She was embarrassed to have to go into the street with the three boys who had all known her. Well, they hadn't known her, but they had known her. The crazy way her mother talked.

She thought of the movie Carrie.

So she stood around in the street while her mother watched from the picture window. The girl was picking some peeling rubber off her mint Converse she had drawn on with a pen, running her fingers through her...stop watching me, she grimaced at the window. The curtains banged shut like an impossible old maid, muted.

Rach smelled two of his fingers and then crossed himself nervously, not even realizing he did it.

"What food do you smell?" Nial asked. He didn't wait for her to answer. "Bananas? Do you smell bananas?"

"No," she said.

He had been practicing to be a hypnotist using YouTube. Which she figured meant he was practicing to be a rapist.

(He had to be buying those ugly clothes for something.)

"Barbush barbush barbush barbush barbush" practically hummed someone in stoner monotone.

What she had been doing before her mother chased her from the house:

She had been dissolving various colored dyes in glasses of water in the kitchen. Peering at them like a Russian scientist. She was conscious of the soft fact that she liked the high ceiling in that room and how it was always deserted in there since her mother was useless. Psychic. Useless. The sound of colors dissolving in water was no sound at all. The air was cleared of some sort of static by this process.

It was as though she were holding the hand of water like a mermaid.

She had been watching the colors plume out into phantasmagoria, vivid arabesques and serpentines. Sea serpents and orgasms. She was a girl, after all. She was these essences, she knew. Was she any good? If she just listened, she knew it would be the way she wanted in life somehow. If she just listened. So she stood on the street with the three boys who had all known her and wanted to know her again and she wondered. Was she really any good? And what good were these boys with her mother behind the curtains she was holding in both  hands now, unsubtle. Her so-called psychic mother who fought and pleaded and fought again with banks like lovers. Her bankrupt psychic mother. Who could not cook or suck a man's cock to save her life. And that was the woe of both of them, wasn't it?

She chased off a perfectly good trucker, a perfectly good idiot, this summer. And he worked ridiculous overtime. Solvent and invisible. What an idiot her mother was.

If she could just haul off and hit her in the face. She knew the feeling but couldn't quite own it, tame it. Punch her. But through that iron curtain. While she cowered in her pusher manners behind the walls of the house they would eventually lose. Let it just happen. Let them ride the wind. Maybe she could pare off from her then. On the wind of shared failure, the way people do. The way people divorce reasons. Or promises. There is beauty in such errors. Such fuck-ups.

"What do you smell now?"

It was Andy, mocking the august mannerisms of the junior rapist-hypnotist.

She was inside the color blue. It could not touch her if she remained inside the walls of the color blue This was an actual place like a prison, the color blue, but with this difference: the rest of the world was looked out and that externality was the prison. Blue means within. This shade of blue was a vivid sapphire. It was a roaming spirit condensed in a still person. It was what gave water its sexual prowess. The sexual powers that water has at night, all night. Wild water. Even the water in a night bathtub has a shade of this.

Neon has nothing on water, except when neon reflects in it. Then it might win. Like a serpent against a mongoose. The mongoose has nasty powers. You know Riki Tiki Tavi. She let the smoke out slowly from her nostrils. She did it right under her mother's glass nose. Let her press behind the curtains into the glass of street looking. Fairy pimp-mother. Let her fuck off, let her hear this thought, psychic bitch.

So her mind wondered and the boys touched each other. Their hands covered each other's hands like lovers. They pushed. They walked backwards. Their language skipped beats like hearts will do when the closeness is all anticipation. The boys. Nervous coiled springs in them like you see in hunting dogs. She noticed how they were doing this over and over. Unconscious, since they were boys. Boys are unconsciousness, she thought. She figured there must be exceptions. But they were lovers in this way. These three in the street. Dancing into each other. Giddy not awkward. They were like Three Graces. Maybe a little homely but still.

Three Graces. With a basketball under the arm of one.

"That must smell like your body odor," she said. But she said it soft, so friendly. So that it was a tease. A sexual poke. A sexual poke given out of boredom, acedia. The sexiest kind of flirtation. The insincere kind with nuance.

She wondered if she would be sentenced to be the insincere flirt (the word is cocktease, she knew) all her life?

Why was it a question? Why was she sentenced to asking questions instead of making declarative statements like the idiots do?

"Do you want to play basketball?"

