Shivering
Published by Press 53 in the Surreal South Anthology, 2013.
Brandon needs a bag so he drives out to Snug Harbor, to a single-wide trailer there with no front door, a black trash bag hanging loosely in the frame. He walks inside and there’s this brand new stereo and this brunette named Kimmy holding a naked toddler in her arms, and Kimmy has enormous tits full of milk. She’s wearing a tank-top and men’s boxer shorts. Brandon stares at her.
The husband and father and holder of bags, Jake is his name, whips his head around in the living room to Metallica’s “Trapped Under Ice.” His blond hair is long and liquid how it moves, waving, pulsing, spreading out and again and again, he chugs away at an air guitar, his wrinkled can of Old Milwaukee.
Once the song ends Jake turns a knob on the tuner and the two of them, Jake and Brandon, they sit on the couch together. They don’t immediately get to business. Jake starts going on about this new power he has, this God given ability that came on him while he was pissing outside three nights before. Brandon asks him to explain, even though he’s mostly watching Kimmy walk around the room and the kitchen nearby, staring at her tits and thinking how this girl could do better. She could have it all with a face like that and a pair like that. She could have the big city neon and high heel shoes, the Jacuzzi tub, anything at all. But instead here she is, right here in a trailer with no door out in Snug-fucking-Harbor. With this fucking guy.
Jake says that one night he had looked up to an almost full moon and sighed on account of all the piss coming out—it was a long and good beer-piss, he made clear—and there came this sudden chill on him. Not an outside wind kind of chill, either. He called it a shivering, said it took hold of him like one hell of a shivering and it lasted long after he was done with his piss. Jake had stood there with his dick in his hand just trembling, unable to stop, incapable of calling out to anyone. He says inside of him then must have been the ghost-hand of God, charging him up, bringing him to full ecclesiastical power. Brandon laughs a little bit at that. Then he apologizes, says go on.
So Jake takes him by the arm and walks him back outside, the black trash bag crackling behind them. They step onto the front lawn and Jake leads Brandon over to a wide tree stump. He tells Brandon to watch, to just get a load of this, and he holds his hand out. A ribbon of flame then twists from Jake’s palm to ignite the stump.
And Brandon hops backward. He licks his lips, looking from Jake to that stump on fire then back to Jake. This is impossible. How high he must be right now, except he’s not, not yet, dear Lord. Brandon shields his face from the sudden heat. Flames tongue up toward the sky, wood starts to snap and pop and it’s a real fire now, that stump is fully on fire.
Brandon looks to Jake, asks what the hell he just did, and Jake says he only thought of what he wanted and there it was. Like, he said in his mind, let there be fire on that stump and it was so.
“You can do that?” Brandon asks.
“Where you think I got that stereo?” Jake tosses his head back, flips the hair from his face. “I drove up to Wal-Mart and I thought to myself, I thought let that well-dressed fellow there be generous. Let him offer up a thing with surround-sound speakers and a docking station, I thought. A sub-woofer, disc changer, turntable, everything, the silver one there, best one in the damn place. Let that fellow be kind unto me and it was so.”
Brandon shakes his head, tries to make sense of all this. He wonders why God or whatever in the sky would choose a man such as Jake for a shivering and not himself. Why not someone from somewhere like New York or California, Washington D.C., some big shot with a necktie and sunglasses?
Brandon frowns. “You just got a stereo? That’s all you got?”
“So far,” Jake says. “I got plans though. I got some good ideas.”
“Like what?”
“Well, like I’m gonna get some lotto tickets and win them all. Then I’m gonna reunite Pantera, bring Dimebag back to life and everything. Get them to play out here, in the yard. And I’m gonna make it so cops can’t even see me anymore. Like I will be invisible, but just to these goddamn cops. Can you imagine?”
Brandon says that all sounds good, but maybe he ought to get a front door for the trailer too, and Jake says “shit, yeah, goddamn, let there be door.” And it is so.
Kimmy opens the new door—brilliant white and freshly painted, just how a door from nowhere ought to look—and she peers out at them. The naked child is still in her arms. “Come get this boy,” she says to Jake. “I’m gonna take a shower.”
Jake and Brandon both move back inside.
Jake sits on the couch, Brandon does too, and they watch as the little boy waddles into a corner by the kitchen and begins to urinate. He has one hand on his hip. Jake laughs, says his son is a wild ass animal, and Brandon says nothing to that, suddenly noticing the stink of the place.
