The Rabbit, The Jaguar, & The Snake

The Widow

The Widow Mrs. Feldman leaned her elbows on the sill, her ample belly pressing against the radiator, testing the limits of her coarse, black skirt. She sniffed the early evening air, the wart on her nose quivering with each whiff. The neighborhood stank as usual: a bouquet of garbage perfumed with mildew and gutter rot, and riding beneath that, the musk of the homeless men who laid up in the alleys during the day. It had always smelled that way, for years and years. Sometimes worse, sometimes better. But the new century had brought with it new odors. Car exhaust and gasoline, bleach from the factories, chemical and stringent, with a soupçon of cancer. Not that The Widow Mrs. Feldman cared. She was there long before the white men constructed their towers and poisoned the land, and she would be there long after they were gone. She was an element of the earth, as timeless and indestructible as dirt, susceptible to nothing but the nuclear tides of the sun.
She looked up and down the block, scanning for any signs of trouble, then zoomed in on the old abandoned townhouse right across the street. It was in as poor condition as ever—the bricks were stained, the windows streaked with grime, and moss hung out of the leaf-choked gutters. She paused, peering hard at the door, searching, waiting for the slight shimmer in the air, the rippling that signaled that something had come over from the other side. Nothing.
Unsatisfied, she hawked up a lunger and spat it out onto the sidewalk below.
"Demon!" she snapped. "Demon! Come here you little . . . demon."
A thump sounded from some far off room above. Demon liked to hunt in the attic. The insects were juicy there, the rats juicier, and, if the crone had some leftovers from her own nocturnal adventures, he had his pick of the best vital organ meat in the city. Lungs untouched by smoke, livers unsullied by alcohol. The Widow Mrs. Feldman pulled the stump of a cigar out from the folds of her sweater and plunked it into her mouth, lighting it with a snap of her fingers. Smoke carpeted her lips, and she watched the shadows loom over the street. The best time to use the door was right before the sun set, in the gloaming, the transition from safety to terror, and the gloaming was coming soon. That's when the beasts crossed over.
A city kid ran down the street in front of her, shouting "yeah you and what army?" over his shoulder. His voice reminded her of BG, King of the Goons. She thought about her last conversation with him and snorted.
"'Oh but they ain't coming over here,' he says. Oh yeah? Tell that to my Demon. He's gained five pounds in the last month, the little pig."
She took another pull on her cigar and blew out a heavy, gray cloud.
"Tells me to do my job. You do your job, I say! Pah. Stupid goon. The faces change, but they're always the same. Demon! Come here you brute!"
But Demon was a long time coming, and she drifted off into her memories, back, back, back, all the way to her beginnings. She didn't remember a father or a mother. She had no siblings. She just was. In those early times, she wandered the landscape, cold and alone. She spoke no language, had no tongue of her own. She sang to the plants and the water, and they provided for her. She drank from the streams, and they were cool and clean. She ate what she could catch, first the little creatures, the mice and the rats, the frogs and the fish, but it was never enough to fill her belly. In time she learned the songs of larger game, and she sent sweet sweels of melody out into the air, and they came to her, and she feasted on their flesh.
But with the bigger beasts came prodigious danger, horn and hoof, teeth and claw, and she didn't always win. Even worse were the things that walked upright. They made tools and knew fire. They were cagey and knew how to fight. She had only tasted a few before the rest came for her, chased her through the forest with bone clubs and spears. They cornered her in the foothills, and she cowered against an outcropping. She could still see the flicker of their bared teeth in the angry red flames of the torches, the thrusting spears. She reached up around her back to rub the old wound. The skin was shiny and smooth beneath her hairy hand.
"Demon!" she yelled again. "Oh!"
Something tickled the back of her legs just above her dirty brown hosiery. Demon. Or his tail, rather. He was a gray Bengal cat with black stripes and striking blue eyes, prone to mischief, yes, but sagacious and loyal. And powerful. He rarely used it, for the transformation drained him, but if tested, if threatened, he let it loose. And woe to the creature stupid enough to be on the receiving end. He wound his way in and out of her skirt, rubbing his face against the scratchy stockings and purring. The Widow Mrs. Feldman chuckled.
