Burnt Tongues

  “Don’t call her a bitch. Oh, Jesus, him? Are you serious? This Sprockets son of a bitch?”

  Her laugh startled them, and she swung the gun back and forth, pointed it finally toward the carpet.

  “What is he talking about?” The black turtleneck ponytail man stepped between them. He put his palms together. “And seriously, put it down, little girl. We’re taking him downstairs and I’m calling Richard and Shelly and we’re going to celebrate.”

  “Don’t call me little girl, Leland. I am not in the mood.”

  “She’s not in the mood, Leland.”

  “And you shut your piehole. You’re not getting out of this.” The gun found him again.

  “Did you just say piehole?” He looked at her pleadingly, then at Leland, who seemed more concerned with the decor than adultery, and back to her. “You think you’re a monster? What kind of monster could you be when you turn murder into a dinner party? How hard is that to give up? Where’s the knife? That little peashooter doesn’t even have any bullets, does it? Fucking white carpet?” Yanking and twisting, he tipped the chair and thumped on his side on the floor, staring at his own face in the shine on Leland’s loafers. “What’s he got that you can’t leave? A huge cock? Money? He won’t let you leave, what a crock of shit. Shoot me then.”

  “A huge—oh, my God.” Leland giggled and backed up. “Sweetie, he’s yours. He likes you; I get it now. And he thought—oh, that’s priceless.” He fell into a leather recliner, put a hand over his face, and shook with laughter.

  She stepped toward him, the heels robbed of their power by the soft floor, both hands still tight around the gun. “They’re my family.” She shrugged and knelt at his head. Her eyes were very green. “A family of monsters.”

  “So leave. I love you. I mean, I could love you, I think. It’s only been a few hours. Couldn’t we just get some coffee first?”

  “I’d be in that chair if you weren’t.” Her voice was cold. “Love me? I bet you would.” She placed the barrel against

  his temple.

  “Celia,” he said, “come with me. My name is Scott. I never told you before.”

  Celia was pale. “I thought only frat boys were named Scott.”

  “I wouldn’t have done it to you. I couldn’t have. I won’t.”

  “Aren’t you scared?”

  “Of you, yes. But not the gun.”

  Leland groaned. “This is very sweet but—”

  Celia pulled the trigger without hesitation, and his head poured blood all over the white carpet.

  “I would love a cup of coffee.”

  “Cut me loose, and I’ll show you where we can dump

  the body.”

  Celia used the knife from his jacket, the knife that still smelled of limes, to slice away the layers of tape.

  While rolling her brother’s body in a rug, Scott came across a gnarled little blue finger. Down on one knee as he was, he presented it to Celia with anticipation.

  A Vodka Kind of Girl

  Matt Egan

  Ruby stuck a small plastic sign inside her car window saying, “You can never be too thin or too rich,” and a year later they stuck her in the ground inside a wooden box.

  The garage she bought the sign from is the same garage I stop at on the drive to the church. Paying for my petrol and extra-thick banana milk shake, I notice that sign on sale behind the service counter.

  People saw that sign in Ruby’s car and said it was so Ruby. As though she came up with the mantra, lived by it.

  “Did you know the average person burns around six hundred calories a day?” she told me once upon a cigarette break at work. “And that’s just from being alive.”

  She kept a little white book in the bottom of her bag, and she’d search through its index, flick to a page, and find out the calorific expenditure for almost any activity.

  “Walking, you get rid of two hundred eighty an hour, depending on the pace. Running, something like seven hundred. And you know something weird? You burn more calories eating than you do sleeping.” Holding her cigarette to her lips and inhaling the thing into her lungs, she thumbed through the little book’s pages with her free hand. “Listen to this. They reckon that ten minutes of sex uses between fifty and one hundred calories.” She dropped her cigarette and mashed it into the ground with the tip of her shoe. “Depending on the pace.”