“Let that piss be now clean,” Jake says. The puddle the boy made recedes, disappears, leaves nothing but unstained carpet. “I love it.”
Jake ought to use his power for a house, Brandon thinks, or a mansion even, a jet plane and pilot to fly him and Kimmy and their boy clean off. Leave Snug Harbor and these Carolinas far behind them. But he doesn’t suggest anything, he has his reasons.
They finally get to business.
“How much you want?” Jake asks.
“An ounce?”
“Sounds like a question.”
“Well, I was just figuring. Since you can do anything now.”
Jake shakes his head. “That ain’t right, now is it? Me chosen by God, you looking for handouts.”
“Sorry.”
“That ain’t how this works.”
“Okay. Quarter then.”
“Have some goddamn class.”
Jake pulls an old metal lunchbox from under the couch and opens it, removes a
cellophane roll of weed. Brandon hands him sixty dollars, which Jake places inside the lunchbox before reclosing it. They both relax on the couch, smoke a little, and maybe due to Jake’s power it’s the best kind of high Brandon has ever had. Inside of the air high, ultraviolet high. And they don’t really speak anymore, they just sit there, feeling things.
After a while Jake is asleep. So is his little boy, small and fetal on the floor. Brandon gets up, walks back to the bathroom where the shower still runs. He knocks lightly. “Come in,” he can hear Kimmy say.
Brandon steps inside and there she is, distorted behind a transparent shower curtain. Her skin is brown and yellow in the shitty light and those tits stand out like globes from her chest. Excellent and profound globes, he thinks, they are perfect.
“What the hell?” Kimmy says.
“You said come in.”
She makes no move to cover herself. “I thought you were Jake, dumbass.”
“Pretend that I am.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Look at this place, and look at you. Don’t make sense.”
“And I suppose you think that you and I do?”
“Well. I mean, why Jake?”
She tilts her head, grins. “His hair.”
Brandon inhales deeply. “I can take you away,” he says. “I been saving up, for a while, I can take you to the city. Any city you want, anywhere. I can work at a restaurant someplace or a bar. We can wear nice clothes and take cabs, limos.”
“And my boy?”
Brandon frowns, thinking. “He can come too, if you want.”
Kimmy smiles then turns back toward the stream of water. “You suppose I’m better than this, and I agree. I agree that I am better.” She sends her hand slowly down her neck and chest to her belly, lower, closes her eyes. “I am better than this trailer,” she says, “and that man with his gorgeous golden hair, and you. The smell of this harbor and the ground and trees, the weight of this atmosphere.”
She raises her arms back up toward the ceiling and tits are all that Brandon can see right now, glorious, pregnant tits.
“Better than this whole planet of men planning to save women, slapping shoulders, spending money and rutting and drinking and dying from prostate cancer and heart disease, liver failure. I am beyond your low biology. I always have been.”
Kimmy seems to glow in that shower as she throws the curtain open, slick and with steam coming off her like smoke from the stump-fire outside. “A man may feel he is magic,” she says. “He may feel a shiver and believe it is God that is the cause of his magic, but it is only his proximity to me. Or others like me. That man may have his every desire until the end, but he will end. I will go on long after he is bacteria, after he is broken down to planetary nutrients, as you, too, must ultimately be. And you think you can save me.”
Kimmy presses her naked body against Brandon, wetting his clothes. He looks down at her, unsure if this is real or his high gone far ahead of him.
“You are very close to me now,” she says, “for this short while. What do you desire?”
And he is at once full of need and too much truth, a wish to know more. He wants to see the scaffolding of time and the universe, schematics of these things, to know how energy came to be. He wants to know of himself before birth and after death, of souls and nightmares and dinosaurs, he wants to know who Kimmy is. If there are more like her. But he can only stare at her magnificent nudity, so she pulls away from him, grabs a towel from the rack on the wall. He sees sadness in her face and figures he must be a disappointment to her. Not that she would have expected more. Sex is all Brandon wants, sex forever, hot swampy sex that bleeds and bawls in the night with this cosmic creature he has come upon. And Kimmy knows this. She is familiar with animals, knows much of their stupidity. But still, she grieves. Perhaps for that naked boy in the living room, pissing on the floor, babbling and mewling the way all men do. Now sleeping. Unable to be anything more.
