The Becoming

The rope was slick and shimmered in the early morning light. Really, it wasn’t a rope at all. It looked more like the intestines that spilled out of people’s stomachs in the movies. He bent over to touch it, but stopped himself. The cord ran in two directions: up the side of Grandma’s house into the window he’d left open and through the grass of the front lawn in the direction of the Harris home. A morning dove cooed. Crickets were still chirping. A fly buzzed near his ear causing the boy to recoil. Now the sun set the many windows along the street into geometric candles. The wind blew a whisper through the trees. It was cold but the good kind of cold, the sort the boy enjoyed because he knew it was going to be a mild day. He nudged the cord with a foot, it swished in the grass but did nothing else. He looked back at the Dodson’s house. He saw her watching him from where she’d pulled the sheet away from the window. She waved. He returned the gesture.

She wasn’t coughing or hacking when he came in. “Grandma?” His voice seemed too loud, too revealing. But why should he care about something like that if everything was alright? “I couldn’t find help, that’s why I left...Grandma?” She could be sleeping, he thought. If she was, she’d have already woken up when he came in. She was such a light sleeper she had woken the boy up to tell him to stop having a bad dream because he was moving around too much. She wouldn’t ignore him, that was one thing she’d never done. No matter how mad the boy made her she would always answer him when he spoke.

He tried one more time, “Grandma?”

Something moved upstairs, it was faint but reminded him of when he’d played hide and seek at his cousin’s house; how he could hear them hiding in the room he entered. Grandma was up there, hiding from him. Waiting for him to find her so she could, ‘do things’’ He thought of one of the knives stuck in the wooden cube on the kitchen counter but he couldn’t bring himself to even keep the idea in his mind. To carry a weapon meant he was to kill Grandma. “I’m coming up,” he said, hoping that would help but unsure of how.

Every step was like firing a flare gun into the air: “I’M RIGHT HERE.” He gripped the wooden railing and focused on it’s smooth and comforting texture. The second floor was eye level now.

On the landing was a cord connecting the short distance between his and Grandma’s room. He passed by the bathroom and heard the sink dribbling from when he’d left in such a haste. “Grandma,” he said, never looking away from the cord. The closer he came, the better he could understand exactly what it was.

Last year, some time close to summer vacation, their teacher began spending the last hour of their day on a topic she labeled, “Our Changing Bodies. Most of what she said and what was read in the packets she handed out did not surprise the boy-unlike his classmates who hooted and made cat calls and gagged at any mention of their ‘sexual reproductive organs’. On the last day of their seminar, which coincided with their final hour of class for the year, Mrs. Horowitz wheeled in the large television reserved for the boring movies they had to watch with a substitute teacher, which consisted mostly of people speaking over large black and white photos that panned left to right in a crude attempt to feign motion. This time she said they’d be watching a movie called ‘The Miracle of Life’. Just about everyone groaned when the camera cut to a wide angle view of a woman’s vagina stretched to impossible lengths in order to accommodate the protruding hairy orb. When the baby gushed out the class turned away. One kid, Bobby Paquet, said, “that’s fucked.”

“This is how each and every one of you were made!” Mrs. Horowitz said over the collective moaning of her students and the infamous woman on the screen. “You need to learn to respect this.”

The boy never turned away. He was enamoured with the entire process. The baby looked gross when it came out, but the fact that that’s how he was made amazed him. But what he found drawn to more than anything was the umbilical cord that uncoiled out of the mothers wound in what seemed to be an endless length. A male voice narrated over the scene. He said that the umbilical cord connected many channels to transfer various necessities from mother to baby the same way a fiber optic wire sends information from sender to receiver. He grew very sad when the father cut the cord. It was severing the most intimate bond a child could have with their mother.

When the video was over and the lights were turned back on and his classmates took their hands away from their faces, he decided that when he had a baby he’d let them stay in that symbiosis for as long as they wanted, he wouldn’t be in a rush to sever that bond.

Now, looking at this enlarged version of what he could not resist comparing to an umbilical cord, he felt disgusted and disturbed, What was it sending through? Better yet, what did the ‘mother’ look like?

