Freezer
But the worst part of that whole thing was the walk-in freezer. Going in there. Rutting with her in there. Fucking senselessly the way the young do. Noticing little things all the time to distract myself from, what—what I was doing? And why would I do that? Shame? I don’t know, I think about it sometimes and I don’t know. I don’t know myself well enough to be able to locate what compelled me to feel shame, or maybe it wasn’t shame. Maybe it was some sensation not unlike the knowledge of your own mortality, you know, when that knowledge, that little factoid I am going to die dawns on you in the shower, while you’re doing dishes, while you’re driving. It’s more likely to occur while you’re not even being confronted by death—I’m more likely to think about death while I’m ensnared in the mundane than I am when I hear about the passing of a relative. Is that just me? It hits like a cargo train. So maybe that’s what I was thinking about in that freezer ten-odd years ago. Not even consciously. Maybe it was in the back of my head somewhere, that I was going to die one day, rattling around under the hood in the ol’ brainerino while I was fucking my boss in the walk-in freezer at McPhaiden’s. Or maybe it was some other totally different and horrible thing I needed to distract myself from. Who can say?
But anyway, like I was saying: I’d notice things. Old thumbprint stains smudged in the rime. Blood and grease pooling in the trays of chuckmeat. Sweat on the underside of the saran wrap. Crumbs in all the corners where we’d snuck in some interprandial snack, which my boss said we’d be fired for if she caught us. My boss, the one I was fucking. There was only the one. She was forty-three. She was married. Her husband seemed like a nice-enough guy.
I met him once. He showed up during a staff Christmas party to help hand out bonuses and little Christmas gifts and he was wearing a shirt that had the Jaws cover on it, but the shark was wearing a little Christmas hat. He was a big guy, a lot taller than me, which made it really surprising when his wife, my boss, kept saying I was “bigger than him.” In what way? My penis was bigger than that guy’s? C’mon. No, it wasn’t. It would bum me out when she’d say that, the way she tried too hard. But I never told her to stop, so what does that say about me.
I’d fuck her standing up in the walk-in freezer with all her jewelry clamoring and shaking its way offa her, chintzy depressing bullshit offa her wrists, her big stupid dangly dumbass earrings always getting caught in her hair, necklaces pooling in the flesh of her striated throat. At least the freezer had this feeling of being plausibly incidental. It felt like it coulda happened with anyone in there, it felt contained, this frigid subterranean penetralium where anything was possible. And I don’t know if it was the cold, but my time there when I remember it is like a dream. I don’t know how to explain it.
She told me once that her husband knew I was fucking her and that he was going to kill me. She said it like that right out of the blue, we hadn’t even gotten into an argument or anything but there was this tension, there was some tension because I think she could tell how much she depressed me—she could see that I thought what we were doing was bad for me.
I stared at her in her face and told her you’re lying and I said it like that, accusatorily, three or four times, louder each time, willing her to be lying, praying for it, and she started crying all over me. And I got angry, cruel. I got cruel because I was scared of being killed by her husband. Rightfully killed, maybe, I don’t know. But I was scared, angry, told her I’d beat her if she ever tried to scare me like that. She just ignored me. Her breasts were swollen and heaving from her crying and there were bitemarks all over them from when we’d fucked and the bitemarks sank into her skin and stayed imprinted there like that, like footprints in mud, and her tits weren’t elastic enough to level the divots. And I remember staring transfixed at her chest in the ice-cold freezer on a Monday, no—it was a Tuesday—it was Taco Tuesday at McPhaiden’s and we were closing and no one was there, and my cock was dripping onto the slick concrete floor of the walk-in and her face was in her hands and her tears were running down the creases between her leathery sundamaged breasts, and I was staring at her chest in the fucked horror-movie lighting of the freezer, and an image came unbidden to my mind of Saul of Tarsus, from the Bible—I thought of Saul, and I was certain I felt the same sort of sickness that he must have felt, you know, before ever becoming Paul—this vindictive emptiness that can only ever lead to persecution.
I want to be able to tell you that I stopped fucking her after that, because that would be a convenient end to the story. Right?
Haunt
He was convinced he heard, and had been hearing, the sound of his own name called from a distance. Always from behind him, he heard his name, mutilated by the breeze, warped by the span of its travel, so that by the time he’d heard it it sounded like a parody of his name, not like his name at all, and yet he recognized it. When he would hear his own name he’d turn, squaring his chest in the vague direction of its calling, tensing his shoulders and drawing himself to his full height, and he would breathe firmly through his nose, his eyes darting back and forth combatively, his pursed lips working to conceal his unspoken response, posture working to conceal fear.
He never told anyone about it. What was there to tell? It had only begun happening over the past few weeks, and at first he managed to convince himself it was nothing in spite of the goosepimples on his arms—it was his own paranoia, not something to dwell on—it was some crap he’d thought up because he was bored. But the more he heard the noise, the more he could no longer deny that it was more than a noise, but a word, and the word was his name.
Then he started to see movement in the peripheries. As if a small insect were flitting about at the corners of his sight—as if a fingertip’s shadow were passing close to his eye. He’d turn to confront these movements and find nothing. And then he’d hear his own name again, from somewhere behind him, and he’d spin around and square his chest and breathe through his nose, pursing his lips.
After a week he began to develop an intestinal feeling, a gut certainty, that whatever problem had manifested was one that could be escaped, or outrun—that both the phantom name-calling and the shadows in his vision were resultant of a phenomenon localized to his small town. He got the feeling that something there wanted him gone. He’ d wake up in the night to a directionless voice calling his name (which began to sound more like a noise than a name—meaningless echolalia in his ears, a foreign curse), and he would be stirred from his fitful sleep, from his restless dreams, and the feeling would settle again: he had to leave. My dream told me I should leave, he would think. It told me I need to get out. He would struggle to recollect his dreams, and he’d only recall the vaguest details, a nauseating darkness, a horrible pressure—floating geoids, irregular satellites suspended in black, which he witnessed in his decumbent paralysis—and the inchoate sub-aural vibration of thousands of writhing bodies, around him, inside him—but the sensations were so ambiguous that the horrors appeared distant, muted, and far away. And then he’d feel the need to escape, as if behind every corner lurked a threat conspiring to kill him.
But leaving wasn’t simple. He’d just signed a lease. He’d just started seeing a girl. If he moved, he would need to find a new job. He had to make his car payments—he didn’t have money saved up to go anywhere. So he decided to endure, and he stayed.
Past the town’s borders, below the basement of a foreclosed two-bedroom rambler unoccupied since 2015, the bodies of five children, none older than the age of twelve, had been hastily buried below the foundation—interred in the substructure of the house, the concrete poured over them. They’re still there now, lined in a row, arranged shoulder to shoulder in the corner opposite the plumbing penetrations, far from any conduit or piping. Each of them inhumed in the earth, no coffins to hold them, bare flesh given to worms.