.
        “Milt,” my dad said. My dad still wasn’t quite looking at my uncle. He seemed more interested in a drama being played out one gate down, D12, where a young blonde girl was passionately kissing a woman several years her senior. My aunt looked but didn’t frown like my mom would have – she remained expressionless.
        “He’s a fine looking son,” Uncle Milt told my dad. “Reminds me of you.” My uncle’s eyes twinkled. My father nodded once. “I’m parked a bit out. Let’s go get your luggage.”
        During the ride home my uncle and aunt rode in the backseat. Uncle Milt seemed interested in the surroundings and looked here and there, head cocked like he was listening, unrolling his window and breathing in and sniffing. He even put his hand out and tried to catch the breeze. My aunt said nothing, acting like she was asleep even though she was awake.
        When we got home my dad ushered them into the house and I went in behind them and went to my room. It was nice out but being shy, my friends were at school, and I only saw them at school. It never struck me that I could invite them over after school or ask my dad or my mom to drive me to one of their houses. Every so often when my dad asked me how I spent my hours, what I did up there, “in your room,” I shrugged. I wasn’t a reader although I had a few video game magazines that were well-thumbed. If I got so bored I needed to read I reread one of those, studying the pages I had already read through once before, taking great pleasure in doing so. They felt so familiar, even if the bad jokes that littered the magazine were tiresome, that reading them was pleasure.
        When it was time for dinner I went downstairs and found my mother and my father in the kitchen talking in low voices, and my aunt and uncle in the living room with the television on. I saw the backs of their dark heads, still like heads in a movie theatre. The news was on. They watched in silence.
        I entered the kitchen quietly. Quiet enough to overhear a little bit of my parent’s whispers.
        “They’ve never been.”
        “You don’t see us calling them out of the blue and getting on a plane to go visit them spur of the moment.”
        “They’re not us honey,” a little bit angry.
What is wrong with this picture?” My mother’s voice got a little too loud, and I sensed the two heads on the couch shift behind me.
        “What’re we eating?”         My mom turned her sharp face toward me and her manner softened…but not much. “Chicken,” she said.         I shrugged, went back to my room. As I headed up the stairs the two heads swiveled out of the corner of my eye, followed my movements.
        I thought about turning, for an instant I had an imaginary, unshy Theo walk down to the living room and change the channel to something I wanted to watch, turning and giving them a look of ownership: my television, my couch.
        I was sitting in my bed when I heard a soft and quiet knock.
        My uncle came in. He stood just over the threshold, in the carpet worn by my bedroom door’s continuous opening and closing, staring at me. Then, he grinned.
        “Am I bothering you Theo?” He asked, carefully.
I felt weird having a stranger, relative only by name, entering my inner sanctum.
        He sat in the single chair in my room.
“So what is school like?”         “School…school’s school I guess,” I replied.
        He leaned forward in the chair, hands gripping the bottom.
        “Yes, in my experience, school is always just school.” He paused, as if waiting for a laugh. All I did was make a sound though. “What subjects interest you?” I imagined him sitting in a cell when he asked that, in a prison uniform, asking a new prisoner: “what subjects interest you?”
“School,” he said, shaking his head.
        My father came to the door, saw us in my bedroom. He smiled. “Dinner’s ready.” My uncle Milt rose as if regretfully, as if every moment was a lost cause. “We were talking about school,” he told my dad. My dad nodded, his smile disappeared. Then my uncle did.         I ate hurriedly, like usual, but noticed my father and mother also eating in a hurry. Usually I did, just so I could escape to watch TV, away from the too-well lit table, and be on my own, and away.
        Tonight everybody wanted to escape: the three of us anyway. Uncle Milt and my aunt ate slowly and cautiously, as if slow and cautious eating was mandatory. My aunt still hadn’t said a word. My uncle did all the talking. He talked about the price of gas, a topic my father usually talked about but unusually he didn’t seem interested. My mother didn’t ask anyone if they wanted desert. After dinner, my aunt and uncle paraded again to the living room where they again sat on the couch again watching the news.
        Planning to return to my room, having no interest in watching the news, thinking that I had some well-thumbed video game magazines to thumb through yet again, I stopped when my father gestured to me to come into the kitchen. “Theo,” he said. “Go entertain them.” I understood what I guess I had understood since the moment at the airport, when my father had looked away. I had thought it shyness but now I thought it active dislike. He had not looked away the way I looked away (because I was shy and fumbling), no, he had looked away because, maybe, if he had looked them in the eye they might have seen something in his eyes, something like dislike. Something my father would have gotten upset at, if someone were to look at him like that, something my father would not want to show, not want them to know. I shrugged. “Why?”         My mother, who had been poking around the kitchen, stopped and listened, and started again. She turned the faucet on and dumped food into the garbage disposal, flipping the switch and waiting until the grinding sounded empty before flicking it off. For some reason this decided me.
        I went into the living room where they were watching the news.
        I sat in the chair that I preferred, the window behind my head.
        This is the way my parents stranded me. They somehow managed to spend the night in the kitchen, somehow managed to extend the time it took to clear and clean up dinner into the time it took for it to be 10 PM. I watched the cable news, at first bored, then interested when they had a special on how to rob banks. I was thinking it was very interesting indeed when my father came in and told me it was time for me to go to bed. “You’ve got school tomorrow,” he told me. Meanwhile, his eyes said thank-you. When I got up to go my uncle leaned his head forward, smiled, and told me thanks. I went upstairs, but as I did so, I caught a glimpse of my father frowning.
        I don’t know what time they went to bed, if it was right after I went to bed, or if my strange aunt and uncle stayed up late watching cable news like the kind of people movie theater attendants probably hate: the kind that pay for their ticket, eat the popcorn and the candy; when the movie ends they still sit there, through the credits, then when the lights go on, everybody leaves but them. They stay there smiling at the screen. What do movie attendants do, when that happens? I had weird dreams.
