Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth (4 page)

THE HALF LIFE OF PARENTS

Zach had never given Muppets much thought, before meeting his in-laws.

All through his and Kayla’s courtship (two years, four months), she’d managed to only mention her parents in passing, and, as they’d had the justice of the peace marry them shortly after a certain pregnancy test, and he had a thing about large groups of people and the not-so-great outdoors anyway, meeting her parents at the wedding hadn’t been an issue.

Really, everything Zach knew about Kayla’s family could be boiled down to one school photo: her brother, forever six years old, never going to learn to swim.

The age he was when he died,
he
probably would have been into Muppets, Zach said to himself, standing in the bright doorway of his in-laws’ musty home.

Her dead little brother would probably think this was the best thing ever.

Not Zach. Not so much.

And Kayla could have prepared him better, he thought. There’d been a whole four-hour, last-minute road trip where she could have mentioned Kermit in passing. Just to soften this blow.

She was still holding his hand, though. That was something.

Maybe it was weird for her too, after all these years gone. All these years pretending her parents didn’t exist.

Thirty minutes from getting here, her voice reverting to a sixth-grade squeak, she’d called them, surprise. Hi, Dad. Guess who’s coming home? Guess who’s almost there already? The idea was to lead with her shiny new husband, sneak the baby news in with an excited shrug, a few nervous bats of the eye.

A lifetime too soon, now, here they were, Zach’s parent-meeting khakis wrinkled from the drive.

It probably didn’t matter.

On the other side of the wood-paneled breakfast bar dividing the kitchen from the living room, was who had to be Kayla’s mother, Marcy. She was poking her head over the bar. And her torso. Her crazy limp arms.

He could tell she was a she from the yarn hair, the overkill lipstick.

Kayla’s father—Zach was suddenly at a loss for his name—was caught partway up the hall, just on the other side of the brick planter with the fake plants, the planter that would come up to about Zach’s belt, were he over there.

But he wasn’t going to be. He could already tell.

Kayla’s father’s eyes rattled to a rest in their shallow plastic lenses, exactly as if they were settling on Zach, and on Kayla, the new couple.

Zach smiled an uncomfortable smile, made one hundred-percent sure he still had that deathgrip on Kayla’s hand.

“H-hello,” he said, not sure if he should be looking directly at these Muppet parents or not—was that rude?—and over the rest of that first and only visit, Zach found himself unable to stop studying the phone on the end table.

It was old, flesh-colored, had the spiral cord and thick buttons. A real antique. In his dorm freshman year, they’d all used these handsets as hammers, they were so strong, so heavy.

But that was the problem. That was the reason he couldn’t look away from this phone.

Over and over, he kept trying to picture Kayla’s dad darting out from behind the planter to catch the phone when  she’d called, then somehow picking it up with his floppy arm. And directing it where? To which head?

“They never moved from their, their
perches
in the kitchen, and over in the hall, see,” Zach told his first and only daughter Mira four years later, when she asked about legs.

Mira widened her eyes in a way that he could tell she was there all over again, looking at her grandparents with wonder, with awe. Like humans had descended from dolls, maybe, and Muppets were the missing link.

The story made Kayla cry. It was either because of the way he told it, where her parents were wild and unpredictable, fun-loving and whimsical, or because she was always on the edge of crying anyway, lately.

As far as Zach could tell, it was because of the ghost of Kayla’s once-upon-a-time baby brother. She’d thought she was over him, until Mira started holding her eyes like his.

Instead of a splash pool in the back yard, Mira got washcloth baths.

Her food was all cut up into morsels so tiny that Mira had to use a spoon, never a fork. And still there was the chance of aspiration. But even Kayla could tell that, just as growing up with Muppets had left her with certain unshakable suspicions about the world, her following Mira around with an umbrella and disinfectant wipes wasn’t all that different.

So she backed off, step by step.

To Zach, it was like the world was exploding in slow motion. He and Mira were on one postage stamp of an asteroid, and Kayla was on another.