"There you are, you nasty little creature. Where you been, huh? Up in the attic? Get yourself a bellyful?"
He meowed, blinking up at her.
"That's what I thought. You're a good little demon, huh? A good little devil." She scratched his ears, then patted the sill. "Come on up here now. C'mon. Time for you to earn your keep."
Demon followed the sound, tail swishing, and jumped up, sinking his claws into her finger before she could pull it away.
"Ach, you demon, Demon!" she cried, and popped the digit into her mouth.
Then she took a few bits of smoked meat out of a fold in her sweater and sprinkled them on the sill. He sniffed them, wary. She'd tricked him before. When he was satisfied that there wasn't anything wrong with the meat, he chomped in. The old crone waited for him to finish, then sang him his song. He watched her, mesmerized and blinking, before turning toward the street and sitting down, his tail swishing back and forth like a pendulum, irregular at first, then falling into a steady rhythm—swish-swish, swish-swish.
The Widow Mrs. Feldman leaned over and peered between his ears. She watched the air, waiting for the right moment. The shadows of the brownstones lengthened on the street. The air began to cool and . . . there! A shimmer in the door of the old abandoned townhouse. She took a pull from her cigar and blew a plume of smoke between Demon's ears. He didn't even flinch as it expanded in front of him, a dark gray cloud. The crone bored into it, concentrating, willing it to stay, to hover, to reveal what it was meant to reveal.
And it did.
The front door of the old abandoned townhouse flickered in and out, in and out, and then the passage opened and a monster leaped through, shrouded in shadows. Demon yowled and the smoke dissipated, and by the time it had all cleared, the creature had galloped halfway up the street.
The Widow Mrs. Feldman winced as she stood up, her spine popping. She put her hands on her back and stretched. Plonked the cigar in her mouth. Took a few puffs.
"Well, Demon." The cat looked at her. It blinked. "What do you think?"
She waited a moment for a reply, and when none came, she stubbed the cigar out on a black spot on the sill and hid it in the folds of her skirt. Then she grabbed a walking stick from its place next to the window and limped over to her front door, the heels of her boots clonking on the hardwood.
"C'mon you mangy beast," she said. "Time to sing for your supper."

The Rabbit

Hey, how's it going?
Lemme tell you the story about the time I saved the world.
Looking around right now at the burned out buildings and the churned up streets and the bodies in the gutters, I know what you're thinking: "This is how you save the world?" So I guess my answer is that I don't really know. And I don't really care. I kind of look at it as something that happened to me, like jury duty or a colonoscopy. But hey, that's jumping ahead now, ain't it? Let's start from the start. And there ain't no better place to start with than my Ma and Pop.
Pop came to America from the old world before the Model T, if you can believe it. Met my dear old Ma on the boat on the way over, and even though I knew it wasn't the truth, I like to think that the whole thing was a whirlwind romance. Love on the high seas. A jealous suitor. Fist fight in first class, a triumphant right hook followed by a wedding on the main deck, with the ship's captain and the clear blue skies and the icebergs floating by. In reality, pop was a penniless Jew from Minsk, and ma, she wasn't no better off. Their getting together was probably more like a scrum and a moan behind a crate in steerage, a pauper's union at the neighborhood temple, and nine months later, me.
I grew up in the slums of the Bottom with about five million other street rats. Living in a place called the Bottom was exactly like what you'd think it'd be like living in a place called "the Bottom." The one room tenements, the baking hot summers, the midnight bum-rolls, the cholera, the TB, the dysentery. Ah, the golden years. Ma toiled long hours as a seamstress in a heat box deathtrap, and Pop worked a whole bunch of miserable jobs. He was a fish monger, a ditch digger, a stone-cutter. He buried gas lines. Dug subway tunnels. I don't know how he did it, but eventually the old codger saved enough money to buy his own business. A newsstand. Established himself as a true entrepreneur.
