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Date Posted: 23:35:52 10/01/03 Wed
Author: Ashley Owen Smith
Author Host/IP: cdm-66-233-64-203.bnvl.cox-internet.com / 66.233.64.203
Subject: Mother: A Short Story

Mother
A Short Story

By Ashley Owen Smith


for Sigmund Freud



“And just who might that be?”
“Who?”
“That scrumptious little morsel talking to Gwendolyn O’Hara.”
“Ahhh...that would be Hartley Draper.”
“I would devastate him.”
William Pendleton stood talking with his friend Thomas Littlefield at another of Pendleton’s lavish parties.
Pendleton held a dry vodka martini, and Littlefield sipped from a white wine spritzer.
“What does he do?” Pendleton asked, eyeing the young, handsome man like a shark would bleeding a swimmer who’s drifted to far from shore.
“He’s supposed to be this young prodigious writer that all the critics are drooling over,” Littlefield answered, finishing his spritzer.
“Is that right?”
“Oh, indeed. Perhaps you’ve heard of The Pillars of the Sea?” Littlefield asked, favoring Pendleton with a sly smile.
Pendleton’s eyes widened. “That delicious little twink wrote The Pillars of the Sea?”
“Oh, indeed,” Littlefield repeated.
William Pendleton was a notorious playboy (this meaning that he played the boys), and he all but watered at the mouth, watching Draper as he talked animatedly to Gwendolyn O’Hara.
“Why is he talking to Gwen, I wonder?” Pendleton murmured, almost to himself.
“She’s the one who got him the book deal in the first place,” Littlefield answered.
“Really?”
“Well, you know that she’s sleeping with Anthony Delvecchio,” Littlefield said.
“Really?” Pendleton repeated.
Nodding, Littlefield snagged another spritzer from a passing waiter’s tray.
“Delvecchio, Delvecchio...He’s that publisher isn’t he?” Pendleton asked.
Littlefield nodded again.
“How’d he get in here if he isn’t on the guest list?” Pendleton asked, his mind on Draper again. He furrowed his brow and pursed his thick lips in speculation.
“He was the guest of none other than Arthur Noonan,” Littlefield said, if a bit dramatically.
“Arthur Noonan?” Pendleton asked in a harsh, shocked whisper. “Who would’ve thought the old man could still get it up?”
The two friends shared a laugh at this.
William Pendleton was a painter. A very successful one. His latest painting Symphony of Red had sold for a very modest $45,000.00.
He resided at a very large and very old plantation mansion in Atlanta, Georgia. His parties were well known; he had at least one every month. A “small, quiet” dinner party could usually be numbered at 200 people. A “little wingding” would most likely mean cars would be parked up and down Morningside Road, making hell for other drivers, not to mention the local police. Pendleton was very close friends with the chief of police, Omar Menendez.
“Do you actually think their fucking?” Littlefield asked scandalously.
“Does a bear relieve himself in the woods?” Pendleton answered, raising an eyebrow.
“Viagra, d’you think?” Littlefield asked, eyes wide.
“How else?” Pendleton answered. “Do introduce me.”
Pendleton begin walking ahead of Littlefield, anxious to get close to Draper, to smell him.
They made their way through the milling crowd in the ballroom of the enormous house. They stopped here and there to exchange a few polite pleasantries.
Most of Pendleton’s satisfaction from his parties derived from keeping a keen eye on what the women were wearing, and later reporting it to the fashion designer Jean-Claude Fournier.
There’ll be a riot tonight, Pendleton thought as they walked up to Gwendolyn O’Hara and Hartley Draper. The woman has absolutely no sense of fashion, he thought.
Gwendolyn O’Hara, otherwise known as “new money,” smiled at the advancing Pendleton and Littlefield.
Here come Laurel and Hardy, she thought, referring to Pendleton’s short, fat stature and Littlefield’s tall, thin one.
“Hello, William, Thomas,” she said kindly when they finally came to stand in front of her.
“Hello, Gwendolyn, dear,” Littlefield responded.
“Hello, Gwendolyn,” Pendleton said quietly, distracted, hardly taking his eyes off Draper. “And who have we here?” he asked, finally looking at Gwendolyn.
“This is Hartley Draper. He is the Truman Capote of his generation,” she said, her voice full of pride.
God, you’d think she’d given birth to the guy, Pendleton thought. He smiled at Draper.
“Hartley, this is William Pendleton and Thomas Littlefield. William is the one responsible for this little get-together,” Gwendolyn said.
“Hello, William,” Draper said, holding out his hand. Pendleton seized it in his own damp, meaty paw.
“Loved your novel,” Pendleton said airily.
“Why, thank you.”
Draper turned to Littlefield. “Hello, Thomas.”
Thomas and Draper shook hands.
Hartley Draper was one who’d been blessed by his Maker, with the dark blue wounded eyes of an artist, raspberry lips, the lower one slightly fuller than the upper, white-blonde hair that made his eyes all the more prominent, and a trim, muscular body that brought to one’s mind images of Michelangelo’s David.
Gwendolyn smiled over the young writer like a doting mother hen. “William is a painter,” she said to Draper.
“Oh, of course, Gwen. Anyone who hasn’t heard of William Pendleton, painter of The Lightless Channel, has urgent need to climb out of his or her hole,” he said with a tone that Pendleton thought sounded like false compliment.
