Prick of the Spindle: Fiction: Vola: Picture Frame

Picture Frame
by Christopher C. Vola

1.

Cal says he’s sorry for keeping you in that box for so long, knowing how dark and lonely it must have been. But you have to understand that Mrs. Warden hates it when he leaves, even if it’s just to go down the street to the flea market. She’s a very unreasonable landlady. If she knew it was he that stole her keys and made the hole in her fence, there’s no telling what she would do to both of you!

But the important thing is that you are here in Cal’s room now, safe with him. When he saw you tucked away on the shelf behind the fruit stall and the peanut seller, he could almost feel your sadness. A filthy pile of torn scraps and secondhand toys is no place for a goddess. He even took the time to wrap you up in two pieces of old newspaper dated April 20, 1999 and held you like a delicate child the entire walk home. He would have tried to find a bigger box, but he had to get back before Mrs. Warden woke up. She’s always disagreeable after a long sleep.

Cal thinks he’ll place you high up on the wall facing north. Yes, just so. He’s sorry to defile you with his clumsy hands. He will not touch you again. Now you can see the rest of Cal’s room. He admits that it has seen better days. The wallpaper has started to turn brown and peel and his little bed table has faded dreadfully in the sunlight. And that smell! The false hospital clean Mrs. Warden sprays when Cal is asleep to kill the cockroaches and remove the odors she says he creates. He cannot complain, though. The rent is next to nothing.

That’s Wife over there on the bed. She’s still pretty for her age. If you are quiet and do exactly as Cal says, she may not even notice you. She sleeps most of the time. When she’s not sleeping she stares at the growing crack on the ceiling. The crack grows every hour, just like Cal’s love for you.

2.

Mrs. Warden is the fattest, ugliest woman Cal has ever known. She eats lard like air and bathes in gasoline. Her thinning hair smells of rabbit droppings, hundreds of them. The food she slides through the panel in his door reeks of sweat and resembles the crusty shrunken heads of cannibals from the Lower Congo. Cal gives half the food to Wife and throws the rest out the window. He takes the forks that Mrs. Warden brings with his food and uses them to make a sculpture. Cal wouldn’t tell you this, but he’s making it for you. Not even Wife knows.

When it comes to Mrs. Warden, there are three things you must understand. One: be very quiet at all times. Mrs. Warden has the ears of a feral cat. She lives downstairs in the Private Wing, but if you make even one loud squeak, she’ll know everything. Before you could make another sound it would be too late. Two: never look her straight in the eye. Cal says that they are pitch black, blacker than the Devil’s anus, and fling shards of coal if you stare into them. That may not be true, but Cal never takes any chances. Three: Mrs. Warden cannot enter Cal’s room unless someone lets her in. Now do you see why it was so important to steal her keys?

Last night Cal had a dream. Mrs. Warden and an old man wearing a blue plastic jacket were standing over his bed. The old man held a blue box while Mrs. Warden spread paste on both sides of his head. The paste felt like a raw clam’s insides. He couldn’t move his arms to stop Mrs. Warden. She took two metal chords connected to the box and placed them in the paste, directly above Cal’s temples. The old man turned a red knob on the box, and blasts of deep pink, orange, and magenta ignited the growing crack on the ceiling. Mrs. Warden’s thinning hair turned into black fire that spread to the old man and to the newspapers on the floor. Then he woke up sweating in the darkness and heard Wife’s snoring and saw her drooling face on the pillow next to him. Cal felt the wind rushing through the bars outside the window.

The next time you see Mrs. Warden and an old man standing by the bed, open your eyes quickly because it is only an elaborate illusion created by your brain. It is only a dream.

3.

Cal wouldn’t tell you this, but the fork sculpture he’s making for you is now almost two feet high. He’s been hiding it under the bed where Wife will never look. In order to make the sculpture, he rips up old newspapers and chews the pieces until they are sticky. He folds the wet pieces around the forks until the forks are sticky, too. Then he presses the forks together. Sometimes they don’t stick together so Cal needs to chew more newspapers. So far the sculpture is comprised of five forks and almost four fully chewed-up newspapers. Just today, he chewed the entire Metro sections of two newspapers dated September 24, 2003 and December 1, 1997.

Sometimes Cal makes the sticky pieces of newspaper into balls and throws them against the east wall. It is nearly covered in spit and letters. Don’t you think it looks better than the peeling brown wallpaper?

