His big, scarred body moves behind the stainless steel counter with a strict precision and all day the buzzer chants, doors whoosh open to reveal for customers the dissonance of his busy hands wrapping parcels and his half-melted face doing the best it can. Politely, their eyes roam back and forth, back and forth until he carefully places their parcel on the counter. They get a better look at his hands then, how he’s stitched together in a quilt of tight, pale patches given statehood by rosy ridges where the grafts come together. He pulls his hands away and bids these customers adieu and nods to the next. He’s been there long enough that names are sometimes syrupy-spoken but it never goes farther than a name and a price and a thank you for stopping in, leaving customers to wonder for a second about the shape of his tongue. The shop is located in a nice neighborhood teeming with professional people who seldom break the trance of their nagging digital careers, but they do wonder about him. In a day, he counts one hundred or more. The record is one-hundred and fifty-seven!
After closing, he cleans. The night gradually fills the big window that looks out upon the newly paved street and men and women in modern clothes file out from blocky silver Metro busses and head to their waiting condos until the busses don’t come anymore and every condo is occupied by neat, logical people. Every surface of the shop is subjected to bleach and each stray molecule is dispatched with a hard flourish. When it’s over, he feels almost satisfied.
Tonight, he shrugs on his winter coat, double-checks the front door and turns out the lights, leaving only a small neon reflection from the wine bar across the plaza to light his way through the shop. He walks through the space, running his hands lightly over new-scoured counters and gleaming handrails as he goes. There’s an alarm to set and a series of beeps to count, and he steps out into the dark, wet, spaniel-barking world. Moonlight glints off the bumper of his truck and he starts the engine from his key fob before he’s even climbed inside; the dash is a map of electric blue piping and read-outs.
The world is cold. In the rear-view mirror, as he drives the glistening, cake-frosting streets of this enchanted neighborhood, he catches a corner of himself and he is back on the sparse playground, chasing another boy, a tow-headed, skinny one. He’s breathing hard and gaining ground. His prey screams the emergency code word over their shoulder Black Cactus! Black Cactus! in the hope that someone will intervene, but in their hearts everyone understands that once he picks his victim and starts running, there is no stopping what’s to come. Everyone is scared, even the playground monitor with her fur coat and menthol cigarette, nothing short of a witch. He was fast before and he’s even faster now!
He climbs out of his truck to buy a pastry at a convenience store. He climbs back in and eats the pastry in the shivering fluorescence of the parking lot, hunched in the dashboard heat, in silence, without spilling a crumb across the leather seats.
*
His apartment is in another neighborhood and it is not as nice a place. He parks in front of his building, an aging brown-bricked eight-plex with an arched entranceway, and he walks up the pitted marble steps, clutching his keys. The light is out again. His hands, sore from cleaning, emerge from his coat pockets to unclip the heavy carabiner of keys from a belt loop. A lone taxi rolls by, searching addresses, and moves on. It takes a second in the dark.
His neighbor across the second-floor hall has a nephew that everyone knows is not really his nephew and this nephew is sleeping on the floor of the lobby, head propped up on his backpack, tucked in a corner against a stack of phone books. There is nothing to do but walk past him and check the mail, which contains only an electric bill and a grocery store mailer. The boy sighs deep in his sleep as he makes his way up the worn wooden staircase. He unlocks his apartment door and takes in the stale, sanitary scent of being alone.
*
The neighbor’s so-called nephew is about seventeen, has dark circles under his eyes. He stands at the doorway at midnight, shifting side-to-side, kind of twitchy. His pupils are dinner plates. They’ve crossed paths coming and going before, but always in the dark lobby. In the bright, claret-carpeted hallway, the shopkeeper sees him in great detail for the first time. Considerable clumps of his curly, dirty-blonde hair have fallen out or were removed by force. His flannel shirt is oversized and faded, with frayed threads threatening to escape every seam. His pants, dirty and gray, hang low on narrow hips. It’s obvious he’s been beaten recently. Can I use your phone? My uncle locked me out. His hands are swollen and dirty-red. He sees the kid’s been picking at his face, a repulsive, familiar thing people do when they’ve been infested by invisible insects or their cousin has thrown lit matches at a gas can you hold to your chest in a game you don’t understand.
He feels sorry for him, strung out and alone. They’ve all complained about the yelling and loud music that comes from that apartment at all hours and he figures nothing good goes on in there. He hesitates, steps aside and motions him in, pointing to the phone on the counter of his tidy kitchenette. There are few belongings here, like a hotel or hospital, but a neatly bunched gang of white pill bottles and salves sits near the phone and the nephew takes visible note. A wall-mounted miniature grandfather clock in the adjoining space presides over a twin bed, done up with military exactitude; on a bureau, a modest television screen is paused on a woman throwing rocks at a stream while a dark creature watches from behind a bush; the blinds are drawn. Sorry to be a bother, the nephew says, turning away, hunching his back as he mashes the buttons on the phone angrily. He listens for a long time cursing under his breath and they can both hear it ring unanswered in the apartment across the hall.