        In the morning there was no sign my aunt and uncle had even arrived. My mom and dad were already awake in the kitchen. My dad was addicted to coffee. He drank pots and pots of coffee. Because of this, we had a stainless steel coffee machine that could make all kinds of fancy coffee, including ice coffee. The day he brought it home was a Saturday. He came in through the kitchen door holding an enormous box with a picture of a stainless steel spaceship on it. When I told him, in my mother’s presence, she grabbed onto the phrase and started calling it The Spaceship too. The Spaceship’s stainless steel form was bubbling and jumping with little pitter-patters that sounded like the footsteps of mice on savage diets…I sat at the kitchen table, my dad occasionally getting up, filling his mug, sitting back down and resuming a conversation he was having with my mom that was cryptic, that I really didn’t get while I ate nutty cereal, trying to fathom what they were talking about.           “Heard a snore.” Who?
        “Slept like a rock?” Who?
        “…love the taste of…” What?
        “Wasn’t that the cat’s meow?” What?
        “At work Mr. Henderson wants a report of the last month’s ratio to surplus…” What!?
        “Delores at the Club is reading a book about Henry Kissinger.” Who!?
        “Fancy pants.” Who!?
        “I heard the toilet flush and when I went in there was blood on the toilet rim. A lot of blood,” my mom said. “It was super gross. Imagine me standing there looking at all this blood. I gagged. Milt or that woman.” I perked my ears. But it was time for school.
        After school the cars were both gone as usual and I had forgotten about my strange (and strangely hated) aunt and uncle. I used my key to open the side door and went into the kitchen. I could see the dust falling in motes. I dug in the “cookie cabinet” and put a few chocolate chip cookies in a Bounty paper towel (the picker-upper) and went into the living room intending to do what I always do, which is sit down on the couch eat the chocolate chip cookies and then lay down and watch something on satellite.
        The blinds were already closed when I entered the living room. It was dark. I ended up almost dropping the chocolate chip cookies out of my Bounty paper towel when I was reminded of my aunt and uncle: their heads were visible. They were sitting on the couch, watching a talk show. Not one of the popular talk shows. This was the kind of talk show nobody watched, with a fake host in a blue suit and fake guests in outfits that were discolored and diseased. The talk show host was lecturing the guests who were clearly being paid to be there, who were acting out extreme emotions in the muscles of their faces.
        Uncle Milt’s head turned.
        The television vibrated against his face, throwing up a chaos of colorful images of blue and black and green. “There’s the young man,” uncle Milt said.
        “Hi.”
        Uncle Milt’s smile gave me the willies.
        “How was school?” He asked very seriously.
        “It was school,” I replied.
        “Yes, school is school.” I thought he nudged my aunt. “School is school,” he told her, turning his face away from mine. It was a relief. I had gotten lost in the vibrant colors swirling on his face.
        I went into the living room and sat with my cookies.
        Uncle Milt seemed very interested in watching me eat the cookies, like he had a vested interest, to make sure I ate every last chunk of chocolate, every last piece of tan breading (my favorite part). He did not say anything until I finished and balled up the paper towel to keep the crumbs from falling.
        “Good?”         I nodded.
        The talk show host harruanged a young couple for cheating and then made the man take a DNA test to find out if he had fathered the woman’s baby. She cried when it was discovered that he had not, in fact, been the father. My mom came home when the woman was on her knees in front of him trying to push her lips to his shoes, repeating, “take me back I’ll kiss them shoes,” in a magical chant while the host looked on approvingly.
        “Theo,” she said, surveying the living room. “Theo can you help me please carry the groceries in.”
        I hurried to help her.
        I followed her to the car and she turned and started laughing. When we got control of ourselves she asked the Million Dollar Question: “what were you watching?” My expression caused her to laugh some more.
        When I grabbed a bag and turned to go into the house my aunt was standing on the stone step by the side door to the kitchen staring at us. I looked right to my mom and saw her flinch. She hefted the two plastic bags full of frozen food in her two arms like she was going to carry water on her skull – with just the right amount of hesitation – before walking ahead of me in the attitude of one prepared to bite the bullet. I expected fireworks but my aunt held the screen door open until my mom got there. “Thanks,” my mom said uncomfortably.
        My aunt said nothing. Her eyes stared out of her head with nothing I recognized, no emotion or anything I could get – like an alien’s eyes from a movie. A monster’s eyes.
        After my dad got home we had an uncomfortable dinner. My dad and my uncle talked briefly about politics but the conversation seemed to go nowhere. It wasn’t my dad’s fault. He was always game, and we had a ritual between us, where sometimes I’d try to argue a sound byte I had heard from a teacher, something political. It made my dad excited: it passed the time.
        Everyone ended up watching everyone else eat. Then the three of us, me, my dad, my mom, ended up watching my aunt and uncle eat. They ate with their eyes facing their food, their heads very close to their plates like they did not want to miss a spot. Both of them cleaned their plates with machine intensity. Eventually we all stopped eating, just watching them go to work like food mowers. The sound was the glug-glug of plumbing crossed with a meatier sound. My uncle looked up after sucking the last bite down and we three immediately looked down at our plates in quiet worship.
        My food was cold because I had watched them devour their food but I gave it a try, and heard my parents doing the same. Whenever I looked up my uncle Milt watched me. He wasn’t smiling.
        My parents, as if having pity on me, joined the living room after dinner. It was busy with my dad making noises, pressing the remote in a rote fashion. We finally settled on a cable news channel. My aunt and uncle sat on the couch like they had the previous night, faces immobile as stone.
        I went upstairs early and sat in my room. I looked through an old video game magazine, paying close attention to the review, not that I had any real interest in playing the game. For some reason it just held my attention. The moon shone through my window, the white reflection the opposite of the sun, with white rays instead of yellow.
        I kept thinking about something that had happened today at school. Passing between classes I saw a child giant with his arms folded and his hair hanging down from his head standing guard over the bathroom. I didn’t press my case but when I was that close to the bathroom I could hear the sound coming from the bathroom. I heard water that sounded hot. I immediately sensed the water was steaming, molten, and I heard someone, a voice I recognized, scream. The scream started a moment after I tried to go into the bathroom, and even the big guy seemed a little frightened. It sounded like a horse whinny.
        I heard another liquid dropping from the bathroom when I walked away to get to Geography class. I knew instantly what it was because my bladder tightened and squeeze against my stomach. Someone was pissing; in fear, in paint; someone pissed. The rumor at three o clock when the first buses came to take the children to their homes was that the police had come. An older kid named Todd Prency had stuck a 6th grader’s face under hot water, burning him terribly, blinding him in that eye.