“She’ll do things to you. Things you don’t want to do.”

Grandma’s door was cracked open. Had it been like that when he left?

“Grandma, are you okay?”

The silence mounted. He could hear his heart working double time in his ears. He straddled the cord that went up and disappeared under the part of the blanket that hung to the floor. It bulged underneath and was easy to trace.

“What if it get’s me?”

What if it did? Would it undulate like a snake, or would it shoot at him the way that tongue thing did in the movie Alien? He knew he should run but he loved Grandma too much to leave her. It is the moments where we make decisions without a second thought that define us. And although the boy would never truly understand this lesson, he felt a faint knowing inside when he came to the resolve of saving his grandma no matter what.

“Boy, is that you?” Grandma said.

“Yeah,” he said, his hand trembling a few inches away from where her covered face was.

“Come here and lay with me. I want to conversate. Pull the covers down and lay with me.”

When he saw her, he had to put one hand over his mouth to keep from screaming. A flower of blood stained her white pillow and blossomed around her and matted her wispy gray hair. The cord ran behind her neck where it disappeared. He had learned on one of those fake law T.V. shows that the back of the head was one of the softest places in the head, that was why it was the main choice for assassinations. Execution style they’d called it. Here eyes were bloodshot and bulged out of their sockets like a cow. She was looking in two directions at once. And she had this smile, wide and full of perfect false teeth. It wasn’t like a normal smile or even a fake ‘for the camera’ one. This was infantile, as if she didn’t have a full understanding of what muscles were required. He’d seen babies smile like this on the few occasions Grandma had dragged him to church.

‘What happened to you? Where did you go?’ “Hello, boy.”

“Hi, Grandma,” he said. Terror and sadness converted together and pulled him far from her wretched eyes and wasted body. She was one of those things. He’d left the window open when he wasn’t supposed to and now she was one of those things.

“Come here,” she said, her voice low.

“Don’t you want your cigarettes?” he asked.

“Forget those. I want what you have.”

He moved away from her bedside. The bulging eyes followed him. The grin remained plastered on her pale face.

“Where do you leave to?”

“I’m getting something to drink.” Tears slid down his face. His teeth chattered in his closed mouth.

“Oh, that’s nice. Will you be here when you come back?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t take too slow.”

The pistol was where he had left it. The wooden grip fit perfectly in his small hand. The weight felt good, something he could stay grounded with. He put a finger on the trigger and squeezed slightly. The hammer lighted, the ribbed barrel twitched. That was how it worked, exactly like she’d told him. He slipped the pistol into the back part of his waistband and lifted his shirt so it would be easier to grab.

Everything since he’d run out of the house was now unexplored territory. In school, he overheard one of the kids telling their friend at lunch that every time he and his mom left somewhere when they got home she made him check inside every closet and under every bed, even behind the shower curtain. She was certain that his dad had escaped jail and was waiting for her so he could finish what he started. At the time, the boy couldn’t understand all the fussing if all the doors were locked. He had learned in the worst possible way how feasible the paranoia of a hidden intruder in your home truly is. The boy sat on his bed and produced the note from his pocket. He opened it and ran his thumb against the canals the ballpoint pen had scratched on the cheap stationery: “239 Homer St”.

A floorboard creaked. The boy looked up and out at that blackness beyond his room. He put the note away with one hand and grabbed the butt of the pistol with the other. He left room half crouched. Sweat dripped down his back causing him to shiver.

Grandma was gone but her shape remained behind, depressed into the bed like a factory mold. The pillow was a rose floating in a bowl of milk. He opened his ears and heard nothing in return.

Look down stupid.

The cord did not lead from the floor to the bed. Instead it made a perfect ‘u’ shape, averting the bedside to behind the open door. The boy pulled the pistol from his waistband. Sweat made his grip unstable. The buzzing of insects swelled in his head. His hands tingled with a threatening numbness. He placed the gun against the painted wood. He could hear her breathing, a rasp so faint it was as if he were making it up. He put pressure on the trigger. The hammer rose and the chamber shifted clockwise. It would be fast: he’d shoot her then shoot himself. All anyone could ask for was a fast exit out of a tough implication.