*
The sun bathes the front of the shop in a new white light as he readies to open. A small gray bird has made its way in somehow, slamming itself repeatedly against the big spotless window and he uses a broom to gently prod it out the propped-open door to freedom. It lights in a tree along the sidewalk and watches him sweep outside the entrance, cocking its crested head. It’s Saturday morning, crisp but unseasonably warm for this time of year and families are out in sweaters strolling for coffee or walking their labradoodles.
As he sweeps, two boys of elementary school age run past the shop and he finds himself running after them. They run for blocks and blocks and their peals of laughter become screams as one of the children darts off into an alley and he follows the other, making up the distance between them with alarming speed. He windmills his arms and screams his war cry, his face a Jack-o-lantern made flesh, collapsing in on itself. He jumps and grabs and brings the boy to the ground, flipping him over and straddling him, pulling his face up close so he can see every scar, the two small oval voids where his nose used to be. The wind is knocked out of the boy and his eyes are astonished, bulging in terror, all anyone might need for now.
*
The shop is slow all morning and he leans on the counter, watching dark clouds roll in to turn the sky from eggshell to aubergine. A light rain begins to fall. A UPS truck pulls up and the usual driver, short and stocky and stubbly with a wide, simian grin wheels a stack of boxes in on a handcart.
Weird weather today, sun when I pulled out the dock, rain by noon.
Look over west. He points to an especially menacing cloudbank over downtown.
Ah shit, right where I’m headed. The driver frowns.
It’s your lucky day. He attempts a sympathetic smile.
Maybe someday you’ll hire someone to help out around here.
Maybe someday. He was tired of this line of inquiry.
See you next time. The driver’s eyes linger over him before he hurries out.
*
There is a small run of customers before dinner time and when they’re gone he busies himself unboxing the shipment of leaflets and window displays for the Christmas season. There are merry elves dancing with arms intertwined in cardboard cutouts, candy canes and gingerbread men splashed across glossy posters, lengths of tinsel that catch on his rough wrists as he untangles the strands.
He goes to open another box and, with the box cutter, slices himself where his thumb and forefinger join his palm. Fuck! Careful to keep blood from dotting the counter or floor, he goes quickly to the backroom and opens the first-aid kit mounted on the wall over the handwash sink. He removes a small bottle of antiseptic and a roll of gauze bandage. The cut is shallow and his blood a bright red. He dabs at it first with a paper towel and then he is screaming in his high boyish voice as they load him on a gurney and rush him down a blinding white hallway. His mother is running alongside, her bouffant hairdo embroidered with snow and her mascara spreading down her face like spider legs, also screaming. There has never been pain like this, his entire body writhing from the kiss of the gasoline and his Vikings jersey melting into him. A raw, red world slashing its claws at every nerve. They put him under spotlights. They inject something into his arm and his mother kisses his forehead and it feels just like what he almost knows exploding into a thousand pieces would feel like.
*
The earlier rain turned heavy but it has lightened now and he stands under the awning out front of his dark shop after closing, waiting for his ride. He can’t tell if he did the right thing or not. The truck is new and he hardly knows him. He pulls his coat tighter as the wind picks at him, searching for places to stow itself away against his jagged skin. A man who’d been in the shop earlier passes, then turns in a wide, sloppy arc on the sidewalk, stepping one foot into the street and turning to him, good and wasted.
Hey, I’ve been coming in for five years now, your place. It’s the best. I used to go to…
Thanks. He tucks a wisp of thin blonde hair back under his stocking cap.
I used to go to Werner’s over on North Hampton, You know Werner?
He waits for a City truck to pass. Sure, we’ve met.
Well he’s an asshole.
He pretends to chuckle, scanning the street, sorting cars and trucks going past by make and model, seeing if he can guess by the shape and color of the headlights. None his. He checks the time on his phone with concern and the drunk wanders across the street to disappear under the neon Wine & Small Plates sign. It’s 10:15. He hears a rustling and sees something flit across the sidewalk in his direction. It is the same bird. It is unwell. He picks it up gently and cups it in the rough topography of his palms and brings it closer to his chest. Its heart is beating so fast! He tucks it into a fold in his big winter jacket and, when the neighbor’s nephew pulls up in his truck with a loopy, excited grin. He brings the bird with him. He climbs in and says, you’ll never believe this.
The teacher gestures for him to follow her through the curtain, onto the stage and she brings him into the auditorium and he can tell the kids assembled in their jean jackets with KISS patches and velour tops all wonder what the big deal is to get them out of Reading. But then they get a look. She adjusts the microphone and, draping her arm over his shoulder, said I want to explain what happened to Scott. There was a long silence, a silence of years in the auditorium as he shook loose from her warmth and turned away from the crowd.
The nephew bangs the steering wheel and proclaims that’s a damn titmouse, a tufted titmouse! and they both guffaw endlessly at the ludicrous name and he feels its precious heart beating so fast as they drive back to the eight-plex, neighborhoods going from good to worse to bad with every passing block.
Marc Tweed’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in NOON Annual, Bending Genres, New World Writing, and more. Marc works as a technology writer and is completing a collection of short stories tentatively titled Seasick on Land. He lives in North Seattle and also creates paintings, drawings, and music. www.marctweed.com Twitter: @MarcTweed6
Photo by ☼☼Jo Zimny!☼☼ on Foter.com