ODD? (8 page)

Blaise felt heat warming her face.

But what about the cockatrice?

The problem was too big for her to deal with for the moment. With an “Um, okay,” she chose denial. She let herself into the garden, trying shyly to avoid eye contact with either of them. “What you doing?”

“Getting the otaheite tree ready for winter,” the man replied. “It won't last out in the open like this.”

“I bury it in the soil every winter,” the Venus-built lady told her. “Then I dig it up in summer, and it blooms for me by the fall.”

“And that works?”

“It works, yes,” the Venus-built lady replied. “It bears, and it feeds my soul. Is a flavour of home. You going to help me pick, or you want to help Johnny dig?”

Standing this close to her neighbour, Blaise could taste the warm rose spice of her breath. Even her skin had the scent of the roses she ate. Blaise looked at Johnny. He was resting comfortably on the shovel, watching both of them. He grinned, jade eyes bright.

Who to help? Who to work close beside? “I will help you pick for now,” she told the Venus-built lady. “But when Johnny get tired, I could help him dig.”

Johnny nodded. “The more, the merrier.” He returned to his task.

The otaheite apples seemed to leap joyfully from their stems into the Venus-built lady's hands. She and Blaise picked all the fruit, ate their fill of maroon-skinned sweetness and melting white flesh, fed some to sweaty Johnny as he dug. The woman owned a flower shop over in Cabbagetown. “Is called Rose of Sharon,” she laughed. “Sharon is my name.” Blaise inhaled her flower-breathed words.

Johnny was a metalworker. He pointed proudly at Sharon's wrought-iron railings. “Made those.”

The ruddiness of this white man came from facing down fire every day. Blaise imagined him shirtless at the forge, forming the molten iron into beautiful shapes.

“I need help at the shop,” Sharon told her. “You don't like the job you have now, and you have a gentle hand with that fruit you're picking. You want to come by Monday and talk to me about it?”

Blaise thought she might like to work amongst flowers, coaxing blooms to fullness. “Okay. Monday evening,” she replied.

She and Johnny dug out most of the soil from around the tree's roots while Sharon steadied its trunk. Then all three of them laid the tree in its winter bed, clipped its branches, and covered it with soil.

“Good night, my darling,” whispered Sharon. “See you soon.” The bleeding hearts quivered daintily. The roses dipped their weighty heads.

The sun was lowering by the time they were done. The shelter would be closed, but probably the cockatrice was asleep by now. Blaise stood with Sharon and Johnny beside the giant's grave that held the otaheite tree. She ached from all the picking and digging; a good hurt. Johnny put a hand lightly on her shoulder. She felt the heat of it through the fabric. He smelt of sweat and fire and earth. On Johnny's other side, Sharon took his free hand. She and Johnny kissed, slowly. They looked into each other's eyes and smiled. Sharon slid an arm around Blaise's waist. Blaise relaxed into the touch, then caught herself. Ears burning, she eased away, stood apart from the warmth of the two.

“I should go now,” she said.

Sharon replied, “Johnny likes to take earth into himself. Soil and rock and iron.”

“What?”

“It's what I crave,” Johnny told her helpfully. “And plants nourish Sharon. What do you eat?”

“How you mean? I don't understand.”

Sharon said, “You must know the things that nourish you. Sometimes you have to reach out for them.”

No, that couldn't be right. The bird birthed of the heat of Blaise's anger had eaten as it pleased, and it had turned into a monster.

“Urn, I really have to go now. Things to take care of.”

“Something we can do?” Johnny asked. Both his face and Sharon's held concern.

Blaise looked at this man who ingested the ore he forged, and the woman to whom flowers gave themselves to be supped. She took a deep breath and told them the story of the cockatrice.

Blaise's hallway still had the oily smell of cheap chocolate, burnt. She stepped guiltily around the ash smear on the carpet. “This is my place.”

“Careful as you go in,” Sharon warned.

