A rabbit looks a lot smaller without its head.
“We already took him downtown. If you wanna bail him out tonight…”
It’s all in the ears. Without those, you could mistake the corpse for a woodchuck or an overfed squirrel. You might even think it was a rat if it wasn’t for the tail.
You might not even see it in the dark.
The rabbit’s throat is cut ragged though. Bits of fur are scattered around a loose pentagram of gravel in the elementary school parking lot. Some of the stones look wet.
“You know if it happens again, they aren’t going to keep looking the other way.”
This is the third rabbit in as many months. I don’t know what he does with the heads. The local cops have come to recognize the signature. We used to go to school here, back before Dad decided he was going to go work in some oil fields. Peter has painted the bricks with the rabbit’s blood. One of the officer’s is trying to wash away the ragged letters. The blood runs down through the shoddy brickwork. I pick up a few stones off the ground. They are cold.
“I know,” I say to the sergeant, the same one who calls me when Peter has broken into the hospital cafeteria or stolen all the red chillies from the Korean grocery again. The sergeant always sighs before identifying himself over the phone. “I will talk to him about it.”
“You’re going to have to do more than talk,” the sergeant says. “You’re going have to commit him or get him some help. I can’t keep writing mischief when this shit goes down.”
The red letters are five feet high. The lines fade toward the end of the phrase. A rabbit only has so much blood to give. I don’t know where he finds them in this city.
“My sister, she’s got a kid like that, you know? That’s why I wanted to give him a break. Some people just ain’t right. Not their fault. Could be something in their… uhm, DNA? You wanna call it that? Some people are just born a few pieces short of the full set, you know?”
The wall reads SATIN LIVES! in sloppy block letters. The exclamation mark is dotted with something like a skull. My brother still can’t spell.
“I know what you mean,” I say, and kick at the pentagram until it becomes a star.
• • •
When I was ten, Peter slammed my hand in the bathroom door. I think the first time it was an accident. I like to tell myself that. The next five rapid slams crushed three of my right fingers. The bones pushed through the skin. The world went red and white and he was laughing. Mom said he didn’t understand. Peter was always trying so hard to please everyone. He thought it was a good joke. He was only five. I still have my pinkie and the thumb.
After the first surgery, my Mom told me, “Everything heals given time.” When she left to go ask the doctor about my medication, Peter came over to inspect my hand. He asked me where the middle fingers were hiding. I told him they’d been swallowed up by the doctor. That they were a sacrifice to some frightening God, the same one we read about in church before Mom stopped going to Mass. Peter always liked to listen to me talk. Lying in that hospital bed, staring at what was once a hand, I told him the real reason Dad had left: he wasn’t really Peter’s father. Peter had black hair, didn’t he? He had blue eyes too, right? Dad was blonde. His eyes were green.
Peter nodded. I lay there trying to erase stories I’d heard about oil fields or Africa or the unexplored rivers of the Amazon, whatever Mom decided to tell me that week. I erased a man who liked to read me stories about monsters, about things hiding in the dark, things waiting for you to get lost in the woods or down a sewer drain. Things made of shadows and hate. He read me things about two-faced men and ancient gods bent on destruction, and then said goodbye. We moved into an apartment after that, one with heavy bathroom doors and only one window.
With sunlight filling the hospital room, I told Peter all about the demon that snuck into our house one night before he was born. The one who looked like a man, the one who made our father flee into the country or into a bottle or wherever he ended up, trussed and beaten and drowned in the Mississippi after a bet went badly. These are the things I liked to imagine.
I told Peter about the seed this man planted in our mother. I told him how it grew and grew until Peter came out screaming, covered in blood. Peter didn’t ask me any questions. His eyes didn’t grow wide and he didn’t turn away. He just nodded. I told him he was born from some beast, some creature bent on corrupting the earth. Did Peter remember church? Did he remember the speech about the mustard seeds and the weeds? Well, someone has to plant those weeds too, Peter. Someone has to spread them across the soil. Peter nodded again. You weren’t born the same way I was, I said. That’s why you like to kill the flies. That’s why you did this to my hand.
• • •
“So, we’ll hand him over to you for five hundred. Do you have that much on you?” the man behind the desk says. He doesn’t look me in the eye. He tries to avoid staring at my right hand.
I keep the money in a jar over the stove. Dina and I have gotten used to this ritual. The money usually gets returned eventually. Folding cardboard boxes all day isn’t exactly a career, but it’s full time. I work the night shift so I can keep an eye on Peter during the day. She’s still working at the pharmacy and tries to stay awake until I get home. Once Mom gave up the ghost, it fell on us to take Peter under our roof.
Houses are cheap down by the highway, and you get used to the constant thrum of traffic running up and down your spine—some new age, droning lullaby. Sometimes it drowns out Peter’s noises, the chanting or scribbling or whatever it is he’s doing in the dark. He doesn’t really sleep. He tells me he doesn’t like to close his eyes.
