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Twenty-Nine
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House of Sighs Twenty-Eight:
TWENTY-EIGHT:CampDiana awoke to the sound of seven gossiping friends. Two older teenagers slept on the other side of the cabin. She liked the counselors, idolized them—they didn’t judge, or bicker as much as she and her friends did. They respected each other, and Diana liked that about them.This would be her final year at summer camp.She planned to go for a swim, to help the younger visitors at meal times and take part in whatever activities were scratched on the chalkboards. Breakfast was in the dining room at eight. Large, wooden tables covered in toast and fruit. Diana played with her food and laughed when a slice of orange hit the cheek of a girl next to her. The culprit was nowhere to be seen. By nine o’clock she and the girls were in the canoes, life jackets around their necks. The girls talked about how cute the male counselor was. Twelve thirty rolled by and lunch disappeared down hungry mouths, boys made farting sounds, counselors huddled together and commented on the
House of Sighs Twenty-Seven
TWENTY-SEVEN—hard against the bus floor. Incredible pressure in her bladder.Screams all about her. The old woman, whose name she couldn’t remember, had her hands over her eyes and was kneeling in the aisle, rocking. She looked so sad, and Diana was scared for her, though not for herself.The man with the big veins in his arms, the one with a goatee, ran past her in dreamy slow motion, and jumped into the stagnant air.***Jack landed hard on his feet. The faggot ran wildly around the back of the bus, thumping against the seats and windows. The faggot was everything wrong in the world. Sure, his eyes might look sympathetic and everything, but Jack saw him for what he really was: the conspirator in all things weak and lost. The faggot was the enemy, more than anything else. The faggot was the driver; the faggot was the dead kid, splattered on the road; the faggot was the driver’s brother; the faggot was everyone but Jack, the only sane person left in this wasteland. The faggot was
House of Sighs Twenty-Six
TWENTY-SIXJack drove his fist into Michael’s face, watched the kid crumble to the floor and then jumped on him, arms thumping away. Michael kicked out in defense, one foot connecting with the base of his attacker’s jaw. That he connected at all was luck alone.The sound of a hundred busting soda cans under the heels of a hundred drunken men, followed by the tinkle of glass, exploded through Jack’s head. He faltered, clutching at the already forming welt, and watched the faggot wriggling out from under his knees.***Jed stood on the hood of his destroyed pickup. In his hands, he held the hammer, ribbons of hair clotted on its head. He pulled himself up onto the roof of the bus, which was white and reflected what little light remained in the day. The clouds were at the point of breaking, weeping. Wind shook the trees through the valley. As Jed slid across the surface of the bus, he left a snail trail of gore in his wake. Dirt blew against his face, although it was no longer a face,
House of Sighs Twenty-Five:
TWENTY-FIVE:HomeJed, who had run ahead of the rest, burst through the door, trembling and out of breath. The smell within hit him hard, offending and displacing his senses. Butcher shop stink. Blood. Raw meat. Shit. It wasn’t just the room that smelled, but he, also.Violent afternoon cartoons played too loud from the television. It was getting dark quick and the first hailstones were pelting the corrugated roofing, filling the house with hollow pot-and-pan rumblings.Curtains billowed, signaling the arrival of rain.Reggie cradled Liz between her legs by the kitchen door, hugged her from behind, an awkward bundle of limbs rocking to and fro.She was conscious of the flesh in her hands, the sensation of her skin pressing against her daughter’s dead weight, but her mind was mostly empty.Once, she’d entertained the thought of being a teacher, only like most of her aspirations, it never eventuated. Instead, Reggie bounced between office work and retail, never quite happy. As a c
House of Sighs Twenty-Four
TWENTY-FOURSarah tripped over the threshold and fell into the living room. Her glasses were back in the bus, and the heavy crucifix slapped against the side of her face. Though her vision blurred, the mother and daughter could be clearly viewed in their embrace across the room. It was like something from the Francis Bacon paintings her children had studied at school, the ones that upset her so much she’d written to the principal requesting the artist be removed from the curriculum. What she saw now was a grotesque knit-work of meats, impassioned and ungodly.It made her sick.As Sarah crawled across the musty carpet, Michael entered behind her, hands still on his head. Like Jed, the first thing he noticed was the smell. As a child, he’d talked his mother into buying him two pet mice for his birthday. This room smelled like the cage his pets called home—musty newspapers and urine and captivity and blood. Because unknown to his poor mother, one of the mice was cannibal, and it ate th
House of Sighs Twenty-Three
TWENTY-THREEUpstairs, Jed threw the bathroom door open and the handle smashed the wall. Almost slipped on the tiles. Panting hard, fast. Locked himself in. Scolding vomit threatened to rise in his throat again, so he grabbed the porcelain washbasin to steady himself. What he saw in the mirror made him recoil.The reflected man couldn’t be him.This man’s skin was covered in matted bits and pieces of other people.A murderer.Jed laughed. No, he wasn’t a murderer. He was a youngish, fucked up, average guy. If anything, his worst crime was being a cliché, not a killer. He’d seen enough movies to know that murderers lurked in the dark, sharpening their knives; they danced in the moonlight wearing their mother’s clothes and made lampshades from the skins of their victims.He was just Jed.History wouldn’t remember him—he wasn’t some future horror icon.I’m as common as the cold.The man in the mirror was someone special.“So you can’t be me.”Jed pulled his shirt over his head,
House of Sighs Twenty-Two
TWENTY-TWOSarah nuzzled Michael’s neck.He smells like Bill. Perhaps the two men even shared the same taste in cologne. Was it Old Spice, she wondered, or maybe Imperial Leather?Something with a ship on the bottle, sails unfurled and billowing in a breeze. It didn’t matter either way in the end; this wasn’t an attractive evocation. If anything, the familiarity startled her—and then it dawned why. These matching colognes were artificialities masking the natural, a musk to hide almost dead things, to hide fear.Bill.Thirty-nine years of marriage. While the majority of that time had been well spent, the skeleton of their relationship weathered dislocations more than once. In 1960, Bill, for some reason, thought it was okay to indulge in his newfound penchant for younger women. Caught in the act, he said that regardless of the error, his heart was hers forever, but owning it came with a caveat: he demanded she acquiesce and accept his flaws. Only human. Humans made mistakes. Bill com
House of Sighs Twenty-One
TWENTY-ONEReggie caressed the air where her daughter’s cheeks should have been, were she to still possess a face. “Don’t look, baby,” she said, her voice syrupy with phlegm. “Daddy’s got his gun. Who’re these friends you’ve brought home? You should have told me so I could’ve had dinner cooked for them.”Wes stood over the remaining passengers as they dropped to their knees. He felt dissociated from what was happening, the gun a strange weight in his double grip—it teemed with energy he didn’t think could be controlled. Comprehending what he had done proved a struggle, let alone what he knew he was about to do. That awareness sparked from a simple question, one he kept circling back around to: Who were these strangers, these people with their grotesque pantomimes and prayers? A shudder ripped through him, and Wes’s mind re-entered his body. The answer didn’t matter anymore. And he wanted it to stay that way.He gripped the gun, sneered. It was he who couldn’t be controlled, not it.
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