Malus Domestica (8 page)

A pullchain dangled against her face. Cutty pulled it and a soft yellow bulb came on, revealing an attic.

Years of accretion surrounded her, most of it dusted. Victorian-style lounges and parlor tables with baroque mahogany scrollwork and silk cushions. Steamer trunks full of foxed books, scrolls of paper, yellowed newspapers, movie posters plastered with the faces of long dead actors. Bookcases with broken glass windows set into them. A clown marionette hung from the rafters, face forever frozen in a loopy laugh. A coin-operated weight scale from 1936. Shelves and shelves of bricabrac—toys, coins, bayonets, flintlock pistols.

Cutty walked a meandering path through the labyrinth to a door at the far end.

This she unlocked with a skeleton key.

Inside, a bed faced an old tube television in a dark room. The only window was a tall gothic rectangle that looked out on the back garden, and it simmered with Tyrian purple light.

Playing on the TV was the History Channel, which she never failed to find ironic, considering who was watching it. The TV’s glow traced the contours of the room with a thin film of blue, but the shape under the thick quilt was only a suggestion in the soft light. The light of the attic’s bare bulb filtered through the open door and fell across the foot of the bed, bisecting the bedroom with dirty gold.

A gray cat lay curled up by the footboard.

The bedridden shape stirred in the shadows. “Evening, cookie.” Its genderless voice was a dry croak. Folded up in it was the hint of a sarcastic Brooklyn accent.

“Evening, Mother,” said Cutty.

“It
is
evening, right?”

The old woman slept more often than not these days, and often woke in the wee hours of the night. The bedroom was timeless; there was no clock here, digital or analog, which is how she liked it. Mother hated counting down the hours alone in her rare moments of wakefulness, and the constant ticking was maddening, a torturous metronome out of a Poe story.

“Yes,” Cutty said. “It is evening.”

She put the plate on a vanity and took a bendy straw out of the pocket of her sweater, slipping it into the tea. Sitting on the bed, she helped her mother sit up and drink some of it. The sound of her slurping was like the slow tearing of paper.

“When is it?”

Cutty traded the tea for the plate. “It’s October. October 2014.”

She gathered up a spoonful of ground porkchop and fed it to the shape under the quilt. The spoon rattled against her mother’s twisted grimace as the meat slid inside. Mother mashed it against the roof of her mouth with her tongue and swallowed.

“2014?” wheezed the shape. “Shut the front door.”

“Time flies.”

“Time flies like an arrow, but bees like a fruitcake.”

These garbled aphorisms had long ago ceased to concern Cutty. Considering the crone’s state, it was a wonder she could even communicate. She eased some of the chopped green beans into her mother’s hard mouth as if she were feeding her through a kabuki mask.

Mother sighed. “Will you hand me the television remote controller thing, cookie?”

“Where is it?”

“I dropped it. It’s on the floor.”

The shape’s shriveled eyes followed Cutty as she put the plate aside and stooped to gather the remote. She put the batteries back in it, put the cover back on, and sought her mother’s hand.

“Here you are,” she said, putting it in the stiff claw.

Fingers curled around the remote with a subtle crackle. The TV changed channels at a stately pace as Cutty continued to feed her antediluvian mother pureed pork. The gray cat on the quilt looked up, yawned, stretched, went back to sleep.

“I think we’re getting close,” said Mother, when dinner was almost over. “Finally, finally, finally. After all these long years.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Maybe once it’s done you won’t be keeping me in the attic with the rest of the antiques.”

Cutty gave her a wry look.

“What?” asked the shape.

“You
know
you’re only up here to keep you safe. Safe from those nasty murdering men and their stolen heartstones.”

“Bah. You don’t care about me.”

“How can you say that?”

“You hardly ever come up here to visit with me anymore.” Her mother coughed softly into one dry fist. “You’re always downstairs with your friends and that weird Irishman that cuts the grass.”

“I’ve told you before, he’s not Irish.”

“He’s ginger as hell, he does all the lawn work, he drinks, he’s Irish until proven otherwise.”

“No habeas corpus for you, huh?”

Her mother chuckled, though her face didn’t move. “I’m corpse enough for both of us.”