“You just can’t stay inside, can you buddy?” I say as we climb into the car.
“There’s too much out there to see, Al,” Peter says. His voice is still high-pitched. He sounds fourteen, but his face is pocked and pitted. “Too many things going wrong. Too many people thinking they understand how the world works. They don’t know it’s broken.”
My brother believed me about the demon thing. He swallowed the entire story and spat it up in classrooms, onto teachers’ face, students’ laps and the principal’s brand new Cadillac. He scrawled it on the pews in churches and in the middle of the street with spray paint and claw hammers. Fellow residents in the apartment building began to take the stairs when he got in the elevator. Mom got used to switching schools, driving him to doctors and psychiatrists with lots of diplomas and no explanations. Peter just told them he was born this way. He was born under a sign. He was born a weed. I looked at my hand and didn’t say a thing. The doctors never showed me how to use it, so I had to adapt on my own, growing stronger. Peter liked to watch it twitch, watch the tendons slowly return to life. He tried to hold it at night. He learned to whisper my mother’s mantra in the dark: everything heals given time.
The streets outside are wet. The blood on the school is still there though. The roads on this side of town all wind into each other, smashing stacks of row houses and tenements together. The medical clinic on the hill overlooks everything below it, surrounded by the last few apartment buildings they’ve delayed destroying until the weather improves. Those towers are empty now except for the rats and asbestos, waiting to sift its way into our lungs once they bring the stacked concrete down into organized piles. Peter keeps running his fingers over the inside of the window, playing with the condensation, drawing eyes over and over until the glass is full of accusations. I take a corner and avoid what looks like someone’s cat split in two across the dividing line. Its eyes don’t glow.
“You didn’t do that one, did you Pete?”
“Cats are my friends,” Peter says, wiping away all the eyes from the glass. “You know that.”
We pass a patch of burnt ground in between some old row houses. They are now abandoned due to smoke and water damage. The police spent three weeks harassing us about Peter, insisting he must have got out one night to start the flames. There was gasoline all over the place when the fire crews arrived. Three women and two children died from smoke inhalation. The bodies were found stacked in a pile, according to the officer who knocked at our door. Someone had planned it out in advance. Stacked like kindling were the words he used. I told them Peter didn’t do it. He never played with fire much. We kept him locked up pretty well at home. It’s mainly boy scouts who learn how to play with the flame, I told the officer. They teach those kids how to burn things down and then give them a badge for it. They even let them practice it for kicks in the woods.
“I just need to collect more seeds,” Peter says. “I want to start my own garden.”
I ignore his words and continue to drive along the jagged pavement. Mom’s grave had to be moved when they expanded the highway out here. It bypasses most of the downtown now, avoiding the coffee shops and strip joints that have congealed between empty tenements and old auto shops. They built these great big green sound barriers to keep out the noise, but those walls just toss the sound further off into nicer neighbourhoods. It’s quieter to live close to the six lanes drilled through the core of this place—an old wound reopened for a vivisection. I learn a lot of these words from Peter. His medical textbooks are filled with check marks and ancient runes. I don’t know where he finds them all, but he is still learning to read. We don’t ask a lot from him.
Our house doesn’t have any neighbours—just two plywood husks leering out into the dark. You can find us on a dead end street that backs right up onto the highway’s walls. A couple people live at the head of the street, but they gave up talking to us after their dogs started to disappear. Peter tries to be friendly, but Mom never let him out much after a generous guidance counsellor lost an ear during talk therapy. Maybe the judge took pity on him. The deal got knocked down to house arrest. Until Mom passed away, we never saw Peter outside. His only access to the world came from the sound of Mom’s television through the walls.
The nightly news informed him of broken bodies and sixteen car pile-ups somewhere down south. It highlighted epidemics sweeping foreign nations and exposed the dangerous spread of flesh-eating disease in tropical climates. People were losing limbs, eyes and their entire facial structure. The sounds gave a voice and a shape to the evils he could not see. It wormed its way through the walls and Mom’s attempt at soundproofing. When I picked up Peter two years ago, the entire bedroom was covered in rows and rows of egg cartons. He had dressed each one up in bright red paint. I knew it was paint because blood turns brown after a while. He was drawing images of his father. That’s what he told me before the landlord arrived and started talking about a lawsuit.
“Get out, Pete. You cannot be pulling this shit anymore, alright? What would Mom say if she were here, huh? She would not be impressed.”
“Where did they put her? When can we go see her?”
Peter liked to visit her grave before the highway uprooted all the corpses in the south end of town. I would watch him for hours in the graveyard while he sat with the tombstone, running his fingers over the inscription—all things go. I imagined Peter asking her who his real father was, asking if what I had said was true. Asking about whatever creature had crept into her bed, asking for her to absolve him once again. She was always willing to forgive him. Each wound he left behind, she said she would wait for it to heal. Lawyers were paid off and bondsmen became close allies. Sometimes they slept over after Peter was released. Mom told me he just needed time. He needed to figure out who he was. The world was so busy telling us what we were meant to do, meant to buy, meant to be—Peter had to listen to some voice inside. I showed her what was left of my hand. I asked her to count my fingers.