Me, however, I was free as a bird. Lived like a king. I hung out the usual gang of gutter punks. Skinny Pete. Squinty. Slappy. The Mangler and the Jew. We got up to all kinds of hi-jinx, me and them. Alley smokes. Heel hacks. Knife fights. But then Ma died in a factory fire, and Pop didn't know how to put up with me. Granted, I was a bit out of control, and short of drowning me in the river, there wasn't nothing he could do to keep me in check. Plus, he'd just got that newsstand off the ground, and he couldn't have a liability running around, that liability being me, so his only option was that free school them papists run.
And by that I mean Catholic School.
And Catholic School was Catholic School.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "ain't you a Jew? Them papists don't let no Jews in Catholic School."
Well, you're right, you're right. But pop, he wasn't no dummy. About three months before he signed me up, we started attending mass. Every Sunday morning, every Sunday night. Pop got himself in thick with the priests, told them that he wasn't no religious type, that it was too late for him but that he didn't want his only son to go to Hell. Next thing I knew, they're swinging that censer all over the place and tracing the sign of the cross on my forehead with water. And just like that, I was a mackerel snapper, with all the privileges and blessings and hope of heaven.
He packed me off to Our Lady of the Bleeding Hands and Slit Throat that very fall, and then my education began in earnest. And boy oh boy did it suck. Sure I got me a nifty uniform and three squares a day, and oh yeah, they taught me how to read, rite, and rhythmatic, but I also got myself a hefty backhand whenever I done anything to offend anybody, which, given my natural constitution, equated to a considerable amount of backhanding. I'd always thought I was pretty clever, a real yuk yuk guy, you know? I even got The Mangler to laugh on occasion. In my opinion, my mouth was the best part about me, but them priests didn't seem to share my sentiments. (Well, they did and they didn't, but more on that in a sec.) They hit me so much their knuckles'd swell up just looking at me. Unfortunately the kind of behavior in which I specialized also drew a different kind of attention, the kind ain't nobody want, and from there my story went from pitch black to pitch blacker.
Satan black.
Ninth bolgia of Hell stuff.
I don't feel like going into all the details cause there ain't no point in grossing nobody out. The only thing you need to know is this: all the things that happened to poor kids with no resources in Catholic School happened to me. Pretty unconceivable a century later; run of the mill back then.
I got my revenge, though, right? Not after they fucked me up permanent, and not until I was much older, old enough for everybody who hurt me to forget about who I was and what they done, but revenge was got. I won't go into the particulars. That story's been told already anyhow. Some jerk wrote it up in some dumb book he published. A Stick in the Eye or . . . what's that? Oh yeah. A Knife in the Back. Anyway, it's a good read. A real pot boiler. Seven short stories and a novel. You should check it out. Especially the one about me.
Go ahead.
I'll wait.
 Okay, maybe we ain't got the time for that kind of thing right now. For those of you who don't want to, or who ain't got the time or the patience, or who can't read, think of it this way: That priest's head looked good up there on my wall, didn't it? Not as good as them two goombahs, dumbass Basilio and fat little Arko, but good enough for government work.
So look, enough with the exposition. Here's where the story really begins.
About a year after that, I was killing time at Pop's newsstand, selling the typical newsstand type stuff, like newspapers, and magazines, and chocolates, when The Widow Mrs. Feldman stuck her head out her window.
"Howzit," she said.
It was a slow day. The war'd been over for three years, and the twenties was roaring like a lion. After the morning rush, ain't nobody was interested in the good news, so I sat back and put my feet up on a stack of City Sentinels to read the science section.
"Fuck you, you old witch."
"Hey, language, language. Is that any way to talk to your elders?"
"No. But it's the way I talk to you."
She laughed that chuffy laugh of hers. Half phlegm, half soot: "Huh huh huh. Huh huh huh."