For a while they could still see each other, but then Kayla went to visit her parents for a long weekend, to figure herself out.

Except it must not have worked.

A week passed, then two. Alone with his daughter, Zach found himself taking over all the worries Kayla had left behind. He’d always had concerns about the outdoors, but what was the indoors, if not just a trapped little piece of the park, the street, the alley?

Because Mira’s little fingers could pry back the electric socket covers, he turned the power off at the fusebox.

Because anybody could knock on the door, he stopped answering it.

And every chance he got, he would fall to his knees and hug Mira, and tell her all the stories he knew, and paint Mommy as on a great adventure out in the scary world, fighting for him and for Mira.

It was his duty, he felt. And maybe it was even true.

Next to go were their shoes, because shoe laces can be a choking hazard.

They slid around in socks, and when Mira wasn’t looking, Zach’s breath would hitch in his chest at the weight of it all, and he would click the flashlight on, shine it at the ceiling like a beacon.

But that was a fire hazard. He had to be more careful.

Walking to just his voice in the hall a day or two later, Zach making sure his voice didn’t shake like it wanted to, Mira’s skating feet snagged a nail. It had pushed up through the aluminum strip separating the kitchen linoleum from the living room carpet.

She chirped surprise and fell forward, into Zach’s arms. They leaned back against the couch like falling into a trench in wartime. Zach smoothed her hair down, held her face against his chest, and only heard it when she did: the front door, jingling and jangling.

Zach’s heart splashed into his stomach.

It was a break-in. He’d refused to deliver Mira to the world, so the world was coming for her.

He shook his head no, no, and then the front door opened for the first time in three weeks, turned into a square sheet of sunlight. It threw a hazy shadow on the wall Zach and Mira were staring at.

Zach felt a beat of recognition in his chest, like he’d been here before.

“What?” Mira whispered to him, and he crossed her lips with his index finger, so he could remember.

When nothing came, he breathed in deep, held Mira tight with his left arm and used his right to peel one of his socks off.

He bit the elastic top of the red-striped sock and ran his hand down all the way to the toe, then periscoped up over the back of the couch, his new, toothless mouth open as wide as his hand would go, in surprise.

Insert seven seconds of absolutely dead silence, here.

Until Mira’s newly-socked hand (sparkly) came up beside his, looked around, opened its mouth in surprise as well.

“Mommy?” she said.

The shadow on the wall behind the couch took a step back, into the sunlight, her edges getting more definition.

“Kayla?” Zach said, the base of his jaw tingling.

The sharp intake of breath from the doorway told him everything.

“I brought, I brought—” she said, then said it better: “They want to meet their grand-daughter.”

Beside her, then, two yarn-headed shadows appeared at her hips, their heads moving unnaturally fast, casing this living room.

Because her face was right next to his, Zach could feel the wonder spread across Mira’s face.

“Close the door?” he said, over-enunciating so his hand could match up.

Or maybe the voice was actually coming from up there.

“Zach?” Kayla said, falling to her knees, “Mira?” and that was exactly when the phone on the shelf by the television rang once, long and perfect, the handset dancing in its cradle.

“I got it,” Zach said, and, somehow, he did.

OLD MEAT

Dear Abby—

I’ve resolved not to inform the authorities on her, my wife. But I write to you to ask whether I should inform
her
or not, my wife. And, in trying to come to a decision, I of course ask myself if
I
would want to know.

In the daylight, the answer is rational, and simple, and obvious: yes.

But in the night, lying in bed with her, I’m not so bold. Yet at the same time I have to suspect I have nothing to fear, really. Have we not been married already thirty-eight years? Surely if she meant me harm, it would have happened well before now, yes?

And, though they’re blameless in the sense that their intentions were innocent, still, some nights I curse our new pharmacy for even making me aware of my wife’s condition. Better that I had just continued to sleep peacefully by her side, in my customary place instead of on the far side of the bed, away from the open window my wife has always insisted upon. Supposedly my repositioning to the other side of the bed was to lower my antihistamine dosage, and make me more alert. But I would take as many pills as necessary, Abby, not to have begun lying awake well past my usual hour, when the medicine had usually pushed me into sleep.