        It seemed far removed from me at the time, and I listened to it with the inquisitiveness of anyone hearing a grisly story. Except it didn’t touch me at the time, while we sat in the bright lights, while the teacher marked grades or marked her vacation schedule behind her desk (whatever she was doing), only now it did bother me and I started thinking about it. When my uncle Milt came to my door I felt relief.
        “Hello,” he said. His thin face smiled radiantly.
        “Hi,” I replied.
        “How was school?”         This time I answered him. I would not have told my mom because she would have freaked, I would not have told my dad because he would have gotten angry. I told uncle Milt.         When I finished telling him, even including the part about the horse whinny, he nodded and rubbed his chin.
        “Well,” I said into the silence.
        “Well Theo, man can be a monster.” He smiled when he said this, lines on his forehead rippling. “Man is not always a monster but man always has the capacity to be a monster.” He knocked on the door.
        “Thank you,” he said.
        “Theo,” he said, once seated in my desk chair.         “I see it in your eyes, “ he put up a hand to forestall protests I was not about to make. I was reclining on my bed and I started to feel uncomfortable, as if this would be a wisdom lesson, like the kind my father gave me, every time after major turbulence in the White House: Power corrupts. Men are fools. I sensed we were sharing a moment, even though I couldn’t put my finger on it, and the moment was precious to Uncle Milt who definitely seemed smart enough to recognize that he and my aunt weren’t exactly celebrated in the household.
        Uncle Milt’s eyes weren’t exactly looking at me; they weren’t exactly not looking at me either. His eyes looked inward.
        Then he farted.        
        It was such a nasty sound, not like my dad’s farts which were warm and fuzzy but smelled like old diapers, or my mom’s whose farts started somewhere in the distance and ran like a long distance sprinter, or like a really loud zipper, but didn’t smell. Uncle Milt’s sounded the way death’s farts would sound if death got gas. Painful and grinding like a set of rusted gears sheepishly turning out the terrible sound, shrugging guys with FART hats saying to each other, “at least we got some pressure.” The sound of his fart dried out my mouth and made swallowing seem as difficult as learning a dead language. His face twisted, the cheekbones popping and receding. His lips drooped. I lay there a long time watching the slow, dreadful minutes tick past.
My aunt and uncle weren’t up and about, just like yesterday they slept, and it was almost like they weren’t there at all. When I told her about the blood, her face paled. “There was blood all over the bathroom,” my mom told us. “I cleaned it up at 2am and almost threw up. Blood everywhere. A handprint in the mirror.” She shivered.
        “Well make sure you don’t say anything,” my dad warned us.         After school I walked home instead of taking the bus. The leaves were boiling in the wind like the whole outside was a stew and the leafy triangles, the brown twigs, all were the ingredients. Don was a big brute, a year or two years older than me. He presided over a group of kids he called the No Jacks club. He was their de-facto leader. There were quite a few kids who hung out with Don. None of their names was Jack.
        Don had a younger kid, a neighbor’s kid, named Alex huddled on the green grass between the street and sidewalk. Alex was three years old and had an enormous head and a sheaf of straight black hair that jumped down his face like a wall climber. He didn’t speak complete English and relied on body movements for help. Huddled in the grass, unsure of what he was in for, he was taking great big breaths. His Spiderman bicycle lay in the gutter, the left training wheel bent up.
        I saw it and kept walking. I was on the other side of the street and Don had never messed with me before so I figured I was safe if I just ignored it. I was right. I heard Don and the other No Jacks taunting Alex, asking why Mexicans didn’t learn English. Don was tall and skinny and a born fighter, rough and dirty.
        In the kitchen, digging through the refrigerator, I found a pudding cup and brought it with me to the living room. Today only my aunt watched TV. She ignored me like I wasn’t there. Finally I mustered the courage to ask where my uncle had gone.
        I hadn’t heard her speak and was beginning to believe she was deaf but she answered immediately. “Sleeping,” she said. “Milt does not feel well.” Hearing her speak was a shock – even more of a shock was the sound of her voice. She had a beautiful voice.         I sat there quietly. A Seinfeld rerun was on, one which had a soup maker deny them soup. We watched in dead silence.
        Uncle Milt didn’t show up for dinner. My aunt didn’t offer an explanation.
        We ate in silence. I expected my parents to behave differently hearing the news about Milt, the blood, everything, but they didn’t. If anything my aunt was segregated, like she was already gone – like she and Uncle Milt had already departed. After dinner the phone rang. My dad shook his head at my mom (he hated the phone and refused to get a cell phone because he said he couldn’t stand talking on them no matter how convenient other people thought they were). My mom answered.
        A few moments later she bid the caller goodbye, then looked at me.
        “Theo,” she said. Something caught in her voice, something blue and strange and sad, it caught there like all the sad, blue things of the world, a worm in a beak, a dead man on a slab. “Alex Richards is in the hospital,” she said.         I shook my head. “It was that guy Don,” I told her.
        Her face contorted in anger, while my dad looked on confused, and she stood there watching me, until finally, like Atlas dropping the Earth, her face came to an utter halt, a surrender to graveness and disappointment.
        “I was on the other side of the street,” I protested.
        “You didn’t help a three year old,” she screamed at me.
“I just saw the messing with his bike.” She read the lie in my eyes. Her face crumpled she turned to my father.         I clobbered the stairs when I went, wondering if they expected me to die. Did they expect me to defend him, and be in the hospital too? I flipped on the lights in my room intending to jump on my bed.
        Uncle Milt sat in my desk chair. He looked unwell. His pale head, covered in dying hair, was lowered as if he were looking under my bed. He covered his eyes when I turned on the light. His hands were thin and ghastly colored. He peered through his hand at me. “Turn it off,” he sighed at me. “Turn it off boy.”
        I flipped the light switch.
        Darkness flooded my room again. Then I thought about the blood. I felt pity. The old man was dying.
        When my eyes adjusted to the dark I sat on my bed and stared at him. In the darkness uncle Milt was ghoulish, blue and dark and ill.
