Short Stories

God's Nightmare

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I wake and the first thing I see is the toasty sun peeking between the leaves and pouring creamy light onto my bed. I don’t remember what day it is, not yet. Dots of sun scoot over my face. I listen. Birds. A few melodies and some screeches. The hum of the highway. It’s late. I wonder why I’m not at school. Or church. Then, like a dropped glass, I remember.

                                                                       *

This is the way spring used to be.

    Everything is melting and brewing up horsey smells, gushing up from the yellow grass, rushing in sandy streams along the road, splattering down the drains. The trees vibrate their new fuzz against the electric sky. Tiny winged things appear from nowhere and zip about in the air. People poke their faces outside, and meeting warm wind instead of the winter bite, let their feet follow, and t-shirt arms, and hatless heads. Nice day now isn’t it Mrs. Jones? How’s your mother doing, Erika? Them darned squirrels got into the attic again, Jack. Mrs. Jones with her bandaged legs shuffles around on her splintering porch, lining up her rugs on the railing, and whacking them with a broom until the dust from her stale TV-lit rooms flies off to some wonderful, unimaginable future.

    Then I feel its warm breath. The thing with long wings, large and nameless, has arrived and it’s gliding around in the air, waiting to settle. It’s like the day before your birthday. It hangs around in the sleepy street, tanning its soft sides in waterfalls of sunlight. It waits for me each morning so I run to my window, yank up the snappy blind. Yes! It’s still there, shining on puddles, glowing at the tips of the fence, circling in haloes around the trees. And there is Teddy – this is before he went blind – pulling a wagon of rolled up newspapers, and it makes him dream about the end of school and buying a radio with his newspaper money.

    Sylvia hangs out all the blankets and leans on the fence, staring up. She’s thinking about her new family of rust people – a baby made of wheelbarrow parts, a dog made of springs. Soon she’ll waft into the kitchen, her eyeliner streaked, her hair frizzy, find a good radio station playing Elvis, and pull things from the fridge to make cream puffs or dough babies or whatever I want. No more black pots of root stew, lumpy brown oatmeal, bread. Some days we just snuggle in her bed and suck on sugar cookies and listen to the birds chatter.   

    Saturday. All the cars are parked along the slushy curb like crooked teeth. Even Mrs. Jones, who beats her rugs every chance she gets, waits a bit longer between hits and looks up to the treetops where she might have heard a bit of song.

    Thomas is walking back from town with his newspapers and whistling. Even if there is a war somewhere (which there always is) and the pollution indices are up (which they usually are) and another factory is threatening layoffs (which it often is), he will whistle. On days like this, problems seem solvable. He takes them as proof that the world still needs him.

    “What if the world was perfect?” Sylvia prods. Thomas is feeling bad, but not too bad, about an oil spill in the Pacific ocean and everyone so busy proving it wasn’t his fault instead of just trying to clean it up. Sylvia thinks he should just be glad he still has a job.

    “Perfect?” he looks at her, his newspaper wilting in his hands. Thomas is a person who can talk and read at the same time, or so he claims. Though he doesn’t always seem to hear what Sylvia says.

    “Yeah, if everyone was neighborly and held hands and shared and helped and cleaned up after themselves,” she says, kind of snarky. She’s probably still sore about the sweater Thomas gave her for her birthday, though she won’t say so, not on a day like this. She looked like a bison in it, to tell the truth, and he forgot that wool makes her skin spotty. She drops her teaspoon of sugar in her mug, the ‘white-death’ she’s vowed to stop buying, then buys anyhow, supposedly for me, so I don’t grow up fanatical.

    “Sisyphus, I guess,” he mumbles, flipping over the page of the paper. He likes to quote Greek myths and scientific theories to explain things. Keeps him from having to talk about his feelings, Sylvia says. But then he notices Sylvia is crying and he’s totally stumped. He reaches his hand and covers her paint-stained fingers with his long bony ones. Because before this spring, she hardly ever cried, not even when she lost her job at Timmy’s.

