[I promised, and I deliver. A dreamy short story with a smidgen of smut for the faithful. Since it’s in Chattanooga and has magic, I guess this one’s in the Good Witch universe, but I’m afraid that universe is falling off the rails from Changeling: The Dreaming into bizarro-land. Thanks to Joe the Poet — who would faint dead away if he read this — for pointing me in the direction of the Agency of Angels.]
Zippp-p-p-p.
A surreptitious hand lowers a zipper. Before I open my eyes I stretch and try to remember, then vaguely remember, then fail to remember, where I am.
A bed with a sheet coming off the mattress. No mattress cover. Plush toys stealing the space. Crumbs on the sheet. Stiff stain on the mattress. I open my eyes and in the light spilling under the door from the hall I make out:
Piled toys and household goods: baby walker, baby swing, Rubbermaid containers, garbage bags of quilts and clothes, tall lamp with no lamp shade, every corner and half the small floor covered up to shoulder high. Don’t even think about getting at the closet.
A patch of sticky-looking carpet.
Not a hoarder’s space so much as the space of folk who live crowded. Generations overlap. Daughter falls pregnant while mom’s on her fourth — and mom will go on to have seven. That kind of thing.
But I’m making it up. I haven’t met these people yet, though I hear the household waking up on the other side of the door. A podcast plays on a cell phone. A door slams.
Inside, the man in bed with me finishes unzipping his pants, zipp-p-p, quiet because of the sleepy children who now patter past outside. His cock pops out, dark pink, cut, not (since everyone always wants to know) so very big, but thick and toothsome and ready. A bit of sticky golden curl comes out clinging to the shaft and separates like fern uncurling.
I must have been asleep with my head on his thigh, or near it, because he gets me under my chin with blunt fingers and guides my mouth over his cock. He smells like sleepy human, salt and roses.
I get as much of that warm smooth cock as I can — which isn’t much, because his pants are in the way. The teeth of his zipper cut into the tender underside a bit, but he doesn’t mind. Just holds my head in place with a good handful of hair.
I’m about half smothered and very happy and then the second guy in the bed starts working my jeans down.
It’s only a single bed and the plushies have stolen most of it so we are, you might say, pretty cozy. Nonetheless the second man persists, also as you might say, and I wiggle my ass up to help him. His hands find my lower back and it’s all too soon and the situation’s all too strange for me to feel wet already but I don’t mind. I want him and his buddy here — who may also be strangers; maybe this is as much of a surprise to them as it is to me — both inside me at once. I want to be filled to bursting, a writhing little piglet — but at the moment I’m not thinking anything like that cartoon language, I exist fully in those seconds, choking down more and more of the first man’s cock as his heavy hand traps my head, and arching more and more as the second guy starts to work his cock against my ass —
Bang bang bang bang
Someone hammers the door.
“Hot water’s almost gone.” A woman’s voice. The matriarch. “Y’all better get up!”
I share a second of regret with these strangers. We cling to each other as if we really love each other, as if — think of it — we really know each other — but we don’t love each other and we don’t know each other from Adam, either, and we tumble out of bed into the icy air, elbowing, pulling pants up, hopping across the sticky carpet to the too-bright hall and across to the shower.
I get there first and the tile’s all black mildew and the water’s tepid but at least the air’s still steamy and warm. I don’t have a change of clothes but I find a pair of clean underwear in my pocket.
And that’s the last I see of that house for some time, 12 hours, maybe 14.
A couple hours later, but still early in the morning, I drive down the terrace road beside the interstate highway looking for Sherwood Apartments. I find the narrow steep drive up between dogwoods and redbud and follow it until it opens out into a parking lot with another drive leading off the end of the parking lot. These apartments are half-timbered with quarter-inch thick timbers tacked into plaster and popping off here and there. Front door, big window beside door, big window up top, repeat, repeat, repeat. People have put aluminum foil in the south-west-facing windows to save on HVAC bills.
I squint at the apartment numbers. I’m looking for 302. This is row 100. I follow the very-much-one-lane drive up to the second parking lot, another sharp turn and steep ascent. Again, trees crowd to the curb.
