City of the Immolated

The phone stopped ringing. It’s just another phone call, she dismissed the third time that day.

Harley stared down at the phone laying on its receiver. Her spirits failed her and her fingers curled back into a fist. A rock tore the lining of her guts. A cold laughter mocked her. She saw it in the window reflection. A sinister grin, soil clumps filling his mouth and eye sockets.

She neared the window, and took hold of the nylon bindings holding the curtain against the wall. Wind blew snow against the window. She buttoned up her coat, and placed a palm on the glass. The frost melted beneath her hand. The first snow of the year shedded over the urban glow. She wiped away condensation and looked into the street. The Pink Panda Twenty-Four Hour Daycare only four blocks from her apartment. Upright shambles occupied the space between her and the Daycare. She noted them all for not a single thing changed about them in the time she lived in this neighborhood. The garage full of trucks from the 40's, the lot of rusted parts exposed by the wind lifting tarps until the elastic cords snapped off and projectiled over the razor crowned chainlinks. Stealing from you does us all a favor, she thought, looking to the place to rent backhoes and take out loans, the fenced off soccer field, the bus stop,  the phone booth, then the cleared lots of once standing structures since burned down. In the distance, gleaming towers polluted the clouds with the noxious haze of regurgitated butter.

Her phone rang again. She decided not to idle. She closed the curtain, took her purse, said goodbye to the cat, and locked the door behind her.

Her boots scraped against the sea green carpet as she stepped around the blood stains and patches of bald floor. A stranger slept against one door with his head buried in his lap. Foreign tongues argued behind another door- she felt ashamed, but curiosity provoked her ears. In the next door, she heard the whispers of two male lovers. The next, the explosions and gunshots of an analog TV set, then it all slipped away as she sunk down four flights of stairs to the ground level.

An old woman collected mail, an older man grumbled behind her. Harley greeted them good evening, but they ignored her. Outside a police officer ticketed a car parked in front of a hydrant. His cheeks and nose red like blood. He plastered the ticket on the windshield and went along into the steaming streets. Harley knew the owner and covered her smile. Already a nest of tickets fluttered under the windshield wipers. The early snowfall tumbled from the glass into the tickets to destroy them. Not my problem, Harley assured.

She stuffed her scarf down her coat collar. Still her bones recoiled and her chest shivered from the sharp cold burying its teeth into her bones. She wore only a shirt beneath, no sweater, no undershirt. Her phone vibrated in her purse. She ungloved one hand and pulled the device free. The curb became quicksand when she saw the digits- a caller from some obscure room in the city. She took out the battery. The phone stopped, the haunting digits frozen, the pixels one by one succumbed to a dark bleach.

She passed the meth lab. A flash and a bang lit up the curtained RV windows. A unibrowed man stepped out and smoked a cigarette. He warned her with watchful eyes as Harley strode past benign to the illicit operation. The unibrow man lost interest in her. He sniffed the night air, smelled her blood, but detected no potential for victimhood. A shiver went down his spine, and he stomped out his half burned cigarette. He decided he was safer in the exploding meth lab.

Her teeth chattered. She knew a one eyebrowed man once before, way back, back then… she drew her phone and tossed it over a fence. She used a track phone anyhow. She dropped the battery in a trash can. A bum dug through the trash and devoured a half eaten bag of movie popcorn. He choked on a kernel and slid back into the brush of dark between two buildings. She wondered if she knew him before, if perhaps he might let a little secret out to the wrong people- then take them right to her. She felt around her purse. No mace, no gun- nothing to fall into the hands of the little panda bears. The pink sign shined a block away, just over from the barred windows of the liquor store. She smiled, a warmth brewed beneath her chest, the unibrow and the gagging vocalist ceased to complicate her evening. Her shift started at 9PM, but she showed up an hour early every night to see the children to bed.

“Only thirteen tonight?” Harley asked the dayshift sitter.

“Holidays roll around, we don’t see them as much.”

“I love seeing them go to sleep… it’s my favorite part about children. When they’re awake I cannot stand them.”

“It’s going to be a quiet night. Our troublemakers aren’t here, we have plenty of formula for the babies, and snacks for the older boys and girls. Whatever you need. Plus with this snow, it's so toasty and warm- good luck waking them up in the morning.”

The dayshift sitter closed the coffee room door, and beckoned Harley.