“I don’t know, buddy. They took all the coffins up north. They’ve still got to sort them out. And the tombstones too. Gotta make sure everything matches up.”
Peter strides ahead of me toward the front door. It’s got three locks and a peephole, but we don’t get many visitors. I’ve given up on ordering pizzas.
“They won’t do it right, you know. They don’t know anything about the dead.”
Dina sits at the kitchen table inside. She’s got three plastic bags laid out in front of her.
“I discovered where he’s been keeping them, Al. With the food. In the freezer. It has to stop. Now. I can’t keep finding this shit around the house. What kind of house is it when you can’t even have anyone over? Imagine someone from the pharmacy finding this shit in our freezer?”
There are three frozen rabbit heads on the kitchen table. Each one is wrapped up tightly in a plastic bag with elastic. All their eyes are covered in frost. The ears have been pushed down and around their faces like cowls. Peter tries to snatch them off the table, but I knock all three onto the floor. Dina doesn’t say anything else. She just looks at her hands and shakes her head.
“What did we talk about, Peter?”
He won’t look me in the eye. The kitchen light is buzzing above us. The three heads are glowing on the floor. He wants to scoop them up, but I press him back up against the green refrigerator. He starts to whimper a little. Each time he breaks one of the rules, we have to enforce a punishment. Six beady eyes watch as I drag him out of the kitchen by his hair.
“Put them down the disposal, Dina. I don’t want anyone finding them in the garbage. I don’t think we’ll be able to explain it. Not after he brought all those cats inside last time.”
I’ve had to explain a lot to Dina. Our first date involved a visit to the city jail when Mom couldn’t get off her shift to pick my brother up. At first she thought it was kind of cool. Peter was like a shaman, she said. Dina told me about black magic in her basement with friends from high school, about an aunt whose psychic readings were so accurate the woman was run out of her village back in Albania. Dina wanted to believe Peter knew what he was doing. She wanted to believe in a world where his chaos had a pattern. Time destroys all patterns though—eventually all you see is one unending line. Occasionally, I get phone calls on my break. Dina finds birds stuffed inside our oven, or Bible pages plastered to the bathroom walls.
She’s given up on patterns and shamans. She just wants to get the stains out, fast.
“I need them!” Peter screams. I drag him with my good hand toward the old den at the back of this failing house. We spent three weeks reinforcing its walls with two-by-fours and old deck furniture before Peter moved in. The ceiling is covered with soundproofing and insulation. Peter has pissed in every corner, so we bleach it once a week. The chemical scent rushes out in a cloud as I open the door. There is a mattress on the floor with a plastic bucket lying beside it. Peter is pleading with me now. His hands are groping at my waist, but we don’t feed him much these days. His muscles are shrivelled. You can see them through his skin.
The door is heavy. I invested in a fire door after he broke the first one down. Sometimes the lock slips and he sneaks out, but usually we maintain a vigil. Dina talks about surveillance footage, but I don’t want any evidence of this. I don’t want anything to remain.
“Give them back, let me take them. I need to plant them!”
I slam the door, twisting the lock with what’s left of my right hand. Peter is screaming again.
“I need them! I need them!”
I know it’s just a matter of waiting. Dina and I are expecting our first yowling ball of flesh this summer. The doctor says it’s going to be a boy. She wants to name him Aldous. I don’t ask her why. I want to name him Peter. Maybe give the name a second chance.
“They are mine! Someone needs to plant the weeds!”
I can hear my brother’s fists banging on the walls. I try to ignore the sound and turn on the TV. I watch the nightly news as they survey the bloody markings my brother left behind. The reporters have begun to call him the Great Satin. One newscaster giggles at the name. The camera zooms in close on the letters, but it avoids the headless rabbit corpse. I close my eyes and flex the remains of my right hand. Sometimes I can pretend the fingers are still there.
“Let me out, you stupid fuck! I need them!” my brother screams from behind our homemade padded walls. The lady on the TV talks about the recent graveyard transplant. A few corpses have gone missing, but authorities assure the community all the bodies will be recovered in due time. Dina is trying to sleep in the bedroom wearing industrial ear protection. Her door is leaning open. The headset looks like someone melted orange rabbit ears onto her skull. She says she wants to move, says she wants to leave this place. I’ve told her all of this is temporary.
“I need them!” Peter yells, but his voice is getting small.
Given time, everything dies.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew F. Sullivan is the author of the short story collection All We Want is Everything (ARP Books, 2013), a Globe & Mail Best Book of 2013, and WASTE (forthcoming Dzanc Books, 2016). Sullivan no longer works in a warehouse.
LF #027 © Andrew F. Sullivan. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, October 2012.
