Screams  was originally published in the Halloween 2007 edition of  DemonMinds .

 

                                                                    photo by Josh Otis

SCREAMS
by David Alan Richards

 

He sat on the sofa staring up at the ceiling. It was hot and the sun was burning. He never went outside. He thought of children, and air, and nothing.
     
They were coming to visit him today.
     
There was sunlight in his eyes, but he managed to get to all the windows. He managed to get to all the windows and pull down the shades, before he collapsed back onto the couch. Resting, but not relaxing in the dark.

###

The tape deck played golden oldies from the nineties. Brian had been hardly more then a baby then, but he remembered some of them. He wondered why his parents didn't have a CD player in the car. Tapes were old-fashion and soon wouldn't exist.
     
A bee or a big fly, probably a big fly, yeah, it didn't have strips and was fuzzier, buzzed against the car window on the left side of the backseat near Brian's head. At the car window's impact it died.
     
It could have been the right side. Brian didn't know, being slightly dyslexic. It affected his reading a little bit.
     
He taken longer then usual to get through A Catcher in the Rye for school, but his teacher, Mr Byrnan, had let him take unlimited extensions with Brian's note from his parents, explaining, and he'd finally absorbed the material, if not particularly related to it. Holden Caulfield whined too much. He was a fucking cry-baby.
     
The car air conditioning wasn't working right and Brian was annoyed. "When are we getting to Uncle Frank's house?" he asked his mother and father. "The sky's getting dark soon."
    
"Don't nag, Brian," Brian Sr. said. His father was called Brian Sr. Brian was called just Brian. He hadn't taken to Brian Jr. It sounded too corny.
     
"We'll get there when we get there," his father said. He went back to driving. There was something black underneath his typical reprimand, but Brian couldn't place it and so he tried to forgot about it. His mother turned around from the passenger seat, smiling at him, but the smile seemed forced.
     
Uncle Frank, dad's older brother, was crazy, psychotic. Mentally ill was the word Brian was supposed to use.
     
Dad sometimes talked about Uncle Frank, usually focusing on his brief and apparently really cool kidhood.
     
Uncle Frank was a baseball champ, all the other kids loved him, he was handsome, great in school, he had a lot of girlfriends. After that part of his childhood, Uncle Frank had gone bonkers for no real reason, just a weak mind, or genetics, or fate. Brian had been reading about Greek tragedy in english class and he knew a little about fate.
      
At fourteen and a half, Uncle Frank had run out onto his family's green suburban lawn into his neighborhood, butt naked, screaming at the top of his lungs. Eventually, his family got his clothes on, but he hadn't stopped screaming for two years. Brian's father didn't talk much about it. He'd only explained the whole story once when he was drunk.
     
Uncle Frank had screamed and screamed. They put him in a crazy house, but he hadn't stopped screaming until the doctor's invented Thorazine and loaded him down with it. In those days, that's all the medical people had for crazies, except hospitals. The Thorazine calmed Uncle Frank and he became a vegetable zombie forever.
     
Now he was on some drugs Brian thought were called something like pychotopic and atypickles, still drooling, and vague, and sad, and zombie. Plus he'd got thinner and thinner until he was a stick and completely alone and no wonder.    
     
The new medications were supposed to be better. Not for Uncle Frank. He was a thin, drooling skeleton and it looked like he'd be one until he died.
      
Brian Sr. had told Brian all this about Uncle Frank when drunk and the next day seemed to have forgotten, but Brian remembered. Vividly.
     
He was eleven then. Now he was thirteen. Hair was growing in embarrassing places and everything seemed disoriented and he sometimes wondered if he was going to go crazy, too. It was supposed to run in families like the color of your eyes, your favorite food, or your weight.
     
He looked for his own craziness sometimes and he thought he might have found the edge of it, but he sure as anything didn't run out on the streets naked or whatnot.
     
Yet.
     
Brian and his parents would visit Uncle Frank in his section eight HUD house for crazies and stay overnight for a day or two. The place smelled bad like Uncle Frank and it was as useless and gross.  
     
Brian thought his parents went there to try and show they were good people. They tried to make nice and make small talk with Uncle Frank who didn't make much sense and mostly slept and smelled the whole time or talked too much about crazy stuff.  
     
Uncle Frank never changed his clothes and had a fake, tight-lipped smile; tense, distracted and forced like Jesus Christ about to be crucified in a limp TV movie or Freddie Kruger with a severe case of anemia.  
    
"This visit to Frank's is special," Dad had said in the living room, one night, a week or so ago.
    
"Why?" Brian asked.
    