"Jesus," I said. "You inhale a smoke stack or something? You gonna be alright?"
"You're a funny one," she said. "Real wiseass. You get that from your pop or your ma?"
Ma'd been dead for centuries, but Pop, he kicked it only a few months before. Lasted pretty long, him. Ninety-five years. Not bad for a time when most people died at half that age. It's fantastic, actually, unless you consider how he died, because he died kind of shitty, if you ask me, with the cancer eating away at his lungs until there wasn't no lungs left. I was already irritated before she reminded me of all that, but now I was irritated considerable more. I took my feet off the papers and plonked them on the sidewalk.
"You need your attitude adjusted?"
She waved me off.
"You don't scare me. Mr. Feldman was the last one who tried and look at what happened to him. Plus," she nudged her chin at the old abandoned townhouse. "I know what you done over there. And I like it."
I gave the old place a glance. It was all blackened at the base from when them two idiots tried to burn it down, and the windows was still cracked and grinning at me, but it was still standing, proud and unbeaten. I returned my attention to the article I was reading.
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. You got style, kid. And I know you been thinking about expanding your services."
Now that one shocked me a little. How the fuck she did know about that? She wasn't wrong, but, well, after I finished "The Unholy Triumvirate," I ain't had no inclinations to carry on. I felt I'd done my duty, purged my demons. Lived along with the knowledge them fucks who did what they done to me and mine would never be able to do it to somebody else and theirs. Until recently.
I'd heard things about what was still going on at that school. Good old Ronnie Resnick told me about it, and let me tell you something, I was none too pleased. In fact, I was so unhappy that I was actually thinking about giving them a little taste of my scalpel and bonesaw, add a few more trophies to my wall. But that was as far as I got, just the thinking about it, and as far as I knew, thinking about a crime wasn't a crime. That wasn't the problem, though. The problem was that The Widow Mrs. Feldman knew about the crime I was only thinking about.
"You know fuck all about it," I said.
"About what?"
I stared at her over the top of my paper. She wouldn't look me in the eye. Looked everywhere but, mumbling and muttering to herself. Dead giveaway. Finally, I said, "You know fuck all about fuck all."
"You're a laugh riot. A gaggle of giggles. I don't know fuck all? You just told me everything I needed to know."
"Ah you're a crazy bitch," I said.
But she wouldn't let it go. Kept laughing that hoarse laugh. I won't lie to you. It pissed me off.
"The fuck you laughing at?" I snapped. She laughed harder. A little ball of energy swirled up in my chest. I tried to keep reading, but it wasn't no use, so I folded the paper and slapped it down on the stand. "Can I help you with something?"
"No, but I can help you with something."
"Not interested."
"No, really. Listen. You look in the mirror lately? You look good for a guy your age."
"Watch it, you old hag. I might be horny, but I ain't desperate."
"What are you? Thirty-three? Thirty-four? You don't look a day over twenty."
"Sorry, you're not my type."
"I heard that about you."
Sometimes a body just got to absorb the insult. That was one of them times.
She said, "I know you know what I'm talking about. I know you seen it, too. You're in your prime. You'll never look better. I'm just trying to help you out a little. Give you a boost." I pretended to read again. "Look. I'm on your side here. You wanna stop them fucks from doing what they do?"
Fine. Fuck it. She knew. How she knew what she knew, I don't know. But she knew. I put the paper down.
"Yeah," I said. "I do. I'm gonna kill every last one."
The Widow Mrs. Feldman nodded.
"That's what I thought. C'mere a second."
"Fuck that. I ain't going nowhere. You come here."
"Got a bad hip." Her cat jumped up on the sill next to her and arched its back against her shoulder. She pet it. "Hey there, Demon. You come out to say hello?" Demon meowed. The Widow Mrs. Feldman reached behind her and put a glass of something on her sill. "Demon made you something to drink."
I looked at it. It was tall and skinny and filled up with something green and goopy looking.
"I ain't drinking that."
"It's cool and fresh, and it's a hot day, no?"