The apartment was close and hot. It reeked of sulphur. Blaise flicked on the light.

The TV had been gutted. It lay crumpled on its side, a stove-in, smoking box.

“Holy,” Johnny growled. The couch was in shreds, the plants steamed and wilting. The casing of the telephone was melted, adding its own acrid smell to the reek.

Blaise could feel the tears filling her eyes. Sharon put an arm around her shoulders. Blaise leaned into the comfort of Sharon's petal-soft body and sobbed, a part of her still aware of Sharon's rosiness and duskiness.

A bereft screech; a flurry of feathers and fur and heat; a stinking hiss of pepper and rotten eggs. The cockatrice rammed full weight into Blaise and Sharon, bearing them to the floor. Sharon rolled out, but the cockatrice sat on Blaise's chest. Its wordless howl carried all the anguish of
Mummy gone and leave me
, and the rage of
Oh, so she come back now? Well, I going show her
.

Blaise cringed. The cockatrice spat a thick red gobbet at her face. It burned her cheek. The drool smelled like rotting pepper sauce. Blaise went cold with horror.

Suddenly the creature's weight was lifted off her. Johnny was holding the cockatrice aloft by its thick, writhing neck. Blaise scrabbled along the floor, putting Johnny between herself and the monster. Johnny's biceps bulged; the rock-crushing fingers flexed; the cockatrice's furred hindquarters kicked and clawed. It spat. Johnny didn't budge. Fire had met stone.

“Kill it for me, Johnny, do!” Blaise shoved herself to her feet.

“Oh God, Johnny; you all right?” Sharon asked. “Yes,” he muttered, all his concentration on the struggle. But his voice rang flat, a hammer on flawed steel.

The cockatrice thrashed. Blaise's belly squirmed in response. The animal made a choking sound. It was dying. Blaise felt warmth begin to drain from her body. Her heat, her fire was dying.

“You have to go,” Blaise whispered at it. “You can't do as you want, lash out at anything you don't like.”

Sharon gripped Blaise's shoulder. Where was the softness? Sharon's hand was knotted and tough as iron-wood. “You want to kill your every desire dead?” she asked.

The cockatrice sobbed. It turned a hooded look of sorrow and rage on Blaise. Then it glowered at Johnny. Blaise saw the membranes slide back from its eyes. She lunged at it.

Too late. The heat of its glare was full on. The air sizzled, and Johnny was caught. Sharon screamed. Johnny glowed, red as the iron in his forge fires.

But he didn't melt or burn. Yet. Blaise could see him straining to break the pull of the cockatrice's glare, see him weakening. Her beast would kill this man.

“Bloodfire!” Furious, she charged the cockatrice, dragged it out of Johnny's grasp. She heard Johnny crash to the floor.

The cockatrice broke away, fluttered to the carpet. It glared at her. Hot, hot. She was burning up with heat, with the bellyfires of anger, of wanting, of hunger.

“Talk to it,” Sharon told her. “Tell it what you want.” Blaise took a step towards the cockatrice. Birdlike, it cocked its head. It mewed a question.

“I want,” she said, her voice quaking out the unfamiliar word, “to be able to talk what I feel.” God, fever-hot. “I want to be able to say,
You hurt me
.” The cockatrice hissed. “Or,
I'm not interested
.” The cockatrice chortled wickedly. “Or,” Blaise hesitated, took in a burning breath, “
I like you
.”

The cockatrice sighed. It leapt into her arms, its dog-heavy weight nearly buckling her knees. Its claws scratched her and its breath was rank, but somehow she hung on, feeling its strength flex against her. She held the heat of its needing body tight.

Suddenly, it shoved its beak between her lips. Blaise choked, tried to drop the beast, but its flexed claws grasped her tightly. Impossibly, it crammed its whole head into her mouth. Blaise gagged. She could feel its beak sliding down her throat. It would sear her, like a hot poker. She fought, looking imploringly at Sharon and Johnny, but they just sat on the floor, watching.

