Sometimes I dream I'm being chased by fanged macaroni. They vary in form from four-legged to winged, or sometimes they move around like snakes, their burning eyes singeing my skin when their gaze touches my bare back. When they latch onto me with barbed teeth, it's strangely erotic. The pounding blood in my ears is reminiscent of bleating sheep, lulling me off into complete darkness.

  "Sir?"

  When I open my eyes, the stewardess is leaning over the end seat in the next row up, gazing at me with a big pearly smile.

  "We're descending into Omaha, so please bring your seat into its upright position."

  I incline my seat and think about... flank steak. I glance out the window, half expecting to find winged macaroni swooping past. But all I see is my reflection staring back at me, and the patch of slightly discolored skin under my right eyebrow looks a little darker than normal. I touch it, as if to make it disappear, then close the plastic blind as I rub my nose and sniffle.

  It's a six-hour drive from Eppley Airfield to my mother's house in Callaway, so I stop at a Denny's to pick up some dinner. While a team of high school football players decked out in grass-stained uniforms and muddy cleats stuff down greasy cheeseburgers at a long line of tables in the middle of the dining room, I unfold my copy of the Los Angeles Times and sip coffee between bites of sirloin. The rabble's laughter distracts my attention, but I do my best to block it all out as I skim the columns. I pause at an article on page five headlining "Kids Find Sixth Body Floating in LA River." Taking out my Swiss Army Knife key chain, I carefully cut out the column.

  The blonde-haired waitress comes over with the coffeepot. She'd be pretty if she lost fifty pounds. "More coffee, Sweetie?" she asks.

  "Please." I smile, folding up the article and tucking it into my wallet.

  She smiles back and I stare at her gold nametag with a butterfly sticker in the corner; Lynette is her name. "Is the steak all right?" she asks.

  "It's fine, thank you."

  "You want some pie?"

  I shrug. "What do you recommend?"

  "The apple comes with a scoop of vanilla ice cream."

  "I'm not big on dairy products."

  "The blueberry's good, and fresh out of the oven. Microwave that is," she chuckles.

  I smile back at her as I order a slice of blueberry pie, and when she brings it to me, I devour it in three bites and sop up the rest of my steak juice with a piece of bread. Then I go into the bathroom and lock myself in the far stall. Using my Platinum Visa card and a rolled up fifty, I do a line of coke I smuggled past airport security in soluble capsules I keep in a Valium bottle. Afterwards, I pay my bill and leave Lynette a nice tip and get on my way, driving down the interstate at ninety miles an hour in my indigo rental Accord, blaring my Rick Springfield's Greatest Hits CD.

  I arrive at my mother's house by ten PM and pull up in front of the ragged farmhouse my father built after he came back from Vietnam. My older brother Willard sits on the porch steps, smoking a cigarette and he barely spares me a glance as I take my bags from the trunk. Our seven-year age difference shows in his sagging face, yellowed teeth, and wiry hair.

  "Well, it's about time you came to see Mom, you loser." He says, gazing at me over the glow of his Marlboro as I approach. "Mom's already in bed but she wanted me to wait up for you."

  Willard holds the door open for me while I drag my suitcase inside. There are only two bedrooms and Mom set out blankets and pillows for me on the cramped two-person couch. Without another word, Willard slinks up to bed in the room we shared as kids, and I stretch out on the couch, my feet dangling over the armrest. The musty smell I knew so well as a boy is still here, clinging to the blanket, pillows, the couch, and the air.

  Tonight I dream about mice flooding the house, millions of tiny feet scurrying over my body. They carry me away on a furry wave, chanting in a chorus of squeaks, "Holden is a sissy! Look at him squirm! Swallow it down you little wimp!" They giggle and lock me in the barn out back.

~

  The next morning, my Mom comes downstairs and wraps her frail arms around me, blessing Jesus that I've finally come home to her. Liver-spotted skin hangs loosely from her arms and face and splotchy-white cataracts gaze out under droopy eyelids. As a boy, I loved how my mother's hair reminded me of autumn leaves on the Elm tree in the front yard. But stringy clumps of silver have replaced it and with her toothless smile, she reminds me of an exhumed corpse. Mom asks about my trip, her ancient breath raising the flesh on my neck and I wish she'd get her decaying hands off me. She shuffles to the kitchen, still clutching my shirtsleeve and gives me a bucket from under the sink. "Be a good boy and help your brother with the chores."