  Jabbing her finger into her stomach, Ruby used to say how she needed to do more sit-ups and cover more ground on her early morning jogs. She pinched some skin between her index finger and thumb and denied it was all in her head.

  The busiest pub in town was The Crown, and if you walked through its doors some time after midnight on a Friday, and if you were a young bloke whose wallet had enough spare change in it to get a double vodka Coke for the slim blonde leaning against the jukebox to stop her from keeling over, the chances were good that she’d lead you by the wrist into the men’s toilets, kneel on the hard orange tiles, and demonstrate the art of impromptu fellatio.

  Her party trick, she’d stretch her mouth wide open and cram her hand into it, push those fingers in as far as they would go until her knuckles disappeared. “No gag reflex,” she said.

  Waiting for service at the bar, you heard one guy tell his mate, “Buy Ruby a Smirnoff Ice, and the next thing you know her knickers’ll be hanging round her ankles.”

  “Wait a minute,” his mate said, tilting his head back and looking through narrowed eyes. “That bitch actually wears underwear?”

  Most weekends, these guys and their friends would take Ruby into the men’s toilets or behind the row of trees at the far end of the pub’s garden. They’d help her burn a few hundred more calories. Depending on the pace.

  “It’s just use and abuse,” Ruby used to say.

  Standing in the churchyard with the rows of people gazing into Ruby’s hole, I glance around and I can’t see any of their faces.

  From the side, the walls of the muddy pit they lower her into look like huge slabs of chocolate sponge cake, moistened by an early morning drizzle. Her parents stand at the edge of the hole, looking into it. They hold hands, his right hand in her left, their fingers interlocked so tight the blood gets trapped, turning their fingertips dark red.

  When they heard the news, people at work said they couldn’t believe Ruby was gone. She was so young. There was nothing in her appearance to suggest any kind of illness. A family friend phoned in with the coroner’s verdict: acyanotic congenital heart disease. There was no way anyone could have spotted it. Ruby’s heart was defective since birth.

  Maybe that explained the frigid pallor of her skin and the fainting and the tiredness.

  It was only a matter of time, they said. A tragedy waiting to happen.

  But they didn’t know.

  They didn’t know that the human body contains such invisible, essential things as electrolytes, things so infinitesimal you wouldn’t even know they’re there. Vital salts called potassium, sodium, calcium, and other names you remember from chemistry in secondary school. These things conduct your body’s electricity and make sure your internal organs work the way they’re supposed to work. They keep your heart and liver and kidneys and nervous system from packing in. How the oil, coolant, and petrol in a car keep the engine ticking and the wheels spinning.

  All these electrolytes flowing through your arteries, pumping through your heart and liver and kidneys, an invisible relay team carrying electrical impulses around your insides. Squeeze enough water out of your body, and these salts get stranded. Flapping about in one place, they can’t conduct that vital electricity to the inner bits of you that keep

  you alive.

  Say if you don’t drink enough water and dehydration kicks in.

  Say if you can’t stop throwing up the contents of your stomach.

  I knew about such things, but when people asked me about Ruby, I’d say, “No word of a lie, congenital heart failure.”

  Who’d have thought?

  Ruby and me sto
od at one end of the bar, polishing cutlery and wrapping pairs of knives and forks in scarlet napkins. Last orders had been called half an hour ago, and the place was empty.

  “There’s something I need to ask you, if that’s all right,” I said.

  Buffing a steak knife with a kitchen towel, she glanced at me. Her eyes had the color of a newspaper left out in the sun too long. “If you want to talk about what I think you want to talk about, then no, not particularly.” She dropped the knife into a tray of cutlery and started rubbing another one.

  I twisted a napkin with my hands and leaned onto the wooden counter. “Listen, I’m not trying to psychoanalyse you or anything. I just—I mean, have you ever talked to anyone about it?”

  “What’s the point?”

  “Your mum and dad, maybe?”

  “What’s the point?”

  “Don’t they know what you get up to?”

  Ruby balled the towel up. “Why’d you put it like that?”

