Free Creamy Bullets by Kevin Sampsell

I gave her a headache.”
    I left the job site without clocking out. The little girl and the stiff old lady were in my Regal Town car and I was driving us to my retarded brother’s house. I guessed that the girl was four, five or six years old. The old lady made strange sounds and I told the little girl not to worry, sometimes people speak Russian when they get really bad headaches. I tried to sound calm as I apologized to the corpse for running her over. The girl sorted through the crushed groceries and found a good banana.
    At my brother’s house, no one was home. There was a baseball game that afternoon and I knew he would be at the stadium selling and throwing peanuts. I opened up a sleeping bag on the floor and zipped the old lady inside. “She just has to take a nap,” I told the granddaughter. “Do you want to take a nap too?” I felt a blanket of exhaustion starting to overtake me again.
    When I woke up I was lying on the floor next to the old lady and I thought I heard a beeping sound. I instinctively flung my hand toward the sound and pressed down on the stiff lady’s breast. The beeping stopped. Some spit bubbles were seen on her lips.
    I heard the little girl playing in the bathtub. My brother appeared, entering through the front door with a handful of mail and a baseball bat. The little girl called out: “Are you awake? Hey guys, are you awake!?”
    I stood up and put an ignorant look on my face. “Walter—” I started. The little girl skipped out of the bathroom, half wet and half naked. Walter gave me an impatient expression, one he often used when I visited him unannounced. I tried not to stutter as I introduced the body. “This…is…” I shot the girl a Please-help-me look.
    “Grandma,” she announced.
    “Yeah,” I said. “It’s, uh, Margaret. She has a…uh, she’s sleeping.”
    Walter gave the body a good look-over. The old lady seemed to say something briefly in Russian. Walter leaned down to check her breathing.
    “Margaret’s not breathing too well,” Walter told us. “What’s your name?” he asked the little girl.
    “Janey,” she stated.
    Walter lead Janey to the exotic fish room and told her to name all the fish while he made some coffee for his sleepy visitors. Of course, Walter knew the old lady was dead. He was retarded but he wasn’t dumb.
    I was taking the body out of the sleeping bag when Walter came back into the room. He picked up the baseball bat and delivered three sharp blows to the raggedy body. I tackled Walter to the ground and pried the bat from his hands. “What the Hell do you think you’re doing?” I questioned.
    Walter shook himself from his violent spell and looked at me shyly. “I just always wanted to beat someone with my bat before. To see what it felt like. I mean she’s already dead.”
    A strange musty smell started to make its presence known. We helped each other off the floor.
    Janey came hopping into the room announcing the names of the exotic swimming pets- “Otis is the fat green one. Jojo is the long skinny orange one. The one that looks like a raccoon is Captain Jones. Rodman is the weird-looking black one. The shiny blue one is—Grandma, your headache is better!”
    Walter and I spun around to catch sight of the old lady’s body suddenly sitting upright and opened eyes looking dazed. She wheezed and coughed and spread her arms in front of her as if to say, What in God’s name happened to my body?
    “Grandma, talk like a Russian again. That was neat.”
    “I just got back from the promised land,” the lady said. “And you there- the touched one,” she pointed at Walter and smiled, “You were there, wearing a tuxedo.”
    Walter looked down at his body, making sure he wasn’t dead or wearing a tux.
    “Janey dear, come help me up honey.”
    The little girl went and held the old lady’s hand.
    “Oh my,” said the grandmother, “I do believe my legs are crushed.”
    Right at that moment I began to think of ways to get the