Sex and Murder Magazine

By Ari Feld

Everyone in the house agreed that the animals became unignorable that fall. The renters could no longer kid themselves that it was the pipes, or ducts, or the building’s unknown organs chirping and scratching. Rodents, mustalids, non-migrating songbirds, or perhaps even a litter of feral cats had located the profound refuge of human architecture and installed themselves in whatever’s behind the plaster. And yet, it might only be a squirrel on the siding or wind clapping the shingles. The second floor produced the most scuttling and chittering and was also home to the most indifferent and otherwise occupied tenants.

Every time she ventured up, Linda suggested that perhaps creatures had begun occupying the house. Don’t you hear that? She would say to shaggy young men she found there. That is the sound of scratching. They looked uncomfortable with her assertion, as if the mother they had never had were now telling them that she had been there all along.

Linda found a pregnant rat in the toilet bowl. When her daughter was a child, Linda had dreamed that a squirrel-rat emerged from a crevice in Sheila’s room. The unholy rodent squatted on its haunches and begged with buckshot eyes. Her daughter offered the creature eggs each night and after a while it began to resemble a dachshund that preferred to bed in her dirty clothes. She started feeding the animal sausage and it developed legs like a jackrabbit and took on the evil disposition of a rutting pig and it began to catch mice and eat them instead of offering the tiny maulings to the foot of the master’s bed. Sheila let it eat a doll and the hair snarled in her brush. The animal no longer resembled any natural creature. Linda was cheerless and she ignored her daughter’s questions about animal husbandry. She’s keeping a demon! Linda tried to warn herself and worm from the dream. And the animal grew. It looked like a mythological beast, the unholy grafting of the sphinx or the griffin. But this abomination was made of creatures that dig the filth, that pilfer, and eat what they whelp, that breed without season, and lack the ancient monsters’ nobility which cancelled some of the revulsion they conjured. This creature was one of the ugly cousins—the shrew with her insect stained beard, the wild dog, necklaced with deer ticks, the squirrel bloated on caramel corn and sour cheese. It slept under Sheila’s bed and eventually, Linda supposed, went on to devour her daughter in that realm of dreams woken from.

Linda decided to ask the young man who often went around the house nude if he could remove the drowned beast. Her reminding him to unsoil the couch or the commode had become a ritual they both recognized. He accepted the raspings as the reality that had reached them, a happening as blameless as a blizzard or sleep. Linda reminded the young man, whom the other renters called something like Dirt, or Lint, that people had taken matters into their own hands and had been exterminating nuisance varmints for several years now. Okay, he said, but even if we had a phone, just try to call the landlord and you’ll see what kind of weirdness he perpetrates on this house and all who live in it. He had taken the precaution of paperclipping the arts and leisure section around his waist after Linda had beaten the signal to rise and remove into his doorframe. She appreciated the thought. There was no door proper to his room, only a lime green sheet that kept everyone out. Linda had learned that just barging in on him meant rapidly extricating herself from a situation in which she had just barged in on someone penetrating his fist or the often gagged and writhing form of an apparently willing young woman. This Clod or whomever he was, operated with as much rumpus rousing as possible in order to tempt interrupters or the casually curious and to teach them to shun his sheet or witness him crouched frogwise over his thrashing partner. He would never tell Linda to leave him to his pleasure any more than he would attempt to purge the house of animal insurgents. She felt that he would maintain his rhythm and leer at any mouse cowering in the corner just as he had leered at her in the early days. Happily he also took part in “away games” as he called this whoring around.

He went into the kitchen and found a plastic sac.

“Thank you,” Linda said, “for girding your loins. Perhaps you’ll advance to pants or the business section.”

“I am the business section,” he said.

“If I were your—” she stopped herself. “Thank you, Clump.”

“What if you were?” he said, enthralled by the possibility.

