Bury the Children in the Yard (10 page)

She was aware of something else too. She didn’t know where it came from exactly. It felt like something else opened up in the back of her head. It was like a window. She didn’t understand it. She didn’t know if she
wanted
to understand it.

In this window, this spooky ghostplace at the back of her head, she saw Brent. At first, she was afraid he could see her and then she realized he wasn’t paying any attention to her whatsoever and even if he
was
there wasn’t really any physically possible way he could be living inside her head. At least, she didn’t
think
there was. But her thoughts still didn’t seem entirely her own.

He looked at himself in a mirror and smiled, as though he were posing for a picture. When he smiled, all of the scars on his face bunched up, making him nearly repulsive. He was naked to the waist and the same scars etched their way across his pale torso. He held a large knife in his hand. He placed the blade to the right corner of his mouth and pulled the knife toward his ear so the skin opened up into a gaping red wound. Then he did the same to the other side, blood running down his neck and onto his chest. Now he would be smiling whether he liked it or not ... permanently.

The result was monstrous.

What was the point of all this? Amy wondered. But she only wondered what the point of Brent’s actions were. They seemed so tragic and awful compared to what lay in front of her. What lay in front of her didn’t make her feel bad at all. It made her feel ecstatic. She ran along her road, the wind whipping around her body, oblivious to its cold sting. Running like that,
thinking
about the one simple act of left leg-right leg, took her mind’s eye away from the glowering image of Brent.

Her road ended in a cliff tumbling straight down into the ocean’s depths. What lay just beyond that cliff was what really captured her attention. What she saw was something that looked like an island paradise. Only the island was very small. Perhaps the size of her backyard. And it was as high up as the cliff, tottering there, the top of it fatter than the bottom. Amy didn’t think it would take much to knock it over. But she planned to go there.

The window in the back of her head opened up again so she could see what Brent was doing. He was in his basement.

Blood covered him. In one hand he held the same butcher knife he had used to slice his face and in the other hand he held a huge pair of gardening shears.

It took her a second to realize what he was doing.

He was
pruning
the women in the basement. The pruning shears went
snip-snip
with great dexterity, taking a leaf here and a finger there, flesh and vegetation treated as though they were the same. Then he leaned over them, the blood spilling from his wounds, “watering” them.

How long would it take him to realize she wasn’t there? How long would it take him to realize he didn’t have the latest flower he needed? The latest flower he
desired
?

For a second, she contemplated running back to her parents, charging through the front door and telling them about everything that was going on. But she didn’t do that. She didn’t think it would help. Didn’t even know if it would be possible. Besides, she didn’t think she was in any condition to know what was going on herself. She imagined herself jabbering on, half-incoherent, spouting nonsense about thoughts not being her own.

What she wanted was the island beyond the cliff in front of her.

In her mind, she watched as Brent sliced an earlobe from one of the women. The woman cried out in some kind of ecstatic agony and something resembling a poppy took the place of the earlobe.

Above Amy, the sky was dark and purple, clouds ominously swirling. In front of her, the blue sunfilled sky. She wanted that.

She stood at the edge of the cliff and opened up her arms to the sky, opened her arms to the wind, letting it take her, letting it gather itself around her clothes, bearing her up and toward that island.

She closed her eyes, smelling the sea as she crossed overtop of it, hearing the waves crash down on the rocks below.

Then she felt ground beneath her feet, smelling the fragrant jungle around her.

She opened her eyes and gagged.

The view around her was similar to the view in Brent’s basement only a thousand times worse.

Amy knew these people were not living. That was impossible. Maybe their bodies experienced some kind of unknown sensual pleasure but none of it was of their own choosing any longer and she didn’t think that could be considered life.

She didn’t want to be on the island anymore.

But she didn’t know if she had a choice or not.

She turned to go back the way she had come but Brent blocked her path.

How did he get there?
she wondered.

It wasn’t important, she figured.

He moved up close to her, grabbing her around the waist. She smelled his blood. It opened up her nose and poured through her body in a way none of the flowers could.

“Let me go,” she said, still choking.

“Where do you want to go?” Brent said, his ghastly smile directly in front of her face.

And suddenly, much like the window in her mind that allowed her to see what Brent was doing, something else opened up and she thought she knew what he was thinking. He wanted her to stay here with him. He wanted her to be his queen in this sick warped world of half-life and half-death. He wanted her to let him slide that giant knife down her skin, open up a vein and let her blood spill out so he could drink it. So he could absorb a little more of the things growing around him.

“I just want to go home,” she muttered.

“I think you’ll like my home much better.”

“No,” she muttered. She tasted doom on the back of her throat. He seemed so much stronger than her. She struggled against him but it didn’t seem to do any good. He could drag her down into the soft dirt and do whatever he wanted to do with her.

But then his grip lessened somewhat and a hurt look blossomed in his eyes.

Amy took this chance to stumble back from him and his blood-spattered knife.

Behind him stood, if one could call it that, something that was half-man and half-bush. His arms were missing. In their place were two vines with lavender flowers dangling from them. And beneath the lavender flowers were thorns no fewer than six inches long. This man wrapped one of his arms around Brent’s neck.

Amy wondered if Brent was the one who had created these awful things or if he was just fulfilling someone else’s destiny. She turned away from the scene, away from the island, running toward its edge. She stopped at the lip of the island, teetering over the drop and the ocean below.

The ocean wasn’t there, she told herself. The ocean had never been there because all of her thoughts were her own and the person who was thinking all those other thoughts for her was left to deal with his own nightmarish fate now. Holding out her arms, she let herself fly into the blue day, sinking slowly down to the warm waves that were not there.

She woke up on the floor of Brent Johnson’s basement. No sign of the plant people were down there, just the strangely cerulean walls that now seemed comforting. Maybe she had just come down here and passed out somehow. Maybe the whole thing had been a dream.