Cutty spooned the last of the green beans into her mouth and set the plate aside. Reaching into one of the deep pockets of her wizard-robe cashmere sweater, she brought out an apple. It was the size of a softball and its skin was the liquid, recondite red of a ruby. Rare striations of peach and gold curved down its sides.

Her mother sighed with relief and contentment at the sight of it, like a castaway seeing civilization.

“It’s almost time for another harvest,” said Cutty, handing her the apple. “I think this weekend I’ll see to that. Roy and Theresa can help me carry them to the house.”

Mother clutched it in her bony hands, and lifted it to her lips. Her mouth opened, the corners creasing and flaking, the joints of her jawbone cracking, and she pierced the fruit’s skin with her teeth. A soft groan of delighted pain escaped her throat as she bit into the fruit.

Instead of juice, vibrant arterial blood dribbled from its rind and ran down her arms, dotting the quilt.

As the rich carmine ran down her throat, Mother’s skin loosened, her fingers fulling and flushing. The corded veins snaking down her neck and across her shoulder plumped, throbbing, and fresh life trickled throughout her body.

“An apple a day,” she gurgled.

4

K
NUCKLES
BANGED
ON
THE
side of Robin’s van, waking her up with a start.

She squirmed out of her sleeping bag and opened the door. Joel stood outside, sidelit by the pizzeria’s security lights. He squinted into her flashlight beam. “Hey. I thought that would be you, out here in this sketchy-ass van.” He had put on a light windbreaker, and had his hands tucked deep into the jacket’s pockets. “You got any free candy?”

“No, fraid not.”

“Damn.” Joel glanced over his shoulder. “Hey, I wanted to come tell you…my brother Fish, he owns a comic shop in town? And he does this movie-night thing every Friday. He gonna start it up in about—” He checked his cellphone. “—Twenty minutes. You know, if you want to get out of that creepazoid van for a little while.”

“I don’t know. I—”

“Miguel usually lets me bring over a bunch of pizza from the shop. Employee discount.”

Robin paused. The Sriracha-pineapple-pepperoni slice she’d had for lunch had been amazing, and she was more than ready for Round Two. “Jesus, why didn’t you say that to begin with?” she asked, flicking on the dome light so she could find her clothes.

“What in the
hell?”
asked Joel, peering into the back of the van.

He reached in and took the broadsword down from its clamp on the wall and struck Conan poses with it. “What is all
this
now? This part of your witch-huntin YouTubes channel?”

Robin wriggled into her jeans. “Yep.”

He put the sword back and tipped one of the plastic bins so he could see into it. Batteries. “You loaded for bear, hooker.”

“Witch-hunting is a resource-intensive business.”

Shrugging into a sweat-jacket hoodie, Robin clambered out of the back of the van and locked it up. She had the video camera in her hands, and as Joel led her out to his car, she turned it on and aimed it at her face, holding it at arms’ length. “Hi everybody. It’s Malus. I was getting ready to settle down for the night with a good book and a bowl of staple-food ninety-nine-cent Ramen when my new best friend Joel—”

She aimed the camera at Joel. “What up, internet.” He blew a kiss.

“—came to invite me to Movie Night. Complete with more of that goddamn fantastic pizza from the pizzeria. Lady Luck smiles on me for a change.”

Joel drove a beautiful jet-black Monte Carlo with bicycle-spoke rims and whitewall tires. She opened the passenger door and slid into the plush black interior to find an eight-ball gear shift and an armrest wedge with a picture of Elvira embroidered on it, and the words B
LACK
V
ELVET
in cursive.

“All black.” Robin buckled up as Joel tossed himself into the car. “I bet this thing is a bitch in the summer.”

He turned the engine over with a cough and a beastly, deep-throated
grum-grum-grum-grum.
“Honey, it’s a bitch all year,” Joel said, throwing it into gear and pulling out of the parking lot.

The subwoofers in the back howled “Crazy On You” by Heart as he piloted Black Velvet down the twisting highway out of the canyon, his headlights washing back and forth across the trees. The backseat had a stack of vibrating boxes in it, filling the car with the tangy-savory smell of hot pizza, and her stomach twisted into knots immediately. As they came into Blackfield proper, the headlights spotlighted familiar sights that brought back a flood of nostalgia.

Much of the town was different—there was a new Walgreen’s, and the Walmart had become a sprawling co-op—but underneath the shiny new veneer of change were old landmarks saturated with memories.