Draper had mentioned one of Pendleton’s older paintings. The Lightless Channel had been worked on during one of Pendleton’s depressive periods. The painting featured a gray background with several angel-shaped images in white. Even the critics said is was a work of art that one might not want to put in a hospital or an insane asylum’s suicide-watch floor because the grayness of the background and the whiteness of the angel-shaped images was apt to make one feel dreary, uncaring about life and its brighter happenings.
“And I thought The Pillars of the Sea was absolutely breathtaking,” Pendleton said with the same tone false compliment.
Pendleton and Draper stared at each other: Draper’s expression was one of icy indifference and amusement; Pendleton’s was one of lust.
Pendleton’s loins ached.
“Well, I see you’ve met my boy!” came a voice with a thick British accent.
Pendleton’s and Draper’s stare was broken and they and O’Hara and Littlefield turned towards that voice that had come to them.
“Quite the little nymph, don’t you think?” Sir Arthur Noonan said, coming to stop within their little conversational circle.
Sir Arthur Noonan was at least in his eighties with a fringe of white hair ringing the crown of his head and deep lines cut into his face. He was tall with a thickness around his middle that almost became a potbelly.
Been hitting the stein a little too often, Noonan? Pendleton thought.
The fat painter was the first to greet him. “Arthur! My good man, how have you been?” he asked heartily.
“Oh, fine, just fine.”
“And that nasty angina?”
Noonan shot a look at Draper and seemed to blush a bit.
“It’s fine, too,” the old man said sternly. But it was as though he was trying to convince Draper of that rather than Pendleton.
“I heard your name mentioned in relation with...what was it?...Alzheimer’s, maybe?” Pendleton asked, enjoying himself immensely.
“Certainly not!” Noonan said vehemently.
“Oh, perhaps it was your wife, then?”
Noonan regarded Pendleton with a look of fiery anger and stormed off into the sea of party-goers.
“Don’t you think that was a little rude?” O’Hara asked.
“Oh, he’ll get over it,” Pendleton answered, “a man that old should take pains to not collect too many enemies if he wants to die with a clean conscience.”
“I oughta knock the shit out of you,” Draper said to Pendleton.
“Oh, if I were you, I’d think twice about that. You don’t want an arrest record when your fame is still so young. I happen to be close friends with our chief of police, Mr. Omar Menendez. We knew each other in high school. We used to fuck under the bleachers everyday after the final bell rang.”
“You are a disgusting, nauseating pig of a man, and I thought Red Symphony was amateurish and hardly worth the canvas it was painted on. My three year old niece can fingerpaint better things than that,” Draper said and turned to follow Noonan.
“Draper?” Pendleton called.
The writer turned back and faced him angrily.
“Does the old man manage to get it up? Or does he use his finger?” Pendleton asked with genuine curiosity.
A vein throbbed in Draper’s neck and a thin sheen of sweat greased his face.
He looks even better when angry, Pendleton thought.
“Go on and find Arthur,” O’Hara said to Draper.
Draper left.
O’Hara turned angry eyes onto Pendleton.
“Oh, do keep your mouth shut, Gwen,” he said when she opened her mouth to give him a tongue-lashing.
“That was incredibly rude and uncivil. I’m ashamed to be on a first-name basis with you,” she said. And she too stormed away.
“You keep this up, and the next party you throw will be able to fit in an RV,” Littlefield said.
Pendleton laughed at this.
“I wouldn’t think it was funny, Bill. You don’t make it in People if you end up throwing parties in a Winnebago.”
“You overdramatize,” Pendleton replied. “These people love me to insult them. Sometimes I feel like Simon Cowl, only with a better haircut. They take my insults because they know that I can squash them like a bug, and they know that they can’t do a damned thing about it either.”
“Don’t be so sure of yourself, Bill. Arrogance doesn’t become you.”
“Have you ever seen me any other way?”
Littlefield had to admit that he hadn’t.
“Let’s go mingle,” Pendleton said.
Again they made their way around the ballroom, chitchatting with most of the guests. Pendleton insulted Baroness Uma Zbornak and told Raleigh Weber, the oil tycoon, that his toupee resembled a dead opossum that had seen a terrible end–perhaps death by vehicle.
“You’re on a roll tonight, Bill,” Littlefield told him a few moments after Pendleton had had a Harvey Wallbanger poured over his head. He’d told Mimi Feldman that here husband had a mouth like a Oreck.
“Rather entertaining, don’t you agree?” he asked, wiping the alcohol from his face and hair. His right cheek still smarted after having it slapped by Pamela DeYoung. He’d revealed to her that her new husband, Congressman Isaac DeYoung, squealed when his nipples were pinched. He felt his broad face break into a lascivious grin.
It was infectious, and Littlefield found himself smiling as well
Pendleton finished wiping the Wallbanger out of his hair and replaced the red silk handkerchief in his pocket.
“Ready to dive again into that viscous sea of humanity?” Pendleton asked him.
“Indeed.”
“Let us be off, then,” Pendleton said.