This level’s the same buildings but older, 201–206, 207–212, and so on. Some units have holes in the walls. Up again, around again.
Now I’m in a different apartment complex, though the numbering continues. These are semi-detached buildings in Brutalist style. The first floors hover on squat supports with breezeways underneath. Long, low ribbons of window line the stained concrete forms. I see just one window papered with foil.
Folks have planted flowers in poured-concrete planters scattered about the shady compound. Begonia, ferns, bleeding hearts. Someone’s trying herbs, but they won’t get enough light here. This is the top of the cul-de-sac. Except the residents, cars don’t pass through. A cat sleeps on the pavement. An old man sits in the breezeway, smoking a pipe.
A woman wearing yellow pedal-pushers and a loose blouse follows a little girl of about 3 around another building. One of those mixed miniature dogs, I don’t know what kind, something wiry and annoying, trots in front of them.
This is a lot of detail, I think, for a dream. Then I think, I’m dreaming? At first I’m convinced of that truth, but then I’m not so sure. Maybe this is one of those days when everything feels like it already happened.
I watch myself ask the woman, “Amelia Brown?”
“That’s me.” Amelia smiles and brushes chestnut bangs out of her eyes. Hazel eyes, sprinkle of freckles on her nose. Her skin looks dusty as if she’s shaken a puff of translucent powder at her face, but in a hurry, the 3-year-old already pushing her way out the door —
I hold out the dossier I’ve come to deliver. “This is for you.”
She takes it, then glances at it. A line flickers between her eyebrows. I can see she’s changing her mind about admitting to being Amelia Brown, about reaching for the stiff brown folder.
“Thank you,” she says.
“What a lovely little girl,” I answer.
“This is Jocelyn.” She smiles again, for politeness but also because it’s what we do, even when we’ve been given certified papers by a courier, we make the situation easier for the nice lady who has to deliver bad news.
I hope it’s not bad news. Amelia — who looks pregnant under that smock — already has enough to worry about.
“Jocelyn, say hello to the lady.”
No one’s ever named Jocelyn. There’s usually just me.
Jocelyn jumps as if she hadn’t noticed me. Then she shades her eyes to squint up into mine. “Hello. I can dance.”
“Can you? Will you show me?”
She spins a pirouette, holding her dress out stiff and revealing dimpled knees, then hides behind her mother.
I merge into traffic and keep driving south, over the ridge cut and down the centrifugal bend that promises to send your car airborne over the valley that spreads in front of you. It’s a hazy October morning, obscuring oak trees and billboards. The frost’s burning off quick. Smog sparkles gold —
I realize the year can’t be even 2000 yet. They fixed the grade over Missionary Ridge 25 years back. But was I this old in the 90s? Veins loop over bony knuckles on the steering wheel.
When the matriarch — whose face I never saw — pounded the door the man with his cock in my mouth released my hair long enough to buffet my head — half-cuff, half-caress — in a way that seemed to express the most kindhearted regret and fellow-feeling. Too bad, kid, time’s up. Gotta to lace up our boots —
If I believed in heaven, I imagine that’s what they’d say right before they kicked you out: Time’s up, kid, lace up your boots —
And out you slither into an icy world of greasy bed sheets and fake paneling on the walls and never enough time to get anything done.
It’s only the 1990s and I’m already too old and I haven’t gotten anything done.
The basement at United Methodist Church–Thankful is damp but enormous. There’s the usual set-up: half-court sized fellowship hall with a scuffed gymnasium floor, basketball goal winched up and hovering over rows of tables and folding chairs, restrooms, stage with frayed navy curtains at the far end, and at the near end a kitchen with a bunch of coffee urns, taped memos everywhere — please wash and dry all dishes you use — please do not turn thermostat past 70 — and serving hatches giving onto the fellowship hall.
We’ve unfolded six tables, three rows of two, for this reunion. Women have spread vinyl clothes over the tables and set out salt and pepper shakers. No one used the kitchen, apparently; this is all potluck and paper plates. Folks mill around. I know some of them. Many I don’t.