  “What?”

  “Asking if they know what I’m getting up to. Fuck me, it’s not like I’m killing babies and harvesting their organs to make a bit of money on the side.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not like I’m hurting anyone else.”

  I blocked the words I wanted to say behind a wall of clenched teeth. I played with the napkin. “I know.”

  Unfolding the towel on top of the counter, smoothing it out with both hands, she said, “I know you’re trying to help.”

  I lifted my elbows off the counter and straightened up. “I just thought there might be something I could do. You’d tell me if there was, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because I’m just trying to say, if you feel like it, I’m—”

  “You can’t do anything.” She smiled, but there was something the matter with her eyes.

  They hold the wake at Ruby’s house. People huddle in the spacious living room—their footprints zigzagged in little trails across the soft red carpet.

  Arranged on a large wooden table in one corner of the room, framed pictures of Ruby: Ruby as a baby, sleeping in her cot; Ruby as a toddler, building castles on some beach; Ruby posing for a school photo; Ruby standing in front of a Christmas tree, holding a glass of red wine.

  Eighteen years condensed into a few photographs.

  Quiet music drifts out of oval speakers on the walls and blends with hushed conversations. People hover over white china plates patterned with sausage rolls, rice crackers, and tortilla chips from the buffet spread in the hallway.

  Standing next to the fireplace, a woman I’ve never seen before turns to the bloke she’s with and says, “I dunno. This doesn’t taste like light mayo to me.”

  I don’t recognise any of the people in the front room, so I go to the kitchen to get a drink.

  Bottles of wine stand on the kitchen table next to a few bottles of spirits and cans of soft drinks. I drop a handful of ice into a tumbler and pour a large whiskey and Coke. Ruby’s little white book would tell me it’s worth about eighty calories.

  “That was her favourite drink, too,” someone behind me says.

  Turning around, I see it’s Ruby’s brother, Chris. I had met him only once before when I gave Ruby a lift home from work.

  “Actually I think she was more of a vodka kind of girl,” I tell him, smiling in the sympathetic way you smile at anyone who’s just buried his only sister. “What are you drinking?”

  He nods at the glass I’m holding. “Make me one of those.”

  I turn around and make his drink. I can feel him looking at the back of my head, and I’m too afraid to turn around. I hand him the glass.

  After draining it in one quick gulp, he places it on the kitchen worktop. He stares at the empty glass, at the ice cubes, for what seems like a long time before he looks at me. “Did you know about Ruby?”

  I take a sip of my drink. “What do you mean?”

  “Did you, you know, know about Ruby? I think you know what I’m talking about.”

  And I could say: yes, I knew about Ruby running off to the toilet after wolfing down a plateful of cheeseburgers and chips followed by a big slice of cheesecake slathered with pouring cream, all washed down with two pints of diet cola.

  And: yes, I noticed the sickly tangy smell on her fingers and breath.

  And: the blue cheese stench clouding up the toilet after she’d used it.

  And: the pink raw calluses on the knuckles of her right hand, how her top teeth scraped and grazed the skin there. And those teeth stained and spoiled by splashes of stomach acid, hydrochloric acid strong enough to burn the skin off the palm of your hand.

  Her chipmunk cheeks all puffed up, the glands in her neck swollen and sore.

  The fluffy flecks of half-digested food that ricocheted against the side of the toilet basin and clung to her brittle hair and shirt collar.

  Her eyes, bloodshot and cracked with red lines.

  Chris is still looking at me, waiting for an answer.

  I swallow a mouthful of my drink and try hard to make it look like that’s the only reason I’m swallowing. “What difference would it make now?”

  He keeps staring at me, and the second hand on the wall clock behind him tick-tocks full circle before he looks away, takes an unopened bottle of red wine and a wineglass from the table, and walks out of the kitchen.

