Skewed Universe
Megan Hart
Smashwords.com Edition.
Copyright 2010 Megan Hart
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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A collection of short, skewed stories…just for fun
Words
Isabelle stopped typing at the sound of the beep. God bless spell-check. Impatiently hitting the spell check command, she waited. She was hot into the story, nearly finished, and the words were flowing from her brain like butter on a hot cob of corn. And still, she waited. No alternatives.
Damn. She really needed to update her computer’s memory. Now she'd have to use the dictionary and risk losing the story burning to be set free, or go on and check it later in the rewrite. Isabelle, never one to hesitate in releasing a story, went on.
Later, as she curled up against her mound of pillows, her glasses on and a pen tapping against her teeth, she came across the misspelled word. Such a simple word, one she'd used a thousand times before. It was funny, she mused, how using a word over and over could make it almost lose its meaning. Like saying "bubblegum" for 45 minutes, or something. After awhile your mind played tricks on you.
"Hey, Gloria," Isabelle called to her roommate. "How do you spell 'aspirin'?"
"How do you spell what?"
"You know, aspirin. Like Bayer or something."
Gloria stuck her head in the door. "I never heard of it.”
Isabelle narrowed her eyes at the other woman’s foolishness. "Don't mess around, Gloria, I need to know."
"Why don't you look it up in the dictionary?" Gloria asked patiently. "You do have a dictionary, don't you?"
"Yes, I have a dictionary," Isabelle replied rather sourly. "But how can I look up a word if I don't know how it's spelled?"
Her friend shrugged. "Well, Issy, I wish I could help you, but I never heard of the stuff."
"Gloria!"
"What?"
"Aspirin, you know, the stuff you take when you have a headache?”
Gloria snorted. "I usually take godage when I have a headache, and so do you."
Isabelle, disgusted, yanked open her bed-table drawer and drew forth a small bottle. After struggling with the child-proof cap for a few minutes, she finally popped it open and, triumphantly, shook out a few white capsules.
"There!” She cried. "Aspirin!"
"There, godage," Gloria replied. “It says so right on the bottle, Isabelle."
Isabelle looked. GODAGE, read the bottle in bold black letters. Jaw dropping in astonishment, she blurted out a word she had seen written on the bathroom wall and for which she had never previously had use.
"Maybe you should take a rest," Gloria said sympathetically. "Work on your story tomorrow."
"I think I will," Isabelle replied rather feebly, putting the bottle back into the drawer, which she shut with a dull thud.
The story was staring her in the face when she woke up the next morning, the red ink she had used to revise it looking suspiciously like blood. Taking up the sheaf of papers, she checked the word again. ASPIRIN, right there, in plain black letters. Isabelle rubbed her head tiredly. She picked up the pen she favored, red ink with the end gnawed, and scratched out the letters until the ink leaked through the paper and stained the page underneath. GODAGE, she wrote in her careful hand, and then she went on.
"Sam," she said later, "do you think I'm crazy?"
He hugged her hard around the waist, squeezing a little "oof" of air out of her. "Positively bonkers."
“But do you think I have hallucinations?" Isabelle persisted as she squirmed away from his grasp.
"What do you mean?"
Quickly, she told him of the previous day's confusion. Then she paused and bit her lip. "I could have sworn the word was aspirin, Sam, but when I looked it up, it said godage. Gloria said so too. Am I nuts?"
"Of course not," Sam soothed. "But you just probably checked in the wrong book."
"What other book would I use?" Isabelle asked. "You look in the dictionary to find a word's spelling and meaning, Sam, I'm not that nuts."
Sam looked at her strangely. "In the what?"
"The dictionary, you know, like Webster's."
He put a hand to her forehead as if checking for fever. "Honey, are you sure you feel all right?"
Isabelle’s stomach sunk. "What do you mean?"
"Well, honey, everyone knows that if you want to know a word's spelling and meaning, you check a klinkle."
"Get out!" Isabelle shrieked. "You're trying to drive me nuts!"
"Issy….”
"Get out! Get out!"
Sam fled under the onslaught of her words and the flapping of her hands in his direction. When he had gone, Isabelle sank into a nearby chair and buried her face in her hands. This was too much. She checked her good old Webster's and sure enough, it said klinkle on the cover. She groaned and went back to bed.