“The dumpster wasn’t unlocked last night.”

“No, no- you’ve made a mistake.”

“I know it’s not pretty business but- If you aren’t… doing your job, then we’ll find someone else who will.” Her words soaked with regret, each syllable-even the pauses of her breath, drove nails into her heart.

“There’s no problems.”

“No, but there will be if you don’t start leaving one out.”

Harley made coffee and hung up her coat. She looked young once, trails of youth remained on her face, wads and clumps of broken down flesh caused her body shape to swell and bloat in asymmetrical patterns. Gray hairs spiraled from her black locks, and her lips remained an early morning pale, sharp and narrow.

She sipped her coffee, but felt the pins of insomnia outwork the caffeine. They pierced her eyelids, the curve of her spine, her joints, even her toes and finger tips. She knew how a fractured mirror felt better than most.

One of the kids yawned, and she lost concern for her depreciating health. She left the coffee room to see the little pandas. Eight sleeping bears, each one fat and comfortable on floor mats covered in cotton cocoons, pillowed with stuffed animals, the glow of the Christmas cartoon washing over their restful faces. The four infants slept like piglets in straw. The Sleepless One, a little girl that slept during the day and animated after nightfall, hung out in a lit corner pulling blocks out one by one and using them to construct a model of the Golden Gate Bridge with arches and columns and lanes- even the anti-suicide fences.

Harley asked the girl, “why not sleep?” The nocturnal wonder stared without smile and produced a piece of art from her overalls. Harley took it, and asked for it to be explained. “That’s my house. That’s my family in the mad room. That’s our dog with me. That’s you,” She pointed to the basement. “Making hot drinks for us.” Harley took the art. Tickled giggles escaped as she examined and re-examined. The girl went back to her blocks. A scar ran down along the bridge of her nose down to her upper lip where a piece of her mouth discolored into a pink square- a burn scar. Harley wore many along her thighs and foot bottoms. The inflictions never fully healed.

Harley looked over the drawing again while listening to the holiday cartoon in the nursery. A movie she saw every holiday, when the snow first fell. In that first year she heard it over the sound of sharpening blades, foaming pots, and cracking whips. How nice, she thought, to be able to enjoy it for once.

Then little Johnny stirred and awoke with cry. Harley sprang, possessed by the possibility that he needed a hospital- but she also worried about him awakening the other children. He buried his face into her lap, but the phantasms that provoked his fit struck fierce bolts too terrible for him to disclose to her. He whimpered to Harley and asked for a new cartoon because the Christmas one reminded him of the night terror. So she switched it off and put in a different tape. The VCR whined and hummed as it reeled back the cassette while she comforted the boy on his mat, giving him a new juice box and a cookie that she baked herself. He settled down, but his eyes did not shut for the rest of the night.

The shadow of a broken man emerged from the veils of steam. Harley looked from the children to the front window stretching across the wall. Outside misted with fresh snowfall steaming on warm streets. The drifter sifted through the mist, and placed his hands on the glass to peer inside. His gangling limbs bowed out. Glasses pressed into his soft, fat, balding features. Harley rose from the dark of the nursery and erected against the counter. She didn’t reach for the button that dropped the iron shutters over the window. Two bolt locks kept the door secure. A camera recorded the front of the building, and the rear. The glasses glared with electric snaps, and he pulled his hands across the fogged window, leaving a long hand print across the pane before vanishing into the street where the snow melted to gravy colored slush.

She leaned back, satisfied that the visitor went on his miserable way. She didn’t hate the creepers- she shared blood with far too many to hate them. However she stayed at the counter, watching the snow sprinkle under the current of childish snores.

She saw the same three things whenever she wished that the kids would have a life better than hers. A royal-purple Mercedes with golden rims rode past towards the shining towers. Anarchists rioted down the streets with bats and flaming garbage cans. A tribe of hunter gatherers migrated towards the city limits. Her heart raced, her forehead moistened- and the pitch fork veins pumped oil into the furnace of her inner war machine. Not because they lived the way they did, but because what they practiced failed to alleviate the lesions of the Pink Panda children.

Little Johnny walked up from the nursery pulling his blanket with him. He saw nothing outside but noticed his babysitter seething like one of the diseased rats he often ate breakfast with. She took a pen from the counter and wrote line after line until the black ink leaked through to the surface, leaving vessels of blue and black to sink into the cheap counter top. His attention went from her to a short stool that he pushed to the counter. He climbed up to read what she wrote, but she crumpled it up and tossed it into the recycling when she detected his snooping eyes.