*****


The party was over and the clean-up crew was busy downstairs and Pendleton was upstairs in his private bathroom. He was in the bathtub, fantasizing about Hartley Draper, masturbating furiously.
He had had fun, a lot of fun, and he was excited about calling Jean-Claude Fournier and telling him what the people, especially the women, were wearing. That outfit O’Hara had been wearing was almost enough to send him into gales of laughter.
She’d been wearing a too-big black Giorgio Armani suit. It had set off her square, mannish shoulders and had exacerbated her height and made her look frumpy. And the glasses, good Lord, the glasses! They’d been pushed up on her nose and had thick black frames. And they were enormous, nearly reaching above her eyebrows.
Pendleton almost felt sorry for the poor guy who was sleeping with her...What was his name?...Delvecchio.
But he knew that, behind those enormous glasses there was a beautiful woman. It was almost as if she were afraid of someone seeing her as beautiful. Perhaps it was some women’s lib hullabaloo. Maybe she, in a fit of frustration, had one day dressed herself as unattractively as possible, thinking that no man in his right mind would hit on her again. But it seems that that hadn’t deterred this Delvecchio guy.
He climaxed and laid back against the tub, his manhood flaccid, but still in his hand.
“It seems as though age hasn’t changed you at all,” came a sudden and familiar voice.
Raising up so abruptly that he water sloshed over the side of the bathtub, Pendleton whipped his head around and looked with abject horror upon the form of his mother–his dead mother.
“Mother?” he asked in a tremulous voice.
“You should be ashamed of yourself, William Daniel Pendleton,” the ghost scolded.
“I’m sorry...I–I...”
Pendleton fumbled with a towel and laid it over his shriveling genitals.
“I know you did that when you were a teenager,” she spat out, “but I had no idea that you would still indulge in such vile behavior after becoming a man. It is despicable!”
Pendleton looked at her, his broad face pale, his eyes bugling so far that they seemed as though they might dislodge from their sockets. “My God, where have you come from?” he asked in a terrified whisper.
His mother, before her death at the age of seventy-four, had been a very severe woman. She wore her hair pulled back in a bun so tight as to cause her eyebrows to crawl up her forehead. Her expression was always one of stern disapproval, her small, colorless lips pursed. Her cheekbones were high and her eyes had always been bright with the intensity of hatred and cruelty; they had been hard and cold like polished stones in winter.
“I’ve been here,” she answered, and said no more.
She disappeared as suddenly as she had appeared.
Pendleton blinked, rubbed his eyes with two wet fists.
“Oh, God,” he said aloud.


