Free Plow the Bones by Douglas F. Warrick Page B

until it looked like it would split, then settle like there had been no change at all. In the end, they all looked the same, their O–shaped mouths full of fleshy grey suckers and that infinitely, terribly dark hole at the very back.
    Ah, Jesus. He had pissed himself. Hot tears swelled up behind his eyes, ran down the swell of his bottom eyelids, pooled in the deep old line where his eye socket met his cheek. He could see the dark bloom on the sheets, felt them stick to his hospital gown, felt both of them stick to his skin.
    He wanted Audrey, wanted her to hold his hand and say, “Hush, now, I’ll call the nurse, we’ll clean you up.” He didn’t care if she looked tired, ready to go home, ready to be done, just as long as she’d be here right now, just in this one single moment, and tell him he didn’t have to be embarrassed of his body or his mind or the fact that he had just peed all over himself, that he and this stupid goddamned broken ice–box were not the same thing! Please, Audrey, for the love of God, please!
    “I…” he said. “I feel… I don’t know…”
    The little smile on Eisley’s face faltered, died. He looked sad. He closed his eyes and breathed deep through his nostrils. “Jesus, Cotton,” he said. He pulled his glasses lower onto his nose and rubbed the bridge with his finger and thumb. “I just want you to know that this part never gets any easier for me.”
    What was it he had said about nature and compassion? That was the great big damned rub, wasn’t it? That was the great lie Eisley had perpetuated, that God or chaos or mindless evolutionary competition could birth something like these hungry little monsters and still be called compassionate. No degree of truth–telling now, no amount of confession, could excuse him for that, could it? Cotton hated him, hated that he had wanted to be him once. He wept.
    The sucker–babies leapt onto him.
    A thousand little cuts. The death of a thousand little cuts. That was familiar, somehow, like from a song or a poem or something… The Jabberwocky wasn’t right, but it was the only thing he could remember then. One of the grandbabies, how lovely she had been with her fat cheeks and dark eyes, sitting on the couch while he pantomimed the scene from
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There
.
    They’d hung up afghans in the living room to act as curtains, he and Audrey, and he’d tied one around his neck as a cape, and Audrey had manned the super–8 camera. He struck a heroic pose and stared up at the imaginary jaberwock, with his jaws that bite and claws that catch. He pulled the plastic sword from his belt and his little grandbaby gasped. He’d glanced at her, at Audrey next to her. Her face… where was her face? “The Vorpal blade went snicker–snack.”
    And then the memory dried up. He watched the grandbaby’s brown eyes turn black, watched her skin implode toward her skull, watched her mummify, watched the afghans burn and crumble to ash. The memory died. The lamprey things gorged themselves on it.
    Eisley said, “I wish there were a more poetic reason for this. For them. I wish I could convince you of some grand cosmic choreography. I hope that gives you comfort that I know so little more than you do.”
    His daughters at the breakfast table. Cheerios. Grapefruit halves. Halloween. The girls were both too old for it by then, but Audrey had hung up all these plastic spiders and hanging skeletons all the same. The spiders bugged the hell out of him. The legs were all wrong. “Daddy, why don’t you get a different haircut?”
    “Huh?”
    “You need a new one, you’ve had that one forever.”
    Audrey. Damn it, why couldn’t he… remember her face? “Your father’s had the same haircut since his Navy days, sweetheart.”
    “You never change, Daddy.”
    “Nobody really changes, baby. Not much. Eat your Cheerios.”
    Snicker–snack.
    The memory burnt and blew away.
    Eisley said, “The truth… the only truth…