Blaise tried to vomit the beast out, but it kept pushing more of itself inside her. How, how? It was unbelievable. Her mouth was stretched open so wide, she thought it would tear. Heat filled her, her ribs would crack apart. The beast's head and neck snaked down towards her belly. Its wings beat against her teeth, her tongue. Her throat, it was in her throat, stopping her air! Terrified, she pulled at the cockatrice's legs. It clawed her hands away. With a great heave, its whole bulk slid into her stomach. She could feel its muscly writhing, its fire that now came from her core. She could breathe, and she was angry enough to spit fire.

“What oonuh were thinking!” she raged at them. “Why you didn't help me!”

Johnny only said, “I bet you feel good now.”

Oh. She did. Strong, sure of herself. Oh.

Sharon leaned over Johnny and blew cool, aloe-scented breath on his blisters. Blaise admired the way that the position emphasized the fullness of her body. Johnny's burns healed as Blaise watched. “I enjoyed your company this afternoon,” she said to them both. Simple, risky words to say with this new-found warmth in her voice.

Sharon smiled. “You must come and visit again soon, then.”

Blaise giggled. She reached a hand to either of them, feeling the blood heat of her palms flexing against theirs.

A HARD TRUTH ABOUT WASTE MANAGEMENT

Sumanth Prabhaker

Sumanth Prabhaker is the founder of Madras Press and has had fiction published in, among others,
Identity Theory
,
The New Pantagruel
, and
Best American Fantasy
.

The family liked so much to flush their trash down the toilet that they sold their TV and used the money to buy three chairs to arrange in their upstairs restroom. This was a time when trash flushing was not an uncommon practice, but even then this particular family’s enjoyment was rare. Where most families who resorted to trash flushing were ashamed of their behavior, this family looked forward to the sight of their trash bins filling up. They would recline in their three chairs and watch their trash get sucked down into the hole at the bottom of the toilet, which had a permanent black ring smeared around it, and they would cheer and punch their fists together.

None of the three chairs in the restroom matched in size or color. The family had driven to the shopping mall and split up, and one hour later each member returned to the parking lot, carrying a chair that cost roughly one-third of the price the pawnshop had paid for the TV. The father’s chair was upholstered with a brown polyester finish and had an electrical cord emerging from the back. When he plugged his chair into the restroom wall and sat in it, he would feel small vibrations all over his shoulders and even around his knees, and he would wonder how he would ever manage to leave such a comfortable chair.

The mother’s chair was more like a swing than a chair. It hung from the ceiling like a swing and it swung like a swing, but it was very comfortable as well. The cushion was made of a mixture of gelatin and polycarbonate, so every time she sat down, it would shift around to make space for her, like a mold. The mother loved her mold cushion because she often carried a portable whiteboard in her pocket, which made her pants stick out in a direction most normal cushions couldn’t accommodate. She used the whiteboard to communicate with others, having lost the ability to speak as a child.

The son’s chair was made of gingerbread, graham crackers, gumdrops, licorice ropes, jawbreakers, chocolate bars, bubble gum sticks, candied fruits, lollipops and suckers, nougats, caramel cream cubes, honey roasted cashews, peanut butter cups, and a long crunchy board that tasted alternately like balsa wood and brittle. The cushion was cotton candy. The chair was covered in hairs and strings of dust and all kinds of sticky papers, but the son did not mind. He sat in his chair every day and every day he would pick off little bits to eat while he watched loads of trash sink down the toilet and occasionally use the X-Tend-O plunger to unclog the drain without having to get up.

At first the family had simply tried to cut down on their waste by recycling; they used banana peels as fertilizer and plastic wrap as kindling, which turned the fires in the fireplace a blue-green hue they liked especially to make s’mores over. The mother used hot glue to string together small wreaths from the trash that accrued naturally in their home. She also tried cooking the pieces of paper they used to throw away. For herself she shredded newspaper and stirred it into carrot stews. For the father she deep-fried old Post-it notes and spread boursin cheese over them to hide their messages. For the son she made a crude chewing gum by churning tampon boxes and corn syrup, but he never chewed it, preferring instead to saturate his graded homework assignments in simple syrup and butter and crumple the sheets into balls that he would freeze and later eat for a snack on hot afternoons.