"It's the anniversary of Uncle Frank and the Little Tiger football game. He scored the last point in the last quarter, won it for the team. Everyone was smiling. Mom and dad were so happy. I was so proud of my big brother. Frank was so proud. Frank was so . . . proud..." Brian's father began to cry. It seemed like he was crying from joy, but then it turned into something else and finally, Brian didn't know why his father was crying. He was embarrassed and left the room quickly.
      
He wasn't close to his dad (or mom), although he didn't like admitting it. When they acted emotional it freaked him out. He knew not caring about your parents wasn't normal. He tried to be nice to them, but when he looked at them he didn't feel anything.
     
His mother had come into his bedroom, her shadow against the bedroom wall, after his father's sobbing thing. It was night and she'd woken him up.
     
"Your father's a very sensitive man, crying and what not," she'd said, disgusted and not even trying to hide it or maybe she was so out of it she thought she was.
     
"Goodnight, lovey," she said coldly after awhile. Brian didn't really see the point of her talking. He wished she had just let him sleep.

###

The doorbell rang.
    
Uncle Frank wasn't answering.
     
"Why don't we go around?" Dad said.
     
The back door was open.
     
They went into the disheveled kitchen and through it into the living room. Uncle Frank was sleeping on the couch, oblivious.
     
Him and his skeleton body had stained jeans on. There were holes in them. If he wasn't crazy, he'd have patched them up. Instead, he'd tried to put metal-looking duct tape over the holes and a lot of the tape was coming off in dirty strips, so the holes showed, anyway.
     
He wore a pajama shirt stained with tomato sauce or blood. Probably not blood, because he'd be dead.
     
You could tell he wasn't, only by his emaciated stomach pumping in and out.
     
His clothes were too big for his scrawniness. It went way beyond ghetto style. It looked as if someone had gotten another much bigger patient's discarded clothes from Uncle Frank's mental institution years ago and put them on him so he wouldn't run around the neighborhood naked.
     
They were dirty and wrinkled it. It looked like he'd never taken them off, but you could tell he had, because there were other clothes, just as groudy; exposed, laying around to prove it.
     
Brian accidently looked at two shit-stained pairs of underwear over near the head of the couch Uncle Frank was zombied out on and noticed a dry and rotting crust near their crotch. Brian's expression widened and he quickly turned his head away, trying to pretend he hadn't seen them.
    
Uncle Frank snorted. "Eaaah," he said in a loud whisper and his eyes opened.
    
"Hello, Frankie!" Brian's mother said, too cheerfully.
    
"Eaaah," Frank said still looking at her from his lying down position on the couch. The eyes that had opened were bulging, but every other part of him looked as loose as a corpse.
    
"Frank," Brian's dad nodded and lowered his head.
     
He looks ashamed of his brother, Brian thought, and why wouldn't he be?

###
      
Dinner was Kentucky Fried Chicken. It's cold and greasy, Brian Sr. thought to himself. If they'd been in the fast food chain, he'd have sent it back, but he'd made a quick trip to Main Street to get the stuff and bring it to Frank's HUD house and he didn't want to leave his son and wife alone with Frank any longer then necessary. He knew the drugs were supposed to work, but you never knew what Frank might be up to.
     
He'd exposed himself to a girl scout once, who was selling cookies at his doorstep a few years ago. Or was it a cub scout? Kids of an age all looked the same. Who knew? Brian Sr. just remembered picking up Frank's town paper and seeing some wide-eyed little thing on newsprint under the article.
     
It's parents hadn't pressed charges, so Frank got off lucky. Another three months in the local crazy house and an up on meds. If you could call that lucky. If you could call anything that happened to the poor old fool lucky since he was six months of fifteen.
     
Brian Sr. remembered his brother's winning football touchdown. Then, Brian Sr's mind blanked out for a second with nothing left, but a kind of pain. It was soon gone. He thought about the pain. It had felt like a rotting cut might feel being teased open by a wooden knife. How damned abstract.
     
He tried to bring up more images for the pain, but now he'd lost the original sensation. Come back to earth, fella, he scolded himself, stop dwelling on... things.
     
He tried mocking himself for having felt so . . . awful, but it wasn't funny. So he stopped.
     
Instead of thinking, he went about setting up the paper plates and plastic forks for dinner.
     
He looked over at his brother. Frank was smiling like an animal, but without the appeal.
     
Drugged up and dead enough. He looked quite a harmless, unappealing, little animal, Brian Sr. thought. His brother had been no Cary Grant for years, but the doctor who upped his dosages after the scout incident had upped them so much it looked like Frank would have trouble pulling down his pants when appropriate.
    
Probably goes to the bathroom in 'em. The idea went through Brian's Sr's mind and he suppressed it with a wrinkle of his nose. "Here you go, Frankie," he said taking a cold piece of meat out of the bucket. He served it onto a round piece of soon grease ridden cardboard. "A delicious chicken dinner."
     
