Paul

Featured cover art by Dulcie Power.

6 days before: 5 Loaves 

You get home from work to find that the spider living in your shower has died. You watch it curl in on itself like a leaf caught alight, the smoky tendril of its ghost struggling free, unfurling into the steam. Horses' legs fold neatly under them, hair fanned out over the ground like princesses in children’s stories. Hamsters go much more peacefully than they otherwise probably would have. People worry, at first, what they’ll do now all the animals are gone. The meat and the fish. Mrs Harlan’s terrier stops barking forever and she stops glaring at you in the halls. You’d told her when you moved in that Paul was your brother. There’s more truth in it than anything else you could’ve said. 

7 days before: Hark the herald angels 

The general consensus is clerical error. The computers shut off first. Systems terminating, please save. Dialysis machines and ventilators click off unannounced. Somewhere you’ve never heard of, a family sits silent by a relative’s bedside for hours before noticing they’re already gone. The sun never sets and the streetlights never come on and children play in the streets forever. In the midwest there is a man who has known this was coming for a very long time, he first discovered it written on the 144th page of a vacuum cleaner manual. His is the only phone that continues to ring. When he picks up he hears women praying in languages he doesn’t understand and songs from Charles Waters’ movies. Before the TVs shut off, the President holds a press conference; he is waxy and beautiful, in full technicolour. Urging you to remain calm and embrace this natural aspect of the market cycle. 

8am Eastern Time every fax machine in the world prints the same thing. 

SUBJECT: TERMINAL EVENT 

DATE: 7 DAYS 

2 days before: Schechem 

By now people had stopped pretending. Hurt slips in and out steady and easy as breathing. News anchors whisper headlines in their sleep: rape and murder and messages from our sponsors. Paul has the wide-set vacant eyes of an agreeable infant so you tell him to keep the door locked until you get home. As you walk to the factory, you hear strangled screams from the alleyway and your mind flips through snatches of storybook images; banshees on hillocks and harpies calling from the breakers. For the rest of the day you offer this little token of gossip to the old women on the line. The first few pry you for details so in each telling you add colour to the shadows, then spend the rest of the day in anthropological experimentation, offering variations on your widow’s mite, weighing up the worth of what you’re given in return. Is a tut worse than a headshake? What’s a gasp worth? Which version spreads the fastest? Outside by the fence you retell each one for yourself, waiting for the one that pulls your hand up over your mouth like theirs. By the time your lunch break is over you’ve accepted that none of them make you feel much of anything at all. Before you can get inside, the girl who cleans the machines stops you. Smiles at you. But looking at her fills your throat with cotton. She’s pretty in the plain yet genial way of the young and freckled. You used to walk her home sometimes, years ago, when she first started, before she was given a husband. She’s been pregnant since and you’ve exchanged less words than she’s had children. Filled with life like a grease trap, like the mesh over the shower drain. After a few minutes of silence, she gives in and tells you this is what she wants again. It makes sense, on a day like this, but you can barely look at her long enough to spit out the no without your eyes dragging down to her swollen middle. Can’t look at her without imagining that thing inside her. Raw and new and hating you. 

4 days before: Favour from the Lord 

Labour and poor eating have blessed you with a face much older than it should be and freed you from the younger man’s burden of a wife. The older women at the factory have tried to foist their daughters upon you, and, in particularly dark times when acquiring a wife felt unavoidable you laid on the settee the previous tenants left in the room with Paul’s hand twitching against your chest and wondered where you would put it. The settee only seats the two of you and Paul has strange dreams which he often needs to wake you to discuss in the night. He offers to relocate his button collection from the dresser to make space for any luggage it would require, clothes and books and perhaps buttons of its own. Her own, that is. The logistical strain of possible Venutian accoutrements becomes too much and you spend much of the rest of the evening with Paul pressing a damp flannel against your closed eyes. Eventually, you decide that, if needs must, you can both move to the next city over and buy yourselves another few years. He asks if they have factories there. He asks if you’ve ever done anything else. He smiles at you and there’s something warm and full of blood in it. Like, if you wanted to, you could crawl into the hole in his gum where his left canine used to be. Tucked away warm and safe, growing into something hopeful- a calcium carapace knitting itself together over your flakey skin. 

In a prettier place a street preacher stands sentry on the side of the road piloting a sandwich board. It says The End Is Coming. It used to say something else, but, after the seventh bottle of what he has anosmically decided was juice hit his head he decided that the Lord has many important messages and each one deserves a chance in the spotlight of the freighter headlamps. When a trucker slows to inform him of the scheduling announcement, he is seized by such a fervour that the driver can barely figure that he’s dancing. He strokes the bridge of his nose gentle and intimate around the unfinished wood at the edge of the sandwich board. Huffing God, and plywood, and spraypaint. He presses kisses into it and lets the splinters push cleanly through the wrinkled skin of his lips. In the rearview mirror the trucker sees him move into the middle of the road, balancing on the white line like a field sobriety test. Head back and loose on his neck, jaw slack. White collects at the corner of his mouth and spit clings sticky to the tips of tongue as it writhes toward the sun. He waits to drink deep of acid rain and frogs. He’ll last two days before he collapses, cloven hooves still kicking and skipping against the tarmac. He’s chasing rabbits. White rabbits with all the time in the world. 