A pair of floodlights enhanced the depth of the fog. The engine roar echoed up the street. Frost flaked away from the trembling window. Little Johnny pulled on Harley’s pocket. “It’s from my nightmare,” he informed her. The engine looked like a cast iron oven propelling machinery capable of hauling debris through a mountain valley swamp with tires thick as table tops and a cab that looked like a mine shaft elevator. Harley looked down to the boy, and told him that no such thing is possible, but he insisted. “It’s from my dream, he’s going to come inside- keep him out!”

The truck sped past, cutting a wagon trail in the slush. “See? Nothing-” she tried to assure him before the twisting outburst of melting steel. She looked back out the window. Between the layers of fog she saw the blossoms of flame. Black smoke rose like a flock of cranes fleeing gunfire.

The flames expanded, following trails of dark fuel into the street. The outline of the truck sharpened as it burned. What caused it to crash remained hidden beneath the fog. Harley took the boy back to bed. When she returned the fire blazed on. No help came, so she took the counter phone and dialed the emergency line. Little Johnny got back up, and took two kids, little Rosalita and little Mark, with him to watch the excitement.  The old woman at the other end told her “police are on the way,” so Harley hung up and told the kids to return to the nursery. “I want to see a fireman!” “I want to see the car blow up like in the movies!”

Harley ushered them back to the nursery, but it occurred to her that they might awake and tell the other children about the car accident, so she put them in the play area instead and told them to remain there. She watched the clock for ten minutes. No paramedics nor fire brigade came. She dialed 911 again, but they reiterated what they said before . Harley let the phone rest from its receiver on the counter. The operator’s tone echoed against the dry veins of ink. As she waited for rescue to arrive, the flames grew higher. A charred piece of jerky reached out and pulled himself out from a melted window, crawled through the spilled fuel, and through the street slush, moving like a cripple mantis, dragging his hips against the ground, fighting for every inch, every steamy breath seeping from his mouth spiraled into the smoke lingering from the roasted embers of crackling flesh.

Harley looked down both ways of the street, and saw no ambulance. The man collapsed before the day care. Little pandas stirred awake and peeked over the counter to see the snow build up on the crisp of smoldering person. The snow melted like sugar. Harley undid the locks, and jammed a book into the doorway to prevent the auto lock from engaging, then darted into the snow and mist. The children smelled the savory scent of cooked flesh blow in.

She approached and hesitated above the husk of man looking for signs of life. Snow jumped as he thrust an arm at her- not to take hold, but to swat her away. “Go away- get inside.” But Harley grabbed his arm and pulled him up despite his agonized protests. His limbs buckled, and his organs writhed against the charred leather of his abdomen. Smoke chimneyed from his throat. The flesh peeled from his arm like a bracelet, and he dropped down. Harley dropped his flesh. It sizzled in the slush.

The truck popped and crackled under the diesel reeking pyre. Harley tried again- she tore a strip from the bottom of her shirt, and tied it around his chest right beneath his armpits. He tried to tell her “leave me in the snow, leave me in the cold” but only harsh coughs and puffs of smoke escaped his mouth. Harley promised him pain killer inside. He saw the panda painted on the glass. “I don’t think tyke’s tylenol is going to cut it,” he tried to say.  

His clothing fell apart as she dragged him, and to Little Johnny it looked like a snake peeling its skin. He removed the book from the doorway. The automatic lock bolted.

Harley slapped the glass and told him to open the door. The children, frightened, alarmed, yelled at little Johnny for leaving them out. Little Brain and Special Todd awoke. Todd’s cries sounded like a cow in line for slaughter. She pounded on the door as the children argued over what  to do. Little Johnny insisted that the burned man was an “inkubutt” who intended to harm them. The kids wailed, unsure if they wanted the stinking man in or no. Then the Sleepless One stepped from her corner, her model nearly complete, and slipped between the fussy brats, to the door. She opened it- snow and cold blew in, and the reeking of burned meat entered as Harley lay the man against the floor. She rolled up a coat and stuffed it under his head. His breath sounded like a narrow vent. His flesh bubbles popped and oozed. Once inside the kids saw no cobra-monster, but rather grievous injuries- a man without lips or eyelids.

