Chatterbox

I was just outside of Pinewood Cove, ten miles from the anomaly, but I don’t quite remember driving, parking, or sitting at the counter of Tom's Diner. Not uncommon for a work trip. I felt familiar with the booth next to the broken down juke box over my right shoulder. Empty plastic creamer cups were littered on top of half-eaten plates of pancakes next to a half-finished strawberry milkshake. A pink backpack strap poked out from the green padded booth seat facing away. We’re trained not to trust what we see the closer we get to an anomaly. Especially our intuition. You had to fall back to your training.

My mind wandered to the fortress of trees just outside. An easy place to get lost. I had ordered lunch. In front of me sat a simple BLT on rye with a strawberry milkshake and fries. More food than I would otherwise order for myself, but it had been a long trip. I took a sip from my lukewarm coffee and noticed the dark ring it left behind on top of a half-colored placemat I used as a coaster. A woman named Bonnie read a torn-up paperback about bird migration. She must have served me my sandwich.

Behind me was the front of this fine establishment which was wall-to-wall windows that I knew boiled patrons alive in the summer sun. Fortunately for me and the bulbous man in a faded red trucker hat who sat behind me, it was mid-October. The impending curtain of the coming storm crested Pinewood Cove, which was always my cue to leave.

I tapped my coffee cup with a small metal spoon but Bonnie didn’t budge. I reached into my jacket pocket, slung over the empty stool next to me, and pulled out my chatterbox. It was made of a sheet of purple paper folded into itself enough times until it looked like flower petals that met into a point, that you could stick your fingers behind. The face of three petals had the words of colors written with their respective colored marker, stained red at its tips. Pink. Green. Black. The fourth flap was blank. I socketed my fingers and chose the empty piece. My fingers opened and closed for each letter. The chatterbox spoke. Its mouth seemed to grieve.

N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

I chose the number eight.

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8.

I unfolded the flap. Written in words with a slow, rigid cursive: There’s nothing left to do, is there?

I nodded.

Overexposure to anomalies was a complex problem we were still figuring out. Something to do with the temporal lobe and its auditory complex. Besides obvious signs of hearing impairment, people become unpredictable and aggressive; people see things that aren’t there. Places without sounds become viscous.

“What’s that you got?” asked Bonnie, eyes poking out from above her book.

“Helps me relax,” I replied.

She walked over to me and reached out her hand.

“It feels fuzzy,” she said. She cupped it in both hands, turning her chin to the side like it would jump up and bite her. I clocked the man behind me watching us.

She slotted both of her index fingers and thumbs into the four paper pockets, and she chose black and she chose eighty-two. She opened her message and wept into her hands. I gave her the time she needed.

“You FBI? This some kind of alien tech?” she asked.

I stood up and threw on my jacket.

“Not quite,” I said.

But not completely wrong. I put twenty-five on the counter. More than enough for the sandwich, coffee, and the rest I didn’t touch. I reached for the door to leave.

“You here for that thing that washed up?” asked Trucker Hat. He had broken blood vessels under his right eye that blossomed into a bruise before my eyes. Something about the way he described the anomaly felt offensive. He had a corn cob smile, a few of his kernels rotting on the edges.

“I’ve been on the road. Not much time to phone back home,” I told him.

His mouth got serious. “Jon Michael Smith. He lives on the coast. He found it. High tide. His wife said it was some glowing blob of seaweed. ‘A dead heart,’ is what she said. Jon said it looked more like a fleeting dream. Got them up out of bed after hearing something fierce in the sea’s whispers.”

I watched a man in a yellow rain coat with no shirt underneath, followed by a woman in a deep blue dress pockmarked with small patterns of a fully-bloomed rose, walk into the forest. Their clothes pulled against their bodies as they barreled into wind.

“Did you see it yourself?” I asked.

His smile came back. “Just the colors.” He stood up and straightened his trucker hat. Took a bit of squeeze to get past me to the door. We locked eyes. The bruise under his eye flooded his face, spreading towards his jaw and reaching for his spine. He had a smell: a sulfurous rot, a red tide’s bleach. I’ve smelled him before.

“Hey! He didn’t pay!” shouted Bonnie. The man drove through the fortress of trees, a gloss of fog began to accompany the storm. I threw another twenty on the table and trotted to my car.

Driving into the woods I felt launched into space, and when I landed back on Earth, I expected to return to ash. Pinewood Cove sat shredded behind a curtain of trees but as the trees broke and I sat atop a hill taking in the ocean, I noticed a tree next to me with a bright red kite stuck in its wilting branches. It was the downslope towards town, the wind on my face, that let me know I had cried.