  Slamming the screen door, I pause on the porch steps and stare out into the yard, half expecting to find the old barn gone. But there it is, with weather-beaten door and warped wood siding, just like I remember it. I rub gently at the tiny scar on my right eye as it begins to itch.

~

  Since the school bus wouldn't arrive for another half-hour, I had plenty of time to check the mousetraps that Mom set up to catch the mice who were robbing the feedbags in the barn. The first three had their tiny skulls crushed under the metal bars and the head of the fourth one was detached and laying on floor, its tongue lolling out its open mouth. But I found a live one in the last trap, its hind leg fractured, and splintered knee bones sticking out. I put on a pair of my father's work gloves and carried the trap to the workbench where Dad kept the hammer and nails.

  I nailed the trap to the barn wall, dangling the mouse a couple centimeters above the ground then took out the seven books of matches I swiped from the kitchen. I tore the flaps off of six of them and lined the books up in three neat rows of two, match heads pointing towards the barn wall. The mouse kicked with its one good leg as I struck a match from the seventh book and used it to light the other eleven matches. Settling belly-down on the dirt floor, I set the flaming matches down on the end of the top row of matchbooks and watched the fire travel. In a matter of minutes, all seven books were aflame and the mouse squeaked and kicked, struggling to pull its dangling front legs and head out of the flames. I smiled, the blood pounding in my temples.

  "What the fuck are you doing?"

  I turned to see Willard standing behind me, dressed in his school clothes and holding a milk bucket. My mouth moved, but no words came out as he picked me up by the seat of my pants and flung me on top of the matches. I squealed as the fire bit into my face, but the rising dust quickly extinguished the flames. He shoved me over on my back and straddled my waist while I screamed and beat on his chest. He ripped the trap off the wall and dangled the squirming mouse over me. When I turned away, he grabbed my nose and dragged my head back.

  "Open your mouth, Holden, you little pyro-freak!"

  I shook my head, squeezing my eyes shut and he pinched my nose. I held my breath.

  "I'm going to teach you a lesson about torturing little animals, you weenie!" Willard said, letting the mouse scrap its tiny claws over my lips.

  I thrashed around until I gasped for a breath, thinking that maybe I could close my mouth again before he could do anything. But the next thing I knew, the rodent was in my mouth and Willard held my jaw shut. I kicked and clawed, but my ten-year-old arms were too short to reach his face.

  "Chew him up and eat him, you little asshole! You know you want to!" he laughed.

  Tears streamed down my cheeks. The rodent frantically clawed and gnawed at my teeth.

  "If you're going to torture animals, I'm going to torture you, you little puke! How do you like that, huh? Is he biting your tongue off yet?"

  I slugged Willard in the chest and he smashed my groin with his knee.

  "You eat him and I won't beat shit out of you, Holden."

  I wanted to kill my brother, but he'd whipped me for lesser things than torturing mice. He played linebacker on the high school football team, and outweighed me by nearly a hundred pounds.

  I tried not to think when I bit down on the mouse's head, crushing the bones between my teeth, but I couldn't help imagining the guts sliding down my throat, bone shards scraping their way down. I swallowed. Willard finally left me go and I burst out crying.

  "Now milk the cows and go clean yourself up." He kicked dirt at me. "The school bus will be here in twenty minutes and if you miss it, I will whoop you."

  "Fuck you!" I blubbered.

  Willard spent the next ten minutes beating the crap out of me.

~

  Now I walk into the barn, still fingering the scar, and stand behind Willard while he milks a ratty Holstein, and I entertain the idea of bashing in the back of his head with my milk pail.

  But he turns to look at me. "What do you want?"

  "Mom said I should help."

  He relinquishes the milking stool to me. "You remember how to do it, don't you?"