        After a while he spoke: “we are all monsters,” he said. “Not just men.”         I couldn’t think of a lie. After a while I cried. I shuddered and cried for everyone. I cried for my aunt who was quiet but who sounded beautiful. I cried for my parents but didn’t know why. I cried for my uncle who bled on the toilet, in the sink, who stuck his bloody palms on the mirror. I cried for Alex, who could not speak English, not because he was Mexican, not because he was stupid, not because of any reason but that he was three.
        I don’t know who received the most tears; and then I cried for me, who tallied up the score.
        He listened to it all, his head moving ever so often like it was music to his ears. The arm was cold as stone, strong as granite, light as air. He hugged me to his thin chest and although I had no more tears I fell against him, feeling his coldness. I could feel his illness, in the blood, through my ears, his dead heart, his dying brain – everything was in the hard, immobile stone of him against me.
        He laughed. He coughed after each laugh, but it was a laugh.
        “Theodore,” he whispered against my head. At that moment I felt closer to him then I had ever felt toward my parents. This ill-stranger who was in my house, in my bedroom, who was dying. I heard his blood start to bubble in his throat. Uncle Milt got up. He walked from my bed, coughing. Each time he coughed dark blood flew.
        It spotted my carpet, and as he put his hand on my door, deep bloody coughs shattered against the wood.
        He headed toward the bathroom.
        I sat in the dark a long time listening to him cough and bleed, bleed and cough, each time I’d hear him breathing like he was running a marathon, before the blood and the coughs would start again.
        I begin crying again, summoning tears from my secret repository where I kept the heart-felt ones. I cried even harder when I heard him cry in the bathroom. I could him bang the toilet, and his old tears, much older than mine, clicking and sopping against the toilet – I stopped crying when I feared it was blood.
        I raised up from my bed and went to check on him. The house was dark. Everyone had gone to bed while my uncle and I had been talking and the only like was the familiar places light, that ambient throw rug of identity.
        I don’t know how long I staggered in the hallway, thinking of Alex who maybe I could have saved from the hospital, thinking of my parents who just wanted these people gone, thinking of my aunt with her music voice, like pianos and cellos and violins lined up, along with the most beautiful voice – ever – singing together.
        When I got to the bathroom it was filled with blood. Blood roared out from beneath the toilet seat, nicking the carpet, becoming part of the carpet.
        Bloody handprints on the mirror, blood gathered in a reflecting red pool in the sink.
        I got a towel from the towel and washrag closet, got on my knees like a washerwoman in the movies, and begin to swipe up the blood, soaking the blood like it had somewhere to go. By the time I was reaching for my second towel, the first had become a soaking pyramid of still cloth. I pulled the grey steel sink stopper up and ran the faucet and watched the blood drain away; thick and bulky blood. I cried while I did it. When I was done there was no trace of my uncle’s spilling. There was no sign that my uncle had even been there. I had never cleaned so good. Everything gleamed like it was new, the toilet paper was a full roll and I could imagine it slowly rotating on its holder, the toilet was bereft of pubic hair, of the yellow pee stains my mom often complained about and tried to pick out who did it like she was going through profiles in a police station: dad or Theo. Theo or dad.
        It was both of us, I thought.
The yellow was stricken from the record, was lifted up in the bloody urine-soaked towels that made capricious faces on the bathroom floor.
        I kept expecting the bathroom door to open, honestly I hoped it would – my mom would gently push it open and see me and the evidence of my trials, the blood towels, the spotless architecture of the toilet, floors, and mirror. I went out to the kitchen, quietly, under the sink, to where the garbage bags were kept, retrieved one and brought it back to the bathroom, stuffed the towels in it, where their sharp shapes defied logic and poked out of the garbage bag, like twisted stars. I was afraid the bag would rip because the blood sloshed at the bottom of it, separated from the towels, and I took great care on my way to the kitchen once again, opening the kitchen door and lifting the bag out, making sure not to rub or hit it against anything. I put it in the trash underneath a bag of coffee filters, a bag of stale BBQ potato chips, underneath a cardboard box that had at one point contained tinfoil. As soon as I released the bag the part I had held together tightly opened, releasing a scent of strong meat.
        Then I went to bed.
        When I woke up the next morning at first I had a hard time remembering cleaning that mess up. The morning crowned the edge of my window, early, the color the cousin of twilight. It was Friday.
        Sick, dying Uncle Milt and my aunt were leaving tomorrow. At breakfast, after a few moments while I wondered if one of my parents would ask me if I had been up last night, and if so, what had I been doing – I ventured to ask where they were from.
        My dad shrugged. My mom said she thought they were from Pennsylvania but she wasn’t sure. “I’ve got the letter around here,” she said. “Somewhere, in the bill drawer.” The bill drawer contained copies of all the bills my parent’s received, copies of checks, receipts. For a while my mom had been keeping her grocery receipts so the thing was a clutter of paper wadded and as complicated a chaos as a broken spider’s web.
Dad asked out of the blue. He read the paper and drank his spaceship coffee, head down.
        “Why?”         “I thought,” he said. “You might want to spend time with your aunt and uncle before they leave. I noticed –“ here he looked at my mom. “We noticed that you and Uncle Milt seemed to hit it off pretty good.”
        I shrugged.         “We can take the boat out,” he said.
        The boat.
        The boat was serious business. The boat was an occasional apology when my dad was busy at work – like in the past when he felt guilt that we weren’t spending enough quality time together. The boat. Merely going out on the boat was big, meant big things. When we had moved here, two years ago, my dad took me out in his boat to break the news. The boat was in the garage covered by a grey tarp to ward off injury.
        My mom was looking at me strangely.
        But still – no one asked if I was up last night, if it had been me, up, cleaning the blood. I decided to go back to bed to wait for my dad’s call. I lay down and fluffed my pillow and stared at the plaster bubbles in the ceiling, not expecting, really, to fall asleep, but expecting some kind of tranquility.
