Government Assistance by Alyce Wood

I knew the neighbours’d complain if we let it rot out front again.

It was growin’ dark when the doorbell rang—four thirty dusk in December dark and only a little before curfew. It made me jump, though I’m sure I knew it was comin’, the same way I’d known it each time before (all except the first).

I hovered between the kitchen and the hall and rolled my left foot to grind my big toe in the hardwood. I didn’t want to answer it, but I had to. Nobody else wanted to either, I suppose.

When I shouldered open the screen there was nobody there, like usual. Or nobody livin’.

It was curled up tight, same as always, hands coverin’ its head, knees bent up into its chest and face pressed down real awkward into a deep polystyrene tray—and all wrapped close to scarred skin in clear plastic.

I turned my body almost all the way away, the balls of my feet twistin’ on the floor so wet salt and grit from mat-wiped boots dug into my bare soles, but my eyes stayed stuck on the delivery as I called into the house, ‘We got another one.’

My mother peered round the bottom of the front room doorframe, right where the paint was almost scrubbed down to bare wood from the gate. Her eyes widened and she clambered to her feet.

The baby gurgled in his swing and she cooed, told him she’d be right back.

‘Em!’ she cawed to my sister. ‘Help me haul it out back.’

I stared down at it. They almost all were full grown, but this one looked small. It couldn’t have been much bigger than me—I’d’ve even guessed our hands were the same size. Its eyes were closed.

The eyes were always closed.

Em scurried downstairs, gaze averted as she wiped chip dust on her pants. She thought I didn’t know but I’d seen the pink bag in her closet. Couldn’t remember the last time I saw a corn chip less the last time I tasted one.

I only took two (broken ones, at that), so she wouldn’t catch on. I ate one, savoured it ‘til it almost went sweet in my mouth, and stashed the second.

They both stepped out the door. My mother picked up one side of the tray, squeaky in her grip. Em grabbed the other. They carried it through the house and out into the backyard where my father was reclined in his wrought iron sunbed, nose in a chapter book.

He didn’t so much as glance at us before he muttered, ‘Burn it.’

‘But—’ His glare cut me off and I pressed my back to the brick wall. The flick of his page turnin’ sliced through the air at me, like a papercut.

Em pierced a quarter-sized hole in the taut shrink wrap with her index finger so hurriedly she almost jabbed the contents. She snatched her hand away and stifled the shudder that visibly climbed right up her back from her calves to her scalp.

My mother poured in gasoline from the 5 gallon jerry can, ‘til the plastic was all filled up like a pale yellow water balloon.

I dug my fingers into the wall and my stomach roiled with the ache of hunger. Brick splintered off under my nails as they bent backwards.

Em struck the match so it flared with an orange glow in the thin winter air, and dropped it into the hole. She backed away quick as the flames reached up with desperate, thirsty arms.

The blue polystyrene tray melted into flesh and the clear plastic burst in the heat so gasoline splashed across the blackened ground. Smoke wreathed into the sky, tanglin’ into tree branches, and the skin blistered, red to brown to black—scars from transplanted slivers sizzlin’ away.

Smelled like badly forgot-about BBQ.

I looked over the sunken fences and watched hazy plumes rise from neighbours’ yards on both sides, birds howlin’ to a sunless sky.

My father didn’t look up once—took the crackle of fire and the stench of burnt pork as ambience for his stories.

There was never any blood before, but this one I saw it—two thin streams of red, one from the nose and one from the mouth.

The flames obscured the label as it brittled and turned to ash, but the words were burned into the backs of my eyes more keenly than the memory of a dozen such incidents were scarred into the razed earth of our backyard.

Government Assistance:

Free range whole human.

Alyce Wood

Image: Pixabay.com – burned out fire in a patch of grass.