  I sit down. "Of course I do." Grabbing two nipples, I yank down and the cow groans.

  Willard punches my shoulder. "Be gentle, Holden." He shows me how to do it and I want to slap him. "So, you're a hotshot lawyer over in that big city of yours, huh?" He leans against the wall.

  "An entertainment lawyer," I reply.

  "Would figure you'd do something useless."

  "At least I'm not stuck here in Podunk Land," I say, "where the college football team provides the only excitement."

  Chuckling, Willard says, "Football will make a man out of you. Hell, if I hadn't hurt my back, I could have gone pro."

  Yeah, right you could have, you fucking loser. I turn to stare at him. "No one said you had to get that lame-ass liberal arts degree that can't even get you a job at Burger Haven. You should have gone into law or something."

  Willard glares at me. "I know you think you're the Lord's gift to this world, but Mom sure as hell couldn't rely on you to take care of the farm after Dad died."

  I hand him a full bucket and start on the next. "I have no regrets, Willard."

  "Every time America's Most Wanted comes on, I watch for your profile, but it looks like you didn't turn into a weirdo after all. I had my doubts, what with that animal fetish of yours and the run-in with the law your senior year--"

  "I was cleared of all wrongdoing."

  "Like I said, I had my doubts, but it looks like you turned out all right, even if you do something completely useless for a living."

  "What I do has a purpose." My eyes are fixed on the cow's udder.

  "Hurry up with that milk. Mom's making strawberry waffles this morning."

~

  After breakfast, Mom goes back upstairs to rest, and Willard drives into town to buy a turkey for dinner. I lay on the couch, unable to take my eyes off the pictures on the walls.

  There's one of me at age four sitting on a rocking horse, a cowboy hat sagging over my brow and toy pistols in a cheap vinyl holster hanging from my hips. I stare fearfully at the camera, grasping a swirled lollipop in my hands. As soon as the picture was taken, Dad took the sucker from me, saying sugar would rot my brain. Fifteen minutes later, he bought Willard a Hershey bar at the drugstore down the street and when I asked why he got a candy bar, Dad whipped me good and told me to shut my yap. "When you can pull your weight around the farm, like your brother does, then you can have stuff. But until then, stop your bawling."

  There's a picture of Willard and I standing in front of the Christmas tree when I was seven, each of us holding our favorite gifts. Willard holds a Daisy Rider BB gun and I have a Chipmunks Sing the Beatles LP. The next day, Willard stole my record and used it for target practice. I tried to stop him but he pushed me to the ground and slugged me in the gut with the butt of the rifle. "Mom and Dad hate you!" he screamed. "They never wanted you, and they only kept you because they had to!" He made me eat a fistful of dirt, and nailed my record to the split rail fence, shredding it to bits with twelve shots of his gun. "Nobody will ever love you!"

  Next is a picture of Willard and Mom and me standing in front of Dad's two prize-winning steers at the county fair when I was ten. On the north side of the fair grounds was a cave with an entrance big enough to crawl into and a tunnel leading to a big open chamber. Willard said a girl once crawled inside and was killed by vampire bats. He dared me to stick my head into the hole and look for her bones. "I'll let you look at my Playboy if you do," he told me. I stuck my head into the dark and was just about to ask him how I could possible see anything in the pitch black when he shoved me in and wouldn't let me out. I couldn't turn around. Hearing a stirring ahead of me, I started screaming. Willard let me out when he heard Dad calling for us and when I told him about the noise, he said that it was probably a vampire, coming to suck me dry. I awoke later that night, crying from a nightmare, and he said, "I made that up, you little girl. There ain't no such thing as vampires."

