The purgatory of assets

Brett Biebel

            We lived half a mile from some guy they sent to prison for life. I don’t know what he did. I suspect my parents hid the details from us. Perhaps that was the right decision. There are ways of finding out, I’m sure, but I prefer not to think about it. I prefer to stick with what I remember, which is that he confessed, went easy. He was older, owned his house outright, and they said he used to send letters to neighbors, to family. The letters were little more than lists of things to do. Set mouse traps in the garage, he wrote. Please, remove the curtains from all windows so that intruders will be clearly visible from the street. Post warnings about rubbernecking and its consequences, none of which should be physically violent, but all of which should evoke deep-seated guilt and unshakeable fears regarding eternal damnation. Load and run the dishwasher once every three months, to prevent dust build-up on the dishes. Replace the furnace filter quarterly. The list was endless. My sister used to know the location of the spare key, and she may have performed some of these tasks. She told me she did. She hid at this place when our parents were drunk, when school got shit, when she was sad for no reason or all reasons or just because of the things about being alive. I followed her out there one night. I watched her open the back door without making a sound. The place was filthy. People threw beer cans there. It smelled like all kinds of chemical dyes and tobacco and must. You could feel the toxic infiltration, the way the man’s wishes were being ignored. Some of that caught in my throat, and Jaylene heard my thrashing cough.

            “I was wondering when you were gonna show up,” she said. “Come on. Help me out with this.”

            She led me to a closet, gave me a broom. We swept. We mopped. We found three dollars thirty-six in loose change, and she promised the Dairy Queen if we could make it all look just as good as new, and that took four hours. It must have been midnight when we finished. The Dairy Queen was definitely closed, but she said we could do the next day, and, besides, she had something better anyway.

            “Better than the Dairy Queen?” I said.

            “Follow me.”

            We went down into the basement. It had a cement floor. Way in the back, there were wrestling mats and dumbbells, immaculate. There was a boombox, working order. I saw squat racks. I saw a rowing machine. It looked like an Olympic training facility, like what you’d see in the movies about those Soviet-style sports programs, and I started running, grabbing things. I started doing push-ups on one of the mats.

            “What happens,” she said, “is people don’t explore much. They just trash the first thing they see. Things can be right under their floorboards and then…” She paused. She puffed out her cheeks and exhaled like someone had disappeared. “Here, why don’t you try some sit-ups?”

            I rolled over onto my back, and the ceiling was covered in drawings. Most of them were charcoal. She turned on some kind of strobe light, and I could make out animal shapes. There were deer. There was our mom. Jaylene had drawn this sea serpent with its mouth full of weeds while a hundred boat passengers took pictures. There were growths on the monster’s back she told me were a crazy, unknown disease, but the disease wasn’t going to kill him. Mostly, it would transform him. It would grow humps, some of which would grow their own mouths, some of whose teeth would resemble chainsaws, and the etiology of this illness was… more than anything you could ever conceive. And the thing was, the more hideous this monster got, the more terrifying and disturbing, the more people would want to take photos of it, and the hungrier the thing would be, but its whole life it had known and been trained to remember that humans were poison. Eating just one, even just an arm or, hell, a fucking eyelash, it would be like those tropical frogs in the Amazon, only about a billion times worse. One little drop would be the most painful death imaginable, and so this monster would snap and lurch at the onlookers but then chicken out at the last minute, and the people would ooooh and ahhhh and lean in close and give rave reviews to all their friends, and it would go on like this until one day, finally, the monster wouldn’t chicken out. He’d eat someone. Maybe a kid like me. Maybe her. Maybe it would be that fuckface Daniel Pinkus, but that somebody would get gnashed and burned by stomach juices, and the monster would writhe and shriek and explode like fireworks. “Picture the Fourth of July, buttbreath,” she said, only instead of strands of magnesium or whatever, it’s sea monster body parts. It’s viscera and placenta and corpuscles, and the people who get these dying-display photographs won’t even know what they’re witnessing, but they’ll cherish the pictographic evidence. Some will sell it, make millions. The monster will die, and the owners of the exhibit will collect whatever whole pieces remain and clean them up and taxidermy them, or else offer them to exotic gourmet chefs, and it all depends on what the calculations of the business office say in terms of revenue streams, in terms of financial sustainability and the long-term potential for secondary markets. 

            She turned off the strobing, and I asked if any of that was real. What I think of, whenever I think of Jaylene, is how she looked when she slapped me in response. She slapped me soft. She said, “Not for you, asshead,” and her face was shadowed and dimpled and resigned. There was talk of my exemption. Her eventual escape, she said, was something I could either exploit or excuse.

Brett Biebel is the author of three collections of flash fiction (48 Blitz, Winter Dance Party, and Gridlock) and A Mason & Dixon Companion. His work has appeared in many magazines and been selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. He lives, writes, and teaches in Illinois.