*****


Pendleton tossed and turned in his gigantic four-poster, canopied bed. The red and gold silk sheets were twisted tightly around his fat, stumpy legs.
He flopped on his back, his rounded stomach sticking up, and stacked his hands beneath his head.
I won’t tell anyone, he thought. I just won’t tell anyone. Even if I do they’ll think I’m nuts. But that wouldn’t really matter, either. There were a lot of crazy painters. Geez, look at Van Gogh and Pollock.
He was frightened–that much was a given. But he was also confused. He’d never believed in ghosts. Even when his mother would force him to go to camp during the summer, when he and his troop would gather around the campfire, he’d let his thoughts wander, highly disinterested in the ghost stories and such.
He found himself believing that there had to be some reason why she’d come back, some motive for her return.
Had he done something to make her mad at him?
As a little boy he’d only needed to speak when she had a guest over and, after that guest left, she’d search him out in the house, grab his ear, twisting it, and drag him to the Punishment Closet. There he’d stay, in the dark, terrified, until his mother decided that the closet had punished him enough. His mother had been a firm believer in the old adage, “Children should be seen and not heard.”
The thought that she could be lurking in the enormous house, in spirit, as she was, sent little shivers of fear down his back like drops of melted snow. The thought that she could move through doors and walls, rise through the floors at will. He shuddered.
Pendleton forced his mind to entertain more pleasant thoughts, like making love with Hartley Draper. He tried to picture the writer without a shirt.
Would he have a six-pack?
Would his biceps be hard, large, and rounded like smooth stones?
Would he be well endowed?
Pendleton’s manhood began to throb with rushing blood, and he put his hand beneath the sheets. But then he jerked it back guiltily.
What if she came back?
His manhood quickly deflated.
He lay awake, eyes scanning the big room constantly, until the lids became heavy.
He fell into a light and troubled, dream-filled sleep when dawn’s gray, smokey light begin seeping through the red miniblinds.


*****


Pendleton sat at the long mahogany table, eating a large breakfast consisting of scrambled eggs with cheese, three thick sausage patties, and two halved buttermilk biscuits smothered in rich white gravy.
He ate with gusto, shoveling the food into his mouth with his fork, dropping dollops of gravy on his silk kimono.
His maid, Myrtle, had really outdone herself today. The eggs, with the cheese melted into them, were exceptional, the sausage was greasy and ever so slightly pink on the inside, and the biscuits were sopping with the delicious peppered gravy.
Finishing, he scooted his plate away from him and picked up his small, dainty teacup and finished the dregs of the Oolong. He poured himself some more from the gleaming stainless steel pot, unfolded the paper and lit a Marlboro Menthol 100.
His attention kept drifting from the newspaper to the subject of his mother. He couldn’t help but wondering if maybe he could hire an exorcist to make his mother to leave. He realized this was an absolutely ridiculous notion but, spirit or not, he wanted his mother gone.
He suddenly decided that he wanted to throw another party, and soon. A good dinner party would banish thoughts of his mother from his head.


*****


“Michael Llewellyn?” Littlefield asked.
“Oh, no, Thomas. He was at the party before last, and he bored me to tears with a story about a boat he’d just bought.”
Pendleton and Littlefield were sitting at the dining table, heads bent over a piece of stationery bordered with roses, going through Pendleton’s extensive roster of past party guests. Littlefield would sound off a name and Pendleton would accept or deny.
“Frank Feldspar?”
“Why not? He makes a good roll in the hay every now and then.”
Littlefield looked up at Pendleton with a faint expression of hurt.
Pendleton caught it, said, “Oh, come now, Thomas. No one stays in a monogamous relationship anymore.”
“I–I know,” Littlefield replied. “I just wish you wouldn’t flaunt it the way you do. Like that night at the party. I don’t want to know how many men you’ve...given blow–how many men you’ve satisfied orally. I love you, William, and you know that.”
“Don’t start with that shit again, Thomas. I don’t love you. And that is what you need to know. Know it well, Thomas, keep it close to you, because I’m not sticking with anyone. Ever.”
For a horrible moment Pendleton thought Littlefield would start bawling. His face turned red and his eyes went glassy and he hiccuped.
“Let’s finish this guest list and go to lunch,” Pendleton said cheerily.
Littlefield took a deep breath, said, “Aaron Guttman?”
“No! Absolutely not. That man drives me mad with pictures of his little rugrats. No.”
“Hartley Draper?” Littlefield asked with a slight edge in his voice.
“Oh, certainly. See if I can’t make up for last time. And jealousy most decidedly does not become you, Thomas.”
“Harry Lipschitz?”
“Hmm-hmm,” Pendleton answered.
“Terrence McTiernan?” Littlefield droned on.