  Next to that picture is a family portrait taken when I was twelve. As soon as we got home from Sears, Dad went off to the bar while Mom stayed home and cooked dinner. Around midnight, I looked out my bedroom window to see Dad's pickup truck parked out in the south field. I got dressed and went out there to find him screwing Emily from the feed store. I was so stunned by the bestial grunting and the creaking of loose shocks that I stood there and stared at Emily's straining face. When she finally saw me, she cried out, and Dad poked his head up to the window. We locked gazes for a split second before I ran back towards the house, and he chased me, struggling to pull up his overalls. He finally caught me on the back porch and dragged me over to the barn. He beat me with a switch he ripped off a tree and called me a filthy gook and said he was going to cut my throat. He gave me a black eye and a limp, and when I screamed, mom's bedroom light switched on. Poking her head out the window, she called, "Holden, is that you?" Dad's distant, wide staring eyes abruptly returned to the present, turning soft as he hugged me to his chest. "I'm sorry, Holden. I can't stop myself sometimes!" he spewed at me with rancid whiskey breath. "I don't mean any of it!" At breakfast, Mom stared at my bruised face but said nothing.

  There is also a picture of Willard at graduation from the University of Nebraska when he was twenty-three. Three months later, Dad took his pickup off a bridge while driving home from the bar in a rainstorm. Emily died that same night, under similar circumstances, but Mom didn't cry for her. I laughed during Dad's funeral service, sending Mom into hysterics, and Willard whooped me afterward. "Have some respect for the dead, you retard."

  Then there's me at high school graduation, dressed in a gray sports coat and black knitted tie that used to be Willard's, the same one I wore to Prom since Mom couldn't afford to rent a tux for me. The morning after prom, my mother awoke me from an alcohol-induced sleep and said the sheriff wanted to talk to me. She looked worried the entire time Sheriff McGregor asked me questions about my date with Sara Shepley. Where did we go after the dance? What did we do once we got to the end of the road by the Garrison's north field? "I would rather not discuss that," I said, and McGregor put me in the back of the squad car in handcuffs while my mother wept. I grinned at Willard as he glared at me from the front porch.

  Sara had showed up at the sheriff's station with her mother and father, screaming date rape and bawling about bite marks she found on her breasts when she woke up that morning. I denied all allegations, but was still charged with sexual assault. Six months later, at the trial, my lawyer broke her down on the stand and she confessed that because she'd drank quite a bit of Everclear that night, she couldn't actually remember whether or not she'd consented. She burst into tears when she saw me grinning at her.

  I left high school with a C plus average but a poor-kid's scholarship to the University of Nebraska where I became a Podunk Cornhusker along with the rest of America's losers. But there were chicks by the truckload and none of them seemed to care that I was a little weird. They didn't notice that I religiously watched a copy of Texas Chainsaw Massacre that I ripped off from a video store. And when I got them doped up enough, they'd laugh when I drowned tabby kittens in the dorm toilet. I eventually transferred to UCLA to get out of Nebraska.

  I look away from the pictures, wondering why I agreed to fly out here when Mom called. I pull the article I cut from the Los Angeles Times out of my wallet and unfold it, reading carefully. The cops still don't have any suspects. "Loser, huh?" I laugh.

~

  A knock at my Brentwood door last Saturday morning interrupted my breakfast of sunny-side-up eggs, Tabasco, and fried liver. I walked from the kitchen, still chewing, and secured the oak French doors behind me. When I opened the front door, the man standing on my front step showed his identification and introduced himself as Detective Samuel Gavin.

  "I have been hired by the family of Susie McGuiness to continue the investigation into her disappearance," he said before sitting down on my white leather couch.

  "You're not a detective for the city of Los Angeles?"

  "No, I am a private detective."

  "Isn't that kind of like a rent-a-cop?" I smirked.

  But Sam ignored the remark and took out a little green spiral notebook and flipped it to the middle. "You were Ms. McGuiness' talent agent from July of '94 until this past summer, correct?"

  I nodded.

  "How did you meet?"

  "She was recommended to me by her previous agent, who was retiring that August. We worked for the same firm."

  "Was your professional relationship with Ms. McGuiness a good one?"

  I nodded, watching him scribble in his notebook.

  "According to the police report filed with the LAPD in June, you saw her the night she disappeared."

  "That's... that's correct. She came by the house and was very upset, crying about the conviction--"

  "For drug possession?"

  "Yeah, that one. She said she couldn't take the life anymore, needed to start out fresh. I tried to talk some sense into her, but she took off anyway."