We keep setting out food — fried zucchini, fried okra, casseroles, creamed corn, pinto beans, field peas, Stouffer’s beef tips heated in the microwave, some kind of taco pie made with minced-up chicken and no spices between flat soggy tortillas. Then my mother says, “But no one’s at the table yet, this will get cold” and puts some casserole dishes back in their quilted warmers, and the few folks who have ambled over to check out the table see it empty and amble away again.
Food to feed a couple dozen, and a couple dozen people here (at least, they keep coming and going) and no one’s eating.
At last I lose patience with the way my mother acts, haste to no purpose, doing and undoing the same action over and over, and I say loudly, “We have to start feeding these people now.”
My mother looks at me like I’ve committed an indecency but I lift my voice again, “Come on, y’all, sit down, come eat!”
Then other women start summoning, too, and the people who stood up to leave are hustled back again.
My mother, a frail skeleton wearing a dumpy white-haired woman, looks worn out. She’ll spend the whole meal bustling and waiting on people, never eating a spoonful, maybe a bite of leftover chicken in the kitchen later. She has never once in my life not looked worn out, and I think, Beloved was right, the only way to live was to give up custody of all those children —
I see plenty of children here, preteens mostly, picking at the country cooking, hunched over their phones. In cars on the way home they’ll beg their mothers for McDonalds.
My grandma, the crazy one, still alive, sits beside my dad, who’s also still alive, and again I think, This is a dream, he’s still alive, and then remember he really is still alive or at least hasn’t died yet. I’m sure of that part. He hasn’t died yet.
I know he’s alive because here I am breathing, pushing hair out of my eyes, serving fried okra, and the one future he always predicted for me was that I predecease him. You’ll die before me, he told me back when I was in middle school. And now he’s a wasted, 80-year-old man picking at his food. Guess I don’t have much time left.
I keep coaxing the guests to take some of this, some of that.
“Here’s this zucchini, Grandma, you like that, and a biscuit, let me pour you some gravy — ”
She takes the biscuit but I look over to answer someone’s question about dessert plates and when I look back she’s scuttled off somewhere.
My dad nibbles the smallest bites of food. He has late-stage bowel cancer. It hurts him to eat, he shits blood, no wonder my mother — who graduated from children’s diapers to grandbaby diapers to mother-in-law diapers to husband’s bloody clothes, sheets, toilet seat, everything, and taught behavior-challenged high school kids 15 years of that time — is always worn out.
I got away, but I cheated. I’ve cleaned up plenty of shit, adults’ and children’s both, but far less than my allotted fraction of human feces, and believe me, one day I’ll pay.
Thinking this, I sit down beside my dad to listen to him talk and coax him to eat. He picks at some minced-up chicken. If it was a big ole chocolate mousse, now, he’d eat all that. All he wants anymore is soft chocolate food. I imagine the man in Choke, remember him, drowning his mother with chocolate pudding? — Palahniuk knew what was up.
But he’s alive, right? Palahniuk’s alive? He can’t be dead, not so soon, not yet.
My dad, a thin, hunched-up old man who used to be ruddy and still wears a goatee, mouths at a couple of bites and talks about his mother who was until five minutes ago sitting beside him.
“She’s was a lot of pain, but I think mine is worse now. Yes, I’m in far more pain.” Then, “I’m a lot more tired than she was, that’s for certain. My exhaustion is much worse.”
Worse has always been his favorite word. There’s always worse.
He is dwindling, though. He’s in pain, and he’s exhausted, but not too exhausted to come to the table and complain about it. The bowel cancer is taking it out of him.
Imagine never having your ass fucked ever again.
I keep nodding and encouraging him to eat. “This chicken is mild, see, it’s chopped up fine — no onions, no hot pepper — ”
Across the room the children who were making a racket before dawn this morning are racketing again and some of the other people from the crowded house with the moldy shower are making their way to the table and I have no idea how they’re related but I’d better get up and serve them —
Behind the serving hatch in the shadowy kitchen I see a man in a dove-colored sports coat picking through the industrial serving dishes. He catches my eye and just lifts his chin:
Come on over here.
He looks like a man inspecting from the IRS or Department of Child and Family Services, the familiar way he’s poking around, but his coat’s much too expensive for that.