        I dreamt of a strange boat. In the dream I was fully aware of myself, at least I thought I was – in a dreamy way – and I was toward the aft end of the boat. I had a fishing line cast over the side. I stared into the cool, blue water. It wasn’t any lake I recognized. In fact, just as I felt in control of myself, like at any moment in the dream I could have pulled my fishing line out of the water and moved to another section of the boat and recast it, I knew that we were somewhere – somewhere big – like an ocean. The blue waves were calming and I passively leaned out over. After a while, I looked down and saw the name of the boat had been worn off by countless decades spent in salt water. I could read THE but nothing else. It was a cute boat, almost like a cartoon boat. In my dream I walked forward. I passed the captain’s cabin. (It was that kind of boat). There were gibbering electronics in the captain’s cabin, red and amber lights that went on and off and a slight wheeze, a shuddering, as if there were voices, even though I heard none. I continued to walk forward. My uncle sat on the forecastle.
Uncle Milt looked better. His face was healthy and stronger-featured than it was in real life. His eyes were young and bit by young desires, similar to my own.
        “Theodore,” he greeted. It was a shark. A great black shark a few hundred feet from the tip of the boat. It played in the rousing water, its nest of white jaws revealing themselves every so often, as it jumped, Dolphin-like, and nosed the water again.
My uncle asked.
        “He’s a shark.”
“It’s a blood shark.” He smiled. “They’ve died out. They used to travel in packs, in swarms, and they used their strength of numbers to feed on whales even.”
        “I’m dreaming,” I told him.
        He put his hand out. “But you see the blood shark by itself,” he pointed with his hand. His fingers were long and his hand unlined.
        “Do you see how it frolics, how it plays?”
The shark my uncle called a blood shark rose out of the water and opened its maw. The teeth were fangs as sharp as blades but curved. It had a tongue. A great yellow tangled tongue that looked both too narrow and too long to possibly be natural. The tongue reminded me of an octopus.         My aunt came from wherever she had been. She looked wet and unreal. She was young, just a few years older than I was. She smiled at me, long black hair covered her tanned face. When I smiled at her she reached up and unbound the top of her swimsuit.
        She showed her breasts. The tips of her nipples were light blue. She reached down and shook out of the rest of her bikini. Her lips were very red and yet very dry.
It was my uncle’s hand that stopped me. He held my arm in uncompromising fingers. A seagull shit on the deck just a few inches from my feet. The sun clamored down, blinding me. “Look,” my uncle said.
        The blood shark was gone. The sea was empty except for the gentle roll of waves like a field of grass. There was no land in sight. There was no shark in sight.
        When I looked back toward my aunt, all I saw was a flash of movement and a splash in the water near the boat. A moment later the black shark shot up into the sky, water drops coming with, and the huge yellow tongue shot out and unwound, shooting slime, and then retracted, and the blood shark fell back into the water.
My uncle asked me.
        His warm hand grew cold.
All of us born monsters. All of us hoping to outwit death, Theo.” I looked into my uncle’s eyes. They were weary and old. He was old. The uncle Milt who had come to my room, who had shit and spat his blood. Blood gathered in his eyes.
        “These tears outwit death, Theo,” he said. The red tears ran down his face. His eyes followed. Then his cheeks gathered up like fluid and ran. He was a skull case. His skull was stained and his jaw opened and in the insides dust formed, until it was all dust and the sea wind which was always present blew it away.
        There were hands on me. Invisible hands, thrusting me back and forth like a puppet. I worked my legs but to no avail, the hands heaving me here, and there.
        My father’s night breath blew in my face.
        “Wake up,” he said. My room’s light was on. My father was dressed in the pajamas my mom had bought him last year.
        Lights flickered outside my window.        
        “Your mom found your uncle Milt,” my dad said.         The ambulance flickered again, and I saw the panic lights recede.
        My mom was in the kitchen. Her eyes were red and fat from crying.
        “The bathtub was filled with blood,” she told my dad. “His head was under all the blood. How can someone have that much blood in them? It isn’t right.” She said this while she operated the big spaceship coffee maker. “How much blood does the human body have?” She asked anybody. At this point I could tell she didn’t care. Her eyes got bigger and smaller, the pupils shrinking each time, in opposition. “He lay there, I could see all the wiry hairs, his head underneath all that blood.”         I walked toward the bathroom. My dad might have protested but I didn’t turn to give his protest any credence. I dreaded it. As I walked I remembered cleaning up the night before.
        The fake wood bathroom door was closed. I pushed it open.
        There was blood everywhere. It was as though someone had tried to take a bath of blood. It was up to the fill level. All that red. There was blood on the floor, on the toilet, down under the toilet was something red and thick that looked like a different variety of blood, from somewhere else, a different shade, darker, almost black. I bent down in front of the tub and stuck my hand in the blood and pulled out the stopper.
        The blood bubbled and sang.
        When I reached my arm back it was covered. I went to the sink and turned the faucet on hot. I looked at the door.
        My parents were standing there, in horror. My mom came in and grabbed my arm whispering, with her shoulders shrugging, while my dad just sagged by the door as if empty, as if this were his blood. Even though I didn’t need any help she held my hand and waved it under the faucet, joined her other hand into the battle, kneading the blood from my pores. It went on this way until my hand was withering and the hairs were so damp and flush against my flesh they reminded me of black worms, trying to bite their way into me.
        “Where’s she?”         “Aunt -,” I couldn’t think of her name.
        I straightened and pulled my hand out of the water, reached for a towel.
        “Let me,” she said, grabbing a towel and thrusting it over my arm, tying it into a bandage as though I were bleeding.
My father asked quizzically, from where he sat looking out the window as though the ambulance would be back.
        “Are we going to the hospital?”
My father turned toward my mother.
        She paused, heavy as a bell, her nod.
        The way to the hospital didn’t feel like anything. I didn’t know what time it was, but the darkness was complete; the lights from other houses were dark, they had turned them off and it was like a ghost street. I sat in the backseat, waiting, but nobody said anything. We passed Alex’s house, the three-year old. The light in their dining room was on. It was strange, seeing it, and the few other houses which had lights on, when I saw them – I wondered if they were the No Jacks, young as myself, probably scared at their own strangeness and violence. My father turned the radio on and for a second a woman’s voice hummed from the car. Then he reached out and turned it off. We parked in visitor parking. My father got out, and he looked at the white sign for Visitor Parking. You had to pay to park there. But instead of his normal curses, he just ignored the sign, for my benefit I believed.