"No. Kerry." She had to make it clear she understood the real beg there.

"Behind the 7-11..."

"I know behind the 7-11, Kerry." She was forced to be stern with this horny boy nostalgic already for what had happened over and over in his mind.

Did he really not wash his hand for days? You hear the thing.

The dog on the carpet with his belly upturned. (Look at my yummy, well-behaved balls.)

Just imagine the power, she thought. Why am I not abusing the power? She thought she must be crazy like her mother. Was she merely "psychic" too? To call oneself a psychic was to confess one saw oneself as passive before and within the universe. It was not a magical power. It was a form of usual victimhood. There was a sisterhood. A weakness. It was to believe in feeling over knowledge over feeling. Folding over knowledge over feeling. Like laundry.  How did she know this when she was just fifteen? She just did. A puppet. If you sit on playground swings alone, you will eventually become a philosopher. Everything's eventual. She was a girl philosopher. She had spilled her essence but not her thoughts all over the crooks of these boys who believed that brown longnecks behind the 7-11 were magic talismans on a road somewhere.

She was told that she was prettier than the prettiest girl in the best magazine inside the 7-11..With her legs pinned back like a Japanese butterfly.

She should know.

A Man Woke Up

A man woke up holding his wife's hand. He hadn't opened his eyes yet, but he was contemplating asking her for his favorite breakfast. Or was it his turn to make breakfast? He felt waking up was harder than usual that morning. Instead of using his eyes, he kept them closed and let his fingers explore his love's dainty hand. His fingers "read" the unusual setting of the wedding ring they had spent such a great deal of time picking out, designing together. The baby must still be asleep, he thought. He smiled at the quietness of the moment with his eyes still shut. It was nice. His fingers lingered on that strange asymmetry of diamonds.  But she was not in bed with him. Why was she standing next to his bed? As he continued to trace a curve in the ring's setting, a harp of diamonds, he opened his eyes

When he did see her, confusion came flooding in.  His wife was many years younger. She was smiling, but there were tears in her eyes. How could she be younger? His mind briefly entertained the ridiculous notion that he had traveled back in time. He searched his mind for what had happened the previous night, before he had gone to sleep, but there was nothing. It was a blank. This nothing disturbed him greatly. He felt a chasm of dread opening up. He spoke his wife's name and watched as one of the tears which had gathered into her eyes made its escape and traveled down her lovely, impossibly young face.

He tried to rise to comfort her, but something was holding him in the bed. He saw the machines then, he heard one of them, he realized where he was. It was a hospital room and a cheerless one.

"Dad, I'm Rebecca," the woman he had at first seen as a younger version of his wife sobbed as she bent over to kiss him on the forehead. "Mom's gone. You've been in a coma for nineteen years. She died in the auto accident. You survived, but they weren't sure if you would ever wake up. I told them you would. Eventually. I promised myself." A smile broke through her lovely face. Her mother's face.

He saw the ring on her hand as it came up to caress his face. It was indeed his wife's ring.

Happy Birthday

How old was the Eckes boy when he disappeared?

That's what Joe really wanted to know.

Once a year, that creepy old dude who now lived alone in the Eckes house would come into the bakery department and place an order for a customized "Happy Birthday!" cake. Last year, it had been "Happy 9th Birthday!" This year it was a birthday cake for a happy tenth.

"Please just give me your basic, generic boy's cake," the old man had said.

"Who even talks like that?" Joe had muttered to one of his co-workers the second the old creep was gone.

Joe always made the cakes to order and the old man, Edgar, that's all anyone really knew about him, his name, had always picked them up shortly thereafter.

Some of the girls in the bakery said Joe was being too harsh, that it was probably a part of the grieving process for him. It was a way he remembered his son.

"Not son," Joe would correct the women. "It was his stepson."

Joe finally found the article the night the creepy old dude had picked up the "Happy 10th Birthday" cake. It had been archived online by the local newspaper four years ago: "Six Year Old Boy Missing." So the birthday cakes were definitely keeping up with Damian's birthdays. But the date was wrong. Joe read the article again. Damian Eckes was believed to have disappeared somewhere on the walk home from his elementary school. It had only been a five block walk. Joe wasn't convinced he hadn't made it home and disappeared from there. But the police had found nothing which made Edgar anything more than a person of interest, at first, and then he had been cleared. Joe began to wonder if the boy wasn't still alive somewhere in that big house that creepy Edgar had inherited. For the boy's mother had also gone missing. Two years after her son's disappearance. True, there had been a suicide note and her grief at the loss of her son had been crippling. The woman was inconsolable. That had been her only child. So the suicide had been understandable to most. There was little suspicion. Her car had been found parked by a bridge over a river that had been in full spring torrent at the time. But her body had also never been recovered. Joe wondered about that too.