  Sam doodled in his note pad and I craned my neck to see what he was writing. When he glanced up at me, I feigned a smile. "Her parents seem to be under the impression that you know where she is," Sam said, flipping the notebook closed but holding his place with his thumb.

  "That's what they think? I don't know where she is."

  "As a matter of fact, they think you might have done something to her."

  "Like what?"

  "Do you take any illegal substances, Mr. Matthews?"

  "Do they claim I do?"

  "No, but Susie mentioned something about it in her journal, said you not only got her drugs, but sometimes you took them yourself."

  I shrugged. "So I do a little coke now and then. Who doesn't? And maybe Susie asked me to get her some."

  "Did you ever make sexual advances at her?"

  One night, when I was completely loaded on coke and Crown Royal, I told her that I was in love with her, and especially liked the shade of auburn she'd dyed her hair for her last movie. When she told me about it the next afternoon, she had a good laugh. Another time I told her that I wanted to nibble on her sweetbreads with a little bit of applesauce. "I may have said some things that could be construed as... sexual," I admitted.

  "She was thinking about firing you and getting a new agent."

  She came to the house that night in June to tell me she was going with another agent at another firm, but I talked her into staying for a drink so we could discuss it. I slipped a roofie in her Chardonnay and had my way with her while she hunched over the guest toilet, drooling. "You stupid bitch! You're so fucking third-rate that you couldn't even get work if you spread your legs on the god damn casting couch!" I kept her locked in the basement for three days until I decided what to do with her. That evening, I sat on my back porch, cooking all-meat shish kabobs on the grill and wondering not only if it was time I got off the cocaine, but also how I'd managed to get so much blood under my fingernails.

  "I didn't know that," I said, sniffling.

  "Yes, she was." Sam stared me down.

  Smiling, I said, "Well, that's news to me."

  "I'm sure."

  I glanced at my watch and said, "I hate to rush you out of here, but I have an eleven o'clock meeting. Perhaps we can continue this discussion some other time?"

  Sam stashed his notebook in his jacket pocket. "I want to schedule several hours to talk to you about this. How about tomorrow afternoon at one?"

  "I have another meeting. How about Friday night at five?"

  He left and I locked the door behind him. From the window, I watched him pull away in his rusting blue Volvo and I cursed myself for not getting the electrified security gates.

  I threw the rest of my breakfast down the garbage disposal and went to my bedroom to get dressed for a jog. I stepped over the mangled remains of some redheaded girl lying sprawled out in a puddle of blood in the middle of the marble floor. I didn't know her name. When I met her at the club last night, she said she was a vampire, but she looked more like an anorexic meerkat. I showed her who was the real vampire. While I finished dressing, the telephone rang.

  "Holden, don't you even care about your mother anymore?"

  I held the portable phone in the crook of my neck while I jimmied with my zipper. It was a little early in the year for my one telephone conversation with my mother. "Of course I care, Mom."

  "I want you come see me but you probably have too much to do in that big city of yours to care about seeing the woman who endured sixteen hours of labor for you."

  "Well, I am kind of busy, Mom."

  "For Christ sakes, Holden! It ain't like I'm going to be kicking around forever."

  "Are you sick?" I searched the top of my dresser for my college ring.

  "Two bypasses already and the witch doctors want me go in for another in two months. But I ain't doing it."

  Not finding it, I went into the bathroom and looked there. "Why not?"

  "My chances of making it out of the anesthesia this time are practically nil, and I ain't wasting Willard's hard earned money on something that'll end up killing me."

  I wanted to hang up so I could find my ring, get my jog done, and start cleaning up the mess in my bedroom, but I stayed on the line anyway. "So you're not having the surgery?" I started poking around the girl's body, wondering if my ring slipped off sometime last night.

  "The docs give me about three months to live. I don't want to die without seeing my youngest boy first. You've been away since you left for college, Holden."

  "I know." I found it under the bed.

  "Is it too much to ask to see you just once more before the Good Lord takes me?"

  I almost hissed, "Yes it is, you damn bitch!" but I bit my words and allowed a moment to compose myself. "Of course not, Mom. I will fly out tomorrow afternoon to see you... and Willard. I could use some time away."

