BLOOD CALUMNY
Joanna Koch
Kevin didn’t want to share a room with their mother. In the tiny house after the divorce, she said they didn’t have a choice. Telling this to Bastien while lighting a cigarette to appear casual, because their hands and mouth need something to do in the huge chasm between speaking and waiting to be judged, need anything other than Bastien’s hurt silence, Bastien’s head turning away; Kevin insists it’s nothing personal. “It’s not you, it’s me. I can’t be with anyone. Not like this.”
Alone again, because it’s what they asked for — now isn’t it? Kevin crushes what’s left of their cigarette, dumps the contents of the ashtray in the outdoor bin, and washes their hands longer than they really need to. Puts the ashtray in the nightstand drawer with the remnants of a pack of cigarettes, a bad brand and a bad habit from college that Kevin gave up years ago.
Well, mostly gave up. Kevin’s not a saint.
They’re not responsible for what it does though, either, because it’s not their choice, it never has been, and if Bastien or anyone else could understand — but they can’t. The blood, the tears, the murders — and now that Kevin’s older, the heat, the rage, the unpredictable eruptions that never came like clockwork and come now hard with increasing frequency and capricious vengeance against the host. The parasite people call a blessing.
It’s not like Kevin hasn’t tried to have it taken out.
Planned Parenthood in 1987, University Women’s Center in 1992, Ladies First Fem-Care in '99, Planned Parenthood again in '01, Sweet Valley Whole Woman’s Health in 2010, and on and on for nearly fifty years, a litany of providers saying dear and hon and Miss Kevin, reciting a litany of excuses with clucking tongues. It doesn’t matter if Kevin’s a big, hairy guy waving money in their faces and begging them to get the monster out. The minute Kevin hits an exam table, the clucking starts.
Left to take matters into their own hands, Kevin closes the tobacco drawer in the nightstand. Modelled on an apothecary cabinet with eight stacked compartments, it hides a hatch holding errata shipped across the country after their father died. Masculine objects recall life before the onset: coins, pocketknives, a rusted harmonica, marbles, an old watch. Kevin decides on a military folding knife with a three-and-a-half-inch blade. Opens the knife and places it next to their phone charger in easy reach.
In the tiny house, after the divorce, sharing a room with mom because the girls were older, the girls deserved privacy, Kevin’s arguments dismissed as selfish. Kevin can’t sleep. Not with their mother fighting off blankets like an invisible assailant. The house asleep, the world asleep, their mother unconscious, Kevin cornered in the extra bed between the thrashing woman and the bedroom door. Her sleeping body kicks and flails. Face flops over in Kevin’s direction, pouring sweat. A smile crawls onto her slack lips. Mouth emits a pleasured moan. There’s a smell of rotten musk; something meaty and slippery releases itself from tangled legs and sheets. Wet noises slop out, and a limping shadow skulks away, wandering the walls and ceiling in the darkness. Kevin freezes, stares, tracks its progress. Lumbering like a giant slug, thick and moist, it blends into the rustling curtains and merges with tossed blankets. It unfurls in recessed corners where the moonlight can’t reach. Dangles for an hour above Kevin’s toy chest; sways like an extra appendage from the ceiling lamp. Swims through pools of shadow poured between furniture and floor. Finally prowling to the foot of their mother’s bed, turning in circles like an angry cat, it wiggles beneath the disordered covers and squeezes back into its hiding place with a loud pop.
In the morning, Kevin’s mother tries to hide the stain. Don’t be scared. I’m going through the change. Someday you’ll understand.
Sometimes in the suppurating night-time shadows, it gets lost. Meandering senile, perched atop a tall dresser next to their mother’s handbag, working its two thick, prehensile loops around to imitate the shape. Thudding on the floor and lying immobile for hours as if drunk. Kevin can’t hide in the bathroom or stay awake all night watching the wandering lump of shiny musculature with its trailing webs of fat. Sooner or later, Kevin has to sleep.
One night they wake up in the dark. Their mother snores. Stuffed animals guard the L-shaped perimeter of Kevin’s cramped bed. Kevin reaches for the safety of a favorite plush elephant, its floppy ears deformed by moonlight. The soft, furry body presses against Kevin’s chest, but the trunk is slick, wet, and smelly. Kevin doesn’t remember dropping the toy in the toilet or having an accident.
When they understand what their senses are saying, it’s too late to throw the thing against the wall and escape its embrace.
If Kevin tried to explain the invasion to Bastien, imagine the derision. You’re not telling me you really believe that, are you? All kids have bad dreams. Yes, Kevin would have to confirm. That is exactly what I believe. And then Kevin would have to talk about the murders.
Because it’s never been enough for the parasite to co-opt a habitat inside Kevin’s body, first snip, snip, snipping away at the natural epithelial barrier, then ballooning inward with murderous suction, and last looping its flexible appended egg sacs through painful ligatures, stringing bubble-soft proliferations within the cradle of Kevin’s bones. Kevin’s mother exhausted as a host, the parasite throbbing with new life. Kevin clotted with abdominal gristle as it spits irregular blood. Wandering still, it comes back sated with strange blood; black, brown, elastic, and stringy; smelling of foreign anatomies; pitted with liverish clumps. What it kills, Kevin never questions. It moves like a thief. Kevin catches it with the knife.
Marks on the nightstand, the mattress, the hardwood floor: failed impalements. Kevin feels it fighting dormancy as they age, yet still it weighs heavy, holding on inside them between erratic manic travels and explosive gore. Gone for days, maybe a whole week now, and god knows Bastien can’t be allowed to stay over, can’t be the next witness or victim; Kevin waits alone, armed as the sun goes down, pretending to sleep. A shadow in the dark, a lump in the sheets. All the reasons Kevin never lets a lover spend the night.
It rears. Kevin strikes.
Try explaining the knife to Bastien, the cries of the thing strong and unruly after a bloody jaunt. ...
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