Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
They had gone out together, the night before, but after he had been drinking a while, Ig had just naturally started to think about Merrin, the anniversary of her death coming up in a few days. The more he drank, the more he missed her . . . and the more conscious he was of how little Glenna was like her. With her tattoos, and her paste-on nails, her bookshelf full of Dean Koontz novels, her cigarettes and her rap sheet, Glenna was the unMerrin. It irritated Ig to see her sitting there on the other side of the table, seemed a kind of betrayal to be with her, although whether he was betraying Merrin or himself he didn’t know. Finally he had to get away—Glenna kept reaching over to stroke his knuckles with one finger, a gesture she meant to be tender but which for some reason pissed him off. He went to the men’s room and hid there for twenty minutes. When he returned he found the booth empty. He sat there drinking for an hour before he understood she was not coming back, and that he was not sorry. But at some point in the evening they had both wound up here in the same bed, the bed they had shared for the last three months.
He heard the distant babble of the TV in the next room. Glenna was still in the apartment then, hadn’t left for the salon yet. He would ask her to drive him to the doctor. The brief feeling of relief at the thought of dying had passed, and he was already dreading the days and weeks to come: his father struggling not to cry, his mother putting on false cheer, IV drips, treatments, radiation, helpless vomiting, hospital food.
Ig crept into the next room, where Glenna sat on the living room couch, in a Guns N’ Roses tank top, and faded pajamas bottoms. She was hunched forward, elbows on the coffee table, tucking the last of a donut into her mouth with her fingers. In front of her was the box, containing three-day old supermarket donuts, and a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke. She was watching daytime talk.
She heard him, and glanced his way, eyelids low, gaze disapproving, then returned her stare to the tube. My Best Friend Is A Sociopath! was the subject of today’s program. Flabby rednecks were getting ready to throw chairs at each other.
She hadn’t noticed the horns.
“I think I’m sick,” he said.
“Don’t bitch at me,” she said. “I’m hungover too.”
“No. I mean . . . look at me. Do I look all right?” Asking because he had to be sure.
She slowly turned her head toward him again and peered at him from under her eyelashes. She had on last night’s mascara, a little smudged. Glenna had a smooth, pleasantly round face, and a smooth, pleasantly curvy body. She could’ve almost been a model, if the job was modeling plus sizes. She outweighed Ig by fifty pounds. It wasn’t that she was grotesquely fat, but that he was absurdly skinny. She liked to fuck him from on top, and when she put her elbows on his chest, she could push all the air out of him, a thoughtless act of erotic asphyxiation. Ig, who so often struggled for breath, knew every famous person who had ever died of erotic asphyxiation. It was a surprisingly common end for musicians. Kevin Gilbert. Hideto Matsumoto, probably. Michael Hutchence, of course, not someone he wanted to be thinking about in this particular moment. The devil inside. Every single one of us.
“Are you still drunk?” she asked.
When he didn’t reply, she shook her head and looked back at the television.
That was it then. If she had seen them she would’ve come screaming to her feet. But she couldn’t see them because they weren’t there. They only existed in Ig’s mind. Probably if he looked at himself now in a mirror, he wouldn’t see them either. Only then Ig spotted a reflection of himself in the window, and the horns were still there. In the window he was a glassy, transparent figure, a demonic ghost.
“I think I need to go to the doctor,” he said.
“You know what I need?” she asked.
“What?”
“Another donut,” she said, leaning forward to look into the open box. “You think another donut would be okay?”
He replied in a flat voice he hardly recognized. “What’s stopping you?”
“I already had one and I’m not even hungry anymore. I just want to eat it.” She turned her head and peered up at him, her eyes glittering in a way that suddenly seemed both scared and pleading. “I’d like to eat the whole box.”
“The whole box,” he repeated.
“I don’t even want to use my hands. I just want to stick my face in and start eating. I know that’s gross.” She moved her finger from donut to donut, counting. “Six. Do you think it would be okay if I ate six more donuts?”
It was hard to think past his alarm and the feeling of pressure and weight at his temples. What she had just said made no sense, was another part of the whole unnatural bad dream morning.
“If you’re screwing with me I wish you wouldn’t. I told you I don’t feel good.”
“I want another donut,” she said.
“Go ahead. I don’t care.”
“Well. Okay. If you think it’s all right,” she said and she took a donut, pulled it into three pieces, and began to eat, shoving in one chunk after another without swallowing.
Soon the whole donut was in her mouth, filling her cheeks. She gagged, softly, then inhaled deeply through her nostrils, and began to swallow.
Iggy watched, repelled. He had never seen her do anything like it, hadn’t seen anything like it since junior high, kids grossing other kids out in the cafeteria. When she was done, she took a few panting, uneven breaths, then looked over her shoulder, eyeing him anxiously.
“I didn’t even like it. My stomach hurts,” she said. “Do you think I should have another one?”
“Why would you eat another one if your stomach hurts?”
“ ’Cause I want to get really fat. Not fat like I am now. Fat enough so you won’t want to have anything to do with me.” Her tongue came out and the tip touched her upper lip, a thoughtful, considering gesture. “I did something disgusting last night. I want to tell you about it.”
