Another short story - Suburbanality

Hey everyone, as a Friday change of pace, here's another short story that never seemed to get published.

Suburbanality

 

            A distant voice brought me out of the forest.  At first it was stifled by the rustle of the trees, but I could distinctly hear my name.  "Tor." I turned to face the sound.  Sam turned to me, tapping the tip of his pen on the boardroom table, "Tor, can you give us a quick debrief on the meeting last week with HR?"  The forest vanished, replaced with a nondescript office boardroom, the furniture purchased from some Scandinavian discount outlet, plywood edges visible through the laminate that had been peeled away by too many fingers wasting time.  The people around the table were equally worn, cheap suits and polyester ties framing blank faces.
            I didn't want to retell that meeting.  Not that I couldn't of course, but revisiting that meeting was a reminder of how much time was wasted sitting around boardroom tables dreaming up red tape schemes to keep people alternatively busy and then bored in the same week.  The HR meeting had been particularly boring with Ms. Collins, the head of HR for the department, babbling along at the head of the table.  "Sure Sam,” I began, “for those of you who haven't been following the latest developments, the HR department has struck a Reparations Subcommittee to deal with the issue of back pay for overtime.  Due to my present light workload following the fall rush, Sam has asked me to represent our group on the Subcommittee.  We held our first meeting last week and I will be happy to circulate the minutes to those interested parties when I return to my office."

            Was this really my voice? I was having a hard time believing it. Subcommittees? Minutes? I could feel the seconds ticking by.

            "At any rate, all I can say at this time is that negotiations are currently ongoing, and we are working to resolve the back pay issue with management.  There may be a need to strike up some negotiating teams as we are not unionized, and I'll let you know in the near future if we need volunteers."
            I could feel the eyes of the room on me, heads nodding in near unison.  They hadn’t heard a single word I had said, each person lost in their own little worlds.  Mine was a forest, lush vibrant green, soft pine trees swaying in a cool breeze.  Occasionally, depending on the meeting, or the speaker, there may be a mountain off in the distance, its snow covered peaks visible above the tree tops.  Or in the case of the HR meeting, the presence of Ms. Collins' voice added a brook happily gurgling along a winding trail headed for nowhere in particular.  I wondered what their worlds looked like, what impact my voice had on them.  Perhaps a small rodent had wandered into their cities and labyrinths. I would never find out.
            "Thanks Tor.  That concludes today's staff meeting.  We have a tough quarter coming up, so let's all get back to work."  The spell had been broken.  Some shook their heads as if to deny that reality had been re-imposed on their day.  Others merely rose from their seats languidly, automatons clicking further on to their date of retirement.
            I rose from my seat and exited the boardroom.  Stretched out before me, reaching to the extremities of the floor was ‘the Farm’.  Row upon row of grey boxes lined up much like coffins returning back from war.  My box was number 11E479 sitting at the crossroads of wastings and pain.  The Farm was a communist’s wet dream, each box identical in shape, size, and function.  Everyone had a ‘u’-shaped desk with a computer, one phone and a lamp.  The overhead fluorescents made the lamp unnecessary, but at some point in time management had decided that holdovers from bygone days of less efficient automatons were excellent reminders of how far we had progressed as a society.
            I assume the position, hands on keyboard, feet flat on the floor, back aching ever so little. I stare at the blank screen in front of me. It stares blankly back.