    I twirl my knife in the butter dish, carving up a nice loop. I’m wondering what is going on but I feel pretty sure it can’t be anything big. And Thomas and Sylvia will fix it in any case. Fixable – that’s how everything used to seem.

                                                                           *

I hold my breath. Listen for footsteps, running water, the radio. I step into the hallway. His door is shut. I lean into the bathroom – the sink is wet. Sylvia’s door is swaying slightly, breathing in and out, eerie and silent. I tiptoe to her room, stand at the door, my bare toes sticking to the floor. The door exhales and I peer in. Her window is wide open, the lace curtain puffing out. Her bed is made, all tight at the edges like an iced cake. She has cleaned it all up, put everything back in order, so you can’t tell. But I can tell, because it’s not a normal order. It’s a scared, fussy, too-neat order, like no one dares move or breathe in this room. The rug that Thomas threw up on is gone. Where it should be, the floor boards have big cracks and smudges of different colours of paint.

    I pick up the hairbrush on Sylvia’s dresser. The handle feels good, cool and sleek like a Queen’s septre. It has roses hammered into the rusty silver. It makes me think of a princess, with her silver posterbed and rose vines climbing in at the window. The matching mirror is speckled with copper, like splatters of paint. I turn the mirror to catch my face. I look older than I remember. My nose isn’t so pointy anymore. I place the mirror, face down, on the doily.

    I guess I won’t be going to church with Granny today. Usually Granny gets me up and puts on the kettle and lays out a clean dress. Sylvia probably went with her instead.

    I guess Thomas is sleeping. There’s no way to stop it, Sylvia said. He just gets off balance.

    When I came in for lunch yesterday I knew something was wrong. The music was too loud. Sylvia was scrubbing milk bags in the sink. He was already in his armchair. I knew right away I wouldn’t be able to tell him about Teddy’s kittens, which were missing. Thomas’ troubles fill up the house like his $1.99 used records and there’s no room for anything else.

    I considered his droopy face, his tiny sad eyes. He reminded me of the beagle Nancy found in the alleyway. There was a plate of macaroni and stuff on the little table next to him. He looked up at me and started talking, as if I could hear over the blast of the symphony. Mahler it was, the one about the end of the world. Though the world wasn’t about to end, ever, because the record was skipping. I lifted the stereo lid and nudged the needle forward.

    I sat on the footstool at Thomas’s feet and took his hand and tried to tickle his life-line but he didn’t laugh. So I sat there quietly and waited for the record to finish, getting up only once to open the curtain. The window looks onto the backyard and my shed. It cheered me up to remember I was making birdhouses there.

    After the last sound in the world had died out of Mahler’s orchestra, Thomas turned to me.

    He had told me about Timor before. He said the Timorese were gentle people. He showed me pictures of the children playing in the dirt with sticks. They had big smiles. He said the Timorese lived simple lives and took good care of their children. He had lots of photos. There were kids carrying each other or holding hands or piggybacking in all sorts of jumbled combinations.

    “What happened to those children?” I asked.

    He reached for his bottle of Canadian Club. His hands were jittery. He shook his head. I saw a big brown envelope under his leg, held tight. They had sent him more photos.

    “What did they do?” I pleaded, hoping he would show me the photos.

    I hoped God had not let anything awful happen to those children. Although it’s not like he’s so reliable. I’d heard about bad things happening before, bad enough that you have to wonder if he’s even awake. Sometimes, it seems like we are God’s nightmare. At school we learned about the Holocaust. It was so horrible I could hardly believe it at first. And of course there’s Jesus. Nails poking right through his hands. I felt so sorry for him I took the baby Jesus from Granny’s creche and kept him under my pillow. But later on, I felt cheated and stuffed him back in the box. I was mad that Jesus had been made out to be so special for his suffering. And even madder that people could do such a horrible thing more than once. That’s when Sylvia wanted to take me out of Sunday school. “She can stay home and bake bread instead. Do something uplifting.” But Granny insisted, mentioning our ancestors and all. And Thomas said I wouldn’t get brainwashed as I was the kind of person who asked questions. He says his ancestors were protozoans, not Christians.