"Yeah, but I ain't drinking that."
She seemed to take that in, studying me, reading me, but she finally shut up so I was able to get back to the news. Whoo boy, the world was in a ton of shit. The Great War really fucked things up good. Unemployment rising in Germany. Some asshole in Italy and his black shirts. The old lady started to hum a tune. I didn't notice it at first cause she sung it under her breath, but then it seeped into my head, into my bones. I'd heard me a lot of music in at that point in time. "I Ain't Got Nobody." "Ain't We Got Fun?" "I Ain't Nobody's Darling." Streets was positively filled with that new jungle bunny shit. But this was something different, eerie and earthy, like the trees and the rocks and the wind all got together to start a band. It was the most beautiful thing I ever heard, and I felt transported by it back to a time when there wasn't no bricks or buildings, no assholes or asphalt, just the sky and the ground and the oceans and the rivers, and the next thing I knew, I felt something rub my calf, and when I looked down I seen Demon winding his way around my ankles. I got dizzy. And out of the haze came The Widow Mrs. Feldman's voice.
"You sure you don't want that drink?" she said.
And you know what? I did get a thirsty right then. Parched, even.

Years passed, and it was around that time that I started noticing something different about me. My old friends, Slappy and the like, they got older. Fatter. Sicker. Slappy caught a case of the Nationalism, enlisted in the Army, and ended up a corpsesickle when he tried to fight the Bolsheviks in Siberia during the Russian Civil War. The Mangler was too smart to sign up for any government sham but dumb enough to get himself killed in a drunken pub brawl. I heard Squinty went blind, which anybody with half a brain could of predicted, and then I never seen him again. The Jew was the only one who made it out somewhat prosperous. Owned himself a pawn shop near the Industrial District. I seen him every now and then, always alone, muttering to himself, stooped over and worn, like the trials of life weighed on his shoulders so heavy that he couldn't take it no more.
But me?
I stayed the same. Like my body got to the ripe old age of twenty two and said, "Fuck it. I'm done." And that's when I knew. I knew what I was going to do. I was going to follow through on all them thoughts I'd been thinking.
Look, I got a lot of regrets in my life. Who don't? I regret not running away from them fucks at the Our Lady of the Bleeding Hands and Slit Throat before they got to me. I regret not taking on extra work somewhere so Ma didn't have to work in that heat box deathtrap. But one thing I don't regret is drinking the potion old Mrs. Feldman made me that afternoon. Changed my life, it did. Or at least I think it did. Who knows? All I know is that once I realized what was what, all them ideas that'd been swirling around in my head solidified, and the guy I was after wasn't the guy I was before, and everything I'd ever known, the fear, the pain, the helplessness, vanished, replaced forever with an anger that nearly consumed me.
So I expanded my services. And by that I mean killing any fucks what fucked with the well-being of a helpless kid. This took some creativity. You know, before you start in on the judging, you should remember who I was going after. I wasn’t duping no co-eds into helping me carry my groceries up a flight of steps. I wasn't leaping out at grandma from alley corners. I went after the kiddie diddlers, the pedo-pokers. Remember what I told that priest?
"I wish I had someone like me around when I was a kid."
Well, I took that serious, and for a while, it worked out pretty well. I find you been diddling kiddies, I hunted you down and slit your throat. Worked out well for about five or six years, but unfortunately, no matter how skilled or careful or sneaky or creepy, there comes a time in every great killer’s career when he ends up caught. Well, not every one, because has anybody ever heard of Jack the Ripper?
So, yeah, this was some time around ‘51? ’52? I got wind of a local cop whose tastes ran unconscionable. First some kids started spreading rumors. Scumbag took Jerry Blumczech for a ride in his cruiser. Gave Arnold Gold an option in an alley. Then this new cop showed up, lo and behold, fresh out of nowhere, young guy, slicked-back hair, square jaw, and a bit swarthy in the palms if you know what I mean. I seen him talking with the kids on my street, and then he’s walking them to school, buying them ice creams. Classic profile. I also noticed that little Robby Resnick—Ronnie Resnick’s grandson—wouldn’t go near the guy, avoided him at all costs, ran across the street when he offered him a chocolate, took the long way to school. Once I seen that . . . there ain't no words for it. I felt an anger I ain't never felt before, and not for me, but for that poor kid. I didn’t save Ronnie Resnick’s ass from a priest way back when just to have his grandson get his plowed by no cop.