***
            I arrive home around 6:30, a little later than usual, because Sam had asked me to take care of a few things at the Farm before leaving.  Margaret was none to happy.
            “You could have called,” her voice, though raspy from trying to catch the children for the last two hours, could still make its point.  “Jeremy cut his knee while I was making supper, so the rice is burnt. You'll have to find some other side for the chicken.”
            “I'm sorry; Sam wanted me to take care of one more file. I should've called,” I could have argued that this was the first time in two weeks that I'd been home before her, this was the first time in two weeks that I hadn't been the one chasing kids and burning supper, but I knew that argument was pointless.   “Is Jeremy ok?”
            “He's fine, just managed to fall off his skateboard right before dinner.”
            “Oh. Ok. I'm going to change.”
            I made my way up the narrow staircase, pictures of my current family, and my deceased parents smiling down on me in all their black and white glory.  We always got black and white.   Guess we thought it was 'classy-er' then colour.  Funny how 40 years ago everyone was getting colour because it was new and innovative.  These thoughts rambled through my head as I climbed each step.
            Closing the door to the bedroom was like sealing off the outside world.  The sounds of the house and nearby roadway would dim; movements would become slower, more exact.  I reached for the closet door, feeling the cool metallic knob linger in my hand, turning it ever so slightly to release the catch.
            I take my time removing my clothes, tossing them into the hamper one piece at a time.  Sitting on the edge of the bed in my underwear, I returned briefly to my forest.  The lush green trees envelope me with their smell.  The cool ferns beneath my feet conceal the paths that I wandered this morning during the staff meeting.  I can still hear Ms. Collins' brook off in the distance.  Looking up, I see a raven. Wings spread wide as it glides down through the branches until it floats level with my gaze.  Tiny black eyes bore into my brain and its beak opens as if to speak, “JEREMY GET OUT OF THERE RIGHT NOW!”
            Entering the en suite, I stare at my face in the mirror.  There's something different; something that wasn't there in any of the previous 42 years of my life.   My eyes are red, no that's not it.  Maybe it's the tinge of grey in my hair? The patch has been growing of late.  I don't think that's it either.  Something though is definitely different.  It's as if I'm looking at a shadowy reflection of myself.  As if I don't exist, but some futuristic projector is able to impart my likeness on to thin air in front of the mirror.  It's a bizarre feeling, that doesn't leave until after I have put on my jeans and my worn Galapagos t-shirt, a gift from a far away cousin for a distant birthday.
            “You really should throw that thing out,” Margaret says when I reach the bottom of the stairs.  She's talking about the t-shirt.
            “I know, but it's comfortable, it's me, especially when I'm at home.”