The thought occurred again that none of it was really happening. If he was having some sort of fever-dream, though, it was a persistent one, convincing in its fine details. A fly crawled across the TV screen. A car shushed past out on the road. One moment naturally followed the next, in a way that seemed to add up to reality. Ig was a natural at addition. Math had been his best subject in school, after Ethics, which he didn’t count as a real subject.
“I don’t think I want to know what you did last night,” he said.
“That’s why I want to tell you. To make you sick. To give you a reason to go away. I feel so bad about what you’ve been through, and what people say about you, but I can’t stand waking up next to you anymore. I just want you to go and if I told you what I did, this disgusting thing, then you’d leave and I’d be free again.”
“What do people say about me?” he asked. It was a silly question. He already knew.
She shrugged. “Things about what you did to Merrin. How you’re like a sick sex pervert and stuff.”
Ig stared at her, transfixed. It fascinated him, the way each thing she said was worse than the one before, and how at ease she seemed to be with saying them. Without shame or awkwardness.
“So what did you want to tell me?”
“I ran into Lee Tourneau last night after you disappeared on me. You remember Lee and I used to have a thing going, back in high school?”
“I remember,” Ig said. Lee and Ig had been friends in another life, but all that was behind Ig now, had died with Merrin. It was difficult to maintain close friendships when you were under suspicion of being a sex-murderer.
“Last night, at the Station House, he was sitting in a booth in back and after you disappeared he bought me a drink. I haven’t talked to Lee in forever. I forgot how easy he is to talk to. You know Lee, he doesn’t look down on anyone. He was real nice to me. When you didn’t come back after a while, he said we ought to look for you in the parking lot, and if you were gone, he’d drive me home. But then when we were outside, we got kissing kind of hot, like old times, like when we were together—and I go
Ig needed help. He needed to get out of the apartment. The air was too close, and his lungs felt tight and pinched.
She was leaning over the box of donuts again, her expression placid, as if she had just told him a fact of no particular consequence: that they were out of milk, or had lost the hot water again.
“You think it would be all right to eat one more?” she asked. “My stomach feels better.”
“Do what you want.”
She turned her head and stared at him, her pale eyes glittering with an unnatural excitement. “You mean it?”
“I don’t give a fuck,” he said. “Pig out.”
She smiled, cheeks dimpling, then bent over the table, taking the box in one hand. She held it in place, shoved her face into it, and began to eat. She made noises while she chewed, smacking her lips and breathing strangely. She gagged again, her shoulders hitching, but kept eating, using her free hand to push more donut into her mouth, even though her cheeks were already swollen and full. A fly buzzed around her head, agitated.
Ig edged past the couch, toward the door. She sat up a little, gasping for breath, and rolled her eyes toward him. Her gaze was panicky and her cheeks and wet mouth were gritted with sugar.
“Mm,” she moaned. “Mmm.” Whether she moaned in pleasure or misery, he didn’t know.
The fly landed at the corner of her mouth. He saw it there for a moment—then Glenna’s tongue darted out and she trapped it with her hand at the same time. When she lowered her hand, the fly was gone. Her jaw worked up and down, grinding everything in her mouth into paste.
Ig opened the door and slid himself out. As he closed the door behind him, she was lowering her face to the box again . . . a diver who had filled her lungs with air and was plunging once more into the depths.
three.
He drove to the Modern Medical Practice Clinic, where they had walk-in service. The small waiting room was almost full, and it was too warm, and there was a child screaming. A little girl lay on her back in the center of the room, producing great, howling sobs in between gasps for air. Her mother sat in a chair against the wall, and was bent over her, whispering furiously, frantically, a steady stream of threats, imprecations, and act-now-before-it’s-too-late offers. Once she tried to grip her daughter’s ankle, and the little girl kicked her hand away with a black buckled shoe.
The remainder of the people in the waiting room were determinedly ignoring the scene, looking blankly at magazines, or the muted TV in the corner. It was My Best Friend is a Sociopath! here too. Several of them glanced at Ig as he entered, a few in a hopeful sort of way, fantasizing, perhaps, that the little girl’s father had arrived to take her outside and deliver a brutal spanking. But as soon as they saw him they looked away, knew in a glance that he wasn’t there to help.
Ig wished he had brought a hat. He cupped a hand to his forehead, the way a person will when they want to shade their eyes to see into a distance on a sunny day, hoping to conceal his horns. If anyone noticed them, however, they gave no sign of it.
At the far end of the room was a window in the wall and a woman sitting at a computer on the other side. The receptionist had been staring at the mother of the crying child, but when Ig appeared before her, she looked up, and her lips twitched, formed a smile.
“What can I do you for?” she asked. She was already reaching toward a clipboard with some forms on it.
“I want a doctor to look at something,” Ig said, and lifted his hand slightly to reveal the horns.
She narrowed her eyes at them, and pursed her lips in a sympathetic moue.
“Well that doesn’t look right,” she said, and swiveled to her computer.