Joe had called the local police and talked to his old classmate Ed Shanks, who was sheriff now, but had been politely told to mind his own business. The missing boy case was ongoing and the case of his mother had been closed. That's all he could tell the baker playing amateur detective and thanks for calling, Joe, see you at the next high school reunion.

Joe decided that wasn't good enough.

It was a moonless night and Joe was creeping around the Eckes house. He couldn't get over how weird the old man was. He saw there was a chicken coop out back now. Everyone put the man's eccentric qualities down to the double loss he had suffered. They all made excuses for him. But Joe couldn't see it that way, and tonight he was putting that serious suspicion into action.

As he crept around the back of the house, he noticed the back door was wide open. It was a warm summer night.  Maybe the guy was baking. The light from the kitchen lay in a long plank across the backyard, nearly touching the edge of a dark cornfield that covered many acres back. There were no other houses in sight back there.

Joe edged along the house and noticed the two basement windows were painted black. There were also rocks piled up against them, blocking all but a soupcon of the basement light, which was so dim as to make one wondered if one imagined it, if there was really light at all.  But there seemed to be a slight flickering. The windows were mostly buried. Flowering bushes and rocks had been banked up against them, curiously.

Joe had made it up to the back door now, edging along the back wall of the house, and he took a quick peek into the kitchen. There was nobody to be seen. The table was covered by what appeared to be a new, attractively colored cloth. There was a centerpiece and the usual assortment: sugar bowl, shakers, cruets, fruit bowl.

Joe could hear music somewhere. He listened carefully. It was "Happy Birthday." He had pulled his head back after that first quick glance, but now he looked again. It was coming from behind the basement door, which was shut.

Joe felt a sudden boiling of bravery that came out of a boil of insatiable curiosity and he charged the door. Just like that. He realized he didn't even have his cell phone on him. How smart a thing was this to do, he wondered. But he knew he could take that old man. He wanted to take that old man.

"Hey!" he shouted as he yanked the door open so hard it banged against the corner of a kitchen counter, scarring the yellow door. "I'm coming down there!"

It was dim and the old wooden stairs were rickety. "Happy Birthday" was coming from an old record player in the corner of the basement. It was a scratchy old record and this version of the song sounded like something from a kid's show in the fifties. It sounded like a television cowboy singing. Joe saw why it was dim as soon as he reached the basement floor. The single, unshaded light bulb hanging from the ceiling had been coated with red paint. It was unbelievably warm. Joe felt himself start to sweat right away. It was just that hot.

He saw the cake on a low end table in one corner of the room. It had not been sliced. Ten small candles were now burning atop it.

"Hey! Kid! Where are you? Damian, are you here?"

Joe heard a rustling in the corner. He saw something there, a gathered mass, but he couldn't make out what he was actually seeing. It looked like a dark blanket. But it looked full and there was a stirring under it. Was it the poor kid help captive all these years by that freak? And where was that freak right now? Joe's eyes searched for the sort of tool you always find in basements, anything that might be used as a weapon, but he saw nothing.

And then he felt it and screamed. Something had reached out and touched his ankle. It was gripping his leg through the thick denim of his jeans. A hand?  It was so dark he couldn't see. It must be the boy's hand, his mind told him. Get the boy up and moving and get the hell out of there, his mind told him.

But now the "hand" of the "boy" was growing longer and longer, winding up Joe's leg, and down Joe went, struggling. He ended up yanking the blanket for which he had been reaching, and that's when he saw the full size of the creature. Coils and coils of it. It was the sort of pet people warn you against keeping. Because they never stop growing and their appetite grows exponentially too. And it was all over Joe now, all through and around Joe now, tightening. "Amazon" was one of Joe's last thoughts as he heard the door at the top of the stairs slam shut. Now he knew why it was so hot. He also knew where Damian and Julia Eckes were. And he knew he was going to the same dark place.