“He’s a zombie!” Little Johnny maintained to the exhilaration of the children.

Harley ran to the sink in the snack area and returned with a dixie cup of wax paper flavored water. She tricked some onto his lips. Green eyes widened as his tongue lapped the gum rivets below his incisors like a bee on a flower stamen. She wiped his blood from the tiles and nursed the torn segments of his flesh with goz from the first aid kit. His chest rose like tectonic shift, then lowered with exhale singing like rusted windmills. She leaned nearer, for she almost heard a word. Somewhere lost in the breakdown of his growling breathes, she heard the delicate consonants clacking in his throat. “Come… Closer… so… children… will… not… hear…”

She leaned near his exposed gums, the tongue still licking the regions never before reached now sweetened with his own blood clots. “Give… them...one… and… I can… tell you… their…. Fates…and… how… to… avoid.... them…”

Harley rose again to look down at the quarter round eyes quivering with ocular fluid.

“It… is… so… you … can… save… most… if… you… give… them… just… one...other...wise… I can’t… pro….mise… I... can… keep… you ...all...safe….”

Harley looked out over the edifices, a city shrinking every year, buildings crumbling, crime rising, a deteriorating nest of concrete and pollution. Why lose an ounce of blood over this place, she thought.

“Those...locks….will keep… the thieves...and the...jealous… ex spouses… away… but they… won’t stop…what’s... com...ing…just one… just one…”

“Who are you?”

“Just one… just one…”

Little Amy pressed the button on the counter. The metal shutters dropped down part way and stopped. The chains tangled in the compartment. Harley turned on the counter light. All four infants cried. The nine kids gathered around the burned body.

“Get… me… more… water…” he commanded them as they poked at him.

Harley comforted the infants, putting them back to sleep one by one, only to have them wake up again. She rushed around, nursing them with formula and comforting them with back pats. She shooed the children away, looking out for the ambulance.

“It’s… not… coming… for… me…”

Pressure behind her eyes swelled like a balloon. Silvery aura filled her vision. She set the infants back in bed, though they fussed and squirmed and spat. A red camera light blinked towards them, one she never noticed before. She rubbed her temples, the stench so strong that it drifted onto her tongue. The head pain corroded into something sharp and possessive. She almost took a spoon and scooped her eye out to get to the disturbance underneath, but she realized the cameras no longer faced the exterior of the daycare- they faced her. So she went to the security monitor. All the codes and numbers melted into archaic characters, but she saw the icon of a camera- and when she clicked on the tab the camera’s red light died, but to her revulsion the auto lock came undone too. She ran to the door and bolted it with the extra locks. She peeked outside through the metal shutters but she didn’t find an ambulance- instead she saw the mocking smile, dirt between his teeth, saliva and foam slobbered from his mouth, his clothes rotten and earth stained- only a young boy, not a stalker of the night, not a retribution-hungry fiend, but the slender frame of the nine year old she kept in her crack den twenty years back. She gave him taste after taste of crack cocaine, and to her pleasure she found his addiction developed fast and he no longer needed food, water, or sleep to perform his services- so long as she kept him supplied. She made over one thousand dollars a night from the greasy hands, beady eyes- and the plundering appetites of the city’s elite. All because of a magic white rock that she and her friends made in a trailer.

The revenue stream came to an end when one client came out, zipping up his Incotex Bensons, wild and nervous. When she entered the room she found her slave convulsing on the floor like a fish, the back of his head lifting and slamming against the floor. She saw the crack pipe still burning on the hardwood, but didn’t know what to do. So, she crushed his throat with her knee and buried him in some woods. She never knew who he was or where he came from. But she never forget the cyclone of emotions that haunted his face until his neck cracked and he at last slipped away into the backwash from whence he came.

Harley closed the shutter and wiped the sweat from her hands on her pants. The children asked what disturbed her. Some went for the window, but she called for them to stop. She pulled every chair in distance jammed them against the front door. She tore the chain from the compartment and the shutters fell all the way down. As she stood by the window she felt his dirt filled eyes searching for her, breathing against the glass.

She went to the coffee room, pulled out the table, and pressed it against the back door. She dragged in the toy boxes and secured the table in place. When she thought she sealed it, she began to worry about the vents- so she closed them all, and covered them with spare cloth diapers and stacked boxes in front.  She surveyed her work, and thought that no invasive entity possessed the prowess to overcome her barricades.