        We went and signed in with the nurse on watch. She had long white hair that was strangely lusterous, strangely becoming, and strangely soothing. I didn’t see any words pass between her and my father but I wasn’t paying very close attention. A crying woman took and held my attention. Her eyes were beer caps, black with grief, and drunk, drunk with something else. She made a weird keening sound that set the hairs on my neck into a ruffle, like a rainbow lizard.
        I was still watching her when I felt a soft, quiet touch on my shoulder. My aunt looking as quiet as ever, even graver than before, held my shoulder. Her hand gave off a chill, the fingers gentle but strong, and I had the feeling that without a thought she could crumble my shoulder to dust.
        She led me away from my parents who were still talking to the nurse. I followed her through an empty hospital corridor painted with green lines, for navigation.
        Though she was not holding onto me, there was a significant hold, stronger and stranger than any she offered physically.        
        At last we entered the room where my uncle lay. It was not a solitary room. There was someone else in there, an older man who was leaning up and flipping through the channels of the TV mounted in the corner of the room. My uncle was watching the TV, then flip, watching, then flip. The other patient was mad with the controller. A tyrant.
        When he saw us he smiled, an empty, crazy gape, a mad-man’s weirdness in it, bright tongue and strange mannerisms. He said something muffled, holding his hospital blanket to his mouth as though whispering a secret. My aunt just looked at him. My uncle Milt was looking at me. His wrinkles, his strange fibers, which made up his being, all stared at me as though staring at something. As if I was something. I looked to the door of the room. The nurse still hadn’t led my parents here. For once I was important, I thought. I smiled at Uncle Milt.
        He didn’t quite smile. A thin rivulet of blood ran down from his mouth to his neck and when he realized it uncle Milt reached to the table near his cot and took a cotton swab and wiped it, at first just smearing the blood, so it was like a Chicago style pizza with the sauce on the outside.
        He croaked. I went closer.
My quiet aunt had closed the door to the outside hospital, now she flipped off the lights. She smiled at me. Her face for an instant reminded me of the dream aunt, the one who had gotten nude, who I had felt stirred watching, no matter how wrong it might have been in real life in a dream there was nothing wrong with anything. My uncle gurgled. My aunt seemed to be getting younger and younger. The patient in the other bed was suddenly sane.
        “What the hell, turn the light back on you old bitch,” he snarled.
        She advanced on him. The other patient looked at me, pleading. “What’s wrong with her?”         “NURSE!” He shouted.
        She reached down, while I watched stunned, all feelings of self-importance disipitated. Her mouth opened, impossibly a yellow tongue flipped out, unrolling. The tongue’s texture looked like mashed corn, the kind that comes in baby jars.
        “Get away,” he said again, pleading this time, but my aunt was hungry. She made a noise, like a loud elevator and the tongue whipped into his mouth. I watched his throat thicken, veins popped, and he stood straight up, as though to embrace the woman standing over him. His arms wheeled and the hands shambled this way and that as he struggled, and he nearly got free, whipping his head back, the throat thick like he had some disease, some cancer in there, bloating the skin.
        The other patient whispered and kept whispering. It sounded like a prayer. The TV controller dropped out of his hands, bopped the metal rails of his bed, and smacked on the ground, the back case popping open and the batteries falling out and rolling into hard-to-reach places. The TV overlord’s days were numbered. The bendy tongue thickened considerably and became a pipe. I could see blood swarming up through the pipe tongue, red inside a yellow emptying of all of its color, becoming translucent. Her eyes met mine, even while her tongue lay inside the dying man’s throat pulling up his blood like a vacuum. The eyes that met mine were the eyes of a young horrible thing, they also swam with something else, something seductive, talking of sweaty flanks and breasts the size of ships, nipples that spurted a cream liquid, a breaking hymen of blood, mixed with something blue and yet clear, that burned like acid. I tore my glance away. My uncle’s mouth was open in a wide and gnarled yawn. His eyes pleaded with me. Come closer Theodore. Uncle Milt has a bit of wisdom to share with you. His fingers on the rails of his bed were growing little yellow tendrils of their own, the fingers becoming like yellow playdough, wet and braided, like the kind of thing you’d see come out the other side of one of those playdough machines, I mean, I thought…I ran. I tried to run too fast and slid a little but I had the door in my hand when I felt a sudden darkness, a shadow fall. My uncle was floating there and his yellow tongue arced down. He wasn’t floating – not exactly – he was holding himself up by his hands or – well, they were no longer hands, at the wrist, they had broken off and become tongues. I felt like he might ask me about school, the way he looked at me, hungry for information.
        The long tongue slapped my face, ran down my cheek, and then swam off me like a rope in one of those Indiana Jones movies when freed of the tension of Doctor Jones.
        It circled my neck and I was pulled up in the air. I felt the tongue pulsing against my skin, quickly, like too much bass in a car. It had me lifted in the air then, and my Uncle Milt’s mouth stretched, yawned, and the lips curled back becoming so much yellow face putty.
        There was water dripping from his eyes, it splashed against my head and ran down my face, stinging my eyes. Salt water tears.
        I don’t remember my father opening the door to the room. The screams were not just for me. I could hear the distinct sound of what occurred to me must be to my aunt like a ketchup bottle you have to squeeze to get the good stuff, after you give it a good shake so it doesn’t mix with the vinegar.
        I felt myself  drop though and felt a spray of something thick and weird like dry lightning when a rain storm isn’t anywhere near, but purple-grey lightning comes down anyway; which I had seen a few times. The weird stuff came all over me. I lay there, blinking. My dad had sawed through the tongue with a scalpel and he was staring in horror at my uncle Milt who stared down wretching, the tongue going up and coming down like some game one would play if one had a tongue like that, yellow and thin and blood-sucking and inhumanly strong and capable of killing. My uncle tried to suck it in and then his mouth grew big on the ceiling and ore of the weird stuff, which was white and creamy, came pouring out of his nose and flecked around me. I screamed.