The edge of town was marshland with houses that sat on its lips. Ramshackle houses, yesteryear summer homes with wild patches of cordgrass, one or two people on each porch in equal standing. Old faces, all of them. Deep sunburnt wrinkles with aching eyes hardened by the coast. New houses were being built, stilted on soft soil.

Williams Square, the cove’s downtown, its beating heart, consisted of a small roundabout that encompassed General Gavin Williams atop horseback and a small park that overlooked the water. Beneath the statue was a bench where a homeless man writhed in silence, while in the middle of the park a family had a picnic in a circle of actively sprouting pink lady slippers. I parked my car just before the roundabout to observe the tableau. The father twirled the twist tie of a loaf of bread while the mother opened up a jar of jam. Their child, a little girl, sat next to them with her hands outstretched waiting for a piece of bread from her father. Another girl, her twin, kicked a ball and watched it roll underneath the bench of the homeless man whose solar plexus punched towards the sun. The girl walked towards the man, mouthing words and pointing her strawberry-stained finger. The father looked up to the sky, his eyes bulging with fear. His scream was only apparent by the veins bulging from his neck, and the spittle launched from his lips. The mother, noticing her partner’s reaction, looked up as well and stood up and reached to the sky like an angel had descended from the heavens into her embrace. The mother wrapped her arms around herself. I followed their gaze and saw only waves of glorious shades of pink and green, radiating from the shore. When I looked back down, a small black pickup truck had just finished colliding with the little girl, driven by the man from the diner. Her head bounced off the pavement from the violent strike of the speeding truck, popping her little brain like a cherry tomato. The girl’s insides sprayed the homeless man, and flecks of skin and blood dripped from his fingers a ripe, strawberry red.

I sped towards the ocean on a winding coastal road with no guardrails, coming to a sand-dusted parking lot weeded with thickets of lemongrass. The aurora of greens and pinks gleamed over the small dunes that blocked my view of the ocean. The sea breeze carried the smells of strawberries and fabric softener.

I trudged up the dunes, seeing that the aurora funnelled outward from a curled up body on the ground that wore a pink bathing suit with green frills, and burnt blonde hair a shade lighter than the wet sand clumped on their skin. The man from the diner, Trucker Hat, stood at the foot of the slope I stood atop. I all but rolled down the sand to him. He mouthed something to me with green and pink lava lamp eyes. His corncob teeth popped into light, crunchy clouds out of his mouth the more he spoke, and he pointed to the ocean that lapped the girl at the ankles. As his arm extended, his skin popped and sparked, fizzling like it passed through invisible radiation of the anomaly. The tip of his finger became pure bone. Anger gently covered his face and I screamed nothingness at him. I wrestled his arm down and made him look at his finger. Green and pink globs floated out of his eyes, popping like bubbles a few feet above his head. Staring at his finger triggered something within the man to make a dash towards the anomaly. Pieces of him were peeled away in the same way the tip of his finger just was. Layer by layer, skin then veins and sinew, until he dropped – a literal pile of bones.

My training told me to abandon the location; this land was too far gone. The Department would come and quarantine all of it. It was a dead zone that needed to get wiped out, but an instinct within me wouldn’t let me move. I needed to get closer.

Sand shook and floated with a fury that intensified as I stepped closer. I remained whole but wished I didn’t. I knelt down, seeing the anomaly was a little girl, her white bathing suit now a soft pink of diluted blood and her body shivered for warmth. Lacerations covered her skin, the slits of those wounds projecting beams of light. On their own, my hands found a familiar birthmark on the back of her shoulder. My muscles buckled from pushing against the tremors of energy between me and the body.

I grabbed her shoulder to see her face; my fingers broke the further I pushed. I held her head in my hands, and where her face should have been was a gaping hole. A cavern of flesh and bones that blended into a galaxy of stars, its center a blinding light. The source of the aurora. It cut through my brain and heart and eyes. I took out my chatterbox and put it on her fingers. They moved with a knowledgeof color not named on its petals. The chatterbox opened to numbers: six, seven, eight and nine. With each iteration, a memory came forth from the purple paper and danced with the aurora. A new bike, a tear stained journal. At eight it was a man and a truck. When her fingers counted to nine, I couldn’t look. I ripped the chatterbox from her hands and dropped it into her galaxy of stars.

I screamed a silent scream and just before I flecked away into nothingness, my mind wandered back through the fortress of trees just outside of Tom’s Diner. An easy place to get lost.