Breadcrumb #594
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.
“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.”
After wiping away the fertile soil, he stands and clomps over the moist grass and slashes with his arms, pretending his appendages are built-in machetes, through the shrubs of Marcel’s side yard.
Marcel is sitting in his yard. In his lap is a Bell and Howell 16MM projector projecting the classic film, John B. Stetson Goes to Ybor starring a young Jimmy Stewart.
At first glance, Holger thinks the view of the Stetson manor facade is an establishing shot for a classic horror film. He loves the way old houses look in horror films.
“These old houses are always so worn and dirty,” Holger says. Marcel nods without turning in his lawn chair, focusing on the film produced by Intercede Network, but acknowledging both Holger’s presence and opinion. “But they also look so comfortable with their furniture and clutter.”
Marcel takes Holger by the hand and walks his friend to the front door. Marcel’s gabby, excitable parents are sitting in their breakfast nook, both Mom and Dad screaming so loudly about their excitement that Holger swears that the high-pitched double-toned parental pandemonium crosses an irreversible decibel threshold.
As Holger and Marcel stand in the doorway, mouths agape, Mom grabs the mustard and ketchup and Dad grabs the mayo and butter, all four condiments in squeeze-top bottles, squeezing the every loving hell out of the bottles as they scream about their excitement – the vintage yellow, horror movie chunky blood red, the spoiled white, and the creamed corn yellow spray like one part string theory confetti and one part edible fireworks all over the nook.
Marcel says, “See? Eat.” He nods.
“The fuck are you talking about?” Holger says. “Is everybody on cough syrup?”
Vern, shaking her head at him from across the room, snorts and laughs loudly.
Holger’s eyes shoot open as he remembers that the chainsaw is waiting for him. He jumps to his feet and runs past Vern out the front door.
“If you and your friends make me play that damn pocket knife game one more time today,” Vern yells after the little lord, “I won’t let you fill this house with your homemade furniture.”
Holger wields the chainsaw and shows it off to all the neighbors lined up across the street.
They cheer.
“That’s our little lord!” the old man who’d thrown the D battery at him says. He cackles, pulls another D battery from his pocket, and throws it. He misses again.
Holger takes no notice as he smiles proudly and waves the chainsaw at his people. He revs it.
“You the man, Holger!” Ms. Dempsey yells through cupped hands.
“Fuck Trey Andrews. That’s your chainsaw, Holger!” Vincent shouts.
“Build the furniture! Build the furniture! Build the furniture!” the residents of Fennsbury Lane chant.
He spends the rest of the day hacking the chunks of oak tree into smaller chunks and nailing them to the other chunks. The furniture looks less like a couch, dining room table, and bed and more like outsider art.
One by one, the neighbors return to their homes. They return to their cats and oatmeal and croquet sets collecting dust in their foyer closets. They grow tired and fall asleep at the same exact time, 7:30pm. That is how Holger likes the game to be played.
Trey Andrews, his adjacent neighbor and reclusive Intercede Network founder, pulls into his driveway. He steps out of the car and breaths deep with a hopeful smile on his face as he scans the neighborhood, the neighborhood he believes that he and he alone lords over. Trey takes a sip of his cherry soda and from over the edge of the can, notices Holger screwing around with his beloved chainsaw. Trey spits his pop and darts across the property line into Holger’s front yard.
“Holger?” Trey says. “What are you doing with my chainsaw?”
Holger laughs.“Can I, like, pretend to chase you with it?”
“Is this a variation of the pocket knife game?”
“Of course.”
Trey spins around, his back now facing the little lord.
Holger revs the chainsaw.
Trey slowly turns his head, pantomiming a scared Homer Simpson.
Holger shows his teeth through his angry red face. The boy hyperventilates as he wobbles back and forth while swinging the chainsaw.
Mr. Andrews holds up his hands in surrender. “Easy there. Put it down.”
Holger screams as he revs the saw once more.
The blue jays flutter over their heads at their scheduled time, 7:45pm. The boy and the man take no notice of them. They know the drill.
Holger cracks a smile and breaks into laughter.
So does Trey Andrews. Mr. Andrews collects himself and clears his throat. He lets out a high-pitched scream and runs across the property line.
Holger follows closely behind and chases the man into his garage past the empty spot above the work table where he had found the chainsaw.
Trey screams again. He kicks open his door and crashes into the foyer wall, knocking himself out.
Holger halts his chase, turns off the chainsaw, and grimaces at Trey’s unconscious body. He puts the chainsaw back and returns to his furniture building.
As Holger hammers the last nail into the chunks of wood representing a TV stand, Trey’s shadow grows over the boy.
Trey says, “I was only pretending to be unconscious.”
“I know.”
Trey and Holger spend the rest the evening carrying the outsider art into the house.
They set the bed where the TV stand should’ve gone. They set the wooden item that looks nothing like a toilet in the middle of his bedroom. They set the dining room table in Vern’s room. The moonlight splashing through the sliding glass doors of the southwestern ranch style house give the contents soft edges like an impressionist painting.