*****

Maria, the pregnant destitute, arrived the next day with her lizard-skin luggage and the last of her allowance. The porter and driver were dressed in tails and abandoned her on the curb as soon as they had finished unloading. Maria sat on the stoop for a half hour, examining the contrivance she cupped in her hands like rain. Linda watched her from the bedroom that looked onto the porch. She kept expecting her to get up and ring the doorbell. Ring the doorbell, girl. She had left her suitcases on the curb. A car pulled up and the passenger evaluated the luggage.

“Are you leaving these?” He asked.

Maria looked up.

Linda dropped the postcards she was reading and struggled through the wreckage of the bedroom. The car had parked and the passengers were assessing the luggage, hefting the two most enormous valises. They fingered the swirl of scales and tried the zippers, inspecting the baggage for the defect that landed it on the street.

“What you got in here?” one of them asked.

“Hello,” Linda said. “Are you Maria?”

“Yes,” Maria said.

“I’m sorry for that,” Linda said. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I think you misunderstood the young lady. Please leave the suitcases. Maria, you seem to have given them the impression that your things were up for grabs. Perhaps that’s how you got in this family way.”

“Okay,” Maria said.

“Yes, that’s right,” Linda said. “Stop fondling the luggage and depart.”

Linda remembered Maria as the Lolita who had warped the glandular function of a number of boys in Sheila’s middle school. Maria had, in fact, enthralled a boy who had had a crush on Sheila. Sheila hadn’t particularly cared for the boy, Chris or Chip, one way or another, but enjoyed the phantom attention she believed he radioed to her from any classroom in the building. Chunk’s family had moved him to a different school after the shop teacher found him crying and being fellated by Maria in the back of a school bus. The girls entered their blood feud era. Theirs was the wrath of disowning parents. They dreamed about each other and began to understand that they could build a life around the fury. News of the birthday party or Bar Mitzvah that one had attended reached her opposite by a regulated chain of gossipers who shaded into each other along the continuum of loyalty. After it became difficult to listen to her daughter’s recitation of “Sara said that Janie heard Maria tell Margo”, Linda told her daughter to just go on and feed her rage if she wanted to. And finally, at the end of high school, after their hatred had made them such intimates, Maria and Sheila reconciled like exhausted Dons.

Linda gathered that Maria’s father had purpled when she confessed the circumstances of her ovum. That very night, Maria said, he had wrangled a deadbeat client and the client’s girlfriend into tracking down the impregnator, as he identified the young man in question, in order to shotgun wed him to Maria who had no intention of marrying and wasn’t even going to keep the pregnancy. Maria didn’t believe that her father wanted her to marry the impregnator either, but he didn’t know what else to do short of dressing him in cement. Linda seemed to recall a film whose plot was almost exactly that of Maria’s debacle, with a leading lady of promise (the deadbeat client’s girlfriend) who had fizzled (Linda couldn’t remember if it was uppers or downers) and in the film had worn spectacular hats, men’s hats. Linda had even bought a bowler hat in her image, though her then husband had received it with so much hostility that she had given it to a friend. She didn’t ask Maria if she knew the film. She accepted Maria as the prodigal daughter or something, even though it meant one of them would have to sleep on the couch and Linda was the shortest, though maybe they could rig up some sort of bed schedule like the chore wheel that one of the shaggy young men had smoked a couple days after Linda had posted it. The rest of the renters were out of the house, engaged in whatever underemployment or menial education suited their lives as perverts or ignorers of vermin.

“So, anyhow, dad’s a normie, I guess,” Maria said

“We’re upstairs,” Linda said. She lifted one of Maria’s suitcases.

“Cute shoes,” Maria said. “You go, girl!”

By her own estimation, Linda had on those wool sock-slippers with leather soles.

“Thank you, Maria,” Linda said and started up the stairs then paused. “The accommodations do not include any kind of porter.”

“Oh,” Maria said and went back for her handbag. “So,” she said, “who are you?”

*****

“You are the one called Douglas, no?” Linda said. She leaned against the frame just inside the screen door and churned the contents of a bowl crooked in her arm. These shaggy young men spent a lot of time on the porch. This one was smoking.