5 days before: Ezion-geber 

You tell Paul you were a shipbreaker. Before. That your father was a sailor. He nods and in his blue eye you note the appropriate level of reverence. Paul owns a copy of Moby Dick and has made you read the blurb to him many times- eyeing the heft of the book with the fear laced awe usually reserved for angels and extremely large cranes. You’re pleased that he understands the gravity of your father’s position. You neglect to tell him that you’ve never actually met the man. Only know who he is because you spent a childhood lurking in half-closed doorways listening to your mother curse him. Or that you got fired for stealing pieces of the boats you were supposed to be selling. If you’d taken anything valuable you’d be in prison, or in one of the workhouses now instead laying next to Paul. Just pieces of panelling, a storm-trashed gunwale, a few handfuls of smashed porthole glass that cut holes in your thighs through your pockets for the rest of the day until you got home. How you’d spend the whole week assembling them into a small bastardised frankenship in your one room. Waiting for Sunday afternoons to wrap your arms around it, playing sea-monster or uncaring wave crushing it in your grip- mastering that awful keening sob in your throat. Hundreds of tiny imaginary sailors howling laments, tears falling on powdery cheeks for lost sons. 

Paul tells you that he doesn’t have a father. His mother thought that a father was a terrible thing to inflict upon a young man, and so, through a concerted effort of will, brought him into existence without the help of inter-gender relations. A secular immaculate conception. A non-proselytizing Christ. Unfortunately, no schools would accept a child born out of wedlock and so he never learned to read, never learned to spell father with six letters or three. Paul’s mother worked at the factory and his hand is shaped strangely and shakes all the time. One of his eyes is much bigger than the other, absent of pupil and creamy like a saucer of milk nestled into his skull. You can track the advancement of the factory’s chemicals easily enough in its children. When you see the young woman who cleans the machines herding hers around the market you’re struck by the image of the five of them gathered around a pile of not enough limbs and not enough senses like Christmas morning. Fighting over who gets what, until all the younger ones are left with is scraps and hand-me-downs, useless and full of holes. 

3 days before: Onan

In the evening, in the shower, you’ve been staring at your balls for several minutes, feeling something close to powerful, until the spider interrupts and asks what you’re doing. You’re imagining inflicting yourself. You persevere valiantly, an arthritic kineograph in the slow blink of all his eight eyes. Fist clenched, jaw tight. Images forced quickfire through your mind, the socket that shocked you years ago, left you effervescent for hours. The feeling of Paul’s socks against the inside of your shin while you’re falling asleep. The balloon you stole from Jordy Miller’s birthday party when you were 12, the latex cinched tight around your fingers as you unwound the knot, gulping greedy mouth fulls of air from it, holding it inside until your head felt swollen. It felt like hope. It felt like you could keep it. The way the sauce smudges at the edge of Paul’s mouth when he eats spaghetti is enough. Leaves you twitching and heaving against the tiles. When you look down, the spider has turned around, curled in on itself in the querencia of soap scum in the corner. Atrophied and ashamed. 

1 day before: 2:18

The gates of the factory are closed. You stare at the seam where the bars meet for an hour before you accept no one’s coming to open them. The sun stays where it’s been for a week now, stubborn and oppressive. Sweat collects in a smudged line down the back of your shirt. Churches are Wall Street trading floors. Black Friday queues for reconciliation. Limited edition. No refunds. The owner of the store on the corner takes confessions instead of money. You give him cash and leave with a can of spaghetti in each hand. 2 for 1. The branded version is still full-price. There are seven coins and a wedding ring in the tip jar. In a movement that feels like it only works because it has to, you empty your pockets into the jar and hook the wedding ring out on the tip of your index finger. You walk home feeling drunk. You saw a newspaper article years ago about a middle aged man found in a motel room with his pants open and a bag over his head, scrunched tight in his fist to seal it shut. The ring feels like that. Like you have to let go but something beautiful might happen if you don’t. 

A support group for the strung-out and neurotic meets for the final time. They slouch in their chairs, lazy and euphoric. Their leader clarifies that yes, it’s been confirmed, tomorrow at midnight. No fire. No zombies. No sci-fi channel bullshit. We all just stop. A man who spent his teenage years chewing his fingers off the bone and his twenties working on his forearms has scabs hardening over the stumps of his elbows for the first time. He laughs and tears slide like condensation under the collar of his shirt. He tells them about how he’s slept every night this week. No dreams, no sweat. He locked the door once before leaving the house. He hasn’t thought about anything all week. How do people live like this? What do they do with all the time? 

Before: You who dwell in dust 

Tell the spider you’d like to apologise for the other night. He’ll be incredibly angry that you bought it up but it’s important to try even now. He watches you brush your teeth and tells you goodnight. Paul has tacked sheets of newspaper over the window in your bedroom, blowing out the sunlight. It pours into the room damp and tawny, clinging sticky to his hair and the onion-skin of his eyelids. The slow, adenoidal rhythm of his breathing hitches and in the gap his hand finds yours. Interlocking tight, nails gouging tiny crescents into your knuckles. You’ve never had many words and the few you do don’t even make it to your throat in time. He looks peaceful, at least. You wouldn’t know if you couldn’t feel the steady rise and fall of his chest stop. You press your head to the hollow of his soft, still belly, like a conch shell, and pretend you’re not mad at him, because you’re not, you just thought he’d wait for you. Even as something blinding blooms behind your forehead and you know it won’t be long. He’ll still be warm when you go. You could fight it, if you want. His fingers are brittle, like bird bones or kindling. You have just long enough to be gentle as you slip the ring onto his finger.