*****


Pendleton had had an long oval-shaped table brought into his cavernous diningroom, and thirty people now sat around it. Pendleton’s finest china and silver gleamed and shimmered on the table’s surface, fluted crystal wine glasses sparkled and lush, heavy-headed antique cabbage roses rested in bowlfuls of icy water.
Pendleton stood at one end of the table, addressing his congregation. “Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you dearly for joining me in this little get-together. And I wish to apologize, publicly, to Mr. Hartley Draper for my incredibly uncouth behavior of last week.”
He favored Draper with a little smile.
Draper returned with a tight one of his own.
Once again the young writer was with Sir Arthur Noonan. Pendleton had thought it wise to invite the old man, believing that Draper wouldn’t attend without him.
“My maid, Myrtle, has prepared for us a wonderful meal starting off with a delicious consomme, a chef’s salad, roasted duck, with asparagus tips in hollandaise sauce, and glazed carrots. And for dessert there will be creme brulee,” Pendleton said, looking and smiling at each guest in turn. “I supervised the menu myself, tasted every–” he broke off, feeling a cold draft of air billow around his neck. He broke out in gooseflesh, and shuddered.
He knew, intuitively, that it was the return of his mother, and he felt like crying, running to the Punishment Closet. His broad face crumpled and a long wailing sob blew past his lips.
Littlefield, who was sitting at the other end of the long table, stood, taking his napkin from his lap and laying it on the table. “William...?” he asked, concern written on his face.
“Get these heathens out of my house, William!” said his mother, who was standing to his left, behind him.
“Mama?” he asked in a shaky whisper.
“It will be at your own risk if you should let them stay.”
“William?” Littlefield asked a bit more insistently.
“Get out,” he said quietly. Too quietly; no one heard him.
“I want them GONE!” his mother raged.
Pendleton felt even more solitary, single. Because he was the only one who could see her. He was alone; completely and utterly alone. He felt as though he was standing on the edge of a precipice, with his mother behind him, her hand on his back, ready to give him a push.
“Mama? I’m a-scared, Mama,” he said tearfully.
A dark stain began at the front of his pants, rapidly spreading, blooming into a humiliating flower. Urine ran down his leg in streaming rivulets, coming to puddle around his left shoe.
His guests gaped in horror and embarrassment, not wanting to look but unable to turn their faces away. Draper’s lips twitched with the need to smile; but he was able to suppress it.
“Get out,” Pendleton said, a little more forcefully. “Get out!”
The guests began stirring. Napkins were taken from laps and placed on the table, purses were collected, women grasped the elbows of their gentleman callers.
“Get out!” Pendleton said, louder still. “GET OUT!” he roared.
“William!” Littlefield gasped, horrified.
Pendleton turned on him, picked up a steak knife, walking towards the guests, who had just that minute began departing.
“Leave my home. Leave it!”
Little cries of fear and surprise were expelled from chests and eyes widened.
Pendleton wore a mask of devastation, as though he were aware and unaware of what he was doing. As though he were standing outside himself, seeing himself, knowing what he was doing was wrong, but unable to do anything about it.
“Bill?” Littlefield asked tentatively. He slowly and warily made his way to Pendleton, talking softly. “Put the knife down, honey. I’ll have Dr. Ingalls give you a sedative,” he said, talking about the psychiatrist they’d invited.
Pendleton regarded Littlefield blankly.
Littlefield walked closer to Pendleton.
Moving with impossible speed and agility, Pendleton grasped the back of Littlefield’s head and drove the knife into the smaller man’s stomach. Littlefield made a strange sound like a hiccup crossed with a gasp, blood burbling out of his mouth.
Littlefield went down slowly, pulling on Pendleton’s wool blazer, looking up at him sadly.
Pendleton turned on the stunned crowd, the bloody knife held vertically, blade pointing upwards.
“You can’t be in my mama’s house!” he shouted, flecks of foam spraying onto his thick, wet lips. “She wants you gone!”
The words had the effect of a lit firecracker that’d been tossed near a group of cats. The guests began clambering for the door, trampling on each other, violent and indifferent in their desperate race for safety.
Pendleton grabbed a handful of Mildred Fischbein’s hair, roughly pulled downward, stretching her neck out. He put the knife’s serrated edge against the loose, pale skin of her her throat and cut her from ear to ear. Blood spewed in a freshet into the air, splashing in Laura Benson’s face. Laura stumbled back, let out a high-pitched scream, her hands rising involuntarily, flapping them in revulsion.
Pandemonium erupted in the high-ceilinged diningroom, screams echoing and reechoing, cries rising up, only to be lost in the rafters.
His mother, behind him, floating, “That one. Cut him, William.”
Darryl van Damm was the “he” she was talking about. Pendleton had invited him along with his lover Lowell Olyphant.
Pendleton, hypnotically obeying his mother, dazedly advanced on Darryl.
Van Damm tried to fight him off, Olyphant helping him. But Pendleton was stronger than both of them. He easily pushed Olyphant to the floor, the man’s skull cracking on the dining table. Pendleton turned again towards van Damm, grabbed him by one lapel and buried the knife’s blade deeply into his chest.
Van Damm’s eyes rolled back in his head, his mouth opening, but no sound coming. Pendleton let him loose, van Damm crumpled to the floor.
“Get out of my mama’s house, you heathens!” Pendleton shouted.