The next day was no better. Her increasingly alarmed friends informed her that, while they were completely familiar with "fleezbog," "joppling chisms,” and "hefta ritgo,” they had never heard of "toothbrush,” “running shoes," or even "diet soda."
Isabelle, they said, should consider going for some help.
"I'm not going to any shrink,” she vowed and slumped in her chair, which Gloria, smiling condescendingly, informed her was called a dooflunk.
"You're obviously stressed out, honey, " said Sam in concern. "You really just need to rest."
"I don't need to rest," Isabelle snapped. "I need my words back."
Sam and Gloria exchanged meaningful glances.
"I've arranged for a friend of mine to come over and see you,” said Gloria.
Isabelle said nothing, just fumed in her dooflunk.
She was not so upset because she found herself apparently going mad; indeed, she had often assumed that she would end up a little loose in the gears. What so infuriated her was the profanity, the irreverence of the situation. Isabelle, for whom words were greater solace than anything else, found this
sudden desecration more than unnerving. It was blasphemy.
Gloria's friend turned out to be a rather self-absorbed psych major who waved inkblots in front of her face and tried to make Isabelle talk about her sexual fantasies.
"This has nothing to do with sex,” Isabelle told him, pushing his hand off her knee, "and keep your stupid hands off my knees."
“Everything has to do with sex, " the psych major assured her, "and those are your briflits."
Isabelle chased him out of her room by throwing a copy of her unabridged klinkle and two of her joppling chisms.
The following weeks got only worse. Staying inside did not help. Television was mundane, books were certainly no better, and she could not bear to look at her faithless computer, for even that had betrayed her, underlining every word in red after practically every keystroke.
Isabelle, frustrated and bored, fled the house one afternoon after hearing a man in a commercial praise the benefits of HrMinkle's glorious flincoffles. The outside world offered no solace. Everywhere she went she saw street signs, billboards, all changed. Conversations were worse. After a day of wandering around the city in a haze of self-pity, Isabelle gave up.
She certainly did not feel insane, and martyrdom had always bored her. Besides, she had been idle too long; several stories scrabbling around in her head were simply dying to escape.
She would refuse them no longer. So what if all the words were changed? She could use the new ones just as well as she had the old. All that really needed to change was her perspective. All that really mattered was that there still were words, glorious words to use and cherish and form to her own needs.
Words, words, words.
She wasted no more time, but went home right away and straight to her room without a word to either Gloria or Sam, who had taken to biting his nails in a frenzy of concern for her, and who jumped up with an almost comic expression of relief when he saw her come in.
Ignoring them both, she locked the door behind her, eager to get the tale inside her skull out before it exploded from her ears.
Isabelle typed furiously, hunched over the keys like a woman possessed.
"Doris stopped visenglatting at the sound of the wuft. Rav hewl spell-trine. Impatiently dlipting the appropriate hreds that would nhifl her the rignot spelling of the glod….”
* * * *
Killing Point
We did not have to wait in line to get into the restaurant. Amanda declared that to be a good sign. Fewer people would mean better, faster service. She said she was starving.
"Six months ago, we would’ve had to wait for hours to get in here," she reminded me when I made a face behind the officious hostess's back. "Tonight, we walked right in."
"Six months ago we didn't have to worry about homicidal maniacs attacking us on the street."
"That's not true, Helena," Amanda said. "Violent crime did not start with Frank's Syndrome."
"Let's just be sure to call a taxi an hour before we're finished with dinner. I don't want to wait on the street longer than necessary."
"You're such a worry wart," my friend told me.
"Six months ago, we could’ve walked three blocks to the parking garage," I said. "Now everybody you pass on the street could possibly turn around and try to kill you for no reason at all. Of course I'm worried!"
"Well, at least we're seated near the window."
Amanda has a habit of dismissing conversations she doesn't like. Sometimes I wonder how we even became friends.
She was right, however, about the restaurant. La Femme was an incredibly trendy restaurant and, until Frank's Syndrome swept the country and made leaving the house life-threatening, difficult to get into. This was the first time we had been here since the curfew was lifted.
Amanda settled herself into her seat, ignoring the menu. She always orders the same things. She's very predictable. "Thanks so much for coming with me. I know how much you hate this place."