###
Published by Press 53 in the Surreal South Anthology, 2013.
Brandon needs a bag so he drives out to Snug Harbor, to a single-wide trailer there with no front door, a black trash bag hanging loosely in the frame. He walks inside and there’s this brand new stereo and this brunette named Kimmy holding a naked toddler in her arms, and Kimmy has enormous tits full of milk. She’s wearing a tank-top and men’s boxer shorts. Brandon stares at her.
The husband and father and holder of bags, Jake is his name, whips his head around in the living room to Metallica’s “Trapped Under Ice.” His blond hair is long and liquid how it moves, waving, pulsing, spreading out and again and again, he chugs away at an air guitar, his wrinkled can of Old Milwaukee.
Once the song ends Jake turns a knob on the tuner and the two of them, Jake and Brandon, they sit on the couch together. They don’t immediately get to business. Jake starts going on about this new power he has, this God given ability that came on him while he was pissing outside three nights before. Brandon asks him to explain, even though he’s mostly watching Kimmy walk around the room and the kitchen nearby, staring at her tits and thinking how this girl could do better. She could have it all with a face like that and a pair like that. She could have the big city neon and high heel shoes, the Jacuzzi tub, anything at all. But instead here she is, right here in a trailer with no door out in Snug-fucking-Harbor. With this fucking guy.
Jake says that one night he had looked up to an almost full moon and sighed on account of all the piss coming out—it was a long and good beer-piss, he made clear—and there came this sudden chill on him. Not an outside wind kind of chill, either. He called it a shivering, said it took hold of him like one hell of a shivering and it lasted long after he was done with his piss. Jake had stood there with his dick in his hand just trembling, unable to stop, incapable of calling out to anyone. He says inside of him then must have been the ghost-hand of God, charging him up, bringing him to full ecclesiastical power. Brandon laughs a little bit at that. Then he apologizes, says go on.
So Jake takes him by the arm and walks him back outside, the black trash bag crackling behind them. They step onto the front lawn and Jake leads Brandon over to a wide tree stump. He tells Brandon to watch, to just get a load of this, and he holds his hand out. A ribbon of flame then twists from Jake’s palm to ignite the stump.
And Brandon hops backward. He licks his lips, looking from Jake to that stump on fire then back to Jake. This is impossible. How high he must be right now, except he’s not, not yet, dear Lord. Brandon shields his face from the sudden heat. Flames tongue up toward the sky, wood starts to snap and pop and it’s a real fire now, that stump is fully on fire.
Brandon looks to Jake, asks what the hell he just did, and Jake says he only thought of what he wanted and there it was. Like, he said in his mind, let there be fire on that stump and it was so.
“You can do that?” Brandon asks.
“Where you think I got that stereo?” Jake tosses his head back, flips the hair from his face. “I drove up to Wal-Mart and I thought to myself, I thought let that well-dressed fellow there be generous. Let him offer up a thing with surround-sound speakers and a docking station, I thought. A sub-woofer, disc changer, turntable, everything, the silver one there, best one in the damn place. Let that fellow be kind unto me and it was so.”
Brandon shakes his head, tries to make sense of all this. He wonders why God or whatever in the sky would choose a man such as Jake for a shivering and not himself. Why not someone from somewhere like New York or California, Washington D.C., some big shot with a necktie and sunglasses?
Brandon frowns. “You just got a stereo? That’s all you got?”
“So far,” Jake says. “I got plans though. I got some good ideas.”
“Like what?”
“Well, like I’m gonna get some lotto tickets and win them all. Then I’m gonna reunite Pantera, bring Dimebag back to life and everything. Get them to play out here, in the yard. And I’m gonna make it so cops can’t even see me anymore. Like I will be invisible, but just to these goddamn cops. Can you imagine?”
Brandon says that all sounds good, but maybe he ought to get a front door for the trailer too, and Jake says “shit, yeah, goddamn, let there be door.” And it is so.
Kimmy opens the new door—brilliant white and freshly painted, just how a door from nowhere ought to look—and she peers out at them. The naked child is still in her arms. “Come get this boy,” she says to Jake. “I’m gonna take a shower.”
Jake and Brandon both move back inside.
Jake sits on the couch, Brandon does too, and they watch as the little boy waddles into a corner by the kitchen and begins to urinate. He has one hand on his hip. Jake laughs, says his son is a wild ass animal, and Brandon says nothing to that, suddenly noticing the stink of the place.