“Doug!” a sweaty young man shouted from the sidewalk.

“Glob!” Douglas said.

“What, young man?” Linda said.

He did not disclose the syllable’s meaning.

“It is a nice day,” Linda said.

Douglas was studying something across the street.

Linda pumped the mixture until it clucked. Douglas caressed the corduroy couch cushion he was sitting on and brushed the hair into his eyes. Across the street, a raccoon feasted on carrion. Tatters of black plastic hung in a tree, worshipping the destination of the wind.

“You don’t have to put a shirt on,” Linda said, “for the house meeting. Nobody else does.” She watched the raccoon wash its face. It was eyeing the house, weighing a way in. She could tell.

“Doug,” Linda said.

“Glob,” Douglas said.

*****

Simon assured her that he had been living in the basement all year. Linda recognized that she had never really explored the basement and felt uncomfortable that her lack of initiative had yielded this bottom dweller.

“I don’t come up if I can help it,” Simon said, blinking in the kitchen. He had a blue keg-tub with him. “I just needed some water.”

Linda imagined him down there relaxing in a bondage sling, watching submarine movies.

“It’s nice to meet you, Simon,” Linda said. “There’s a house meeting tonight. We have a new member and I want to bring the infestation to everyone’s attention.”

“Which one is my cousin?” Simon asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“My cousin,” (and Linda was sure that he said Piggle or Pickle) “is sharing my room with me for the semester. He’s from the old country.”

Linda wondered which one was the old country. A chickadee landed on the windowsill and split a seed.

“He’s great with puppies,” Simon said.

“Who isn’t?” Linda said and tapped the window with a spatula. The chickadee turned its head slowly to look at her. “And we don’t have any puppies.” She was sorry she had said it.

“He’s studying wood,” Simon said. “There’s a great wood program at the university.”

“So I’ve heard,” Linda pre-heated the oven.

“Sheila said it was okay.”

“I’m sure she did.”

“Is it okay with you, Ms. Linda?”

“Have you ever seen a songbird behave like that?” Linda pointed at the chickadee. She pounded the windowsill and the whole kitchen vibrated. A pan or a can of soup crashed to the bottom of a cupboard. Simon watched her. “It’s a very brave bird,” he said. He pushed his tub near the sink and slid the spray hose from the faucet and filled the room with whooshing. Linda ignored the chickadee. She oiled a baking dish and scraped in the contents of the bowl. The screen door slammed and the storm door slammed and a shaggy young man stamped his boots in the entryway that lead into the living room and then the kitchen. He waved to them and started coughing.

“Anyhow,” Simon said, “I hope it’s okay with you that Brick lives with us this semester.”

“His name is Brick?”

“It’s the name he chose for himself in English class.” Simon dead-lifted the tub and waddled it toward the basement door at the back of the kitchen, jostling water onto the linoleum.

“Don’t forget tonight, Simon. Bring Block if he’s here.”

“He’s here.”

The chickadee had disappeared into the wind.

The shaggy young man shambled through the living room, sniffling. This one had on pants. Linda slid the dish into the oven. He approached her, leaned back on the counter and checked his elbows for breakables. He dedicated himself to observing the pornography or big game kills or whatever it was they were putting on the fridge. Linda scraped the batter from her hands with a butter knife. She ragged the counter. He shifted out of her way and loafed at his ease. He smiled with the peace that passeth all understanding, as if “I know” were the only words he could offer to any question, even one concerning a house meeting. And so, Linda decided that he already knew, in which case she could get to know him later. Someone upstairs turned on a fashionable racket. It sounded like a drunk woman humming to herself with a mongrel band rhythming in the distance. Linda thought that part of the tune belonged to a musical about an avalanche. The renters played every kind of vulgarity and nostalgia. It excited Linda.

