Free Who Made Stevie Crye? by Michael Bishop

go back to sleep. As for the Exceleriter . . .
    “Mama,” Marella said. “Mama, I’m trying .”
    “But you’re just lying there. Surely you can kick these old covers off.” She made an abrupt flicking motion with her fingers, her smile as tight as a triple-looped rubber band.
    Marella began to cry. “Already melted. My fault. So, so hot, Mama. I’m just not any good.”
    “Stop saying that, little sister!”
    “Call Dr. Elsa, Mama. Ask Dr. Elsa why I can’t move.”
    “Marella, we can’t go running to Dr. Elsa with every little problem, especially in the middle of the night. She’s seen too much of me already.”
    “Mama, please—you take the covers off me.”
    Stevie rocked away from her daughter, clutching her face in her hands. She—the so-called adult—was behaving irrationally. Marella might be seriously ill, paralyzed, and here she was refusing to telephone their family doctor, her own closest friend, just because she had made a fool of herself yesterday morning in that forbearing woman’s Wickrath offices. In this situation, Dr. Elsa would be angry only if she failed to call. This was clearly an imperative situation. Stevie stood up.
    “Marella, I’m going to call the Kensingtons.”
    Tears in the corners of her eyes, the child gave a feeble nod. “You uncover me, okay? Before you call. Just for a minute, Mama. I’m still hot. I’ve already melted, but I’m still hot.”
    This refrain enraged Stevie. She grabbed the satin hem of the GE blanket and yanked both it and the sheet beneath it all the way to the foot of the narrow brass bed. Then she began to scream.
    Her daughter’s lower body, from the neck down, consisted of the slimy ruins of her skeletal structure. Her flesh and internal organs had liquefied, seeping through the permeable membrane of her bottom sheet and into the box springs beneath the half-dissolved mattress, stranding her pitiful rib cage, pelvis, and limb bones on the quivering surface—like fossils washed out of an ancient geological formation. Steam rose into the February air from this odorless mess, and Stevie added her breath to it by screaming and screaming again.
    Marella was heedless of her mother’s incapacitating hysteria. “Still hot,” she said. “Oh, Mama, I’m still hot. . . .”

XV
    Stevie carefully tore the sheet bearing this nightmare from her Exceleriter, draped the long page over her dictionary stand, and, ignoring the cold and the syncopated hammering of her heart, reread every line. The machine—which, to use its own wry terminology, she had failed to catch in flagrante delicto —was mocking her. She had tried to arrange matters so that it would produce copy compatible with her desire for answers about Ted, Sr., but it had spun out another sort of text altogether, a cruel lampoon in which her concern for Marella was translated into domestic Grand Guignol:

    Awake or asleep? Awake, surely, for in the next room the resourceful Stevenson Crye, mistress of her fate, tamer of typewriters, could hear the businesslike rattle of the Exceleriter’s typing element, a concert . . .

    Etcetera, etcetera. But the worst, the most tasteless and offensive part of the joke it had played on her, did not reside in these easy satiric jabs, but in the heartless, vividly obscene surprise at the end:

    . . . the slimy ruins of her skeletal structure. Her flesh and internal organs had liquefied, seeping through the permeable membrane of her bottom sheet and into the box springs beneath the half-dissolved mattress, stranding her pitiful rib cage, pelvis, and limb bones on the quivering surface — like fossils . . .

    Etcetera. A climactic passage not merely horrifying but fundamentally contemptuous of civilized human feeling. For some reason the typewriter wished to mock her humanity by blaspheming her love for Marella, by playing upon her deep-seated fears about the child’s mental and emotional well-being, and by depicting Stevie herself as unperceptive and