At The Bottom

“I think you complain just to hear yourself talk.”

They have to be near the right place. The unnerving feeling in her stomach and the familiarity of the trees tells her that much. She finally sees the headstone, feeling as much relief as she can in this place. It pulls at her mind like some unseen portal threatening to pull her into another world full of horror. She thinks that if she spends too much time dwelling on the idea, that it might be enough to drag her in. She tries to clear her head but the cloying sensation won’t entirely leave.

“There it is.” She says.

Barbra pushes a bough aside and looks at the face of her father’s granite marker. It hadn’t changed in all the years that had passed. And she had a memory of her father’s lifeless face as he lay in the open casket at the funeral home. He didn’t look restful, despite the embalmer’s hard work, he looked dead. She’d looked at her father’s father, sitting beside her during the service, and thinking that dead and old didn’t look the same. You’d think that when you were a child, because only old people died. But it wasn’t only old people. Anyone could die. She could die. That thought terrified her. No matter how much she went to church, she couldn’t believe her fear away. She lost her father and gained a pervasive uneasiness that hadn’t ever gone away.

She briefly thought of what may rest in the satin lined box, buried in its concrete vault six feet below the yellowing grass before her. The mental image of the last memory of her father’s face turned from dead to dead and old.

Barbra shudders, if Johnny noticed she hoped he would attribute it to the coldness of the day. She watched him lean down and stake the prongs of the wreath into the ground.

“I wonder what happened to the one from last year. Each year we spend good money on these things, and come out here, and the one from last year’s gone.”

“Well the flowers die and the caretaker or somebody takes them away.”

Johnny finishes planting the wreath, his care in placing it endearing him in Barbra’s heart. He could complain a lot, but Johnny never failed to move in the right ways. She couldn’t recall her father well but thought, maybe this is what he was like. Without all the griping.

“Yeah, a little spit and polish, you can clean this up, sell it next year. Wonder how many times we bought the same one?”

Johnny stands up and walks away from the grave, his ceremonial contribution terse and pragmatic but complete. Barbra’s approach is less subtle. She knees to pray, focusing on honoring her father’s spirit and the coolness of the grass instead of the chill that threatens to shake her from her spine.

Johnny watches and puts his gloves back on, ready for the long drive home.

She begins to pray silently to the heavenly father, asking to convey her love and appreciation and asking for strength in all things.

“Hey, come on Barb, church was this morning, huh?”

Thunder and lightning crash nearby and Johnny looks up at the sky. As he looks back down he sees a man in a suit walking among the gravestones several rows away.

“Hey, I mean praying’s for church, huh? Come on.”

“I haven’t seen you in church lately.”

Johnny scoffs. She hadn’t seen him at church for Easter or even Christmas for what must have been at least ten years. He had waited until church service was over this morning to see their mother. Barbra, again, had to take her by herself.

“Well, there’s not much sense in my going to church.”

Johnny has his own recollections of the day they buried their father. Instead of feeling somber he smirks.

“Do you remember one time when we were small, we were out here? It was from right over there. I jumped out at you from behind the tree. And grandpa got all excited, and he shook his fist at me, and he said, ‘Boy, you be damned to hell.’” Johnny imitates his grandfather and laughs.

Barbara isn’t amused, she remembers. It isn’t why she’s afraid of this place, but it’s a small part.

“Remember that? Right over there. Well, you used to really be scared here.” Johnny says.

Barbara wraps up her prayer, she had prayed at church this morning, but it didn’t feel like enough with her father’s grave before her.

She stands up and walks away, having gotten as far as she had mentally prepared to get. She hadn’t imagined the walk back to the car and tried to think of the warm air pumping in as Johnny wheeled the Pontiac back to Pittsburgh.

“Johnny.” She says, trying to act colder than she is.

“Hey, you’re still afraid.”

“Stop it now. I mean it.”

She walks quickly away, thinking, heat and warmth. If they can only get out of here everything will be better. Johnny smirks behind her.

He knows he shouldn’t hound her, he can feel that he can stop at any moment. But it feels like he’s a shark sensing blood in the water, only he’s sensing fear. And it seems silly to him, she can’t be serious. Who could really be afraid of a graveyard? It’s so childish and weepy. Well, he thinks, if she can behave like a kid so can he. After all, its only the two of them out here, except for the man pacing the graves. And he wouldn’t care, he’s wearing a suit, obviously here mourning some loved one or another.

“They’re coming to get you, Barbra.”

“Stop it! You’re ignorant.”

“They’re coming for you, Barbra.”

Johnny crouches and pulls himself along a headstone, trying to effect his best impression of the ghastly narrators from the now defunct EC comics. Channeling The Haunt of Fear and Tales from the Crypt he presses on.

“Stop it! You’re acting like a child.”

“They’re coming for you.”