  I scoop some more ice into my glass and half fill it with whiskey, forgoing the Coke, my hand trembling on the glass. Turning to leave the room, I notice a gold Zippo lighter tucked into the gap between the microwave and wall, the letter R inscribed on one side. I pick it up, leave the kitchen, and head out the front door.

  Parked in the driveway, Ruby’s car. I move over to it and light a cigarette with the gold lighter, snapping the lid shut with a flick of my wrist. Someone’s cleaned the car inside and out, but when I lean in to look at my reflection in the back passenger window, there are still three small white gummy marks where something else used to be.

  Gasoline

  Fred Venturini

  Iwas leafing through some random book with my scars facing the shelves where reference met foreign languages. I liked the bookstore more than books; it was the kind of place where other people tried to be invisible out of courtesy.

  My scar hiding wasn’t intentional. In restaurants, I’d always get a booth and sit scars in, pointing them away from the waitress and the rest of the patrons. While sitting on a bus, at a desk, on a bench, or even my sofa at home, I would prop my scarred side in my hand, looking contemplative while hiding them. My scars never itched—they were in fact numb—but I’d find myself lightly scratching them in public places, my busy hand shielding the confluence of jagged, pink lines from the eyes of strangers. I never walked out of my apartment planning these little strategies, but I found myself doing them anyway. They weren’t habits, just well-practiced methods from my younger days when I learned, through trial and error, how to hide them.

  “Larry?” a voice said, jarring me from the book I was holding but not yet browsing. “Larry Benton?” The guy was balding and heavyset and wore a white dress shirt with yellowed armpits, his face shining with sweat. “I guess you don’t remember me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head, smiling as if I should remember.

  He tried to get a gander at the scars, see what the years had done to them. But at least he was somewhat polite about it. Children, if they saw, were far worse. They called me all sorts of things, smiling, thinking it was cool that Frankenstein or Freddy Krueger was standing right in front of them.

  “We knew each other when we were younger,” he said, not offended that I didn’t remember, probably chalking up my spotty memory to childhood trauma. “How have you been?”

  “Good as can be,” I said.

  “It’s weird, but I thought about you a lot in my line of work,” he continued. “Especially recently.”

  “What is it that you do?” More kindling for small talk I didn’t want, but
I was curious.

  “I’m not sure if it’s something you’re comfortable talking about, but I worked for BOP—that’s Bureau of Prisons—up by Marion, and, well—”

  “Eric,” I said. Hadn’t uttered the name in twenty years.

  “I’m sure you heard then.”

  “No.” I expected him to tell me that Eric was in prison yet again. Maybe this time for good.

  “He hung himself in his cell last month,” he said as if he were reporting something as mundane as the weather. “It was on my watch, of all the coincidences. He didn’t even leave a note.”

  I shrugged. Probably wasn’t the trumpets and fireworks he was expecting.

  “I know it’s weird to bring it up, but every day I saw him, I would think of what happened. With you, you know?”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “I probably shouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “No, it’s fine. But since we’re talking about it, do you remember if he said anything? About what happened?”

  His face tightened. If the guy had a time machine, he’d be rewinding himself right the hell out of the conversation, so at least we had something in common.

  “I don’t want to bother you anymore, but there were conversations. Probably ones I shouldn’t be recounting word for word, if you don’t mind. Leave it at this—Eric Harris died without a regret in the world.”

  We didn’t even bother lying to each other, saying it was nice to see you. There was just silence, and I flickered my gaze at my unopened book. He walked away without telling me his name.

  Lying in bed that night, the thought that got me to sleep was that Douglas Ames, who graduated two years ahead of me and once called me French Fried Larry from his post in the backseat of the bus, recognized me by my good side.

  Eric was thirteen when he popped open the gas can in my garage and said, “Suck up the fumes, and you’ll see Jesus his fucking self.”

  Gas yanks your soul right out of your body. Pump on the fumes enough, and you feel your mind twisting in two. Sounds painful, but it isn’t. The feeling borders on delicious, especially when you’re too young to know the chemicals are wringing important things right out of your brain.