If only I’d known.
Them kids was paid to spread them rumors.
Robby was paid to act like he was afraid of the jerk.
Blumczech never took no cop car pleasure cruise.
Gold remained just as pure as his name.
And I fell into it like the sucker I was.
One night, returning home drunk from a date with one of The Widow Mrs. Feldman’s bottles, an opportunity presented itself. I seen that sonofabitch pedophile cop walking across the street a block in front of me, and the dark twirlies descended. I didn’t normally snatch nobody on the spur of the moment, and I definitely didn’t do it when I’d been drinking, but up until that point I’d enjoyed a string of successes and I let it go to my head. Isn’t that always the case with people like me? They call it a cycle or something; we plan and we stalk and we kill and we drink to forget it, even if we’re not supposed to be bothered by it, and then we plan and we stalk and we kill again, a little sloppier this time, and a lot sloppier the next time, and worse and worse and then you're spiraling out of control like an idiot. So yeah. Pedocop spotted. Dark twirlies descended. I don't remember what happened after that. One second I was walking behind the guy, the next I'm surrounded by a bunch of dicks screaming at me to hold up my hands, goddammit or they'll shoot.
"Alright, alright," I said, and did what I was told.
Unfortunately for me, my hands was covered with gore. So was my face. And my chest. And them cops is shining the lights in my eyes and I can't tell if it's real or fake, can't see nothing, really, except them lights, and suddenly I realized I was straddling somebody, and when I looked down I seen a busted open chest cavity between my legs.
"Oh shit," I said.
"Oh shit's right," someone said, and slugged me solid right in the temple.
What'd they do? What do you think they done? They dragged my ass to the station and worked me over with a rubber hose. Ripped out my adenoids. Showered me with the old lead sprinkler. They could have saved their breath. I had no intention of lying. I wanted them fuckers to know what I done. Maybe they'd see the light. Maybe they'd understand that I was actually trying to help them out. So that's why when the beatings stopped and my face had time to unswell, and they hauled me into a little room with a bright light overhead and a two-way mirror (you seen TV), and the one cop was breathing down my neck and the other acting all official and polite, and they asked me "Did you fucking do this shit?" I said, "Yeah, I fucking did that shit" and that was that.
I don’t think the cops expected me to do that, kill their boy so soon. I think they thought they were going to do some serious investigating, whip up the media, maybe fabricate an event, something they could use during an election year. They certainly didn’t think any of theirs was going to die, and if they did, they didn’t think it’d be as unpleasant as the way I made it. The guilt must have been phenomenal. The one I killed was fresh out of the academy. Top of his class. Asshole tighter than a corncob. True blue, him, and his dumbass superiors set him up to be gutted like an animal.
I seen the realization dawn on them right then and there in the interrogation room. Their eyes went dead, and they broke out another round of rubber hoses and wooden clubs and brass knuckles and beat the ever-loving shit out of me, punched my half-swole eyes until they was fully swole, pummeled my bread-basket until it was mush. When it was all done and I wasn't nothing more than a bloody pulp, they drug me down to the deepest, darkest, dankest part of the jailhouse, threw me in the moldiest cell, slammed the door, cut out the lights, and marched off, slapping each other on the back and giving each other hand jobs. Okay, maybe they wasn’t giving each other hand jobs, but they was jerking each other off. I’d like to say I took it all professional, but I was scared out of my mind. I soiled myself silly. Them fuckers threw away the key. I was gonna die down there. I curled up on the thin mattress in the corner and cried myself to sleep.