I was staring past her, to the street outside. It was starting to rain. A man walked by, collar pulled up around his ears. Even from where I was sitting, I could see that his eyes were red, his nose raw from too much blowing. He sneezed. I stiffened in my chair, waving my friend to silence. The man was sick.
"He could just have a cold," Amanda began, and I hissed at her to be quiet.
A dog, tail between its legs, trotted toward the sheltering alley next to La Femme. The man sneezed again. He pivoted on his heel into the dog's path and kicked it as hard as he could. I could not hear the dog's yelp. I could only stare as the man, sneezing uncontrollably, managed to cave in the animal's ribs and crush its skull before two MEDcops pulled up and wrestled him to the ground. Their crisp white uniforms were almost glaring under the streetlights.
"Honestly," Amanda said, "with what they have on the market now, there's just no excuse for that."
"Maybe his immunization didn't take," I snapped. "That can happen, you know."
She smirked. "Helena, even if his immu didn't take, he could have picked up something at the drug store. Phildane 580 or something. It's not like we haven't all been drilled about the symptoms of the Syndrome. He can't not have known he was getting sick."
I was suddenly, unexpectedly furious with her. "What if you had been there instead of that dog, Amanda? What if you were the one being beaten to death on the street? Would you have held up one of those perfectly manicured hands and politely asked him to head down to RxMart and pick up a bottle of Phildane?"
"There's no need to get pissy," she snapped back.
"Frank's Syndrome is more than just an inconvenience, Amanda!"
"It's just a bug, a flu," she retorted. "If you start to sneeze, run a fever, you just have to take Phildane. Phildane stops you from reaching the Killing Point..."
"Phildane works, but you have to take the pills! And who wants to think, to really believe, that the touch of hay fever they woke up with this morning is going to make them psychotic? Who wants to believe that in 10 to 12 hours they might have an uncontrollable urge to carve up their neighbors like Thanksgiving turkeys?"
She wouldn't listen to me. She never listens to anything she doesn't want to hear. She always thinks she's right.
"Helena, calm down. Not everyone with a cold has Frank's Syndrome."
"The only way to know you have the Syndrome is if you start trying to kill people," I said with clenched jaws. The sight of her smug face was making my eyes itch. "Once you reach the Killing Point, it's too late, Amanda. You either kill or get killed. There is no cure."
"So you take Phildane when you start to feel sick," my so-called friend said patronizingly, "and even if it is Frank's Syndrome you're okay."
"Nobody is okay anymore," I told her. I was so angry with her that my throat ached.
"We don't have anything to worry about anyway," she said. She had the audacity to reach across the table and touch my hand. "We've both had the shots."
I forced a smile to my face, although the room felt very hot and the scent of her flowery perfume was tickling my nose. I took a sip of cool water. The glass was very thin against my palm. I could break it with a quick twitch of my fingers and use the shards to carve that maddening smile off her face. I sneezed once, twice.
Violently.
* * * *
A Cheap Gold Chain
I am a cheap gold chain. A cheap gold chain that glitters to distract you from what lies beneath the shine; the kind that will turn your skin green. A cheap gold chain that will snap if you give it a tug. I can not remember a time when I have not felt this way.
I am a cat. I want to be stroked and petted. I want to be hugged and kissed. I want to curl up beside someone warm sometimes. I can purr loudly when I want to. I do not always have to show my claws.
I am a wind-up toy with broken gears. I am a cracked vase that will not hold water. I am an apple with a worm within. I am the thin sheet of ice concealing a puddle that shatters when it is tread upon.
No one seems to see this but me. I go to work, I laugh and smile. I count the money. I work in a bank, behind a thick Plexiglas shield that is supposed to keep out the criminals. It is supposed to prevent us from getting shot and dying in our professional, tellerly, linen and wool suits. There is one girl who sometimes wears stretch-pants to work. She is the same girl who wears her skirts too short and her hair too big. Privately, I think she is the type of girl who would wear white high heels with black jeans, but since I have never seen her socially, I can not be sure. I never see anyone from the bank socially.
I am not happy, I am not happy, I am not happy. That is what I am really thinking when I smile and cash checks. Most of the customers during the day are elderly, and sometimes they smell.