There was the bridge she used to play under when she was a kid walking home from school.

Jim’s Diner, where she had her first piece of cheesecake.

The funeral home with the giant sloped parking lot that she’d sledded down one winter and crashed into some spare headstones at the back, leaving a bruise on her ass.

Walker Memorial, where she’d gone to church a few times under the instruction of her therapists in her junior year of high school. That lasted about a month, but she could still hear the vaulted echoes of footsteps, smell the varnish on the pews, the dusty carpet, the faint piss-reek of ancient hymnal books with stiff pages.

“Been a few years?” asked Joel, turning down the stereo so he could talk. He took out an iPhone and texted someone, typing with one thumb.

“Yeah.” Robin spoke to the window, the world wheeling past her face like a diorama. They passed the Victory Lanes alley on 7
^th
and Stuart, the neon sign out front showing a bowling ball knocking two pins into the rough shape of a V over and over. “It has. I didn’t think I’d ever be back here. Lot of bad memories. I said I wouldn’t come back.”

“You said this morning you wanted to pay your respects to y’mama?” He attached his phone to a magnetized ball on the dash,
click,
where it perched above the radio like a mounted GPS.

“Yeah. I might visit my old house too, if I think I can handle it.”

Joel sniffed, tugging his nose. He glanced out the window and then back at her as if he were about to give her nuclear secrets. “Ay, you want me to go witchu? You know, moral support? I don’t know when you wanna go, but I got some time off comin.”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe some time this week.”

“Lemme know. I’ll be there with bells on.” He flicked the tiny disco ball hanging from his rearview mirror and sun-cats danced around the interior of the car. “Jingle jangle.”

Fisher’s comic store wasn’t quite on the main drag through town, but it was tucked into a homey little street one block over, a narrow slice of old-fashioned Americana. Knick-knack shops, drugstores, a pet shop, boutiques, barber shops, a bar, lawyers’ offices, a Goodwill, a soup kitchen. They passed a looming gray courthouse and a redbrick police station.

The Monte Carlo slid into an angled parking spot on the street next to eight or nine other vehicles and Joel got out, taking half the stack of boxes out, leaving the rest for Robin. “Did you say Miguel donates these pizzas?” she asked, picking up the boxes and pushing the car door shut with her hip.

“He sees it as advertising.” Joel said, suggestively tossing out a hip. “Give em a taste, they gonna come back for more.”

Robin chuckled awkwardly.

She felt for the curb with her toe and stepped up onto the sidewalk. The windows of the comic shop were painted with intricate images of Spider-Man and Batman in dynamic poses, Bats in his blue-and-gray Silver Age colors. Over their heads was F
ISHER
’
S
H
OBBY
S
HOP
in flowing cursive.

A man came out of the comic book store and held the door open for them. “You trying to hurt me, man,” he told Joel, eyeing the pizza. He was brawny but slender, with a V-shaped torso and a round face.

“Fish,
you
the one doin it to yourself, don’t blame me.
I
eat like a human.”

The comic shop was dimly lit by bar fluorescents. Comics were only a fraction of the wares on the shelves—there were scores of rare, niche, and run-of-the-mill action figures still in their blister packs, board and card games, Halloween masks cast from various horror movies and superheroes, film props, videogame keychains, themed candy.

A life-size Xenomorph creature from the Alien movies lurked behind a shelf, motionlessly waiting to snag any customers unfortunate enough to step into range of its throat-jaws.

In the back of the store was an open area with booth seats and folding-chairs. Arcing over the heads of two dozen people and a small squad of children was a cone of light casting the opening sequence of horror classic
Evil Dead
on a projection screen.

“Fish on that keto diet.” Joel put the pizza boxes on a booth table and squirted some sanitzer on his hands, wringing them.

The kids immediately got up and came to the table, standing at his elbow quietly like hungry hounds. “He try to tell me it’s good and good for ya, but I see that look in his eye when I bring in these pizzas.”

“What’s the keto diet?” asked Robin.

“Zero carbs. None. Zero, zip, zilch.” Joel made that
zip-it
gesture across his face and started putting pizza on paper plates, handing them out. “He don’t hardly even eat fruit. He’s always been a fitness nut, but this year he’s goin balls to the wall. I don’t know how he does it.”