The infants kicked and screamed. Harley dimmed the lights so the nursery looked like a garden of darkness and untucked blankets. She gathered the nine children. “The ambulance will come and take the poor man to the hospital. You all need your sleep.”

The kids didn’t want to sleep, they wanted to keep poking.

“Just stay here in the nursery- whatever you do, stay here. Do not move.”

She forced each of them to sit on their mats, and she put in another cartoon. This one didn’t look like anything she remembered. The box featured a shrimp and a piranha going on an Amazon adventure- but the images on screen portrayed heads rolling down pyramids to gushing cracks at the bottom where starving hands reached up to take any piece of flesh grabable- the hands fought and hurt each other for the smallest hair. She unplugged the TV. The children looked confused, and anxious. Little Rosalita cried first, then Little Mark, then Special Todd. Harley pulled her hair and went back to check on the burned man.

“No one can take them from me,” she said to him. “You hear that? No one.”

He didn’t hear. His breathes stopped. His teeth looked glossy and clean, his jaw limp. His eyes remained watery as bird baths.  She placed her hand on his neck. His flesh didn’t feel cold,  but hot as summer sidewalks. When she pulled her hands away, she didn’t doubt he died. She removed pieces of his flesh to make sure, but he didn’t twitch. She wiped the ashes from her hands with a towel. She went to check on the children.

One infant needed his diaper changed. Little Ben and Little Amy stopped crying. The others blubbered as they watched her distribute juice boxes, but no sugary fluids or snacks comforted them. The Sleepless One left her juice untouched. She never cried. Yet her attention tunneled towards someone standing above the burned man, concealed in shadows perspiring from a hairline. The spectre snapped its fingers, and the power across the entire neighborhood died.  Harley heard scuffling and shifting, grabbing and tossing. One by one, the crying stopped.

Harley held her hands out, taking short steps to the counter shelf where she left her purse. She pulled out a small utility light, but the switch did nothing. She listened. Even the clocks stopped. Then she felt a cold hand on her shoulder.

“Here”, the stranger slipped a lantern in her hand that glowed with a blue fire. A hand took hers and used it to guide the slide open. The blue light cast over the nursery.

Little Brian slept in the clutches of Cool-Aid stained cloaks. She swiped at them, but they sunk into the floor.

Little Kaylee sat in the corner, but a mammoth of a woman, an insult to the word obese, alone in a small apartment, swallowed the little girl whole and watched TV all day long.

Little Brace, one of the infants, lay in his bed- but the bed sat on seedy motel floor. A shivering crackhead in the corner asked the baby for more “of them sweet gravel” and carried him off to procure more narcotics.

Little Mark slept in a toilet. Someone flushed it, and down he went.

Little Karen slept chained to a mattress on the floor.

Little Amy slept in the warming spotlight of a burning barrel amongst shivering vagrants.

Special Todd slept on a veterinarian's euthanasia chair.

Little Ben slept as warplanes gassed his foxhole.

Little Suzy slept in a red basket made of squirming fingers.

Little Rosalita slept as USIS agents dropped from ropes, and swept her away.

Little Timmy slept behind prison bars.

Little Johnny slept as the moon lit up recently filled grave. One hand still stuck out, took hold of Johnny and pulled him under.

The Sleepless One slept. Under the Golden Gate bridge.

All thirteen of them faded under blankets of shadow. Like they weren't there. Like they never even existed. Yet something remained in the nursery. She lifted the light to see, though she knew already. The sinister dirt filled mouth opened, worms squirmed where a tongue should’ve been. Harley groveled, tears breaking down her cheeks- “Just one, please!” she begged.

The tormentor listened. Other eyes floating like tiny torches in the dark  focused in on her. “Just one, let it be me- let the rest go and I will offer myself.”

The tormentor stepped so near that she smelled the burned rocks of the broken glass pipe and the cologne of the rich old men that lathered themselves in his tender youth. He blew the lantern out. The locks each came undone, and the winter wind blew open the door to bite her bones one last time.

In the morning, the nine children awoke to the squealing of the four infants. The city looked business as usual with a fresh coating of snow. School was cancelled. Their parents picked most of them up on time. The kids were happy that day. The distant towers lustered over them, and sang to them:

“When the bough breaks,

The cradle will fall,

And down will come baby

Cradle and all.”