CHASE GRIFFIN
Holger spins on his heel and stops in the direction of the arched wooden door leading out into the windy field of tall grass. The phantosmia, the smell hallucination, of Stetson leather wafts before Holger’s nose, an off-kilter mix of milk, fish, sulfur, and laundry exhaust. Holger spins again and goes through the next door, the one leading to the suburb.
As he strolls away from Marcel’s house down the sidewalk staring at the contraction joints that cut the concrete slab into squares, Holger imagines himself as a piece in an oversized board game. He heads back to Grandma Vern’s house where he’ll sit and wait for her return.
Scout and the rest of the many children of John B. Stetson catch up to him. Sap and Billy snatch his arms and hold him back, readying him for their grand leader’s punch to the gut.
“Don’t move asshole,” Sap says.
Holger sighs and rolls his eyes. “This is like the twentieth time you’ve played this game today. It’s getting really old. Like, the first two times were funny. Third through seventh times were annoying. Sixteenth through Eighteenth were so funny that I thought I was going to piss myself, especially because you guys were somehow replicating every body movement and vocal intonation to a tee. These last two times have been lacking though. You guys lost your pizzazz.”
Marion asks, “You’ve been counting?”
Skip and Dotty part, and Scout marches through them, his angry face a growing oval in Holger’s field of vision. Scout removes his hands from behind his back and shows Holger a pocketknife. As he opens it, the sun reflects off the sharp weapon into Holger’s red eyes.
An old man sits eerily on his porch across the street from Vern’s and cackles as he watches the blade get so very close to Holger’s eye.
The man reaches into his pocket, retrieves a large battery, and throws it at Holger’s face. He misses, but Holger still feels his pride get bashed by the D battery.
“I’m going to get that devil out of you,” Scout says, holding the knife to Holger’s eye.
Holger closes the threatened left eye, and a couple moments later closes the right eye in a sort of glitchy-blink.
Holger feels as though he will never be able to open his eyes once this affair has ended, but there is hope sparking in the background of his signal machine just behind the fear of blade and question of his eyelid’s new possible fixture and dysfunction. For a brief moment he thinks of himself as fully realized Thom Yorke, but without the musical talent or delusion of grandeur. In his mind he sees the aesthetic bridge connecting the gradations of eyelid-related facial changes. Fully functioning eyelid, Thom Yorke lid, dead lid.
“Please don’t hurt me,” Holger says, almost cracking a smile.
A group of edgy Tampa goths romping down Fennsbury Lane takes no notice of the altercation.
Scout doesn’t stab Holger in the left eye. Blood doesn’t spurt onto their faces. Scout doesn’t scream at both Holger and himself. He doesn’t then stab Holger in the right eye.
Holger merely imagines all of this happening. He cracks and laughs at the game devised by Scout and company. Scout and company laugh too.
Sap and Billy let go of Holger and scurry away, heading west down Fennsbury past the edgy Tampa goths. Susy, Dixon, and Marion follow, leaving behind a plume of dust.
The concrete square below them drops and Holger, slipping from Scout’s grip, falls into a swimming pool.
He peers at the shimmering surface as he sinks to the floor of the pool and watches the tiny bubbles rise. Holger imagines that he is sinking inside a giant glass of soda.
Holger lands in the lotus position. The chlorine feels good on his corneas, and he lets himself sit there for a moment and enjoy the muffled glug-glugging.
The pool floor stretches away from him and bows upward like a ghost-white photography background, the kind of superposition-white that induces vertigo.
Holger slowly rises out of the water and strains when the warm fart of air hits his skin. He grabs the edge of the sidewalk and pulls himself out of the pool.
He collapses and lands on top of the contraction joint, his hip crossing the groove between the squares, two squares over from Vern’s house.
Scout stands over Holger, letting out one long sustained scream at Holger’s soaking wet body. The pool of water grows and connects with Scout’s shoes.
Scout’s scream morphs into a guttural noise that wavers and tapers off as he sprints after Susy, Dixon, and Marion’s dust cloud: swirling into a spiral, it looks like it will never settle.
A shadow grows over Holger’s body. Vern bends over and snatches the little lord, carries him to her house with a small smile on her face.
There is nothing inside the house. No chairs, no tables, no couches, no television, no beds, nothing. There are no kitchen cabinets; just the clean, white spaces where cabinets should be.
Vern sets him on the tile floor. In the kitchen, she pretends to pour herself a glass of red wine and sips on the nonexistent fermented juice.
Holger giggles to himself, eyes closed, tongue now hanging from his mouth. He imagines that he is asleep and pretends that he is dreaming, dreaming about all of the gorgeous artwork that should be hanging from these walls.
The tiles shatter beneath Holger’s limp body and Bermuda grass pops through the cracks. Vern’s house crumbles to the ground. The rubber is sucked into the grass and the reconstructed house shoots out of the ground twenty feet behind him.
Holger sleeps on top of a stolen chainsaw. The light cuts through the empty space in the sky where the mighty oak had just stood and hits the boy and the grass and the fallen chunks of the tree. All forms and materializations are cut, nipped, and hewed with a brush that is connected to a master painter who is brimming with passion and opium. The light gives the contents of the yard hard, neoclassical edges.
Holger wakes and inspects the idle chainsaw with compost crust in his eyes.