I let him wait a bit, this shortish, broad-shouldered guy nosing into everything like he owns the place, but he’s still there when I look up from serving the new families so I push my greasy hair behind my ears and I come on over. I’ll run him off, I think, before he makes trouble for anyone else.
The man in the dove-colored coat takes his nose out of a crowd-sized coffee urn and puts the lid back on it. What did he hope to find there? I wonder. Stolen emeralds? Meth?
I eyeball him: What is your business here?
He’s about my age, if my age would stay put where I can remember it. Blunt strong features, gold hair cut short and parted on the side, maybe a touch of the bottle in that gold, nice eyebrows, high cheekbones, lips a bit too shapely, but folded together now, serious. He’s a shade taller than I am, thick-necked like he used to play football. Changing eyes, green and blue. There might be an elfin lad buried somewhere under that beefy carapace, but if so he’s long gone.
“Can I help you?”
I could go dour Middle Tennessee or may-I-speak-to-your-manager north Georgia, and out of reaction to that dapper jacket I choose straight-up Cumberland Plateau. Kin I help yew?
“Well, yes, ma’am. Yes, I think you might can.”
He’s got the florid upper-crust Chattanooga voice, which is a little Dixie Carter, a little Appalachia, cultured but homespun, you know, a trustworthy accent, an outsider might think, and it’s true, he’ll ask about your grandma and remember every detail, but if you’re from around here you know someone with that accent’ll stab you in the back as soon as look at you, at least if you give him good reason.
I wait.
He comes over, shuffling as if he’s shy to get too close. He shakes a four-by-six photo out of a brown paper sleeve and holds it by the edges. “Have you seen this woman?”
I also don’t want to get too close, but he’s not relinquishing that photo. I bend over it.
It’s a candid shot of a woman in blue scrubs helping an old man. She’s just straightening up, turning away from him, looking toward a natural light source off-frame. A window, maybe, or an open door. I’m a cartoonist, though I never sell much, just share my work in local zines, you know, and I’d like to draw this woman.
The spill of light shows a slender person maybe between 30 and 40, a sweet tired face, no makeup. The hair drifting out of her messy chignon might have been mousy brown once, but it’s almost all gray. One long bony hand rests on her hip. One’s on the arm of the man’s rocking chair.
She’s wearing a necklace, one of those Art Nouveau fairies on a ribbon. The fairy rests in the hollow at the base of her neck. Someone’s colored out her badge — a nursing home badge, I guess — with a black Sharpie. She has a bandage around one wrist and the shadows of bruises on her arm. A couple of those rubber bracelets you wear to support causes. What Would Dolly Do?, Go Red for Women, things like that.
Maybe someone stumbled, I think, and she gave them her arm to help.
She has a fairy’s profile, but what do I mean by that?
“I’m sorry, I haven’t,” I say. I would remember someone as plain and beautiful as that. I ask, “What’s her name?”
“It’s Willow.”
I look up at him. He’s still studying the picture.
“What’s her last name?”
He shakes his head. “I forget.”
Just another stalker, I think.
“Why are you looking for her?” Then, curious again, “How long has she been lost?”
“I should know, shouldn’t I? But I don’t. That’s how I lost her, you see — I forgot.”
As he says that I change my mind and think I might have seen her once or twice after all, from behind, maybe, vanishing into a crowd, that silver hair loose. Maybe today? I try to remember a slender gray-haired woman, one of several women serving at the family reunion, but that’s the wrong one. As I’m thinking it over I catch a glimpse of his hand, blunt fingers with gold hairs on the back, and I remember that not 12 hours ago I had his cock in my mouth.
Then again, I never got a look at that man’s face.
“I do apologize,” I say. “I’ve been distracted all afternoon. Tell the truth, I can’t stop thinking about this guy whose dick I was sucking this morning — ”
By which I mean: Beat it, asshole, quit poking around here in other people’s business, and at the same time, How can you not remember?
For the first time he lifts his eyes from the photo. He studies my face. “Yes, I understand that kind of thing can be quite distracting.”
Yes. That.
I feel a sudden urge to protect this woman Willow from all enemies, especially subtle guys in dapper coats. He’s probably a lawyer or skip tracer or something nasty like that.
“What do you want with her?”