"I am not happy," I say to them through smile-gritted teeth. They do not hear.
"You have a nice day, too," they tell me.
The bank manager is moron. He patted me on the rear one time, and the next time he came to tally my receipts, I stepped on his foot. My heel went down between his two front toes. He has not touched me since. He thinks I am a bitch.
Jonah, cold Jonah, used to call me bitch sometimes. I didn’t really mind. He always smiled when he said it. It was the only time he ever smiled at me. I suppose if I had a friend with whom I could share the sordid details of my love life, that friend might tell me that my relationship with Jonah was not healthy. That what we did behind closed doors was not normal, perhaps not sane. That welts are not an appropriate show of affection; that love should not cause pain. And I might agree, except that Jonah did not love me.
I am the box of candy on February 15. I am the hairball found under the bed three weeks after the cat has died. I am the last piece of Thanksgiving turkey that did not make it into a sandwich or a casserole. The last final bits that no one can quite stomach, but no one wants to throw away.
Today, a man came into the bank through the delivery door. We all assumed he was there to deliver some bottled water for the cooler in the break room, but we were wrong. He had a gun. He made the big-haired girl put all the money she had into a bag, and while he threatened and shouted, he held his arm around my body and his gun to my head.
He was very warm, probably from excitement, and I leaned against him. I enjoyed the warmth. The bank is always too cold for my tastes. His arm was strong. He was only a little taller than I, and my head rested in the hollow where his shoulder meets his neck. He smelled of some cologne I could not place. I enjoyed being held. No one holds me anymore.
"No one move, and I'll let her go," he shouted. His voice was harsh and loud above my head.
He was going to let me go.
Did I mention I am a cat? I like to be stroked and petted. I like to curl up next to someone warm.
I like to write with the sharp-tipped fountain pen that came from Jonah's desk drawer; it has a smooth, fine line and is luxuriously heavy in my hand. I have written letters with this pen. Not love letters.
He was going to let me go. Someone is always letting me go. No one ever stays. I did not want him to let me go. The pen went straight and true into his left eye, and he cried out. His blood was warm, and it coated my hair like honey.
The moron who felt my butt shook my hand and breathed in my face with a mouth that reeked of pepperoni and sour stomach. The big-haired girl offered me a stick of her gum. There has even been talk of giving me a promotion.
I am a cheap gold chain, the kind that will turn your skin green. A cheap gold chain that will snap if you give it a tug.
* * * *
Over Hill
Snow. Crisp and white. It was everywhere, had fallen every week like clockwork since November, and now was marked only by the trails of snowboards and a few skis. A gasoline motor grunted in the background, sending up a hazy, stinking cloud that, thankfully, did not reach her. She stood by the fire-barrel, holding her hands out to the flames although the day had warmed. She was still cold, always cold.
At first, the users of this makeshift ski slope had mocked her, insulted her, or worse, ignored her. Now, she had braved the coldest days, stood in the worst weather, uncomplaining, and she had earned from most of them a certain, grudging respect. Some even answered her questions, although most shrugged and could not, or would not give her any information.
She had a name, Barbara, but no one here knew it. If they addressed her, which was rare, they called her whatever happened to be the current slang of the day. To some, she was "Hill's Mom"; to most she was just "that lady."
Today, the weather had changed. The sun had finally made an effort and burst from behind the snow clouds that had hovered in the sky nearly all winter. All along the road she had seen rivulets of dirty water running into drains. The spring thaw was on its way. Soon the slope would be bare of snow, and she would have to follow the pack as they moved from snowboards to skateboards. Her son had been missing for five months.
A pale girl who was probably fifteen but looked at least three years younger came beside her to share the fire. She was dressed completely in black, which did nothing but enhance her paleness. Her hair, too, was black with a quarter inch of mousy brown beginning to show at the roots. She shivered.
"Hey," she said by way of greeting.
Hill's Mom nodded. She watched the snowboarders swoop down the slope in graceful loops and turns, sometimes coming very close to each other before veering away. As she watched, two of them crashed into each other, hitting the ground and rolling down the rest of the slope. She stiffened, fearful that they had been hurt, but both leaped to their feet at the bottom of the hill and started toward the home-made lift to get pulled up to the top.