  "You're a wonderful boy, Holden. You know that, don't you."

  I stared again at the body on the floor. "Of course I do, Mom."

~

  Mom calls for me from upstairs, and I go outside so I don't have to listen to her decaying voice. On the back porch, I pull out some coke and snort a capsule-full up each nostril.

  Walking around front, I find Willard leaning against his old red Ford truck, talking to a heavy woman dressed in a gingham dress and carrying a basket of eggs. She seems familiar and when she turns to look at me, I instantly recognize her. It's Judy Carruthers, the chick I dated through most of high school, the one who dumped me just before prom. Lucky for her. She was thin like a string of ivy back then, but now she's exploded into a slab of pork.

  "Why, my golly, Holden. I never expected to see you around here again," Judy says.

  "Just visiting," I say.

  Willard stares at me, then tells Judy he has to get the turkey inside. She waves goodbye before heading towards town. "What the hell are you doing out here anyway?" Willard asks.

  "Needed some fresh air." I watch Judy waddle down the road. "You talk to Judy often?"

  Willard goes into the house and tosses the turkey into the refrigerator. "After Mom dies, Judy and I are getting married."

  "You're marrying that fat cow?"

  "She ain't a cow, you asshole, and if you don't shut your yap, I'll do it for ya."

  Willard points a finger in my face and I think about biting it off. "Just remember who's younger here, Willard, and who could kill you before you can get your bony ass out of the way," I say.

  "You should have stayed home in the land of fruits and nuts, Holden. Judy's told me things about you."

  "I'm sure she has."

  Willard walks out to the barn and switches on the light. "We were always better off without you around, and after Mom finally goes, I have no reason to ever see you again."

  "That would be perfectly fine with me."

  "I don't know why you even came back. Are you in trouble with drugs or something? Judy told me that her older sister said you were snorting something in college."

  I smile at him and sniffle.

  "You think that's funny, huh? Shit, no wonder you ain't got no girl. But I guess when you hate yourself as much as you do, you don't really care about that kind of stuff, do ya?"

  My smile vanishes. "I'm only going to tell you this once, Willard, because you're my brother and all that." I stare at him dispassionately. "Don't fuck with me."

  "You're just jealous because Judy loves me and not you. And she never did love you, not even back when she was screwing you in high school. She only did it to get closer to me," Willard says. "And you know what else? You were one of Dad's drunken mistakes, and neither he nor Mom really wanted you but they had no choice. If it had been me, I would have dumped you in a river in a bag." Willard turns to walk away. "You're just a loser and no one will ever love you."

  I leap on his back, sending him crashing to the dirt floor and I pound his head into the ground, ripping hair out by the handful. "Who the fuck is the loser, you asshole? Some day, people will write books about me, and everyone in the world will know my name while you sit here rotting in hillbilly hell with that fat bitch Judy!" I dig my knee into his spine and pull his head up as he gasps for breath. Taking a handful of dirt, I shove it in his mouth, mashing it into his teeth and gums. His eyes roll around his head and he tries to spit, but I shatter his teeth. "And in that book will be a chapter called `The Asshole Who Created the Monster', and it will be all about you!" I hiss in his ear.

  Taking my brother to the back corner of the barn, I tie him up with some rope I find on the workbench and drag a bag of chemical fertilizer over to him. He moves his head around as I grab his cheeks to ram a fistful of fertilizer down his throat, and when I finally get some in, he spits it back out at me. I slap him and threaten to run him through with a pitchfork if he does it again. I finally get his mouth full of fertilizer and hold his jaw shut. "Now swallow! I'll teach you to torture your little brother!"

  Willard foams and flails his legs at me, fertilizer bubbling out his mouth, and when I let him go he convulses and falls onto his side. "I don't need anyone to love me, you maggot!" I say, shoving more fertilizer in his mouth until he stops moving. "Do you hear me? No one!"

  Next thing I know, I'm inside the house again, flinging my stuff into my suitcase with shaking hands. "Please don't come downstairs, Mom. Please don't," I pant under my breath. I rub my nose and start screaming at the suitcase when it won't zip.