*****

The bedroom on the first floor where the house meeting was to take place contained boxes that nobody claimed. It also contained a coat tree and its crop that Linda removed to the entryway. Free weights, an all but dead rubber plant, parking cones, a fun box with sheet metal coping, a half-burned Wurlitzer, lawn signs for local candidates for sheriff, traffic signs, a block of airplane seats row 28 D-F, empty aquariums and birdhouses, and a 200 lb bag of sand had collected in the bedroom. Linda imagined it would be easy to address the freight or plunder with everyone sitting on it. She cleared a circle in the middle of the wreckage and set the coffeecake on an apple crate. The house rattled like a tubercular lung. She kicked the trim and overturned an end table stacked on an end table and a beer rolled from the spilled drawer and gleamed at her feet. She retrieved it. “Sheila,” Linda said, “Sheila.” She sifted through newspaper clippings and ended up excavating an armchair. Mutilations Continue, Another Family Devoured, Housing Sluggish. Gurgling sounded from unknown quarters and a pinch of dust fell from the ceiling. “Sheila, could you round up the goat lords and bring Maria?” Linda looked to the porch for stragglers. Darkness made a mirror on the window and startled her. The room had shrunk to a closet. She climbed a bag of slippers and rocked open the door. Douglas was sitting in the living room.

“We’re in here, Douglas.”

He dead-eyed the carpet.

“I made coffeecake,” Linda said. A laugh track guffawed. Something solid thumped upstairs. “Sheila, turn that off and descend.”

Douglas looked at her.

“I also roasted a goat.”

He nodded or perhaps just listed forward three degrees.

Then came galloping on the porch and a sanity-bending yowl and the front door winked open, burying its handle in the woodlike paneling, disgorging a man tangled in the screen door who tackled the coat tree and collapsed toward the living room. The intruder sounded his war yolp and thrashed in the overcoats. A woman clad to whore stepped in after him.

“Oh Fuck!” Linda said.

“Where’s the impregnator?” The woman said. “I’ll fuck him.” She was dragging what looked like a small torpedo, eyes agoggle, tottering on her French-tipped toes.

“I’m afraid we only have the impregnatee,” Linda said and then shouted at the ceiling, “Help! Someone’s friends are here.” She backed away.

“What do you mean there’s no sandwiches? We fucking walked here.” The woman lifted a safety lighter and the biggest canister of hairspray Linda had ever seen and blew a fireball across the room.

Linda chucked the beer bottle at the whore and ran into the kitchen. She spun the door, which stuck an inch from its warped frame. The tang of scorched draperies and the tongueless howl of a tortured mute followed her. A pack of mice was sifting crumbs on the stove. The whore screeched at her man to get off the floor and cut someone. Linda picked up a plate and dropped it and picked up a pot lid.

“Has the meeting already started?” Simon said. He peeked at her from the basement door. He stepped into the kitchen. “I brought Brick.”

“Ya,” Brick said. “Hallo.”

Linda wedged a folding chair in the split linoleum and braced the door. “Back to your tunnels.”

The lighter clicked and a blaze snarled around the slivered door, catching cobwebs and curling a photo stuck to the frame. Linda smelled paint liquefying. The whore gnashed and choked like someone jawing bullfrogs.

Brick opened the fridge and cracked a beer.

The war yolp and trampling preceded the crash that launched Linda from her squat on the chair. She swam past Brick who was swilling a Peeber and flattened Simon against the back door.

Linda had once gotten heatstroke in Phoenix. The visual world had tightened to a keyhole and pushed her into a rack of potato chips. Her husband had knelt to cradle her awake and there in the snack aisle with the gauze of unconsciousness peeling itself from her brow she could see the marriage lasting forever.

The world broke over Linda like cheers on a surfacing diver. Simon was fondling her in an attempt to free himself.

“Woo-whoo,” He said, “I’m hurt.”

Linda pulled the pot lid off his face and blood swelled to a delta in his ear. Flecks of gold swarmed her. Something smelled like rotten cabbage.

The invader had knocked himself out and sprawled before Brick like a supplicant. The whore advanced, gargling blood.