*****


In the kitchen, Myrtle Kleinschmidt sat on a barstool at the stainless steel island in the middle of the large, state-of-the-art room. She was sipping a cup of chamomile and kava kava tea (she was having trouble sleeping lately) when the racket started out in the diningroom.
Frowning, she put her teacup down on the island’s gleaming surface, scooted down off the barstool and limped to the kitchen’s swinging door. God her feet were sore.
She opened the door about an inch and peeked out into the diningroom. What she saw made her gasp silently.
William Pendleton, her employer, held a bloody knife in one meaty fist, walking around like he was on dope. And as she watched, Pendleton stabbed Darryl van Damm.
People were running around like the devil himself were after them, screaming their heads off, falling and tripping over each other.
Myrtle moved quietly away from the door, and headed for the kitchen’s phone extension.


*****


“Like a fish, William, gut him.”
Following his mother’s orders, Pendleton made his way toward Nathan Flaherty.
The young man did not see Pendleton coming toward him in his slow, purposeful gait, because he was kneeling down on one knee, checking on Lowell Olyphant.
Pendleton grabbed Flaherty’s collar and yanked him to his feet. Flaherty let out a squeak of alarm, his eyes wide.
Pendleton stuck him with the knife and jerked his hand upward, backed away.
Flaherty fell to his knees, a look of almost comical surprise and horror on his face, as his innards slopped out of his slit stomach, falling heavily into his hands with a sickening wet sound.
“Get out of my mama’s house,” Pendleton muttered softly. “Get out.”
Most of the people had gotten to the door, but a knot of them were congested there. There was much screaming and cursing, crying and sobbing. Pendleton walked slowly to them, snagged the first person to whom he was closest, stabbed at them blindly; stabbed another, and another.
The door cleared and a wave of people rushed out of the mansion, running to their respective vehicles, burning rubber and spewing gravel as they sped away.
Pendleton seemed to come out of his daze and he looked at the knife with an expression of horror. He dropped it to the floor, his hand shaking violently.
“Mama?” he asked uncertainly.
“You did good son.”
Pendleton hurried to the bathroom and looked in the large gilded mirror. He opened his mouth in a little O of surprise. Blood had been spattered on his face and was drying in little red-brown flecks. His eyes looked wild, even to him, and his face was abnormally pale.
“Oh, my God, what did I do?” he cried miserably.
“You did exactly what I told you to do,” his mother said suddenly from behind him. “And it’s about time, too.”
“You made me do this? You?!” he roared.
“Don’t you raise your voice to me, young man!”
He looked at the ghost of the wretched woman and raged.