He pulled the trigger.

The gun exploded back, smashing into his upper lip. Wood splinters fluttered through his hair and pricked his cheeks. The world buzzed like the time a mosquito lodged itself in his ear, except that had sounded like a low flying plane, this was high pitched, electronic almost.

Warmth ran down his chin. There was a ragged hole in the door the size of a golf ball. Something thudded, the busyness of it pounded in his eardrums. He put a finger to his chin, it came back red and shining. He cupped his hand under his nose where the gun had struck. I can’t get blood on the carpet, he thought. The other hand was shaking so badly he had to tuck it, gun and all, into his armpit. The overall appearance made him look like he was hugging himself for warmth.

A thin and wrinkly hand appeared from behind the door. It was Grandma. Her nails scratched the polished wooden floor as she pulled herself into view. She lay like a woman getting ready to perform a yoga pose. Her head was cocked towards the boy. She was still grinning. Except...it wasn’t even a smile anymore. Most of her upper lip was nothing but a shredded clump of meat. White flecks stuck in the crevasces and twists. They were her teeth he realized, not bits of popcorn. Her lower lip was mostly intact but it dropped severely. And there was a blackness behind the mangled flesh, like a void the boy could fall into. Blood oozed out and dripped down her face in thick rivulets of bloody saliva. Her face was like a rubber mask, twisted at impossible angles.

“Oh, God,” he said. He dropped the gun and pulled at his hair with both hands. He had to look again, couldn’t pull himself away from that hole in her head. Her breath was scratchy in a way he’d never heard. When Grandma had one of her attacks it originated in her chest. What he heard was reedy, sharper, what it would sound like, he imagined, if it were to pass through all those shattered teeth-broken to bits like old sea shells the tide regurgitated onto the beach.

“Ooooo,” she said. The crooks of her lips were turned upwards, the only true hint to show she was smiling. “Oooo,” she said and the utterance translated into the boy’s head as: ‘got you’. Her bare thighs squeaked. Her nails scratched like a burrowing rat. She wrapped one cold hand around the boy’s ankle. He shrieked and shook his leg violently, like trying to rid himself of an annoying dog. He backed away until he met the hard edge of the vanity dresser.

Leave me alone.

Grandma tried to push herself up. Her night gown stretched, revealing the wrinkly tops of her swaying breasts. Her elbows wobbled and she fell on her face. Blood came out of her in a loud sputter. She was paler than when he’d first walked in on her. “Oooo,” she said, “OOOOO!”

“Stop it,” the boy said. “Leave me alone.”

She grabbed his ankle again. He kicked it away. Her hand flew back and slid the gun towards the bed. The boy stepped over Grandma and picked it up. He leveled it at the back of her gray head, right where the twisty cord protrude like a single marionette wire. She craned up to him. “Oyyy,” she said. At first he couldn’t understand what she was saying. Then he realized she was trying to say boy but her mouth was so broken she couldn’t form the letter ‘B’ anymore. Sweat dripped down and stung the boy’s eyes. He knuckled the pain away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His insides were swollen and his nerves were screaming. He held the pistol with both hands and squeezed. Grandma put an open palm up just before he fired. The bullet sliced the side of her pinky finger and bit into her skull. She collapsed.

The boy stood where he was for a long time, smelling the tang of cordite and the metallic, penny scent of fresh blood. Life left the body so easily it made him question if there was any significance to why we are alive. You spend your whole life marching to a single melody: I can’t die, I’m too important. I can’t die, I’m too important. The axe falls so fast and you fall even faster. Life, he decided, was no different than dogs fighting in a den for status.

The boy stripped the sheets from Grandma’s bed and covered her as best he could. Only her toes stuck out. That and the cord, of course. He moved warily around it, afraid that if he soothed it’s slick wringed shaft it would spring to life, dislodge from Grandma and chase after him like some demented, vengeful snake. The cord never moved, neither did Grandma.

Before he left, he turned back to the white lump resting on the hardwood. He sighed and left the door ajar-he had wanted to close it, thought it might give him a sense of finality, but knew he couldn’t because the cord would have been in the way.