She could hear their giddy laughter, their mock threats to each other. She closed her eyes briefly. That could have been her son.
"That's what happened to Hill," the girl said suddenly.
"What?" Barbara's voice was rusty from disuse.
"Hill and Marty, they had a wreck like that," the girl said. "Marty got a broken nose."
"What happened to my son?" Barbara asked the girl. "Hillard? Hill. You all called him Hill."
The girl shrugged. "I don't know."
"Was he hurt? Did he fall? What..."
"I wasn't paying attention," the pale girl said. She moved away from the fire to passionately greet a boy wearing a neon green windbreaker.
Barbara's heart pounded. After months of asking questions, she had been offered some information! She had a clue! Her mind raced. If Hill had been in an accident, he could’ve been hurt. He could have had a concussion, become confused, wandered away and no one would have noticed, thinking he was going home.
Suddenly she was too hot, she had to step away from the fire. Tiny beads of sweat sprang up on her brow; her palms felt moist. She thought back to November, to the night when her son had not returned home.
"It's almost eight," she had said to her husband. "Where could he be?”
"You know where he is," Jack had replied. "He's up at that home-made ski slope those kids put together on the mountain. Snowboarding. Where he always is."
"But it's dark," she’d fretted. "They don't have lights there."
"Then he's at Kenny's house, or Ron's." Jack had rustled the paper, dismissing her. "He'll be home soon."
Hill had not come home. That night, the area had been hit with the biggest blizzard it had seen in fifteen years. Phones were down, the power was out, and it was two days before the plow had come through to clear their roads. The police were too busy to worry about a kid who may or may not have been at a friend's house. By the time Barbara had been able to get someone to listen to her, Hill had been gone for three days.
"Has there been any tension at home recently?" the officer who came to the house asked her.
Barbara thought of the silent dinners, the muffled fights behind doors. She thought of Jack's scathing remarks about the length of Hill's hair, his friends, his clothes. She thought about the scent of strange perfume on a shirt collar.
"My husband and I have been having some problems, but…."
"Is it possible that Hillard could’ve run away?"
She shook her head. "No, no…."
"Mrs. Waters," the officer said kindly, "we have to consider that possibility."
She’d hung her head then, a failure as wife and mother. Her husband was having an affair with a cashier at the Pick and Pack, and her son had run away.
"Can you find him?"
The police had assured her they would do everything they could, which, as the days turned into weeks, turned out to be nothing. Finally, they had relegated Hill's case to the bottom of the list.
She called hospitals, clinics and finally the morgue. No one could help her. She visited Hill's friends, all of whom greeted her with the same slack-jawed response. Only their parents looked at her with sympathetic eyes.
"Thank God it's not our son," she could almost hear them thinking. "Our son may be a screw up, a lazy underachiever, but at least he didn't run away. At least we didn't drive him away."
Jack moved out to be with the Pick and Packer, and Barbara sat for two days in the silent house and cried. Not because she was sorry that he was gone, but because she was so relieved to see him go. She switched her grocery shopping to the ShopSmart, and found to her surprise that the produce there was better anyway.
She began to frequent The Slope, as it was known, trying to talk to the kids who hung out there to snowboard or ski or get high away from prying eyes. A rocky, commercially unappealing stretch of mountain, it backed Ski Flashpoint, a popular slope on the mountain's other side. Someone, a long time ago, had rigged a crude pulley system out of two poles and some clothesline. It was run by an ancient gasoline motor that spit black smoke and rumbled continuously. Anybody who wanted to reach the top simply reached up, grabbed the revolving clothesline and held on.
She took a spot by the fire barrel, questioning those who came to warm up between runs. Few, if any, told her anything she wanted to know.
"Did you know my son, Hillard?"
"Hill? Yeah. You his Mom?"
"Yeah, I knew him. His Dad was a real asshole, you know? He probably ditched."
"I heard he caught a ride to the coast to try surfing."
Still, she persisted. After awhile, The Slope became a habit. She became a regular. Once, she even brought some hot chocolate. No one laughed in her face, but no one drank any either. The next time, she brought coffee in the oversized Thermos that had been Jack's. She liked to use it knowing that he would be missing it. At least he might miss something, if not her and their son.
"Hey, wait!" Barbara, shaking away the memories, called after the pale girl.