*****


“Hello?” Myrtle Kleinschmidt said into the phone.
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?” a kind voice asked.
“My boss,” Myrtle said tentatively. “He’s gone completely crazy. He’s kill–killing everybody. Just at random.”
“Does he know where you are?”
“He knows I’m in the kitchen, but I think he’s forgotten about me.” Myrtle suddenly began to cry, hot tears running down her soft, powdered cheeks. “His eyes,” she said, “oh, Lord in Heaven, his eyes.”
“Ma’am?” the operator asked. “Ma’am? Are you still there?”
“Yes, yes, I’m here.” Myrtle wiped the tears out of her eyes and took a deep, fortifying breath.
She knew she hadn’t been threatened directly, and Pendleton probably had forgotten about her, but she was so very scared. She found herself thinking about her long-dead husband, Lord rest his soul. She’d been missing Gil a lot lately, more than usual. She’d found herself mourning him one night in bed. She had rolled over onto her right side and had said, “Goodnight, Gil,” like he was there. She’d been so shocked that she hadn’t been able to get to sleep for hours after.
“Can you just come as soon as possible?” she asked the operator.
“I’ve already alerted the police; they’re on their way.”
Myrtle hung up the phone.
She looked around the kitchen feeling at a loss. She didn’t know whether to hide or go outside, or what. She just stood there, feeling helpless. Then she noticed the screaming had stopped.
Myrtle went back to the kitchen door, opened it a crack, and peeked out.
Everyone was gone. But she could hear faint voices, coming from the direction of the hallway.
Mr. Pendleton? she thought. Who’s he talking to?
Her eyes were snagged by the sight of the bodies. Mr. Littlefield; Mrs. Fischbein; Mr. van Damm; Mr. Flaherty. And three other bodies once belonging to people she didn’t recognize.
She said a prayer for the souls of the dead and backed away from the door. She turned and stood, and once again looked around the kitchen–a kitchen she knew as well as her own–and wondered what in the world to do.


*****


Pendleton continued to gape at the mirror, staring in horror at the sight of his face. He could sense, more than he could see, his mother’s ghost.
“Why would you make me do something like this, Mommy?” he asked pitifully.
“It serves you right, you fat little worm.”
“What? What’d I do?” he asked.
“You will not let me go!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You mean to tell me that you don’t remember?”
“Remember what?!”
“You killed me!”
Pendleton was stunned to speechlessness.
“You killed me,” she repeated.
“Kill...?” he asked stupidly after finding his voice again.
“Yes; kill.”
“Mama? Mama, I don’t remember.”
A growl rumbled in his mother’s throat.
“You killed me during afternoon tea. We were arguing the way we always did.”
Pendleton looked at her, his eyes shiny with desperation.
“You’d put rat poison in my tea. Cyanide, I believe. And I died at the table. My voice began petering out, getting softer and softer. But suddenly, before I died, I knew what you’d done. I cursed you. I cursed the very day you were born. The most evil man on earth wouldn’t have been able to understand the depths of hatred I felt for you as I died.”
Pendleton felt dizzy, dazed. He felt confused and nauseous.
“You had gotten up from the table when my voice began going out. You stood over me, as I lay dying, and you said, ‘Goodnight, Mother. Sweet dreams.’ And I tried to raise my hands and wrap them around your neck–your fat, disgusting neck–but I was so weak that I couldn’t even raise my arms over my head. They’d felt so heavy.
“And I died. You carried me to the bathroom, put me in the bathtub and decapitated me. You then proceeded to dismember me, humming all the while. And then you placed my limbs and torso in two separate bags and put me in the garage. The next day you buried me, in pieces, in your rose garden. You won the tope prize at the rose show for your cabbage roses that year,” she added, a strange little smile on her face.
Pendleton had sat on the toilet lid, head in his hands, while his mother had finished her narrative.
“I remember...a little...”
“But you won’t let me go.”
“I don’t remember, Mama. I...”
“You won’t let me go, William, you insufferable fool! You won’t let me go!”
“Mama...Mama, I wish you were here. Really here,” he blubbered, sobbing into his hands.
His mother made a sound of disgust deep in his throat.
“You won’t let me go,” she repeated again. “Your puny gray brain in wrapped as tightly around me as your hand was wrapped around your sad little penis. Let me go, William.”
Pendleton sobbed harder.
“Let me go!”
Pendleton moaned and wailed.
“Let me go, you miserable, despicable insect! LET ME GO!”
Pendleton suddenly leapt off the toilet lid, ran through his mother, and out of the bathroom.
His mother had no trouble keeping up with him.
“I should have drowned you in a tubful of water after I got you home from the hospital. Should’ve put you face-down in your bath water.”
Pendleton raced through the cavernous diningroom, into the kitchen, and out to the garage.
“You aren’t even your fathers! We had your Uncle David over for cocktails and we fucked like a couple of horny teenagers when your dad left the room to get more bourbon. The stupid fool.”
Pendleton began searching the garage frantically, intent on finding whatever it was he was looking for.
“You were spawned during forty-five seconds of animalistic lust! You were nothing but a meaningless microorganism! A stain on my dress! I could’ve squashed you with my thumb!”
Pendleton, with a grunt of approval, found what he as looking for–a gas can–and, walking through his mother again, returned to the house.
“I’ll let you go, Mother. I’ll let you go! I’ll send you to hell a second time!”
He began splashing gas onto the furniture, the carpet, in the fireplace, the diningroom table.
The gas fumes caused more tears to roll down his fat, red cheeks. They assaulted his olfactory senses and made him feel as though he wanted to sneeze.
He slung more gas from the can onto the hallway floor, went to his bedroom and poured some on his bed. The remaining gas sloshed around in the can. He poured some more of the odorous liquid into the toilet, on the bathroom floor, and finally flung the can aside.
Pendleton pulled a handful of strike-anywhere matches from his pocket and held them up before his mother’s ghost.