    I asked Thomas if the Indonesians built gas chambers for the Timorese. “Nobody really knows what’s happening,” he said, “because it’s not in the paper.” Then he started talking about the Turks committing genocide against the Armenians and how maybe this is even what happened to the Neanderthals and the Cro-magnons.

    “If you ever think you know better and want to kill them all off, Erika, drink a bottle of this until you can’t move.”

    “Thomas!” Sylvia was at the door in her dirty Timmy’s apron, a scowl on her face. She looked witchy and I could tell she meant business because she’s never like that, hardly ever.

    “Go on out, Erika. Go have some fun. Nancy is out there building forts with the other kids. You can take the box of nails. And the picnic blanket. And the hammer. Take it all.” A new box of nails. And no mention of lunch. She really wanted me out.

    Thomas just shrugged.

    I slid off the footstool, careful not to touch the envelope. I was afraid. I didn’t want any of those pictures to slip out.

                                                                          *

“I don’t know what happened,” I told Nancy. “Just don’t touch it.”

    I was waiting for the dog-people to go away. Morning and night they bring their dogs here to pooh, then they hang around together puffing on cigarettes and slurping from Styrofoam cups. Sylvia said most of them are laid off, like her, and they’re only here cause they can’t stand suffocating in their apartments. Every second or two, someone shouts at a dog. Bad boy. Down Blacky. Bad boy! Get the stick, Curly. Over there yadummutt. Over there! And it’s not just the dogs that get it. They shout at their kids the same way. Nobody seems to notice how much noise it makes – like fighting crows – because they all do it.

    “I’ll never be like them,” I told Nancy. I’m going to build a raft and escape down this river. I’ll be like Tom Sawyer, only there won’t be anybody chasing me. I’ll be like a star cruising the big, black sky. Then I won’t have to hear these dog-people and their bawling kids. I won’t have to go to church with Granny, or hear Thomas cutting himself shaving cause a vote’s going wrong, or hear Sylvia chanting or hammering brackets when I want it quiet.

    “I saw Ronald this afternoon,” I told Nancy. Ronald is the one who beat up Teddy and smashed his radio. That neighborhood is even worse than ours. We have boarded up windows, but they have rats. “They had this big canvass bag with them.”

    One of them held the bag and another one stuck his arm in and pulled out a kitten, grasping it roughly by the neck. Where’d they get those kittens, I wondered, crouching in the bushes. They pulled out a couple more and started whirling them around by their tails. After a bit, they dumped them back in the bag. Ronald tied it shut with a string. I should have realized what was going to happen. All five boys made whooping noises then Ronald snatched up the bag and tossed it off the bridge. When it hit below on the rocks, they ran like idiots up the hill.

    “They are idiots,” I told Nancy. She nodded hard, to show she absolutely agreed. She was crying.

    I would have kept them in a box with a blanket and taken them around the neighborhood to find homes. Teddy was still in the hospital and couldn’t watch out for them.

    Thomas, who had emptied half his bottle of Canadian Club by then, got mad when I told him. He said those boys are inhumane and those cats should be spayed and how do those parents suppose they’re teaching empathy and building a better world? Then he started ranting about all the other things wrong in the world besides Timor – like our landlord and the Conservatives and children starving all over the place and people polluting the entire planet and we were not even talking about the kittens anymore. I ran off to the river and the brainless crows were screeching in the bushes and before I knew it I’d swung a heavy branch at the bush and...

    “The beak’s broken right off, isn’t it?” I asked Nancy. She looked at it and nodded. It was sickening. Then I asked her to wait with me till dark, to bury it.

    Finally, the stars came out, burning stars that never get wounded. They’re so far away they couldn’t care less what we do. We can never spoil them. Except we’ll lose them soon, from light pollution. But they’ll still be there even if we can’t see them, calm and peaceful, outliving this earth, outliving us all.