She stood up, the aches and pains in her body telling her it wasn’t just a dream. Her throat felt scorched. She felt cold.

She walked up the stairs and through the house. The house was bare, like no one had ever lived there, like there had never been a person named Brent Johnson.

Out of the house, she continued to walk, into the snow, the cold scalding her tender skin. She didn’t bother with the sidewalk, she walked straight through the yard and up to her porch.

A box sat beneath the mailbox to the right of the door. She recognized the printed message on it. She cleared off the address label, half-expecting to see next door’s address on there. Instead, what she saw was her name and her address.

Strangely, she found herself tempted to open it. She wanted, so desperately, to know what was inside the box. But she already knew what was inside the box. She wanted to taste it. She wanted to feel it run through her. But she didn’t want to go where it wanted to take her.

Picking up the box, she marched around to the back of the house and put it into the trashcan with the address label facing down so it was just a box and nothing her parents would be too suspicious of.

Then she took a deep breath of the cold, let it fill her lungs, pulled a forbidden cigarette from the pocket of her coat and lit it, looking around at her mundane little neighborhood, all covered in snow and the first thin strands of dusk.

Bury the Children in the Yard

The Filthiest Thing He Had Ever Read

It was the filthiest thing he had ever read. Being an English professor, he’d read a lot. The students’ final essays were a small stack on his desk. He had kept hers on top, reading it over and over. Now he moved it to the bottom of the stack and glanced up at the class. The room was too bright. The winter sky gray beyond the windows. Everyone in the room looked depressed. No one even paid attention to him. They just wanted to go home. All of their heads were bowed, texting, staring at whatever small screen they held in their hands. A few of them were hastily scrawling things or reading through some other text book. Probably preparing hastily for another exam they were taking later in the day.

Except her. Ashley Burroughs. She stared right at him. He glanced back down at the stack of essays, caught his breath, pretended to scrawl something on one of them.

Her essay had come completely out of the blue. Even now, she sat in the middle of the class, wearing a skin tight white sweater, a plaid skirt, knee socks and, dear god, brown saddle shoes and pig tails. And she still managed to look innocent rather than trashy. Until last night, he had thought she was a post-secondary student. But he had looked her up in the student database. Nineteen. He couldn’t believe he was thinking about going through with this.

Once he was sure his erection had subsided, he cleared his throat, took the essays in hand, and stood up.

“You’re, um, free to go when you get your essay. And welcome to email me with any questions you might have.”

He placed the essays on the students’ desks. Most of them merely glanced at the final grade and either sighed with relief or grumbled with disappointment. Most of the grades were good to average. In the back left of the classroom sat Paul Skink. He had pulled a brilliant essay off the Internet and printed it out. Didn’t bother typing it. Didn’t bother reformatting it.

“Really, Paul ... ” He put the essay in front of the boy, an ‘F’ marked in red followed by a half page diatribe. The kid guffawed, stood up, and walked slowly from the room.

Eventually, the only student left was Ashley. He had felt her eyes following him around the room. He wouldn’t have thought anything of her essay if he hadn’t been mentioned by name. Calling it an essay wasn’t even accurate. It was really more like a pornographic story and again, if he, if they
both
, had not been mentioned by name, he would have just thought it was something written to grab attention with its offensive content. It was, however, remarkably free of typos and, at the end, she had written in pink ink: “I’ve wanted you to fuck me all year.” Even if she had been a bad student or a different type of person, he would have just thought she was trying to lure him into something. Normally he wouldn’t even contemplate something like this. But it had been a very long time since he’d had any kind of female contact. A long time since he’d seriously even considered it. It had been a long time for a lot of things.

“Ashley.” He came up behind her and put the essay down on her desk.

“Yes, Mr. Brown?”

“That was, uh, quite a piece of writing.”

She looked at the essay, noticed the ‘A’ written on it, and said, “Thank you.”

“Did you, uh,
mean
what was written in there?”

“Yes, Mr. Brown.”

“You mean ... you would like to actually
do
that stuff?”

The tiniest of smiles curled her mouth. “Yes, Mr. Brown.”

He glanced at the door to make sure no one within earshot was loitering there.

“I have a cabin out by the lake. Would you be interested in spending your winter break with me?” His heart pounded. He couldn’t believe he just asked her that. He was a fifty-two year old man. He was this girl’s professor. He knew he was completely out of line.

“I would like that very much, Mr. Brown.”

“Please call me Steve.”

“Okay.”

“All right then. How bout we meet at Phuong’s around noon tomorrow?”

She nodded. Her smile broadened.

“And wear your hair in pigtails again. I want something to hold onto when I fuck you from behind.” His heart raced and he could feel his erection blossoming again. He walked back to the front of the room and began putting his papers and his laptop into his messenger bag. He watched her uncross her legs, catching just the briefest glimpse of white underwear. Her nipples stood against her sweater. She may have been blushing slightly. She swung her backpack over her shoulder, held her essay against her chest, and left the room. Steve exhaled a breath it felt like he’d been holding for the past five minutes.

He Was Content to Muddle Along in His Sad Existence

He got in his battered car and drove home through the gray Ohio evening. The college was not a city college. It was a small college in a small college town. He drove down Main Street, past all the historical homes, their windows glowing warmly. He imagined the happy families inside. Families gathering at home for the holidays over good food, strong drink, and warm fires. Many of the houses, he knew, were owned by professors just like him. Some of the more expensive homes were owned by the administrators and the department heads. He could have been one of them. It would have been so easy to become one of them. But a long time ago, something had derailed. He could pinpoint it but he didn’t like to do that. At least not consciously. He was content to muddle along in his sad existence and didn’t want to seem like the victim.