“What a man,” she said, toeing her devastated mate. She turned to Brick and said, “Serve me, Viking.” A tail of ruby slime slid down her chin. “Or I’ll fuck you.” She lifted the lighter and fuel. Brick thumbed the mouth of his bottle, pumped it twice and sudsed the whore.

“Woo-whoo,” Simon said.

“Ya.” Brick toasted his cousin.

“Fucked!” Linda said.

The canister clanged on Brick’s skull and he bounced off the fridge. The whore over-rotated, slipped on the beer and they crumpled onto the invader. Linda and Simon surveyed the pile of clubbed people. The house farted and a laugh track guffawed. The coffeecake would be cold by now. The whore tried to sit up and shrieked. She conjured hell in a mutilated language, writhing between the men and scrabbling for her weapons.

“Let’s see what they’re watching up there,” Linda said. She pulled her knee out of Simon’s crotch and stood up. “It’s okay,” she said. “He’ll be fine.”

They drunk-buddied each other up the stairs. Linda felt the stickiness of a dream escape and the railing separating from the wall. “Simon,” she said. His ear resembled a deadly mushroom. She had the sensation that they were traversing eternity, which had taken the form of a stairway lit by a fly-clogged sun. It whined above them and made the situation plain. She could not imagine how to influence the door that they seemed to be seeking, the panel of darkness that squatted above them and foreclosed the secret of ascent, as unyielding as a cliff edge.

Sheila opened the door, “He’s never been up here before, mom.”

Simon blanched. Her implication was clear. “How do you get down?” He asked.

“An extremely dangerous sex-worker has attacked us,” Linda said and felt better after she said it.

They gained the threshold and dropped each other on the carpet.

“I see that,” Sheila said and shut the door. “Simon seems damaged. Externally, even. What is that smell? Jesus, mom, are you damaged as well? Maria got scared when the ruckus started so she turned up the TV and got unconscionably high. I told her it was just Dirt having a romp.” Sheila turned off the light in the stairway, which lit the sound of someone being flayed on the other side.

Simon said, “I feel unwell.”

“Try not to,” Linda said.

His eyes lifted like the Passion and he fell down.

The women wedged him against the door and went to lock the other staircase at the front of the second floor. They returned with a chair and substituted it for Simon, dragging him foot-first back down the hall, stomping the intervening doors from which a grip of shaggy young men emerged. Maria was corkscrewing the living room with a string of handkerchiefs, prancing atop the coffee table and sofas, “I’m not scared anymore!” She shouted to the entering troupe and fell off an ottoman that looked like a bear cub.

The doors began to beat in their hinges. It smelled like a substantial piece of furniture had joined with the fired draperies. One of the shaggy young men plucked the joint from Maria’s upturned mouth and smoked.

“The attic,” Sheila said.

Simon shook his head and began keening.

“It’s locked for the safety of these curs,” Linda said. “Sheila?”

Maria righted herself and leapt onto the smoker’s lap. “Let’s play,” She said and tried to touch her ears with her ankles.

The house cracked and quavered like a war drum. The yowling that hunted them dropped to a moan, the time-defying incantation of a chain-gang, male voices yoked to each other and the rest of infinity.

Dirt swished out from his sheet and stood in their midst, damp and resplendent. A young woman followed him, her body spangled with light, the image of god that man could look on, the burning bush. One of the shaggy young men groveled. She wiped something off her knee.

“Thusly,” Dirt said, “I meet your challenge.”

“Hey, guy,” Maria said, “I know you.”

Sheila banged out of her room with a fire extinguisher that she blunted against the padlock on the door to the attic, accompanying the intruders’ battering, adding a polyrhythm to the siege. The shaggy young men huddled at one end of the couch, erecting a wall of smoke for protection.

“You’re my guy,” Maria said. “You. The uncircumcised one.”

The door crunched in.

“Sheila, kill the fucker,” Linda said. “Kill it!”