            “But it's so ratty, how am I supposed to get the kids to look nice when you wear that around the house.”
            “Who gives a fuck what the kids wear?!.”  My voice rises, the latent hostility and boredom which has been eating at me all day begins to crack through the wall separating the tongue from the mind.  “Sorry, I had a hard day at work, I didn't mean to yell, let me get the kids ready for bed”.  Margaret says nothing, but her reproachful gaze means that the argument has just started.
            I find Jeremy in the family room on the couch, his face glued to the television.  My son, seven years old, his mannerisms and judgmental looks reminding me more of his mother each day.  “Time to get ready for bed, kiddo”
            “But Dad, there's only 10 minutes left” he flashes me a glance that lets me know that if I disagree there will be trouble.
            “What are we watching?”
            “Ren and Stimpy” His mother hates it when he watches this show.  I sit down next to him, take in the colours and shapes moving on the screen, and laugh half-heartedly at the fart jokes and horrible animation.
            The show ends and I lead Jeremy up to his room.  The walls are covered in superhero paraphernalia. Current favorite Superman has been given the prominent space above the bed, but unknown to him will soon be relegated to the second rate space above the dresser, if not tossed into the closet to languish with the Green Lantern, as soon as Marvel announces its latest run of comics.
            “Dad, close your eyes.”
            “Ok,” I turn around and shut my eyes while Jeremy changes into his pajamas.        Plain white cotton pajamas.  Originally Margaret and I had thought of getting him some superhero ones given his craze for the mutant wonders, but because of his propensity to change his mind we opted for the simpleness of white.  They lent him an angelic look, one that differed significantly from the devilish demeanor that all six-year-old boys are capable of.
            “Dad, I'm ready”. I turn around and Jeremy leads me down the hall to the bathroom.  I watch him put the toothpaste on the brush and start brushing.
            “Remember, 28 times on each side,” he rolls his eyes and makes a sound, he knows.  Where do 7 year olds learn to roll their eyes?  Probably from Ren and Stimpy.  I shake my head and wander down the hall to Heather's room.  Heather is my daughter, 11 years old, and thinks she knows everything.  She reminds me of myself when I was 13 or 14, but lately has also been taking on her mother's traits.  Particularly making jabs at my growing belly, or my greying hair, and occasionally commenting on my wishy-washy parenting style.  Heather is on the phone, no doubt with another girl talking about which boys they're going to love or hate this week.  “Time to get off the phone,” I mouth, pointing at my watch “you know the rules”.  She holds up her hand to ask for three more minutes.  I motion back two and she nods in agreement.   My life is one long negotiation.
            Jeremy has finished brushing his teeth and is getting himself comfortable in bed.  “Can I get a story tonight?”
            “Sorry kiddo, but you're Ren and Stimpy shenanigans cost you all the time before bed.”
            “But Dad, we were almost to the part where Bilbo sees the dragon.”
            “I know, but we've read this one already, and it's getting late”.  I look at my watch.  “8:30, lights out”.
            “But...”
            “No buts, you're lucky you got to watch that cartoon, we'll get back to Bilbo's adventures tomorrow”.
            “Aaaaaaalright.”  Sigh.
            Jeremy closes his eyes and I pull the comforter up over him.  I give him one last pat on the head and then turn off the lights and close the door.
            Heather is still on the phone when I get back to her room.  The look on my face tells her all she needs to know.   “Jen, I gotta go, my dad's being a pain again...yep.....tomorrow...bye.”  She hangs up.  “Dad, why do I have to get off at 8:30? All the other kids get to talk later”.
            “If all the other kids jumped off the CN...”  I stop myself, I am not my father, “because 2 hours is plenty long enough to be on the phone, any more and the phone waves will rot your brain.”
            “har har Dad. I seriously can't wait until I get my own phone. When can I get my own phone? ”
            “Your mom and I agreed that when you're sixteen we can talk about getting you your own line, but your grades have to be good”
            “But sixteen is so far away”.  Not as far away as she thinks.
            “I know, but believe me, it will come sooner then you want it to. Make sure you're in bed by 9:30”.
            “Ok.” She shuts the door on me.
            I wander back down stairs.  Margaret is in the living room watching TV; the volume assures me that she doesn't want company.  I shift my footing towards the den and close the door.  The cool red leather chair embraces me.  I lean over, grab the headphones and turn the stereo on.  Need to pick something, something relaxing.  Massive Attack. Karma Coma comes through the cans as I put my feet up on the ottoman.  The forest closes in again, no raven in sight.

 

***

            I am following a path; the trees around me are silent as the grave.  Every once in a while a cool breeze blows through and my thoughts follow it around the next bend.  Something inside is urging me on, forwards, towards some undefined goal.  It must be at the end of this path.  Must.
            The next bend firmly behind me and still nothing but trees.  Their green leafiness obscures the path and my goal.
            I pick up the pace as the sky darkens, knowing that my goal will be unattainable at night.  Running through the trees, trying to catch the wind, the path slopes downwards ahead of me; the next bend hidden behind a boulder.  I stare at the boulder, a relic of time gone by, the world moving, ever changing, the appearance of the boulder static, timeless, a souvenir from when the earth was young.
            Focusing on the boulder, I fail to notice the root of a tree lying across the path.  My foot gets caught underneath, opening a gash, and I fall to my knees.  The boulder smiles down in amusement.
            I take a moment to recover my breath.  My body is on fire, an itchy feeling beneath the skin, coupled with the pain of the fall.  I remove my tight jeans and t-shirt to properly assess the damage.  Total cost, minor bruising around the knees, and a badly cut foot, bleeding.
            I staunch the blood with my shirt.  My touch ignites pain over my entire body, oddly not just localized in my foot.  My stomach boils up into my throat as the pain wracks my brain.  Synapses fire like a well-running motor that carries the pain unabated from all areas of my body to my head.
            The blood is flowing faster.  Looking at the cut reminds me for a fleeting second of my wife.  The gash appears to be widening.  I tie my belt around my leg to slow the flow.  The wound is now an inch wide and the pain is searing.  I can see the muscle beneath the flesh, sinewy, taught with exertion caused by agony.
            The lips of the wound begin to curl back unusually.  This must be what being skinned alive feels like.  My skin continues to turn inside out, the capillaries of the lower dermis clearly visible over my entire foot.
            The pain is excruciating as the skin on my leg begins to open and reverse itself as well. Looking at my hands, I realized that this condition is not localized; the skin on my hands is completely inside out.
            “It's only a dream,” I scream.  I smack my cheek with my open hand in an effort to wake. I don't.  The pain however, causes me to pass out.  Peace.