She wanted to ask her more questions, to find out if anybody else knew about Hill's accident. Maybe someone had seen him fall. The girl ignored her. Barbara, surprising herself, ran after her.
"I asked you to wait," she said more harshly than was her norm.
The girl yanked her arm from Barbara's grip and glared. "You're not my mother," she said.
"I want to know where my son is," Barbara said through gritted teeth.
Once more, the girl shrugged. "Why don't you ask somebody who gives a shit, lady."
The day really had grown much warmer, warm enough that Barbara had to loosen her scarf. The snow all around was growing slushy. Soon not even the most skilled snowboarders would be able to maneuver in the slop. She turned back to face the mountain, tears of frustration burning behind her eyes.
A line of snowboarders was leaping over a crude ramp someone had made from a pile of snow higher than the surrounding ground. She watched as one by one they skidded over it, each doing a different twist in the air, showing off to their less skilled peers. She watched as the ramp, already diminishing under the sun's increasing warmth, was worn away by the progression of boards running over it. She watched as the last snowboarder skidded across the pile of snow, taking most of it with him. She watched as something emerged from beneath the white covering of snow, something she recognized.
"Oh. My. God." Each word, separated. She heard a roaring in her ears; her legs felt weak. Red spots began to flash warningly in front of her eyes, and she thought she might fall. She had nothing to grab to support herself, and she almost let herself sink to her knees on the muddy ground.
Instead, she forced one leg to move in front of her, followed by the other, until she was running up the slope. She heard a thin sound, and realized it was coming from her own throat as she stumbled her way to the motionless form on the mountainside.
Trembling, she knelt beside her son, her only child, his blond hair dirty atop a pale face. Blood had crusted around one nostril, and a huge bruise discolored the left side of his face. His eyes and mouth were open. His tongue had turned black.
As if in slow motion, she felt the screams rising from her stomach to jettison their way out of her throat. They tasted dark and bitter like baker's chocolate, or blood.
"You knew!" she shrieked to the gathering crowd as she tried to gather her boy into her arms. He was stiff, would not bend, and he kept slipping from her grip.
"God damn you all, you all KNEW!"
Her voice cracked, then shattered from her cries.
Not one of them contradicted her.
* * * *
Mother’s Milk
It was almost like waiting for a sneeze, Helen reflected as her son’s greedy mouth worked insistently against her breast. That same feeling of sensation building, then crashing. Or an orgasm. Of course, it had been an awful long time since she had experienced an orgasm. She winced as the needles and pins sensation of her milk letting down crested, then subsided.
Then again, it had been a long time since she had nursed a baby, too. Not since her last baby was six months old, at least, and he was a good many years older than that now. Still, the body didn’t forget. Neither did the heart, she supposed, but this time around the peace and love she had always associated with nursing her babies just wasn’t there. Maybe because this time around it wasn’t her choice.
“Hey, Ma, quit daydreaming and concentrate,” her darling boy snapped, popping off the nipple with a sound like a cork from a bottle. “You’re drying up already.”
Helen Waite, seventy-two years old, patted her boy Larry’s head gently. “Patience, my dear,” she said. “Be thankful that there’s any there at all.”
“’Be thankful there’s any there at all,’” Larry mocked, fastening himself onto the other nipple rather ferociously.
Twenty minutes later, when she was wrung dry, Larry offered her half a coconut. The milk had been drained from it and was filling his belly, but he offered her the meat.
“You need your strength, Ma.”
“Yes, my dear, thank you.” Helen took the shell in one gnarled hand and wondered when she had grown so old. She remembered a time when that very hand had been as smooth and youthful as the petals of a rose.
Larry stretched out on the sand beside her, hands behind his head, and let out a belch that would have shattered the windows, had there been any.
“This could be the life,” he said expansively. “Sand, sun, water. Too bad there’s nothing to eat and no broad to share it with.” He cast a look her way, eyeing her wrinkled dugs and leathery skin. “Even I wouldn’t dream of breaking that taboo.”
Thank God for small favors, Helen thought, the beatific smile on her face reflecting none of her thoughts. She repressed a shudder at the thought of Larry, red-faced and sweating above her, trying to reach his goal. Thank God he only wanted sustenance.