Johnny looks to the side and sees the man in the suit walking closer. Christ, he thinks, she’ll probably even be terrified of this old guy. He’ll show her who’s acting like a child when she gets to feeling foolish. He can only imagine the look on the old man’s face when Barbra chirps like a bird.

“Look! There comes one of them now.”

“He’ll hear you.”

Johnny grabs Barbara’s arms, feigning terror.

“Here he comes now. I’m getting out of here.”

Johnny playfully runs past the man, hoping he will run into Barbra. It seems that he’s heading that way. Odd. Maybe he’s here to see someone buried under the tree.

“Johnny!”

Barbara, embarrassed and terrified tries not to meet the gaze of the man as he approaches.

He lunges for her, grasping for her neck. Now she sees the sick yellow complexion of his skin, his sunken eyes and registers his torn suit. He tries to drag her to the ground and she struggles to keep her feet, heart hammering so hard she can’t hear anything else.

This is it, she thinks, its worse than I imagined. I must be asleep. Despite that last idea, resignation never occurs to her. It never occurs to her that any time she’s died in a dream she’s always jolted awake, frightened yes, but safe.

“Johnny! Help me!”

Johnny throws himself on the man and pushes his arms away from Barbara. Johnny knows a practical joke when he sees one. He’s the king of practical jokes. And this guy isn’t kidding around. He couldn’t explain the man’s motivations and didn’t have time to think of what they may be.

Barbra runs away, gaining enough distance to feel safe in turning around. She watchs Johnny and the man struggle. There’s no one else around, no one who can help. Johnny is the helper. But who is going to help Johnny?
She clutches at a mausoleum and watches, helpless to do anything else, frozen to the spot, certain the man will give up soon. They’ll have a terrifying story to tell and the ride home will be blessedly quiet, but they’ll be okay. Johnny has to be okay.

The man lunges and tries to bite Johnny. Johnny wretches back, unable to break free from the vicelike grip of the hands that have caught him.

Johnny’s pop bottle glasses are raked from his face and he can’t see. He can’t see and he can’t find his footing, they’re dancing like a drunken Fred Astaire bumbling through In the Mood with an even more inebriated partner. He reels back.

Johnny knocks the man down and tries to punch him but his sense of depth has left him and he misses. The man gets back up and latches on again. Single-mindedly the man’s cold fingers dig into his flesh and tear at his clothes. They dance again and Johnny’s dress shoes catch on something, he has no idea what. And it doesn’t matter.

They fall together and Johnny’s head thumps loudly on a jutting gravestone. He hears the sound for a moment, before the world winks out. Bang. Like a firework but without the ephemeral tracers, as the powder fizzles out and the retinas work to release the echoes of the burst.

Johnny doesn’t move. Her Johnny is laying on his side with the man on top of him, and he isn’t moving.

Thunder and lightning boom as the man lifts his face, bearing his teeth at Barbara. He pushes off and lurches past Johnny’s limp body.

If he didn’t hit the round part hard enough against the rim of the bowl or failed to move fast enough, they would leak all over the place. It was a mess that was hard to clean, especially if he waited too long. The burgundy fluid stained everything it touched and the giant hated having to clean those spills. And no matter how many thousands of the fuzzy orbs he had cracked, he would still have accidents.

Crack. Another meatball plops into the bowl and he tosses the husk into the fire of his stone cooking stove.

There were furious little teeth in the round parts that would latch onto the ridges of his fingerprints, harmlessly pulling away flakes of his skin. He would flick them and that seemed to settle them down enough so he could continue cracking the fuzzy round orbs.

Crack. He grunts, looking down in dissatisfaction. The squirming thing in his hand had turned as he swept it down toward the bowl and he had managed to only create a gaping hole where the thing’s mouth had been.

Crack. One more meatball for the bowl and another limp husk to pop and simmer in the rolling fire.

Sometimes they would clump together, like a roux when the stew has gotten too thick. He would shake their box for a few seconds or break them apart with a paddle. Both methods of loosening the clumps would elicit high-pitched screams and he didn’t care for that. And when he used the paddle their limbs would sometimes come off, causing them to leak. They were always leaking something.

Crack.

Making fresh meatballs was a chore but it is his favorite dish. He resigned himself to the fuss and mess, hearing the rumbling in his stomach. He imagined the sautéed meatballs in brown gravy and his mouth began to water, a trickle of saliva running from the corner of his mouth.

Crack. He guessed that there were at least sixty of the succulent meatballs in the bowl now, the remainder of his night harvest huddled in the corners of the box.

He plucked one of the tiny, delicate ones with no hair from one of the round long-haired ones. The long-haired one made an exceptionally high and annoying sound. He pressed a finger into the bottom half of the mewling one until it crumpled against the side of the box and he felt a sensation like grinding rocks. The mewling stopped.

Crack.