Cal hears Mrs. Warden’s ugly feet stomping up the stairs. He hears the clinking of glass and metal on his food tray. He must hide your sculpture quickly. If Mrs. Warden knew about it, everything would be ruined.

4.

Wife hasn’t noticed you. At least she doesn’t act like it – she’s so stupid sometimes. Look at her red mouth, how it hangs open like a cow! Can you see the puddle of drool collecting on her chin? But still, she is Wife, so Cal must try to keep her happy. To keep Wife happy, Cal makes love to her every other afternoon. Sometimes she’s asleep so he props her back against the headboard, pulls down the covers, and slowly moves back and forth until Wife is pleased.

But what he really wants to do is snap her plastic legs apart like a wishbone. He wants to thrust all the way through her, come out the other side (still thrusting) straight toward your wall. He imagines the two of you doing all sorts of sexual things, which is silly, because we all know it would be impossible. But the idea of you doing these things is so alive in him, as alive as the two cockroaches currently depositing their eggs in bean-shaped cases next to some bread crusts under the bed table.

Sometimes Cal thinks of you, of doing these sexual things together, and looks at Wife. He feels ashamed. But he does not feel ashamed because of her. He feels ashamed because of you, because he knows he would be an inadequate partner for you, because he would never be able to fill you up the way he knows you must be filled. And besides, Cal couldn’t even reach that high on your wall if he wanted to.

When he feels ashamed, he feels horny, so he pulls off the bed sheets and turns Wife on her back. Can you see him whisper in her ears? He tells her he’s horny. He licks her ears. Cal traces the wet lines around her mouth with his fingers. He looks at her eyes to make sure she hasn’t seen you watching, but they are shut tight or staring up the growing crack in the ceiling, he cannot tell. Cal thrusts. Then he thrusts hard. The mattress springs and Wife’s hips bend beneath the weight of his shame.

Downstairs in the Private Wing, Mrs. Warden wakes up. Cal hears her fat slippers on the creaking stairs. He hears her dirty fists pounding on his door and a terrible scratching sound that must be her voice.

“Quiet down in there!”

Cal has her keys. She cannot come and take you away from him. He will let her know:

“Fuck off, witch!”

When Cal hears Mrs. Warden clomping back down the stairs, he is no longer horny. Instead, he takes two stained pieces of newspaper dated March 21, 2005 and rolls them up into a tube. He pushes Wife’s drooping head off the bed table and moves it over a few feet. He leans down and whacks the cockroaches eight times. Eight hard whacks until he cannot tell the difference between their insides and outsides.

5.

Cal thinks Wife has left him. He doesn’t see her anywhere. On the bed, under the bed, in the closet, over by the east wall. He’s been searching all morning. She must have opened the window and climbed out. He cannot figure out how she managed to squeeze through the bars. Wife is tricky. Not smart, but very tricky.

She found out about you – it’s the only reasonable explanation. Mrs. Warden wouldn’t have been able to get in and let Wife out. Cal still has her keys. Wife must have seen him looking at you while he was making love to her, or maybe she heard him speaking to you late at night when we thought she was asleep. Cal knew she would be jealous. Your superior beauty and his conversations with you offended her deeply. She’s probably still crying! You are the only reasonable explanation.

It’s not that Cal is angry, or even saddened by Wife’s leaving him. She had begun to put on weight. All she ever did was sleep over there on the bed. The only thing that bothers him is that when he feels ashamed, there will be no one to do sexual things with. You are too high up on the wall, the growing crack is still too small, and Mrs. Warden is far too fat.

6.

Have you ever had any madness in your family?

Cal only asks because this morning he was invited to breakfast downstairs in the Private Wing. He wore his finest suit and sprayed some aerosol mousse on his head for extra volume and shine.

At the bottom of the stairs a doctor waited for him. An old doctor he’d never seen. Somehow, the doctor knew Cal’s name and his occupation. His fingers felt like ten cold eels as he directed Cal into a tiny room, checked his pulse, tested his reflexes, cupped his testicles, and measured his cranium with a pair of metal forceps. A very pleasant man, to be sure.