*****


Myrtle Kleinschmidt nearly screamed when William Pendleton crashed into the kitchen, banging the swinging door back against the wall. But she stopped herself at the last second by shoving her fist into her mouth.
She watched, eyes wide, as her employer entered the garage like a bull in a china shop, knocking things off the wall, scattering old newspapers meant for the recycling bins. He left her line of sight for a moment, making more loud, crashing noises, giving the occasional grunt.
He came back into Myrtle’s field of vision, knocking more things from another shelf, finally finding what he wanted.
He left the garage, crashed back through the kitchen’s swinging door.
It was like he didn’t even notice me, Myrtle thought, confused and frightened.
But what terrified her the most was what he’d been carrying when he came out of the garage.
A gas can, she thought stupidly.
Quiet as a mouse, she tiptoed back to the kitchen door, opened it a crack as she’d done three times before, and peered around at the diningroom, where Mr. Pendleton stood.
He was talking to someone.
Myrtle strained to hear what he was saying.
“I’ll send you to hell a second time.”
Myrtle furrowed her brow curiously.
She opened the door an inch more; just wide enough to stick her head through so she could crane her neck and see who Mr. Pendleton was talking to.
There was no one there.
Myrtle suddenly caught a whiff of gas as the scent wafted to the kitchen. Fear clutched at her throat with greedy little hands. She tried to swallow but found herself unable to.
She stepped back, away from the door, watched it swing back and forth, making a soft whooshing noise against the jamb.
The stringent stench of gas. Mr. Pendleton with a handful of long matches.
Her mind tried desperately to process this, mold it into something understandable. But she stood there dumbly, utterly mystified, blinking against the stink of the gas, wringing her hands in her apron.


*****


Pendleton stood before the witch, his face a color somewhere between red and purple, his fat, wet lips pursed tightly. His breathing was shallow and quick, his head aching with the gas’s pungent odor. He was dizzy and terrified. Incredibly.
“I’m gonna send you to hell again, Mother,” he repeated, his chest heaving.
“Do it then.”
Feeling cowardice beginning to creep up on him, he stamped it down; put a big, heavy mental foot on it. He held up one of the strike-anywhere matches in his mother’s face, put a thick, clammy thumb on the flammable head. He put the head under his thumbnail and raked the nail against the head.
Nothing.
He tried again.
Nothing still.
Once again he attempted to light the match.
The flammable head broke off the match in crumbs.
His mother laughed.
Growling deep in his chest, he took another match and tried again.
A spark and a scent of burnt sulphur and nothing more.
His mother’s laugh resounded in his head and the diningroom.
With a wet, guttural sound of fury, Pendleton wielded another match at his mother, turned at the waist and raked it against the underside of the dining table.
A flame leapt to the match’s head. Pendleton looked at it with a big, idiot grin.
His mother’s expression remained blank.
“Do it,” she demanded.
“See you in hell?”
His mother didn’t answer.
He dropped the match.
The flames begin immediately, rolling in like a tide, seeking out and burning the gasoline with which Pendleton had soaked everything.
Fire consumed Pendleton, the flames and the smoke twirling around him in a cyclonic dance. He could smell his own flesh burning, could feel it melting, falling at his feet in big sizzling globules.
And, indifferent to all the fire’s light, the darkness came. Cool and gentle, the darkness came.

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