H. Brown
Familiars
Nev cracks the lid of the Vault, making visible a slit of himself: red underlashes, mismatched nostrils, a wide, pale mouth frowning down on me as it might on moldy grain in a grain silo, murky water in a water tower—on something spoiled, now soiling its container. Withdrawal shearing his voice of what primary-schoolteacher’s softness it’s acquired this past year, he asks if the biting has to continue come September, and if yes, then why. If no, then why has the biting seemed oh-so-necessary up to and including this point.
This is a dormant argument he’s reviving. Anything to take his mind off the nicotine, his not-having-it.
The Vault is what I call the corduroy couch cushions I’ve house-of-cards’d into a kind of yurt, vaguely hexagonal, propped in one corner of our living room. The largest cushion, which I’ve laid over the top, can be removed without troubling the foundation. Nev insisted on my adding this hatch, but if I had my way the Vault would be smooth, door-less, crack-less, and Nev wouldn’t require an opening, because he would live inside with me, always.
“Imperative. Absolutely. I need You in high concentrations,” I say, chin underlit by the alien glare of my laptop screen. “Otherwise I might develop a Vitamin You deficiency.”
Nev’s sulk only darkens.
As it’s getting late, I can leave the Vault without suffering undue sun exposure. It isn’t that sunlight burns my skin. The opposite, really: It’s that I can’t quite feel the warmth I used to feel, warmth I know I ought to feel. Whenever possible, I try to avoid occasions for self-pity. So: no sun.
I pause the old soap I’ve been watching—Dark Shadows, episode one thousand—capturing Collinsport miscreant Willie Loomis in a snarl. Behind him, in indistinct silhouette: Barnabus, his unholy captor, all furs and ruby rings.
I feed my hand through the gap Nev’s pried and wait for him to take it. When he doesn’t, I kick at a cushion-wall, collapsing the Vault around me.
Over his dinner (my pseudo-breakfast) of microwave sausage, black coffee, and last week’s leftover half-batch of enchiladas, Nev begins, “I know it’s not rational. It just makes me feel so—”
But he chokes back the sentiment, pressing a knuckle to his lips, like he might puke. He pushes away from the table and cuts a path to the sink, his over-large Windbreaker crackling. Nev’s taken to wearing his coat indoors—this coat, constantly—zipped to his chin. At first, I found this sort of inexplicable. Then he confessed to the chills, psychosomatic flu being symptomatic of the quitter.
The Windbreaker, which is alternating shades of blue polyester, rustles at the slightest touch, the least movement. Sometimes, Nev will sit stock-still at our kitchen table with the Windbreaker’s collar hiding his mouth, the Windbreaker’s cuffs hiding his fists, just watching the sink drip. Or he’ll rest his forehead on the tabletop, gone grey in the face.
Nev lets the enchilada’s still-frozen center fall out of his mouth and into the sink, blasts the mess with the pull-out sprayhead, then lets the nozzle retract.
When I ask him why he’s decided to quit now, and cold turkey, Nev tenses. “I mean, it’s not like I can just leave,” he says, running water to rinse his mouth. “Quick dip out behind the dumpsters for a smoke. When I was an aide, maybe, but now? Someone has to be in charge. I have to be in charge.”
“Exactly.” I aim the tines of my fork at him, prodding for emphasis. “If you don’t teach these kids their Ancient Mesopotamian history, who will? And then it’s ‘Good luck getting a job.’”
“Whereas you’re selling twinkies to truck drivers—"
“And then it’s drugs.”
“—and stoned teenagers. Yeah. Thank you for your service.”
“Murder,” I garble around a mouthful of enchilada, which—what with all the chile sauce I’ve spooned onto my helping—I almost taste. “Prison.”
Nev shakes his head. He puts his mouth to the tap. Ignoring me. As per.
“Electric chair.”
Our queen-size fills the bedroom so completely that to pull the curtains, or to reach the old standing closet, or to leave, we have to maneuver through narrow trenches around the bed’s frame, flattening our backs against the wallpaper, which is faded amber, an artifact of the 1970s. Visible from my side: the white wood door to the bathroom. From Nev’s: the window. Evening makes a thin incision between the blinds, casting across the bed a line of light that bisects us at our waists.
Most nights, my shift starts at ten, so from eight to nine we lie next to one another like this. Nev will keep on sleeping when I leave for work. Personally, I accomplish most of my sleep during the day, when Nev is gone. What I miss most, I think, from before, is sleep—hours, fitted back to front. When I first started working third shift, I found I was consistently waking up alone. This was more upsetting than I expected, so I proposed the current arrangement.
When I am up at ‘em, I’m doing what all needs doing: shopping for two (if it’s sufficiently overcast), laundry for two (if it’s Sunday), dishes for forty-five (Nev insists on a clean mug every time he takes a cup of coffee, mistaking dregs for something more offensive, anonymous grime; but that’s what you’ve been drinking, I tell him, that’s more of the same). And I’m watching a lot of daytime television. Like, a lot. The Bold and the Beautiful, for
example. The Young and the Restless, for another. Days of Our Lives, As the World Turns, General Hospital—
All right.
So maybe I’m not getting all the dishes done.