He began asking Cal questions. At first Cal started to fidget a little, because he thought the doctor would ask about you, about your affair, about Wife’s leaving him, but instead they ended up discussing some rather irrelevant topics. He wanted to know if there was a history of insanity in Cal’s immediate family, if his parents or grandparents had suffered from any form of dementia, paranoia, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and a dozen other big words Cal didn’t understand. Which is absolutely ridiculous because as Cal has explained many times, he comes from a good family, full of doctors and lawyers, most of them leaders in the fields of industry and politics. But he won’t bore you with the details of their astonishing lives. He can see you want to hear more about his breakfast.

The old doctor had devised a way to shrink the nutrition found in a full meal down to the size of five tiny blue capsules. You must find that hard to believe, but it’s true – just five blue capsules and a glass of water, equal in dietary goodness to a plate of steaming hot eggs, bacon, grits and sausage. He handed Cal the meal on a plastic slab, assuring him it was as fresh as a newly disemboweled hen. His delicious breakfast was over in two large gulps. He left a clean plate.

Cal complimented the old doctor’s cooking, forgetting to tell him how much better it was than Mrs. Warden’s gruel. He and his assistant, Thomas, were nice enough to escort Cal back to his room and tuck him into bed. Before they left, he fell into one of the most dreamless sleeps he’d had in years.

7.

Outside the window and just past the metal bars, a tiny honey-colored butterfly glides by Cal’s face, then another. He wishes you could see them tumble together so beautifully. Puffs of air sometimes brush them against the grass as they move across the yard towards the fence. Then a real gust sweeps them up – five feet, ten feet, twenty feet – until they become two miniature globes in the sky. Cal squints to see them for another thirty or forty seconds until they disappear into a cloud, maybe the sun. They are gone. Cal waits for them to come back, but after a few minutes he gives up looking and turns to stare at you.

They probably like it better out there, don’t you think? Two butterflies and Wife.

8.

This morning Cal woke up early to work on your sculpture. It was three feet tall and almost complete. He wanted you to touch it. But when he reached under the bed, his hand found nothing except for three cockroaches swimming in a puddle of curdled milk.

Cal tore apart the bed, flipped over the bed table, and kicked around some newspapers. The sculpture was still missing. He heard rustling downstairs in the Private Wing and thought of Mrs. Warden. Could she have seen the sculpture under his bed when she opened the panel in the door to slide him his breakfast? Had she found her keys? No, they were still in his right breast pocket where he’d had them for weeks.

He sat on the bed for a few minutes trying to collect himself and figure out what could have happened. No thoughts came. Cal knew he had put the sculpture back under the bed after working on it the night before. No one else besides you had been in the room during the last several hours.

Exhausted, he collapsed on Wife’s pillow and turned his head toward the east wall. Then Cal saw it. A small piece of newspaper dated September 27, 2006 poking out from under the closet’s door. He jumped out of bed, flung open the closet, and there it was, your sculpture lying undamaged on the ground.

Who could have done this thing? Mrs. Warden is too fat. Cal would have heard her huge feet tramping around the room. The old doctor is too pleasant. Was it Wife? She does hate you, and besides, she’s the only one tricky enough to slide through the bars. After all, that is how she left Cal.

He has decided to hide the sculpture under Wife’s pillow. That way, it will be right next to him at night. When Cal feels ashamed, it will be like he is sleeping with a part of you. Such a small part, though.

9.

Cal wakes up and hears conversations downstairs in the Private Wing. He slides over the bed table and crouches to the ground, one ear to the floor. There are at least three people talking, possibly more. The floor is thicker than he thought. Cal only understands about ten words but what he can make out clearly are the tones of voice being used. What awful tones! You may not believe him, but in those tones he hears the beginnings of a horrible plan. Cal is very perceptive.

It appears as though Wife has returned and is the ringleader. Cal recognizes her stupid, rotting voice. He listens to her tell the other people in the room awful lies about his treatment of her over the years, about Mrs. Warden’s keys, about the sculpture, even about you! Of course Mrs. Warden agrees with her and proposes that something must be done. They want to take you and the sculpture from Cal, leave him here all alone, he knows it. He cannot hear the reactions of the other people in the Private Wing, but if they have already looked Mrs. Warden in the eyes (which seems probable), it is already too late. They are all brainwashed and tricky, just like Wife.

Cal walks over to the bed and picks up the sculpture. It is more than three feet tall and very sharp. He’ll take it and wait in the closet for Wife. She cannot find him here and if she does, he’ll be ready.

If you love Cal as much as Cal loves you, then you’ll be very quiet. You will not make a sound until this is over.