The main think I had was "what happened?" Why didn’t they parade me around in shackles? Publish my picture in the newspapers? Slap me in the chair and let me do the electric jiggle on live television? I’ll tell you why. Because things didn’t turn out the way they planned. Because I didn’t do it the way they wanted me to. Because I didn’t follow the rules, didn’t fit into a box, and that makes normals itch, and no matter what anybody tells you, no matter how many times they say "live your dreams and be an original," they don't mean it true. Sure, live your dreams. Sure, be an original. But don't do nothing too dreamy or original or you'll freak us the fuck out and we'll throw you in the dungeon.
And that's all it was, them sticking me in that cell. Fear. Pure fear. I educated them on the limits of all that freedom they said they loved so much, and all the sudden they started to think maybe too much of it wasn't such a good idea, that were was people like me who took them serious, took them at their word, who didn’t give a fuck. That scared the crap out of them more than anything else, because where there was one dumb enough or sloppy enough to get caught doing the kinds of things I done, there were probably a hundred more waiting in the wings, just itching to cut and slash and slaughter, and once they seen what the people in charge had in store for them, who do you think they’d be coming for?
Well that wouldn’t do.
That wouldn’t do at all.
Fortunately, there was another group of people that'd took notice of my talents. Powerful people. People like me. Violent, ageless. Better than that, they were from the Neighborhood. Not the neighborhood, the Neighborhood. There's a difference. What's the differ . . . ? Just give me a minute. You'll see.
One morning after breakfast (a rotten orange and moldy bread) I got a knock on my cell all polite like, like I had a choice not to answer.
"Yeah?" I croaked.
The voice on the other side sounded like the streets. Asphalt and brick. Dumpsters in alleys.
"That you?"
I worked my jaw and it clicked.
"Yeah it’s me."
"Lemme in."
"What do you mean, lemme in’? I’m in here. You’re out there."
"No. You’re in there, and I’m out here."
"Six to one, and go fuck yourself." A pause. "Please."
Another pause. Then the guy said, "You gonna let me in or what?"
Seeing as I’d just spent the last few weeks getting my adenoids ripped out, I really didn’t feel like screwing around, you know? "Remember what I said before about 'go fuck yourself'?"
He laughed. Can you believe that shit? Laughed.
"That’s a good one," he said. "Good to maintain a sense of humor. But you know what? You ain’t got no manners."
"I got plenty manners. For example, I said, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ then I added ‘please’."
The silence on the other side of the door hung thick in the air. A mausoleum at midnight.
He said, "Maybe I’ll come back another time."
His footsteps clopped away down the hall.
"Hey, I can be good!" I cried. "You come in here and I’ll give you a shot of my bologna, how about that!" I couldn’t stop laughing. "Oh sure, I got some cheese to go with it, too. And a little grease for extra flavor!"

After that, nobody came to visit no more. They stopped everything, the beatings, the food, everything. The former was a relief, the latter, a problem. I got creative. You ever eat a spider? It’s not as traumatic as people think. I mean, sure, you gotta, you know, actually eat a spider, but then the stomach acid burns it to bits and you’re ready for more. I became quite the arachnid connoisseur. Never reached Renfield status, but after ten days, twelve days, thirty days—who the fuck knew—I decided that, yeah, there really wasn’t going to be a trial, and, sure, there really wasn’t going to be no electric chair, neither, but the cell? The cell was my sentence. Twelve feet by twelve feet of eternal punishment. Four water-stained walls, a gray, concrete slab, a metal bed bolted into the wall, and that slate iron door.
So I ate spiders.
And flies. And silverfish. And cockroaches. And ants. And anything else that showed up. Catching a rat was like Christmas dinner.
Years passed, I guess. I stopped keeping track. Toward the end there, though, I couldn’t really tell what was what no more. I can’t remember when I started seeing things, but I started seeing things. Entire cities demolished by a ball of fire. Houses swallowed by earthquakes. Children snatched from porches. At first, I knew it wasn’t real, then I thought it might be real, then I wasn’t sure no more, and at a certain point, it didn’t matter. There it was, and I was seeing it, so it was real.