 

***
            I come to drenched in sweat in my chair.  The headphones dangle by my side. The clock on the stereo reads '12:00'.  “Wow, that felt longer”, I mutter to myself.  The pain from the dream still lingers. 

            Instinctively I look down at my feet.  The light of the reading lamp illuminates a long scar running the length of my foot to the hem of my pants, my wet pants.  Wide wake now, I realize that the cool dampness is not a result of sweat, but of blood.  All of my clothes are soaked.  The pool stretches three feet in every direction on the hardwood floor.  The salty smell of blood fills my nostrils causing me to nearly pass out again.  I stand up and reach for the doorknob, thoughts of my murdered children swim to the surface of my mind.  Did I do this?  I rush into the hall, which is pitch black with night.
            I reach the top of the stairs in 3 great leaps and rush down to Heather's room.  Quietly opening the door, I peer into the darkness and see her form lying beneath the comforter. A creak of the door causes her to roll over.  She's fine.  A quick check on Jeremy and Margaret reveals that they too are ok.  I notice my bloody footprints in the hall. I follow them back down the stairs and into the den.  There is no other trace of blood along the way.

 

***

            The panic continues.  My lungs fill and deflate in time with my heart.  “Alright, first thing, I’ve got to clean this up.”  The small part of me that yearns for order begins to takeover.  The blood is still dripping slowly out of my clothes.  Thankfully the entire house is hardwood flooring.  I strip naked, tossing my bloody clothes on the floor.  I reach for the mop, but stop when I notice the scars.  My body is covered in them.  The scar beginning at my toes doesn’t end at my hemline, but at my groin.  It is mimicked on my other leg and arms, and coupled with circular cuts around each of my limbs, and a big one down the centre of my torso.  Each scar looks to have healed completely.  I feel no pain, no soreness, nothing at all except a spine-tingling fear that is slowly working its way from my stomach to my brain.

            Before settling into a full on panic attack, I decide that the best course of action is to clean up the mess.  “Yes, before Margaret notices.” 

            Paper towels in the bin under the sink, carefully hidden by an empty bag of potato chips, washing machine on full-tilt (thankfully it’s in the basement), and febreeze drying on the floor and chair, I slip out into the sunroom that looks over the back deck.  Still naked, I reach over to the planter and shift it aside to grab the one pack of cigarettes left in the house, hidden from Marge’s prying eyes beneath a venus flytrap, the one plant that’s mine, which she can’t stand to touch.

            “It eats living things!” she had told me once.

            “So do I, but you still touch me……sometimes,” was my witty reply.

            “It will be less often if you keep bugging me about it.”

            Hence the reason for me keeping it, the plant served as a great place to hide one of my vices.  The lighter is cold in my hands, but like always lights up on the third flick of the wheel.  The smoke fills my lungs and instantly sooths my frazzled brain.  Each exhalation is accompanied by the worries of my mind, transubstantiated into smoke form.

            The neighbourhood is eerily quiet at this time of night.  I had grown up in a big city, lots of traffic, and even more people.  Noise was not uncommon even in the eerie twilight just before dawn.  By contrast this suburban jail of cookie cutter houses and manicured lawns is silent as the grave most nights after eleven o’clock.  In the suburbs, people were too tired from their days slaving in the office or looking after offspring to have any kind of nightlife.  I think though most just couldn’t think of anything to do.  Sleep is much more easily accomplished when bored than when one has something pressing on the brain.