10.

It has been twelve hours and Wife has not come. Cal’s back leans against the wall of the closet as he cradles the sculpture, twisting it like a spit that drips with roasting meat. His breathing slows to fourteen inhalations each minute. He turns his ears in all directions, just in case Wife decides to sneak back in through the window. She cannot surprise him this time.

Cal hears a noise downstairs. He grips the sculpture harder. Another minute of silence and then the sound of feet on the staircase. Not loud, stomping feet, but tiny, delicate feet, so soft that the stairs barely make a creak.

There is silence in the hallway. For a second Cal thinks the sounds on the staircase are only a dream until he hears the clink of metal on the other side of his door.

“Hey, you. It’s time to have some dinner.”

Listen to her lies! It is Wife who would eat you both.

“I’m not fooling around. Come get your food or I’m throwing it out!”

Cal’s stomach rumbles. Wife is tricky. But he does not move. He raises the sculpture and grips the forks until drops of blood and sweat mix and fall from his hands. Wife pounds on the door. She pounds again. Louder. Cal hears a key scraping in the keyhole. She must have taken Mrs. Warden’s keys from him and made copies when he wasn’t looking. That bitch! Still, Cal is well hidden.

The quiet feet enter his room. They walk towards the bed. The tray makes a soft thud as she places it on the bed table. The floorboards creak as she bends down to check under the bed. There is no sound for a long time. Then the feet change their direction and come back towards the closet. There is a hand on the knob. It starts to turn.

“I know you’re behind the door. Just come on out. We’ve played this game too many
times already.”

But this is a new game, Cal says to himself as he scrunches his eyes shut and kicks open the closet door, swinging the sculpture as if he were a madman. Wife screams and falls to the floor as the ends of two forks slash her across the chest, maybe the stomach. Cal made the forks extra sharp, just for you.

There are more cracks and slashes in Wife for each time Cal felt ashamed. For each time he tried to thrust through her. For each time she drooled on her pillow. That makes thirty-seven cracks. Thirty-seven holes in drooling Wife.

But when Cal opens his eyes and looks down, he drops the sculpture on the floor, unable to speak.

That is not Wife’s tray of disgusting food spilled across the floor. That is not Wife’s scratching voice. That is not Wife’s thinning black hair. Those are not Wife’s failing black eyes.

11.

The blood won’t clot.

Instead, it falls carelessly down Mrs. Warden’s arms, chest, and stomach, collecting in the expanding puddle on the floor.

It looks more brown than red, don’t you think? A nice shade of mahogany or copper.

Cal stares at her face. She’s so fat that bulges of skin spill out from her sleeves, from the neck-hole in her blouse, and from under her filthy black stockings. Almost like the expanding puddle enveloping the floor, choking bread crusts, newspapers, cockroaches, and his feet.

It looks like syrup, Cal thinks. Maybe that’s why he’s stuck here. He cannot budge, not at the sight of the blood, or at the screams, or at the sirens. The old doctor pleasantly shoves Cal away from Mrs. Warden’s body, swearing loudly, pleading with him to tell him something, anything.

“Yes, I think I did it,” Cal finally mumbles. “And I’d do it again.”

12.

Mrs. Warden’s body becomes cold as all the blood slowly pours out of it. Her skin stiffens an hour after her fat ankles stop twitching. It turns the color of light green chalk. That’s when the cockroaches and other insects become interested.

13.

I look out the window past the bars and see that the two butterflies have returned. It is a beautifully sunny morning. Their yellow wings are tiny matchbooks making trails of fire on the grass. The sculpture rests on its side just below the window where it was dropped last night. It reflects red and silver metallic sparks in the sunlight. It is more valuable to me now than ever.

The door is open and there is no one to give the rent money. There is no one to bring food on a metal tray. There is no old doctor to offer breakfasts of blue capsules. There is no Cal. There is no Wife, not now or ever. There is nothing to help feeling ashamed. We must leave, the two of us, right away.

I will pull you off your wall, very gently, and wrap you in four pieces of newspaper dated May 26, 2000. Then I will put you back in the box. Don’t worry, you won’t be in there for long. I will find a room, one with freshly painted walls, a bigger window, a pleasant old doctor, and no Wife. I will place you lower on your new wall so we can be close and so I won’t feel ashamed.

Neither of us will ever be alone again, I promise.