The father finally put this diet to a stop when he found a Christmas card stuck inside a leftover flan. He called a family meeting that night.

“I’m putting this diet to a stop,” he said.

“It’s not our choice,” the son said.

He’s right, the mother wrote. Trash has to go somewhere.

“I don’t care. We’ll do what we have to do, but there will be no more eating of trash in this home. This is lower than dogs,” the father said, holding up the Christmas card on his fork.

The family looked helplessly at one another; there was too much trash, they knew, and not enough space for it in their home, but they couldn’t keep up with the rising price of the city garbage stickers. Staring down at his feet, the son confessed a habit he’d picked up from his friends at school.

“Sometimes,” he said, “when I can’t finish my lunch, I flush it down the toilet.”

He showed his parents how he would empty his paper bag into the toilet, and how easily its contents were taken away from him. The mother cried in silence.

“I don’t know where it goes to,” the son said, “but it’s free.”

“You’ve saved us a lot of grief,” the father said.

I’m proud of you, even if you don’t like my sandwiches, the mother wrote, wiping at her tears.

The family began trash flushing the next day. They were the first in the city to try it in such a large scale. They gathered uneaten food and grocery bags and the bag from inside the vacuum cleaner when it got full, and they piled everything up to the rim of the toilet. The son pressed the flusher and watched the trash spin around in a circle, and then slowly lower.

Look at it spin, the mother wrote.

Trash flushing soon became a habit for the family; when they no longer needed something, it went into the toilet, and immediately it was taken away. They felt this process bore an uncanny resemblance to the way their bodies functioned, which made it vaguely Native American—feeling to them.

To keep the water bill from going up, the family used public restrooms when they could, and they agreed to flush their trash only twice a day, once at 4:00 and once at 10:00. This way they had something to anticipate all afternoon and all evening, and they could share in the flushing together, which only seemed appropriate to them.

The 4:00 flush was the louder of the two. This was partly because the afternoons tended to collect the louder sort of trash, such as cardboard slats and empty cans of hairspray, and partly it was because the family had been thinking of nothing but this 4:00 flush all day, and so they cheered rather loudly for it. They cheered when trash piled up too high and they had to steer it with brooms to keep from tipping over. They cheered when the mother got sick from the combination of trash smell and lavender Glade plug-in and she leaned forward and vomited into the toilet bowl; she cheered this as well, clapping along with her son and husband. And they cheered when the toilet shook and made a wet belching sound after sucking down the afternoon’s trash, and a small gray animal popped out from the toilet and landed on the bathmat.

The animal shivered as the family cheered it on. It shook its leathery skin and curled around the graham cracker leg of the son’s chair.

After much consideration, the animal was decided to be a male cat. He was named Bleachy, after the way he smelled. “You’re better than anything we put into the toilet,” the son told Bleachy, scratching the back of his leathery neck.

When the family took Bleachy on walks around the neighborhood, other families stared and pointed at them. Trash flushing had grown more widespread by then, due to the steep price of garbage tickets, but no other family bragged about it the way this particular family bragged about it. They outlined all the grease stains on their T-shirts with magic marker and group-hugged every time Bleachy coughed up a ball of their old trash. This was something Bleachy did very often, so the family trained him to cough into the toilet when he needed to.

But Bleachy soon grew to be emotionally needy in ways the family couldn’t satisfy. He ate all their food and cried all night. He constantly napped in the father’s massage chair, which caused the electric bill to go up, because he never remembered to turn the massage function off. He even borrowed the son’s sweaters without asking, which stretched them in strange shapes as he grew larger and longer.