            As my thoughts are focused on the nature of suburban sleep, my gaze is drawn from the well-tended gardens to my hands and arms.  The cigarette falls from my lips and the burning embers sting the top of my foot before I manage to kick them away despite the shock my brain is going through.  The scars are almost gone.  A close examination of the rest of my body reveals a similar condition with the exception of my foot, where the scar, although fainter then two hours previously, still stares at me like the grin of a small animal intent on devouring me.

            I retreat from the sun deck to the den to collect my thoughts, the room no longer smells like blood and there is no evidence of any of the strangeness that occurred earlier, with the exception perhaps of the fact that I am completely naked.  I sit back down in the armchair and contemplate the evening’s events.  “Perhaps I’m still asleep…” I mutter to nobody in particular.  But it was all so real.  The blood, the smell, the scars, the cleaning.  “But if I am still asleep then of course it would seem real…but then again, if I’m still asleep I’m having a philosophical conversation within my subconscious.”  This, I think, would not be outside the realm of possibility. 

            I decide that the best course of action would be to fall asleep in my dream, thus ending this weirdness resulting in normalcy in the morning.  I direct my attention upstairs, climb into bed beside a snoring Margaret and close my eyes.  This time there is no forest, only the blank space of sleep.

 

***

            “Tor…TOR!  Wake up!”  Margaret’s reproachful voice from the doorway of the bedroom stirs me from my slumber.  The sunlight filters through the forest green drapes leaving the room a smoky hue that mixed with the dark hardwood of the floor.

            “What is it?” I mumble, scratching my head. 

            “Jeremy needs to get washed up before school, and I didn’t have time to make lunches last night.  I can’t do both at once.”

            “Alright.  I’m up.”  I exaggerate the motion required to put my feet on the ground, just to make sure she understands that I meant it.  Margaret retreats downstairs to the kitchen providing me time to inspect myself.  The dream was more like a half-forgotten memory, but I still recalled the blood vividly.  The scars that had seemingly crisscrossed my body only hours previously had disappeared.  I hear Jeremy in the kids’ bathroom and inch my way there. 

            His smile greets me warmly as it does most mornings, “Dad look, I’ve already brushed my teeth.”  His smile widens.  I catch a glimpse of half-chewed cheerio sticking to an upper incisor.

            “Baloney.  Let me smell your breath.”  Jeremy claps a hand over his mouth to indicate that this avenue will not be explored any further.  “Come on then, let’s get this over with.”  With his hand still over his mouth, his shoulders slumped forward in dejection; Jeremy turns towards the sink and picks up his toothbrush as if it were a poisonous snake.  “Remember now, 28 times on each side.”  He nods. 

            After waiting at the door to make sure I hear the sound of teeth being brushed, I make my way to Heather’s room and knock.  “I’m up, I’m just getting dressed,” her voice carried through the doorway held that note of angst that all teenagers seem able to create at will.

            “Ok, but make sure you don’t take too long, you need to eat breakfast.”

            “I will.”

            I lumber down the stairs, making glimpses at the wood where I would have stepped with those blood-soaked feet.  The stairway discloses no secrets.  Neither does the kitchen, where the garbage can stands empty under the sink.  Margaret is putting the final touches on the kids’ lunches.  “So do you want to talk about it?” her voice catches me slightly off-guard.

            “Talk about what?”  I nervously move towards her, worried that she might have heard or seen something last night.

            “Last night.”  The panic began welling up in my throat, reminding me of the forest hours earlier.  My palms begin to sweat, and my heart thuds in my ears. 

            “What about last night?”

            “You know, your shitty attitude all night.”  Relief. 

            “Oh.  I thought I apologized for that already.  Sam’s been giving me a crap load of work to do, and I came home and took it out on you.  I’m sorry; I’ll try not to let it happen again.”

            “Ok.  I believe you, but can you try harder please, I don’t like it when we fight.”  Her arms encircle me from behind like the leaves of a great willow tree brushing against my skin.  I could feel the warmth of her breath in the middle of my back.  As I turn around to kiss her, I can faintly make out the sounds of the garbage truck pulling up out front of the house, and somebody has turned on the dryer in the basement.