“C’mon boy,” Mary called.
Bill was roused and with Bea doing what she was doing he wasn’t sure he wanted to leave where he stood. He closed his eyes. Everything started dancing in the starburst-dark.
The infinite microscopic dots inside his closed eyes swayed to the non-music buzz in his ears. Familiar with him, Bea knew precisely how to touch him. Her hand spread honey-warmth through his midsection and up his stomach.
Thinking he was on the sly, he slid his hand along the shelf to her and began lifting her dress. Both their hands were low and against the shelf, so if someone came into the kitchen they wouldn’t be able to see exactly what they were doing.
Then he felt a slap on the back of his head and his ears rang.
Mary stood behind them. Bea let out her throaty, deep-voiced chuckle.
“Boy,” Mary said, “you got those trays of fried food to be carrying downstairs. Then you got your stuff to be carrying up for the dinner. And Henry Lee waiting on you to help him cut meat.”
She led him by the hand away from Bea’s station and away from Bea.
He could do anything to Annabelle. Annabelle would do anything for him, everything.
The three others were naked in bed together. Their bedroom door, Jack’s bedroom door, was ajar. Bill and Annabelle peeked in before they went into one of the other bedrooms. Bill carried a joint, Annabelle carried the bottle of wine.
They had not eaten any tuna fish.
“Maybe it’s still alive,” Bill said before they left the kitchen.
“I’m dead, stupid,” the mouse said. “Look at me, man. I’m dead.”
The cats lost interest in the mouse once it was dead. At first they kept playing with it, but once they were sure it wasn’t doing anything back, they left it, preened themselves, cleaned themselves and went off to their food bowls to eat.
Bill thought he saw it breathing. He thought he saw her breathing too, that day she plopped down on the sofa and died.
He let that thought go quickly. His mother had been dead now for more than eight years.
Annabelle told him he had to clean it up. She sidled up to him and rubbed herself on him. Like a little girl begging, she said, ”please, please, please?”
Bill found the broom and dust pan. He swept that sucker up and dumped it into the garbage bag then he took the garbage bag out, spun it and tied it with a knot, dropped the bag into the can.
Done.
Gone.
“Good bye cruel world,” he heard the mouse say from the tied bag inside the closed can.
“You ain’t giving it to her,” Mary said.
It was déjà vu. She led him into the storeroom and bolted the door from the inside.
She took a lipstick tube from the pocket of her kitchen dress, painted her lips the dark purple she knew he loved.
No more dinosaurs. No elephants dancing or mice talking or cats in sunglasses. In the closed storeroom, there with Mary, he lost himself in an apocalyptic vision of the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb.
“Get under the desk,” he said to Mary even though he wasn’t saying it to Mary. “Quick. Get down and under your desk.”
“Boy,” Mary said, but before she could get anything further out, he was pulling her down, down, down to the floor.
For her, she would tell him later, it was like that time she was being pushed beside the bleachers at school. She wasn’t being forced then. She’d gone because she was hot and curious and young and stupid.
“We’re all gonna die,” Bill said. There on the floor of the storeroom, he held her to him and said he was glad that at least they’d die together.
By Peter Weiss
and
Coming in a few weeks