        Then my dad was dragging me out, with the doctor’s help. My aunt was screeching and I saw her, my head raised by the hands pulling me. She was the sea girl, in the dream, the black shark, and she was screaming and keening and blood was everywhere, splattering everything. I watched her become a flopping, black thing, huge and angry and awful, skin like wet manure, flopping like a fish in the room, flop, then a yellow tongue shot out, fast, but we had the door closed by then. The tongue hit the door and stayed there, dripping and puckering. There was a burst of sound and the noise I hadn’t even picked up on which came from the TV ended. The tongue had swiveled I guess, had switched targets, and grabbed the TV and threw it.
        Again it banged against the glass, causing cracks in the window.
        The white-haired nurse was standing there screaming and holding a cell phone that had a weird radio dial and her eyes were like diamonds covered in water. She kept screamed when the tongue went through her face. It blew back against the wall behind her, spattering a green symbol of hospital navigation with brain pieces and blood        
        My aunt, whatever it was – was crawling out of the window, black and then yellow, then changing back, fluid like the entire thing was made of that tongue-like material. I smelled old fish and dead worms.
        “Run,” my dad said. We ran. When we turned the corner by the nurse’s desk, which was empty, we heard a male voice scream. The doctor.
        His scream turned into a blubbering sound, of tears and agony. My dad reached the elevator and stabbed the downward button. I was wiping stuff from my face, sticky and thick with the staying power of marshmallow stuff in a jar.
        “Where is mom?” I asked, spitting.
        “She’s – “
My aunt’s tongue smashed into the elevator, denting it and recoiling, with a little high sneezing sound.
        I ran ahead, he followed. The nautical signs at each juncture in the corridor came in handy now. We passed signs for a men’s bathroom, a woman’s bathroom, and a uni bathroom, before reaching a staircase. On our way a nurse was closing up a door, saying something to someone in the room (a patient no doubt) and she looked at us in surprise. She was short with little puffy red hair. Her look faded from surprise to something else when she saw us, and she looked like she was going to do or say something, but my dad got up in her face, grabbing her by the arm. “You need to run,” he yelled at her (once again) surprised face. She held a clipboard in one hand and she dropped it where it rebounded, clattered, the sound echoing. She bent to pick it up but my dad grabbed her by both arms, looked over her shoulder. The corridors shone with white polish and gleamed the further you looked, like when we drove and I thought it was raining because it looked like pieces of the concrete ahead were wet – it was like that, another mirage. The white pools of the hospital corridors.
        “Her, sir,” the nurse said. Ms. Elloway has just had Chemotherapy and I’m afraid she’s too sick to move.” The nurse solidified before our eyes. My dad pushed her out of the way and opened the door and went in. The nurse followed behind him. I was about to go in as well when my dad opened the door a crack and told me to keep a look out. “If you see her or him,” – he hesitated. “Yell and then run. Don’t wait for me.”
        I stood out there in the blazing white, wishing the hospital people hadn’t been so careful. My arms and legs were shaking and trembling and I could feel it all the way into my face, where the muscles shivered like after-effects.
        I heard a scream. The scream had been a man’s voice. I tensed, considered yelling and running but I somehow stayed put, watching. The white corridor went in a straight line before rounding the corner to the left, the way we had come. That far away it was a white ocean. My lip bounced on my teeth. I bit it.
        I looked at the door – then looked back down the hallway. Where was my mother? My dad didn’t seem too worried so maybe she’d left the hospital already.
        A man came running around the corridor. He had a security badge hanging from a lanyard wrapped around his neck. He ran quiet. When he passed me his eyes and mouth both told me to run – his face was like scrambled eggs only partway cooked. He didn’t stop, kept running.         I looked back the way we had come – the way the man had come, and watched yellow tentacles hit the wall with a concussive boom.
        They stayed there, rigid.
        Something, cream or milk, stirred within the hard yellow, bubbling and swirling like a living hypodermic needle. There was some problem in the way I talked. I could only feel a thick tongue trapped in wooden-feeling teeth.
        My uncle drew into toward the tongue. They were his arms now, I saw. He was just a sort of thing now, with my uncle’s face, with a shredded medical gown, the mix of light blue and light green, no hairy ass to show off.
        He reached the wall, turned, and looked at me. Uncle Milt’s face on top of the yellow octopus, his neck too, but the rest was a dripping mass of ever-changing motion.         In his normal voice, he said my name.
        “Theodore,” he said. “How was school today?”
        He scrambled toward me. The yellow things didn’t quite reach the distant, the ends becoming hooks, and dragging the rest of him along. They really were hooks or at least acted like hooks, punching through the floor. I yelled.
        It was too late. I ran into the patient room where my father and the nurse had gone. It was even brighter in there, even whiter.
        The woman, Miss Elloway was young and pretty with a sharp nose. She looked sick and she was loaded in a wheelchair.         My dad had obviously heard my yell, as he was pushing her toward the door I was coming in.         I joined him, kneeling and putting my weight against it.
        The nurse gave us a look of contempt. “I’m sorry Miss Elloway,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry. These are apparently terrorists.” She marched toward us.
        “Move aside,” she ordered. “Otherwise this is kidnapping.” She looked at my father with a self-important smile. Her eyes glazed slightly with it, and she squeezed them shut as if the very moment was giving her pleasure.
        “Move aside,” she dropped her voice. My dad shrugged and kept his back on the door. Surprisingly the nurse attempted to shove him aside. My dad fought her, struggled to keep his weight on the door, pusher her away, but she came back swinging.
        Miss Elloway was wiping at her eyes, like she was trying to remove a pair of sunglasses.
        The nurse kicked my dad in the shin. His face reddened and I could see him reflexively crouch, as if to drop to his knees and roll, to deal with the pain. She kicked again.
        “Hospital policy sir,” she said smiling coldly. “Indicates how we should deal with terrorists who are attempting to,” – she nodded at Miss Elloway who looked a bit more alert. “Kidnap a patient.” She turned to Miss Elloway. “Do you know this man?” I decided to speak up.
        “My uncle Milt is out there,” I warned her. The next jumble of words that came out, outfoxed one another, so I was jumping off the deep end each time, trying to find the correct way to put it, finally giving up and just leaning harder on the door and looking to my father.
        He moved away from the door, nodded to me. “Theo,” he said.
        I stayed put. I gave ground when the nurse attempted to open the door, finally crawling a few feet away.
        She smiled, looked back in at us.