Whatever reaction Ig expected—and he hardly knew what he expected—it wasn’t this. She had reacted to the horns as if he had showed her a broken finger, or a rash . . . but she had reacted to them. Had seemed to see them. Only if she had really seen them, he could not imagine her simply puckering her lips and looking away.
“I just have to ask you a few questions. Name?”
“Ignatius Perrish.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Do you see a doctor locally?”
“I haven’t seen a doctor in years.”
She lifted her head and peered at him thoughtfully, frowning again, and he thought he was about to be scolded for not having regular check-ups. The little girl shrieked even more loudly than before. Ig turned his head in time to see her bash her mother in the knee with a red plastic firetruck, one of the toys stacked in the corner for kids to play with while waiting. Her mother yanked it out of her hands. The girl dropped onto her back again and began to kick at the air—like an overturned cockroach—wailing with renewed fury.
“I want to tell her to shut that miserable brat up,” the receptionist remarked, in a sunny, passing-the-time tone of voice. “What do you think?”
“Do you have a pen?” Ig asked, mouth dry. He held up the clipboard. “I’ll go fill these out.”
The receptionist’s shoulders slumped and her smile went out.
“Sure,” she said to Ig, and shoved a pen at him.
He turned his back to her and looked down at the forms clipped to the board, but his eyes wouldn’t focus.
She had seen the horns but hadn’t thought them unusual. And then she had said that thing about the girl who was crying and her helpless mother: I want to tell her to shut that miserable brat up. She had wanted to know if he thought it would be okay. So had Glenna, wondering if it would be all right to stick her face in the box of donuts and feed like a pig at the trough.
He looked for a place to sit. There were exactly two empty chairs, one on either side of the mother. As Ig approached, the girl reached deep into her lungs, and dredged up a shrill scream that shook the windows and caused some in the waiting area to flinch. Advancing forward into that sound was like moving into a knee-buckling gale.
As Ig sat, the girl’s mother slumped back in her chair, swatting herself in the leg with a rolled-up magazine . . . which was not, Ig felt, what she really wanted to hit with it. The little girl seemed to have exhausted herself with this final cry, and now lay on her back with tears running down her red and ugly face. Her mother was red in the face too. She cast a miserable, eye-rolling glance at Ig. Her gaze seemed to briefly catch on his horns—and then shifted away.
“Sorry about the ridiculous noise,” she said, and touched Ig’s hand in a gesture of apology.
And when she did, when her skin brushed his, Ig knew her name was Allie Letterworth, and that for the last four months she had been sleeping with her golf instructor, meeting him at a motel down the road from the links. Last week they had fallen asleep after an episode of strenuous fucking, and Allie’s cell phone had been off, and so she had missed the increasingly frantic calls from her daughter’s summer day camp, wondering where she was and when she would be by to pick up her little girl. When she finally arrived, two hours late, her daughter was in hysterics, red-faced, snot boiling from her nose, her blood-shot eyes wild, and Allie had to get her a sixty-dollar Webkinz, and a banana split, to calm her down and buy her silence; it was the only way to keep her husband from finding out. If she had known what a drag a kid was going to be, she never would’ve had one.
Ig pulled his hand away from her.
The girl began to grunt and stamp her feet on the floor. Allie Letterworth sighed and leaned toward Ig and said, “For what it’s worth, I’d love to kick her right in her spoiled ass, but I’m worried about what all these people would say if I hit her. Do you think—“
“No,” Ig said.
He couldn’t know the things he knew about her, but knew them anyway, the way he knew his cell phone number, or his address. He knew, too, with utter certainty, that Allie Letterworth would not talk about kicking her daughter’s spoiled ass with a t
“No,” repeated Allie Letterworth, opening her magazine, and then letting it fall shut. “I guess I can’t do that. I wonder if I ought to get up and go. Just leave her here and drive away. I could go stay with Michael, hide from the world, drink gin, and fuck all the time. My husband would get me on abandonment, but like, who cares? Would you want partial custody of that?”
“Is Michael your golf instructor?” Ig asked.
She nodded dreamily and smiled at him and said, “The funny thing is I never would’ve signed up for lessons with him if I knew Michael was a nigger. Before Tiger Woods there weren’t any jigaboos in golf except if they were carrying your clubs . . . it was one place you could go to get away from them. You know the way most blacks are, always on their cell phones with f-word this and f-word that, and the way they look at white women. But Michael is educated. He talks just like a white person. And it’s true what they say about black dicks. I’ve screwed tons of white guys, and there wasn’t one of ‘em who was hung like Michael.” She wrinkled her nose and said, “We call it the five-iron.”
Ig jumped to his feet and walked quickly to the receptionist’s window. He hastily scribbled answers to a few questions and then offered her the clipboard.
Behind him the little girl screamed, “No! No I won’t sit up!”
“I feel like I have to say something to that girl’s mother,” said the receptionist, looking past Ig at the woman and her daughter, paying no attention to the clipboard. “I know it’s not her fault her daughter is a screechy puke but I really want to say just one thing.”
Ig looked at the little girl and at Allie Letterworth. Allie was bent over her again, poking her with the rolled up magazine, hissing at her. Ig returned his gaze to the receptionist.
“Sure,” he said, experimentally.