TO DO LIST
- Clean bathroom
- Vacuum
- Pack
- Dismantle bed frame
He stole his roommate’s tools. He had never owned any. He chose a hex key. Wrong size. Half the screws already stripped. He amputated the four legs and leaned them up against the wall. Uncovered:
- Dust
- Loose pills
- Two crushed condoms (unopened)
- A crusty towel
- A devil’s tail—plush, attachable to belt loop
In the morning—heels and horns clutched in bare hands—she told him to toss it if he found it. He’d forgotten, soon as she’d stepped into her Uber—and the tail had spent nine months beneath him. Nine months, hidden just feet from where his roommate stepped through hallways. Collecting heat and grime, growing into something that could speak. Had his roommate heard? Now, as he held it, the tail tried to tell him where it had come from, what body it had found host in and how he had exorcized the demon limb from her waistline, but he buried this visual, his tactile memory of reaching around her hips while she sat on his lap—fingers finding something soft, long, forked.
He knew it could not have been the tail itself, but as soon as he saw it, he felt that the tail had caused it somehow. It would not have been there if he’d left the lords of the land to dismantle the bed for him. Of course, that was impossible. He had purchased the cheapest frame. He’d assembled it haphazardly eighteen months before. He’d slept atop it, fucked atop it, masturbated furiously atop it, cried atop it, writhed atop it.
Moving it, disturbing it early, revealed a dark world once encased. Was that—it moved—an animal? A bug? Spiders had often winked at him from the ceiling’s webbed corners as he drifted off to sleep. It looked tarantulan. He bent down and saw no life, just violence—a massive scratch crawling across the hardwood.
Part of him knew. He had heard it—dead of night, body vibrating at the tail end of a night terror—the creaking and cracking, the harsh hiss of something splitting open from below. But he’d never checked. He hadn’t looked beneath the bed since he’d set up the frame—figured, after months on a floor-bound mattress, actually procuring a frame was enough. He’d never—despite his roommate’s advocations—stuck a vacuum under there. He had reasons. If it was bad enough—dust mites grown, spores born—he would’ve known. Sickness, fatigue, blood in his bodily fluids—he’d always dealt in outcomes, not causes.
Then the lease ended, and his roommate announced he was moving in with his girlfriend. He could do nothing but notice it now. The brown finish had been torn away. Dust of crushed minerals collected in the uneven gouge. He swapped broom for cell phone:
- Clean bathroom
- Vacuum
- Pack
- Dismantle bed frame
- FIX SCRATCH
His roommate had sent texts.
- The housing company called me
- They said tried you but that you didn’t pick up
- They’re coming tomorrow morning
He didn’t respond. He Googled.
- How to fix a hardwood scratch at home?
- Professional hardwood floor cleaners near me
Reddit said:
- Use olive oil
- You can get these crayons and just color the scratch in.
- Just leave it. You’ll only make it worse
- Try walnuts
HARDWARE STORE
- Loose light bulbs
- Unconnected pipes
He showed the clerk the picture he’d taken of the scratch. The man walked him through the tight rows and then climbed a step ladder and pulled a plastic case of crayons from a top shelf.
“Start with the light ones,” he said. “Then go darker to find the match. You can always draw over the light marks, but once the dark ones are there, they’re there.”
SCRATCH ELIMINATION—or The Day He Saved the Hardwood
- Crayons
- light first, then darker
- “once they’re there, they’re there.”
- Walnut?
He unsheathed the lightest colored crayon from its plastic container and shoved the darker ones far out of reach. In a minute, the wax had splintered to a shard in his fingers, leaving a skin-colored stain on the hardwood. He went darker and only then heard the clerk’s warning as he smashed a red, rusty color onto the waxy floorboards that made the wood look lacerated. He left the room to see it from a new perspective. He took a breath and opened the door and saw the scratch first, before he noticed anything else—the walls still screaming for a new coat of paint, the dust clinging to the wainscotting, the ashy residue on the windowsill. The darkest crayon didn’t match the finish of the rest of the floor, and he’d produced an erratic burst of wax, oil, a stain deeper and darker than what had been there before.
He eliminated the unsuccessful attempts from his list. A single bullet left.
CEMETERY
- Gate locked
- Lights off
- Trespassers will be prosecuted
He’d never broken in—always out before the groundskeeper swept the plots and locked the gates behind him. Now, in the darkness, he had to climb over. The bars rattled against the looped chain, the heavy padlock.
He turned his phone flashlight on, caught two eyes glowing. A coyote sat curled on the steps of a tomb, a pile of walnuts beside its paws. He turned the flashlight off and the coyote lowered its snout. He Googled:
- Are coyotes dangerous to humans?
- Do coyotes eat walnuts?
- Do coyotes live in Chicago?
- Will a coyote attack a human if you get too close?
- Do you need to go to the hospital for a coyote bite?
- Coyote bite treatment cost no insurance
He did math. A rabies shot less than hardwood floor replacement. A lost appendage would compel—well, something. But those responses? They’d revolve around the unknowable motivations of wild animals, the city ordinances that should have facilitated removal from public spaces. Blame would be the last consideration, if he bared a four-fingered hand.
When he returned home, he found that his roommate had already moved out. On a magnetized whiteboard, stuck to the fridge, his roommate had left a parting message:
- I sent the company pics of my room, and they said I’m good to go
- They’re checking the rest tomorrow morning
- Good luck
The bathroom still sported scum. The floors bred dust. The fridge cultivated spores. His own clothing still hung in the closet; the rest sat on flattened trash bags. He had no vehicle with which to exit the state. He had been prohibited from leaving his spent mattress in the alleyway, and he hadn’t called the junk truck. The rickety table still stood in the living room. All his mail would still be fed into the box in the entryway. His walls dirtied by foot smudges, lost pieces of scotch tape, the jagged streaks of red nail polish from when the devil found his lap and needed grip. The bones of the bed frame still sat in their pile in the corner. The mattress bled olive oil. It smelled. He upended pockets, heard the dink of shells. He kneeled in his pile. He selected his first victim and held it to his face. Nuts, he knew, became trees. He was eliminating this one’s chance to grow so he could save—what? Not the world. His own face.
When the walnut met the hardwood, he saw its skin peel off. The lost shell exposed nutty meat beneath. He tossed the carcass, chose another. A smell erupted—overtaking stale smoke, lotion hardened solid—earthy, wet, like he’d grown a garden from collected corner mold. Blood welled from cuts opened at the cuticle. He got hungry, cannibalized a prior victim—chewed the nut to flavorless dust while he raked one of its cousins across the floor. The sun had set, and he didn’t bother flicking on a light. Thought, perhaps, that they’d already cut the power. He couldn’t bring himself to check, and so he lost direction, fit two nuts in each hand and waved them wild across the floor. In the darkness—he must have looked arachnid himself, launching limbs akimbo and skittering with a hiss as he carved off layer after layer after layer. A plan formulated in the pitch black. To make the stain uniform, to buff it out, he traced the brown shells across every inch of hardwood. The scratch was now the entire floor.
He woke to pokes from an angled shoe edge. A woman standing over him, kicking walnut shells that sputtered across the hardwood. She seemed to be speaking. He tried to explain. It came out as a howl.