“I’m sorry Miss Elloway,” the nurse was saying, when the door which was still open a crack, banged the entire way open.
        Uncle Milt grinned. Two yellow rods burst through the nurse’s head, just above either ear. The back of her head came off like a Mr. Potato Head, in a compartmentalized fashion, blood and brains blowing against Miss Elloway who was close enough to reality and far enough from the precipice to know when to scream.
        The nurse still looked like she had something to say, a chiding to give, and then her eyes (they were brown and pretty) fell into the holes Uncle Milt had bored into her head. She really was a Mr. Potato Head now. Uncle Milt shook her but the yellow tentacles didn’t come free. My dad jumped around him, and then dove toward a corner while my uncle opened his mouth, and shoved out his yellow tongue, which crawled after my father. The yellow rope tongue dragged my father back. It had wrapped his leg, and his pant leg went up revealing a white leg and black socks.
        Uncle Milt was dragging my dad back in. I kicked open the trashcan that was marked Medical Waste. Dirty napkins and hypodermic needles fell out. I picked one up. Uncle milt was dangling my dad with his yellow tongue while he attempted to break free of the nurse.
        I took a hypodermic needle and went and plunged it at the bridge of the tongue that was wrestling my dad up.
        The needle came out of the other side, dripping the vestiges of whatever the needle had been used for originally. Uncle Milt immediately dropped my dad. He tried to bring his tongue into his mouth but the hypodermic needle was too long and smacked against his lips with enough force to make the needle shudder.
        Uncle Milt tried to say something. The words were lost, though.
        I grabbed the wheelchair with Miss Elloway who was now making little shrieking noises, and holding her wheelchair. She looked even prettier, her sharp nose wiggling. I pushed the wheelchair out, right by my uncle’s body, smelling fish, and rubbing up against it. Uncle Milt was hot enough to cook on.
        Miss Elloway leaned in too close and when I pushed her out she was gagging and vomiting, though that might have been a side effect of recent Chemo.
        My dad grabbed her chair and gave me a look. I sprinted.        
        He was behind me, and when I got up to the T intersection I turned right following the recent footsteps of the man with the security badge. It was a corridor just like this one, with assorted patient rooms and green symbols painted on the wall. Someone had stuck some kind of tape arrow to the floor. It said Stairwell.
        My dad cranked the wheelchair around the corner, thirty seconds later, while I was almost at the end of the new corridor, ready to turn the corner, still following the exit stickers which someone had handily stuck at illogical intervals.
        An old doctor was staring at a door about mid-point. He looked up when he heard my feet slapping and thunking on the corridor. “Shouldn’t run,” he warned me, white eyebrows gathered in a surely frown. My dad spun around behind me, wrapping the wheelchair around the corner. The doctor’s look was one of disappointment. “Orderlies,” he cursed. The old doctor stepped back at the last moment, before my dad barreled into him.
        I heaved open the door at the end of the hall marked stairwell in big potent red letters. I held the door open while my dad rushed with Miss Elloway, while the doctor continued to frown muttering to himself, ever so often checking the patient’s chart on the door. My dad must have decided to not give warning to the old doctor, probably believing it would do no good. He got to the stairwell which I held open, cavorting with the wheelchair, a rumbling metal thing that I was leaning back to get away from, when uncle Milt showed at the end of the corridor. He was like a big yellow spider now with his human, Uncle Milt head. He scuttled. The doctor frowned at the sight of Uncle Milt. He seemed not to get it, hammed in with chart information, mumbling too himself, big lip stuck out, brow wrinkling in concentration. Big shark teeth bit right into his scalp. I didn’t watch anymore, the big security door closing behind me.
        I don’t remember much of the descent. Mrs. Elloway shriveled and craned her neck, each time we reached a landing. By the second landing we all heard the door above burst open and swing against the concrete walls. We were at the bottom though. My dad pushed the door to the outside, and we rushed out, Miss Elloway blinking like she hadn’t seen the stars for years. My father rolled her across the parking lot, up a curb, through the dark brown grass, against the cement again, the wheelchair squeaking from all the abuse it had been put through.
Mom had the engine started.
        There was no one around, which I thought strange, where had everyone else gone. My mom’s face was white when my dad opened the car door. “Hurry,” she said. Her eyes were stained white in the creases, and they folded over themselves.         I helped my father load Miss Elloway in the car. The ground floor security door swung open but no Uncle Milt. I thought I could hear scampering and rustling noises and I must have made a sound because my dad looked at me, and told me to get in the car.         My dad hurried around to the passenger side of the car and just as he had it opened the night was filled with flickering lights, as patrol cruisers leaped into the lot from the street, sirens and lights both. In the roaring, the first cops got out of their cars.
Something black swam in the sky. It was a fish, an immense black fish, – no, it was a shark, a monstrous one, vast and colored like the night at the darkest hour. It swam through the night like the night was an ocean. No one opened fire or anything like that, and in fact, later I learned that the two cops who were walking toward us, myself, and my father were the only people who saw. My mom was too vexed and afraid and looking out in the dark. Miss Elloway leaned back next to me, quiet and miserable.
        A second night shark joined the first.
        After we talked to the police, and they attempted to sort it all out, weeks later I dreamt about fishing. I was on a boat and my uncle Milt and my aunt, both looking young and fresh, with striking complexions were at the boat’s helm.
        I tried to ignore them. For a long time I fished and waited for something to tug my line. Then I’d hear splashes and a sort of miserable, and young laughter. I’d hear in my dreams questions.
        “Invite us in.”
        I said nothing in my dream, continued to fish. I was too frightened.
        In April, at school, a girl was killed in the girl’s bathroom. They made us all go home. There was some talk of her being discovered bloodless. I continued to dream about invitations, and boats, and sharks, with great black teeth, dripping blood, with yellow tongues.         I knew enough to wait at home, to not invite anyone, even in my dreams. “How’s school?” Uncle Milt might ask, in a dream. My mysterious, far away, uncle.
        Things got weirder when my father and I drove to the airport to pick up his brother and his brother’s wife. My uncle and aunt, not his. My father seemed oddly reticent the entire drive home, and things got weirder, because I started to sense

Reviews

There are no reviews of this item.