My initial thought that first night, of course, lying there without my glasses, everything in the house asleep save me, so that whatever happened might happen like a dream, was that my German Shepherd had crawled up into bed with me. But then of course I remember that Fetch, my German Shepherd, had been buried for nearly half a century.

I closed my eyes, looked again.

On her new side of the bed, my wife’s profile was outlined by the sodium glow from the street lights.

She was sleeping as soundly as always, rasp in, rasp out, her chest rising and falling—unlike mine, I might add.

It’s possible I had forgotten in that moment how to breathe.

Rising up from her pillow was the long, slender muzzle of a greyhound, or a particularly sleek wolf.

When I could, and I make no claims to bravery here, Abby, but when I could, I lightly said her name, and her breathing slowed instantly, almost before the whisper had passed my lips, and then her eyes rolled open, yellow and sickly and not hers at all, but—she’s always been a deep sleeper, see. Though her eyes were open, she saw nothing. It wasn’t her waking, but the animal.

I swallowed, and it was like thunder in my ears, and my knee as I repositioned it to roll out of bed clattered like sea shells in a muslin bag, so that, for the next twenty-eight minutes, I could only clutch what covers I still had and silently gulp air into my mouth, force it down my throat.

On the twenty-ninth minute, like a gift, her eyes closed again, resumed their darting beneath the lids, and the muzzle of which she wasn’t even aware retreated back into her shadowed face with a thick, wet, and reluctant creak, and she coughed in her chest then rolled over all at once, flinging her arm across me so that the tips of her fingers rattled against my side for all the world like claws. But they weren’t, Abby. They weren’t.

She was my wife of thirty-eight years again, unaware of her transformation, and now I know this happens to her nearly every night, regardless of her mood, or the moon’s. The animal in her, what it does as she sleeps is taste the night air from the open window in a way no man or woman ever could. And for now, anyway, that seems to be enough.

But will it always be, Abby?

Needless to say, she’s of course caught me watching her in a different way since that night, watching her at the stove, or tidying the living room, or talking on the phone as if the world and all its particulars are in place, but the answer I give when she asks about my newfound interest in her—and I hope this is real, not just self-preservation—is that I think I’m falling love with her all over again.

At the same time, however, I know that some part of the scent she takes in at night is mine, is me.

So my question, Abby, it’s not so much should I tell her—honestly, I don’t have the heart—my question is that, at my age, can this still count as love? Is the outward appearance enough, never mind the hidden motive, which is simply my base desire to live?

Again, in the daylight, my answer to this is of course an enthusiastic yes.

In the night, however, my wife’s snout rising from our pale green sheets, a purposeful growl emanating from her chest, my heart pounds in a different way altogether, one that has nothing to do with the sacrament of marriage. Specifically, it pounds in a way I fear is going to wake her.

Once the blood has stopped thrushing in my ears, though, and I can hear our fake eggs popping on the stove under her spatula, the question I have to ask myself is would
she
tell
me
? If, say, during my mid-day nap, which of late threatens to take the whole day, if
I
were becoming something else and knew nothing about it, would she tell me, or would she pull the covers up a nudge higher?

The latter, I think.

Instead of telling me, instead of making me know what I didn’t need to know, she would count her blessings that I was such a sound sleeper, and perhaps this is what marriage really is, right? Not love
because
, but love in
spite
.

Or, in my case,
until
, I know.

Until she wakes.

But, too, I’m sixty-eight, Abby.

At this point it’s a foregone conclusion that the end is near. I can feel it inside already, like a spill. The only unresolved portion of it is
how
. Meaning that . . . well, perhaps my wife’s perfect teeth on my neck instead of a hospital monitor later, and a team of doctors leering over me, that might very well be the tenderest expression yet, the most intimate kiss possible.