  Mom hobbles downstairs. "What's all that racket, Holden?" she asks.

  "Go back upstairs, Mother," I say between clenched teeth.

  "Someone just called for you, a man named Detective Gavin."

  "Oh shit! What did you tell him, Mom?"

  "He wanted to know if I knew where you were, said he needed to talk to you about a Ms. McGuiness." Pulling the neck of her robe closed, Mom asks, "Are you in some kind of trouble with the law, Holden?"

  "Just go back upstairs, Mom," I say, tugging viciously at the zipper.

  "Where's your brother?"

  "Go back upstairs!"

  She stares at me with wary eyes. "What's wrong with you, Holden? You're acting like a dog with distemper. Where's Willard?"

  "Who gives a fuck where the hell he is!" I grab up my half-closed bag and head for the front door. "I hope he dies!"

  My mother gasps. "What have you done to him?"

  "Nothing he didn't deserve."

  "What have you done?" Mom holds the banister in a death grip with her gnarled fingers.

  "What do you care?" I throw my suitcase at the front door.

  She turns around and starts back upstairs. "I'm calling the police."

  Shaking my head, I say, "No, don't do anything stupid, Mom. Don't make me come after you." I go to the bottom of the stairs and call up to her, "Mother! Come back down here now!" I race up the stairs and catch her at the top.

  She shrieks, and I swing her around behind me, trying to cover her mouth. But she falls backwards down the stairs, crashing her frail body into the wall and bouncing against the banister until it flops to a halt at the bottom.

  I rush down the steps and lean over her, grabbing the banister to keep from falling over as the room spins. "Mom, are you all right?" Her washed out eyes stare right through me as I shake her. "Mother?" She still doesn't respond and I scream at her, "Now look at what you made me do, you stupid bitch!" I plant a swift kick to the side of her head. "If you'd just listened to me, but no, you never did that, did you? And look what happened!"

  I should be trying to hide the bodies right now, but instead, I grab my suitcase, clothes spilling out the open flap, and stumble out to my rental car.

  I can't get out of my head the image of my mother's dead eyes staring into me, an expression of disbelief locked on her face.

  I get into the car and tear out of the driveway, pounding on the wheel with both fists. "I'm screwed, I'm screwed, I'm screwed!" I start crying, though an occasional burst of laughter drowns out the blast of the radio, and I watch with blurry eyes as the house recedes in the rearview mirror.

~

  I end up at the same Denny's as the day before, drinking coffee and eating a turkey melt sandwich. Lynette calls me Sweetie again as she refills my cup. "That was a quick trip."

  I nod.

  "Were you here on business, or visiting family?

  "I have no family," I mutter.

  "Sorry to hear that." She tries to smile, her teeth as bleached as her hair. "Business then, huh?"

  "Unfinished business." I'm amazed at how depressed I am right now, and I toy with the medicine bottle in my jacket pocket, but decide to finish my dinner first. No use in wasting perfectly good money.

  Lynette talks me into a piece of pie again, cherry this time, and signs off my tab with a winking smiley face. She gives me an animated version of it as she slides the piece of paper to me. "Whenever you're ready, Sweetie." Sipping the last of my coffee, I watch her thick calves as she walks back into the kitchen. She's so nice. I hate her, and that fucking sweetie thing of hers. I see right through it.

  The evening news plays on the old bulky color TV hanging on the wall behind the dining counter and I stare blankly at the screen, imagining a regional reporter standing at the foot of my mother's driveway, somberly reporting a double homicide. The State Patrol shows my high school graduation photo, and the reporter interviews Judy, who babbles hysterically about finding Willard's body. Or even better yet, they profile me on America's Most Wanted, and when John Walsh asks Judy about me, she says, "In high school, we voted him most likely to face the death penalty, but we were joking of course. Who would have known?"

  I have a long trip ahead of me, so I pay my bill and get ready to leave. "Consider yourself lucky, Lynette," I mutter as I leave her a ten-dollar tip and a doodled monster devouring her smiley face.

THE END

Back to top

Copyright 1999 AZX LLC