I can still see him. It’s like a short video that goes in a loop whenever I think of it. I can see his face twisted up in anguish, his feet barely touching the ground, facing me with his hair tangled in his mother’s fist, as she dragged him behind her down the brown-carpeted hallway so she could lock herself in the bedroom with him and beat him all she liked, until he “learned to love her more.”
My mom leaped to her feet, sprinted down the hallway, and got to Susan before she reached the bedroom. They began scuffling and my mother beat Susan back into the living room with a series of shoves and punches, taking a couple of hard smacks to the face herself. The boy was left in the hallway, crying.
“Calm the fuck down!” my mom screamed at Susan as she shoved her so hard that she toppled backward, landing on the couch. My mother turned, scooped me up, and took off running down the hallway with me. Susan got up from the couch and came after us, shouting curses as she came. My mom let me down and told me to run to the bedroom, so she could scoop up Susan’s young son. “Run, Sissy, run! she shouted as she ran fast behind me with the boy in her arms. We made it into the bedroom and my mom slammed the door closed just as Susan landed on it and began slamming her full body into it. “He’s my son, you bitch,” Susan screamed. “I’ll kill you, you little bitch. I’ll fucking kill you when I get my hands on you.” She kept pounding on the door and screaming about the horrible things she wanted to do to us.
Mom got on the bed with us and took the boy. I curled up beside her, against the bedframe, covered one ear with the palm of my hand, and pressed my other ear to the paranormal metal headboard. I heard a man lift a hammer and bring it down, and someone wail, as a machine creaked out its ghastly work. I heard people pounding on the walls to be let out of the dungeons, and imagined what crimes they were being punished for, and who would escape, and who would perish in the flames of coal fire. I heard a young couple whispering their final goodbyes, as the wooden racks they were tied to were lifted and poured into the pit of flame, and reveled in the creek and pop of the metal and wood and flesh and bone as it was eaten by the fire. I stayed there like that, curled next to my mother, my ear pressed against the bedpost, drowning out Susan’s screaming and threatening with the entrancing and oddly comforting sounds of that subterranean torture chamber.
The Owner
WHITNEY COLLINS
Nina and her husband, Harry, got a good deal on the house. It was a charming, bone-colored Cape Cod that seemed to have an agreement with the elements. All over, it was tilted and weathered but also sturdy—petrified almost. They never met the owner. “He’s in Florida now,” the Realtor said, unprompted, twice during the closing. She said it in a plain, firm way that Nina and her husband did not question. She said it like Florida meant Mars or Hell.
On the first night in the house, Nina dreamed of the owner. He sat in a canvas chair in the desert. To his left was a stunted palm tree. To his right, a beach ball that didn’t roll away. He gazed out over an expanse of red sand. He wore a gas mask, but Nina could still hear what he said. “I left you something. Did you find it?”
Nina woke with a jolt. Beside her, Harry breathed serenely. She rose and went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. She wanted an aspirin, but all she found was a Band-Aid tin—the vintage, metal kind—and inside of that, a single white bead. Nina inspected the bead. It was the size of a large pea with a tidy, drilled hole. She put the bead back into the tin and the tin back into the cabinet. She drank from the faucet. When she returned to bed, she could not sleep. She kept seeing the gas mask, the stunted palm. She kept trying to move the beach ball with her thoughts.
In the morning, while Nina stood in front of the toaster, Harry came up behind her and kissed the nape of her neck. When she turned around, he wasn’t there. “Harry?” she called. “Was that you?” Harry didn’t answer, even when she called out again. Nina stood, frowning, until her toast popped up. In that short time, to her surprise, she was able to recall every argument she and Harry had ever had. There had been problems with money and romance, fertility and drinking. Right after they’d first married, there’d also been a woman. A neighbor named Pearl who visited three or four times a week with something from her garden: profane-looking cucumbers, swollen purple tomatoes, fistfuls of fragrant basil. She was good-natured about everything and everyone. There was always a ladybug in her hair. Nina had never seen Harry so happy. He accepted everything Pearl brought without once looking down at what Pearl brought. “You look at her too much,” Nina had said. “Maybe you could learn a thing or two,” Harry had said back.
Nina hadn’t thought of Pearl in a long time. She was filled with a sudden sadness. She left the toast in the toaster to grow stale. She went back to the bedroom and curled on the bed. This time, when she dreamed of the owner, he had two gas