“I’m her agent — her keeper, I guess you might say.” He adds, with whimsical resignation, “We all have our keepers … ”
Have you ever been about to do something you wanted to do with your whole heart — board a train to a city you’ve never visited maybe — but instead, surprising yourself, you change your mind on the platform, pick up your duffle bag, and stride back through the terminal? You’re already kicking yourself. What are you doing? This is your chance! Go back!
Your legs march on. Sometimes you almost feel the hand between your shoulder blades —
That’s your keeper.
He — or she — is charged with keeping you safe, among other things. Most often, their guidance is like a voice, a warning, maybe just the sense someone is watching you.
Once, just once, they can substitute themselves bodily for you. They only do this when you’re in immediate danger. Say you throw yourself in front of a car. Your keeper can take the killing impact. Then the local newspaper tells the story of a girl who was thrown 50 feet and miraculously survived with a few bruises.
But your keeper is destroyed. It was his soul he transformed into body, and that car hit him like Mario in the video game, splashing him into bright coins that glittered a few seconds, then gone.
They sound like angels. But the purpose they’re keeping you alive for — I can’t remember it just now. So much has been lost. But even then, as he explained it, I thought, Something is wrong —
“I don’t understand,” I say, “and I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time explaining all this because even if I did understand, I don’t have time to help you. I have three projects on for my freelance clients, one of which is a night school, I can’t just abandon a whole class of struggling adult students, plus I work this courier job on weekends, not to mention my friends and relations dying of cancer and heart failure and all the things one does die of, everyone I love is dying, and it’s lucky for me I’m not as engaged with my life as some folks are, maybe, but — ”
He waits.
“There’s this boy I love. I mean, who knows how old he is, going on 40 by now, I guess. But anyway, he’s so frail — he never talks to me much, you understand, he doesn’t like me — but the one day he needs me will be the one day I miss seeing him and I can’t risk it.”
I look up at him. “That’s why I got the job at the courier’s. He’s the one gives me my assignments. And I do his spreadsheets and make his contact calls for him. Routine work makes him unhappy, his mind is so delicate — ”
“What job is that?” the man asks.
“It’s a wretched job, you bid on each assignment and any profit comes out of a ratio between the time you bid and the time it takes you to complete the job. Half the time I lose money on it. And every weekend he cusses me out about something I did wrong the past weekend. But I would give him every penny I’ve ever made, every moment of joy I’ve ever felt, if it would make him just a little bit happier — ”
“He’s the gentleman who gave you such a distracting morning?”
Sweat prickles up all over me at that thought, but it’s funny, too. Beloved always acts like I’ve got an icky condition he might catch. I’ve seen him wipe down the arms of the chair I sat in after I leave his office.
“Nope. He wouldn’t touch me with a 10-foot pole. And I would never sully him with such a thought.” Then I chuckle. “He’d have me served a civil process for imagining him that way.”
Now I think this stranger is going to laugh at me. Even hearing myself say it, I realize — not for the first time — Beloved is a vain, petty and wretched human. Of course that’s why he needs me, but I can never make anyone see it —
One day, just once, after my ex was arrested the last time, Beloved turned on the plug-in pot in the office and made me a cup of tea, blessing me out about my life choices all the while. Dumb cow was the least of it. No one understands that, either, how 15 minutes of kindness from a person with no heart is like the two coins from the widow in the Bible, literally all they have to give —
Instead of letting me make his contact calls for him and catch up his spreadsheets, Beloved sent me home by half-past five that evening and did his work himself.
I’m too exhausted to go through it all over again. But I have to be there, to put myself between this frail, impossible human and any harm that might befall him.
After a minute the stranger says, “You’re his keeper.”
No one has ever, ever understood. I nod.
He continues, “So you know how I feel about Willow.”
My whole heart opens.
“Yes, sir, I do. And I’m truly sorry — ”
“Then you understand why I can’t fight fair.” He reaches out and puts his index finger between my eyes. “He’s gone.”
I stare. Something shifts —
He lifts one corner of his mouth in a smile. “And don’t worry about that courier job. We don’t need you any more. You’re fired.”
In 10 minutes we are roaring down the highway in the stranger’s car. I don’t know anything about cars but this one goes very fast.