Laid up, in the dark, with his teeth, Nev tests the thickest part of my palm—the meat below the thumb—hard enough a little pain’s hinted: Here’s where you’ll hurt. Glimmer of an affirmation of feeling.
“One of these days,” he warns into my forked line, “just when you’re least expecting it, I’m going to be so sweet to you.” He relaxes his grip, draws me closer, and, slack-jawed, begins to lathe me where he might have chewed me. I jerk my hand away and scramble to a sitting position, Nev mirroring at a more cautious half-speed. Clocking my glare, he keeps his head down and his shoulders slumped, that strip of light slicing his right arm at the socket. He knows now’s not the time for an argument. Our energy levels are all out of sync. He’s finishing his day, while I’m only just starting my own. So he asks, slowly and with something approaching genuine concern, what it is I need, though he knows well enough what I’ve needed near every night since I turned.
I’m still not entirely sure what happened to me, or how it happened, because it was nothing like what you see on TV. There was no shadow in the park. No ruby-tipped fingernail tapped my shoulder. If some jaundiced specter curved over my bed, then I must’ve slept through it.
What I need now is to feel my flesh give, my flesh displaced. Granted the sensation is not so strong as pain, amounts to little more than a strange, hot twinge, but I do feel something, being bitten.
Nev may bite down wherever he likes. Two conditions: He must not warn me as to where, and he must break the skin. To disturb me this way requires real force. Nev must summon the desire—at least, the adrenal rush—necessary to pierce. If I had my way, he would strip me right down to the bone, do away with all my muscle and gristle, by the smallest of pieces. I make do with what he’s willing to offer: his mouth, prospecting my softer places, his eventual selection, the latch, and the rend.
There is a slight risk of infection if I don’t attend to the open wound immediately, but I always do, so it’s a non-issue. Back when I still thought I might stay young forever, I dropped out of this RN program into which I had deposited a solid year and a half of my life. Maybe I should have slept on it, waited to see if the hair on my legs was still growing. It was. Lesson learned. Still, the skills I did manage to acquire have proven useful: Cleanse hands, apply pressure to stanch the bleeding, douse with peroxide, blot dry, apply antibacterial cream, apply gauze, etc.
Nev insists that I should, at the very least, teach him to dress the wounds he makes. If he’s going to continue to hurt me, he says, I have to let him help, too.
“You are helping, Nev, you’re—,” I start. Over-familiar with this particular line of reassurance, Nev groans into his pillow and rolls over, readying himself for a feverish night’s sleep.
When I slip out of bed, I take the comforter with me, to leave it heaped before the bathroom door. Locking myself inside, I drop my sweats, put on my uniform, and sink my teeth into my forearm, but some lingering preservation instinct prevents me drawing blood.
We trade Nev’s old Geo back and forth and back and forth like the junkiest love letter. He’ll need the car tomorrow morning, so tonight I bike to my graveyard.
As I cycle down our backroad—now spotlit by the occasional polelight, now shadowed in the gaps between—my tires trace the spectral centerline. Shoulder-high cornstalks throttle the length of my commute, cutting slits in the horizon and fringing black the night’s nine o’clock violet.
August has always been my favorite month.
Really, I’m not so different from who I was, I think, as I struggle to catch my breath, as my feet chase my feet chase my feet, and so on, for six miles.
Outside the station, I chain my bike to a rack set back between teetering curb displays—one of antifreeze, the other of water pallets. While squat low, I tease the bike’s gear teeth along the underside of my wrist. From behind pump eight a woman, bleached by the overhead lights, with long black hair and torn jean shorts, eyes me warily. I’d tell her Take a picture. But.
I push into the station, passing under a bit of neon signage. This buzzes perpetually above the front door, half looping blue script, half burnt-out skeleton, Come I ! W ’r Op n.
Ten to six-thirty, I wait, confined behind plexiglass, to dispense from a predetermined slot lottery tickets and cartons of cigarettes; vacuum-sealed egg salad sandwiches and plastic-wrapped snack cakes fat with cream, crinkling promising sugar inside.
Midnight, I put twenty on pump two. Still later fifteen on five. Meanwhile my Shadow preps the station for busier morning hours, clearing the popcorn machine of unspent kernels, un-spoking from the warming carousel hot dogs that’ve shriveled under the heat lamps. Vat of Clorox in tow, he mops the tile glacial. Soon enough he’s cleaned himself up against the scuffed panel that cordons my cash booth from the merchandise. Through my window, I watch him: Escaped of his ponytail, sprigs of his red hair coil in the humidity, so I imagine it must be hot. I imagine it must be near-unbearable in my booth. For appearance’s sake, I keep a toy fan whirring beside the register.
Two in the morning, I take my break, quitting the station in favor of the front curb, where I unwrap and anatomize a swiss roll I’ve stolen off the Little Debbie corrugate, unfurling flat the chocolate-sponge and scraping out the cream. When I hear—a sound like a fly frying itself on a bulb—what must be another neon letter flickering out, I glance back to consider what remains, the sorry state of my invitation.
H. Brown may well be the world’s smallest big brother. Previous publication: Storm Cellar.
Malasaña | Hudson, NY| Cargo Collective | Portland, ME | 2021