It was a relief, then, when the son returned home from school one afternoon to find no trace of Bleachy in the front yard. None of his shoes appeared to have been eaten while he was away. Upstairs, his mother swayed from her chair in the restroom. Her face was flushed.

I’ve done a terrible thing, she wrote. I flushed Bleachy back down.

“Well, he was very codependent,” said the son, trying to hide his tears. “I guess he was also too big for a cat.”

It was so strange, the mother wrote. He said he missed his home. He asked me to flush him back down, but now I think the toilet broke.

The son pressed the flusher and it flipped down carelessly, with no friction or resistance. The X-Tend-O plunger didn’t help, nor did the Ultra Sonic Air Hammer plunger, which the family reserved for emergencies. The son stared at his mother’s reflection in the mirror, wondering how to lie to his father.

The bathroom smells so bad, the mother wrote when the father came home from work that day.

“It’s probably toxic,” the son said. “None of us should go in for a few days at least. Also Bleachy got hit by a car. We had a funeral while you were at work.”

“Well, these things happen,” the father said, trying to hide his tears. “I guess it’s a shame about the bathroom.”

The father liked his brown vibrating chair and how it felt like small voices against his back, and he had loved Bleachy as much as anyone, but more than either of these he valued his family’s safety. By dinnertime that night, he had locked the restroom door and stuffed towels in the cracks, except where in the corner under the hinges he had inserted a flexible rubber tube, to occasionally check the air inside.

The door remained locked for eleven days.

When finally the father agreed to venture into the restroom again, the family’s trash bins were concealed under triangles of trash. Spider webs netted the hallways and maggots took up the fridge’s crisper drawers. The family had dug a small outhouse in their backyard while the restroom was indisposed, a four foot hole covered by the son’s Batman tent. Two neighbors had already moved away because of what the family’s reputation had done to the subdivision’s property value; a third had moved over the past week, seeing the family’s trash pile up so fiercely against the living room window that the glass fractured and leaked out an oily substance.

The father first strapped dental masks on all three of them. He then opened the door two inches and released a finch tied to his wrist, and shut the door. He counted to twenty and opened the door again, tugging his wrist back. The other end of the string had only the finch’s foot attached to it.

The son shrugged and opened the door.

Inside, lying across the counter, was a gray crocodile wearing a tan sweater.

Bleachy, the mother wrote.

“Dang it,” the father said.

“I knew you weren’t a cat,” the son said.

The mother stared at the wet pencil shavings littered along the crocodile’s skin and tried to understand.

“I got stuck halfway,” Bleachy said. “I had to come back up or I would drown.”

I’m sorry, the mother wrote. I understand how you feel.

Bleachy lurched forward and locked his jaws around her throat and pulled up, dislodging her head. The son ran downstairs, listening from under a pile of kitchen trash as his father screamed, and then gurgled, and then fell silent.

The son eventually fell asleep, still wearing his oxygen mask. He dreamed of stepping on dry leaves, when actually his brain was trying to warn him that Bleachy was munching his way toward the son. When Bleachy had eaten all the trash in the corner, he rested his nose on the son’s knee.

The son awoke with a gasp.

“Don’t worry,” Bleachy said, “I’m not going to kill you.”

“Please don’t kill me,” the son said.

“Listen to me,” Bleachy said. “I’m not going to kill you. You’ve made some poor choices, but you’re young. You still have time to change.”

“Where’s my dad?” the son asked.

“How would you like it if there was a big tube that poured someone else’s trash on your house?” Bleachy said. “How would you like it if I took you away and made you cough in my toilet?”

Bleachy placed his teeth around the son’s calf and bit down until he felt the bone underneath. The son cried out, looking at the new holes in his leg, his eyes cracked like crayon. The jaws came unclamped without a sound, and Bleachy turned and crawled away, out of the house, still wearing the son’s tan sweater. Filled with a feeling that was almost sorrow, Bleachy lifted his long gray head and breathed in deep, hoping to find a scent that would remind him of home.