And then one day the guy came back.
I was standing on my bed trying to coax a roach into my cupped hand when the knock came at the door again. I eyeballed it. Thought for a second. Almost had the fucker. Just. One. More. Second.
Another knock came and I said, "Just a minute."
The third knock came harder, and my hand shifted and the roach scurried up and away into a crack in the mortar and I pounded the cinderblock with my fist, crying "Motherfucker!" I turned my anger at the door. "You sonofabitch! You just cost me my lunch!"
"Tsk tsk," the guy said. "I see we haven’t learned our manners yet, have we?"
I stared at that friggin door a long, long time. Sometimes when things started talking to me, if I stared at them long enough without saying nothing, they went away. So I stood there kind of hunched, my hands held up like I was about to pounce, my stringy hair covering my eyes. What was left of my prison uniform hung in tatters off my shoulders, and I didn’t have no hips left, so I had to make a belt out of a strip of one of the pant legs to keep them from falling off. Not that it mattered. When the guy didn't speak again, I relaxed.
Phew, I thought. He wasn’t rea—
"Hello?" he called. "You still there?"
"Oh," I said. "It’s you."
He snickered.
"Yeah. It’s me. You want to let me in now?"
"We gonna have this conversation again?" I sat down on my metal bed.
"I guess we are. So what’s it gonna be?"
"Let’s see. How’s it go again? You want me to let you in, but you’re out there and I’m in here."
"Noooo . . ."
"Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m in here and you’re out there. Still don’t change nothing."
"I don’t begrudge you your bitterness."
"Bitterness? Bitterness? You got any idea how long I been down here? Because I don’t. You should get a look at me. I’m a ghost. A fucking wraith. And all for what? Getting rid of the scum who did what they done to them poor kids? I was helping them out! And they locked me away!"
There was a long pause after that, and ice started to form in my belly. Did I scare him off? Right when I was about to plead with whoever it was not to go, he said, "You mind I can ask you a question?"
Oh thank fuck.
"Go ahead."
"You ever wonder if there was other people out there like you?"
I thought for a minute.
"Like scraggly macs who's been thrown in a hole until the sun explodes?"
"I think you know what I mean."
I took a deep breath.
"Yeah," I said. "The thought did cross my mind from time to time."
"That’s good. That’s real good. So you wanna let me in or what?"
"I can’t," I whispered.
"What’s that?"
"I said I can’t!"
"Oh yes you can. Yes you can. All you go to do is stand up and open the door."
"But it’s locked! They locked me up! They threw me down here and melted the key!"
"So you won't do it?"
"The door. Is. LOCKED!"
"Is it? You ever try opening it?"
The fuck was he talking about? Of course I’d tried opening it. I hung on the handle until my fingers broke, kicked it until my toes bled. Or maybe not. Who knew. One second oozed into the next down there. I could cup my hands against the wall for hours, waiting for a beetle to crawl into it, or lick at the water trail until my jaw ached, and I wouldn’t know if it was the next day or the next week.
"I dunno," I said. "Maybe I haven’t."
"Well, why don’t you give it a shot? If it opens, great. If it don't, well, it ain't like you'd be any more disappointed than you already is."
That was some hot logic right there. Couldn't even start to think of an argument against it, so I said, "Okay."
I stood up shaky and shuffled toward it, and the whole time I'm thinking, "It’s a joke. The fucking fuck is fucking with me." I knew that when I grabbed it, I’d feel the metal in my fingers, the same icy handle that I’d been yanking on for years (or hadn’t been), and once again I’d push on it, and once again it’d creak and whine, and once again it wouldn’t open. And then that son of a bitch on the other side would laugh and laugh, and I'd scream until my voice gave out.
Well. No time like the present, right?
I put my hand on the handle.
I pushed down.
You can imagine my surprise when, with a rusty squeal, the frigging door swung in at me.