“I am my guy,” Dirt said.

“And also mine,” Maria said.

Sheila chopped at the lock and door handle, flaking paint like the shavings from an ice swan. She flailed against the door, denting the mechanism and scouring her knuckles, lost in her art.

A screw head gaped her thumbnail from its flesh.

It budded purple. She stripped her expression, as if any movement might burst her nerves and then she made the sound of the impaled. Linda lunged for her daughter, dizzy and wild with their damage. It felt like someone was flattening nails with her heart. The gold flecks swarmed her. Blood torched the hand Sheila held to her stomach. She eyed the ceiling and wrung the fire extinguisher like a buoy.

Linda shook her voice in the choir of cracked mothers.

Wood whined and croaked asunder. Simon twisted to look down the hall.

It was Brick breaching the door and twisting in the violation. He wriggled and tumbled over the chair in smoking rags.

“Brick?” Simon said.

“Who’s that?” Maria said.

It looked like someone puppeting a corpse.

The minor goddess lifted handfuls of black hair that fell across her like a shawl sewn with gems.

“No, monster,” Dirt said. “We are the tenants of this complicated paradise from which none may cast us.”

Linda pried the fire extinguisher from her daughter.

The whore showed herself behind the blasted door, garlanded in blood and smoke.

“I shit on the souls of your dead!” Linda cried and axed the lock. Simon sat up. His cousin grappled with the air in the hall and mouthed as if he were learning a language bereft of sound. Dirt howled at the monster and tommed his thighs. The minor goddess stood by.

The lock snapped from its screws. Linda tore the door wide and flushed them with air moistened by the evaporated particles of animal fluids. The blast snuffed the goat lord’s hideout. “We’ve been exhaled,” Maria cried. And then the house creaked and the floorboards grew shoots of smoke as the attic began to suck heat through the open door. The prelapsarians linebacked the hall against the deformity that sought them with its drowning arms.

“Escape,” Linda shouted.

The whore lanced the hallway with fire and an acid sunburst gnarled the strugglers. Linda unpinned her unit and soused them in white. The living room filled like a smoky lung.

“Escape!” She tripped. It was less clouded at ankle level where Simon was bawling.

She hauled him aright and slammed him against the wall where she thought the door should be. “Sheila?” Linda felt for breasts in the smoke and tripped. A shaggy young man crawled past her. A filthy hand pawed her neck. She found Sheila and dragged her up the stairs into the agate darkness of the attic. Maria staggered after them, unchaperoned, in a bib of grime, and they reeled in the stinging cavern, apparitions and the afterimage of fired bodies flashing on the black canvas. Simon squatted on the landing, quarrying his sound from the slab of the dispossessed, building a song made of rubble.

“There’s a fire escape, is there not?” Linda said.

Sheila held her mother in the sand-blindness and they sleepwalked into a wall.

“Over here,” Maria said, poking open the cupola with her contrivance and its beam of light, “by these guys.”

They shuffled to her.

“Oh, fucking shit,” Sheila said. “Fucking shit.”

Fractions of light pinwheeled in front of Linda.

The squatters had installed themselves in the cupola that overlooked the street. A bulb hung above them like twilight and they cowered to one side as the women gathered. Trash bags and blankets snarled the floor, their radio hung on a nail, one of them had begun a mural of the night sky on the cupola wall, and they smelled like fouled butter.

Maria wobbled her light over the huddle, “Look, they’re moving. What are they doing?”

Linda ducked into the cupola and crossed the squatters’ refuse, “I thought it was bats,” she said. “You can stay.” Linda loosened the latches on the window and it slid up. The night spun with branches that slashed through the stars and clacked on the fire escape. Linda scrambled through the window and onto the grate. Cinders spurred her ankles. She motioned the others to join her. Sheila knelt on the sill and Linda pulled her through. They looked onto the roar below them, at the mob that crushed the street and bellowed like heated bitches, bloated with their cries, sharking the house like a carcass that the harpooners made.