Calamity

“Then get me my pills.”

“You sound like a monster. Like some dying witch.”

“Fuck you,” she said in a casual way.

He went into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet. The bottles stared back.

“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” she asked. “You just want to fuck me. Well, go ahead. Give me my pills and fuck me all you want.”

Chills rolled over his skin. He kept his tone steady, loving. “I just want you to get better. I want you to get back to life.”

“What about the life that was taken out of me and then from me?” She was on the cusp of tears, as she had been the past month.

“You have to find a way to carry on. We still have three beautiful children. We have to do what is best for them.”

“You just want me to forget!” she screamed. “Forget about my baby? Forget like you forgot. You don’t give a flying fuck about our dead child but I’m not that goddamn heartless! I need to grieve! I need my pills! ”

Anthony’s fingers tightened around a large white bottle.

“You hear me!” she yelled again. “Or don’t you give a shit?”

He turned out of the bathroom, threw the bottle of pills at her head—she caught them with an exasperated ooofff sound, and left the bedroom. He slammed the door for good measure.

What the hell was he going to do? He had to keep his family together. He had to find a way to bring back the old days, the happy days, the days before the baby died.

He went back to the kitchen but his coffee had turned cold.

3

Brendan’s teacher wanted to speak with him. While the playground monitor escorted the rest of the class outside in a single-file line, Brendan approached Miss Tuyol.

She was a young teacher, the youngest in the building, and some of the boys thought she was hot but Brendan didn’t think of her as being hot or not. Actually, he never really thought about any of his teachers.

She was sitting behind her desk, which was organized with colored folders and boxes and decorated with fake apples and little plaques that said things like “World’s Greatest Teacher” and “Teachers Light the Way to Tomorrow.” She was wearing a bright purple sweater with a picture of the Easter Bunny on it.

“Hello Brendan,” she said.

“Hi.”

“How do you feel today?”

“Good.”

“Any trouble focusing today?”

“No.”

“You seemed a little lost when we were reviewing the states.”

“Sorry.”

He had been more than simply lost. He’d been off in another world completely. The pills were supposed to help with that. The pills did help him focus but not always on what he was supposed to be doing.

Dr. Carroll had put Brendan on the pill, what Brendan called his Pillie Billy, in October after a horrible progress report and a teacher-parent conference in which Miss Tuyol made it sound like Brendan had some really serious problems, aside from poor factoring in math and weak memorization skills in history. Next year he’d be in seventh grade, so if he didn’t get his act together (whatever that meant), he’d end up in a far worse situation than he was in now. On the up side, Miss Tuyol complimented Brendan’s creativity and language skills. She said he was a very creative boy. The only reason he had done well in English was because he enjoyed reading and writing stories. He wrote his stories, mostly short things with lots of violence, in a black and white composition book. He wrote the stories during recess or at home in his room. He had left the book at home today but that was okay because he had a different one with him, a really special one.

“No headaches?” Miss Toyul asked.

He shook his head.

He hadn’t told anyone that even before the end of the summer, his head had started to hurt every time he spent longer than a few minutes reading and he’d find himself inexplicably pulled away from the page by an annoying fly or the tree blowing outside his window or even random thoughts in his own mind. Pillie Billy had cured that, sort of. Every once in a while his head hurt but it wasn’t always unpleasant.

“Your story,” she said and picked up the two-page short story he had typed on Dad’s computer. “Do you have a goldfish?”

“No,” he said. The story was entitled “The Dead Goldfish.” It was a bout this kid who thought his goldfish was possessed by a demon and he kills the fish by crushing it beneath his bare feet. Brendan described, as best he could, the jelly insides of the fish filling the gaps between the boy’s toes. He compared it to snot.

“You didn’t kill your pet fish, did you?” Miss Tuyol asked.

“We had a dog once but it got old and couldn’t walk so we had to put it down.”

Miss Tuyol looked like she had something really serious to say. “You’ve never hurt any animals before, have you?”

He thought of how much fun it was to pull Lizzy’s tail. Lizzy was Delaney’s cat. The cat didn’t like it but pulling its tail didn’t really hurt it, not much anyway. Besides, he liked Lizzy and didn’t want to see her suffer.

“Your story is very descriptive.”

“Thanks.”

“Gory.”

“Thanks.”

“That’s not always a good thing.”

“It’s not?”

“Next time, why don’t you try writing about something more pleasant?”

“Okay.” Brendan stared at his sneakers.

“What book do you have today?” she asked.

Brendan held up the large, hard-bound book. It was titled Finding God: A History of Appeasing Higher Powers and Fulfilling Man’s Destiny. It was over three hundred pages with very few pictures and more than twenty chapters. Dad would have called it “heavy reading,” but Brendan never showed his dad, keeping the book hidden under his bed. Dr. Carroll had given it to him, said the book was just for Brendan, something to help him focus better and tap into his natural talents, whatever they might be. Brendan didn’t understand what Dr. Carroll meant, but he didn’t ask questions either. The doc wanted to help, he gave Brendan a book, so Brendan took it, read some of it, and kept it a secret. He was very good at keeping secrets. He had it with him today, however, because he had big plans for tomorrow.

“That looks interesting,” Miss Tuyol said as if he were showing her that dead goldfish.

“It’s just some boring history stuff,” he said with a shrug.

Miss Tuyol smiled. “Okay. Get your coat and I’ll bring you outside.”

On the playground, Brendan sat in a swing and opened the book. He turned to Chapter Two. It was entitled “Animal and Human: Sacrifices to Win Divine Favor.”

While kids ran screaming all around him, Brendan read very carefully, as if trying to memorize every word.

PART ONE

“It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.”

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

1

When Sasha returned from the bathroom, Tyler wondered for the hundredth time what her breasts would look like once he got her shirt off. Her T-shirt hugged her breasts—young, healthy, and firm—just enough, yet the