“Let that piss be now clean,” Jake says. The puddle the boy made recedes, disappears, leaves nothing but unstained carpet. “I love it.”
Jake ought to use his power for a house, Brandon thinks, or a mansion even, a jet plane and pilot to fly him and Kimmy and their boy clean off. Leave Snug Harbor and these Carolinas far behind them. But he doesn’t suggest anything, he has his reasons.
They finally get to business.
“How much you want?” Jake asks.
“An ounce?”
“Sounds like a question.”
“Well, I was just figuring. Since you can do anything now.”
Jake shakes his head. “That ain’t right, now is it? Me chosen by God, you looking for handouts.”
“Sorry.”
“That ain’t how this works.”
“Okay. Quarter then.”
“Have some goddamn class.”
Jake pulls an old metal lunchbox from under the couch and opens it, removes a
cellophane roll of weed. Brandon hands him sixty dollars, which Jake places inside the lunchbox before reclosing it. They both relax on the couch, smoke a little, and maybe due to Jake’s power it’s the best kind of high Brandon has ever had. Inside of the air high, ultraviolet high. And they don’t really speak anymore, they just sit there, feeling things.
After a while Jake is asleep. So is his little boy, small and fetal on the floor. Brandon gets up, walks back to the bathroom where the shower still runs. He knocks lightly. “Come in,” he can hear Kimmy say.
Brandon steps inside and there she is, distorted behind a transparent shower curtain. Her skin is brown and yellow in the shitty light and those tits stand out like globes from her chest. Excellent and profound globes, he thinks, they are perfect.
“What the hell?” Kimmy says.
“You said come in.”
She makes no move to cover herself. “I thought you were Jake, dumbass.”
“Pretend that I am.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Look at this place, and look at you. Don’t make sense.”
“And I suppose you think that you and I do?”
“Well. I mean, why Jake?”
She tilts her head, grins. “His hair.”
Brandon inhales deeply. “I can take you away,” he says. “I been saving up, for a while, I can take you to the city. Any city you want, anywhere. I can work at a restaurant someplace or a bar. We can wear nice clothes and take cabs, limos.”
“And my boy?”
Brandon frowns, thinking. “He can come too, if you want.”
Kimmy smiles then turns back toward the stream of water. “You suppose I’m better than this, and I agree. I agree that I am better.” She sends her hand slowly down her neck and chest to her belly, lower, closes her eyes. “I am better than this trailer,” she says, “and that man with his gorgeous golden hair, and you. The smell of this harbor and the ground and trees, the weight of this atmosphere.”
She raises her arms back up toward the ceiling and tits are all that Brandon can see right now, glorious, pregnant tits.
“Better than this whole planet of men planning to save women, slapping shoulders, spending money and rutting and drinking and dying from prostate cancer and heart disease, liver failure. I am beyond your low biology. I always have been.”
Kimmy seems to glow in that shower as she throws the curtain open, slick and with steam coming off her like smoke from the stump-fire outside. “A man may feel he is magic,” she says. “He may feel a shiver and believe it is God that is the cause of his magic, but it is only his proximity to me. Or others like me. That man may have his every desire until the end, but he will end. I will go on long after he is bacteria, after he is broken down to planetary nutrients, as you, too, must ultimately be. And you think you can save me.”
Kimmy presses her naked body against Brandon, wetting his clothes. He looks down at her, unsure if this is real or his high gone far ahead of him.
“You are very close to me now,” she says, “for this short while. What do you desire?”
And he is at once full of need and too much truth, a wish to know more. He wants to see the scaffolding of time and the universe, schematics of these things, to know how energy came to be. He wants to know of himself before birth and after death, of souls and nightmares and dinosaurs, he wants to know who Kimmy is. If there are more like her. But he can only stare at her magnificent nudity, so she pulls away from him, grabs a towel from the rack on the wall. He sees sadness in her face and figures he must be a disappointment to her. Not that she would have expected more. Sex is all Brandon wants, sex forever, hot swampy sex that bleeds and bawls in the night with this cosmic creature he has come upon. And Kimmy knows this. She is familiar with animals, knows much of their stupidity. But still, she grieves. Perhaps for that naked boy in the living room, pissing on the floor, babbling and mewling the way all men do. Now sleeping. Unable to be anything more.
###