He was trying to be positive, not sarcastic. He was trying for something that sounded half way normal. He didn't think it had worked. "Eat up, pal." Brian Sr. wiped his hand across his forehead.
     
"I like meat." Frank chuckled. He said something unpleasant, and vague, and basically unheard, before his voice trailed off.

###

Brian was tense through the meal. Uncle Frank looked weird, but his features looked enough like dad's to be disorienting.
    
Sitting next to Uncle Frank made his father look weird, too. His dad's stress didn't help the way he looked. He thought it was hidden, but it wasn't. It came out in every movement of his tight mouth, his tight gestures.
     
Brian thought his mom, with her fake big smile, looked like a nutcase, also.
     
I wonder what I'll look like, Brain thought. He wondered how he'd look like Uncle Frank. He tried to dismiss the idea from his mind, but he kept thinking about it.
     
As if Uncle Frank had read the thought, he muttered "Brian" or more like "Briiiiian." It came out in a long, grating drawl. "Briiiian is my friend. Aren't you, Briiiian?"
     
The way he said 'friend' was particularly disgusting, although Brian couldn't explain it.
     
He tried putting his mind on other matters. He was soon lost in wondering if he'd done well on his algebra test last week. Should he have marked the answers with a pencil, not a pen? But he was good at math and felt confident he might have passed. If he'd used a pencil, though, he could have done some of the answers over . . .
     
Uncle Frank was looking at him.
     
Brian gazed down at his plate, trying to avoid contact. When he glanced up, Uncle Frank hadn't stopped. He looked at him, right in the eyes. Uncle Frank's mouth opened in a drugged up glaze of half smile and half disgust. Half digested chicken fell out of him.
     
"Frank!" Brian's father said. "Eat with your mouth closed!"
          
Suddenly, Uncle Frank was across the table, bits of chicken dripping off his chin, gripping Brian's hand, hard.
     
"Brian," he smiled, spitting chicken skin into the boy's lap, "we know." He gave a wink, a horrible wink.
    
"Frank!" Brian could hear his father saying in the background. His voice was loud, but somehow Brian didn't really hear him.
     
Then, his dad was pulling his brother away. The wink had been very intimate and up close, Brain thought and he was afraid. What did . . . they know?
     
A shiver passed through him, then stopped. Brian had reached a point where he felt too scared to shiver. Instead, he looked at Uncle Frank more.
     
He couldn't stop looking.
     
Brian Sr's cell phone rang. I'm on it, he thought. He was in a second, secretly welcoming a chance to distract himself from the issues at hand.
     
A voice on the other end, muddy and mechanically breaking up a little, like cell phone voices do, said, "Hello, sir. This is Mark from Kentucky."
     
"From  where?"
     
"KFC. Kentucky Fried Chicken."
     
"How did you get my number?!"
     
"You left it on your trip to Hawaii slip. You forgot to put it in the contest box. So I read it."
     
"Jesus Christ! What do you want?"
     
"Your credit card didn't go through. Your going to have to come back and pay by cash."
     
"That's a damn good credit card, Marcus!"
     
Brian heard his dad screaming. He was yelling into his cell phone "The chicken was lousy!" he was yelling. "Do you enjoy calling people in the privacy of their  .  .  .  relative's homes and harassing them?!"
     
He said a few more angry words, but Brain didn't hear.
     
Uncle Frank was still staring at him.  
     
A few minutes later, Brian's father had pressed end and was pacing around the table, agitated. "I've had just about it. I've got to go back and pay them or they're calling the cops. It's ridiculous! It's obviously their mistake. I  know that credit card's good! Incompetent bastards!"
    
"Oh, Frank." Brian's mother interrupted his train of thought. She looked worried for a second and then her smile tensed up and puffed out so much it looked like it would jump off her face and do a rigor mortis dance. "Oh, these things happen, dear, don't they? No use getting all worked up about it. I'll go with you."
     
Brian's parents went towards the door. His mom gestured Brian over.
     
"No." He couldn't believe the words coming out of his mouth. Why were they coming out of his mouth? Why? He would think about that for a while. "I'll stay here with Uncle Frank."
    
His parents stood rigid by the front entrance. They didn't look like they'd leave without him. They looked like they were going to say something. For a minute.
    
"Okay Bri," his father stated. He opened the door. Him and Brian's mom stepped out.
     
The door closed, leaving Brian alone with his relative.
     
Brian still stared at Uncle Frank. What comic book or horror movie had said, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.  
     
Brian felt like lowering his gaze, but couldn't or somehow  .  .  .  didn't. Uncle Frank's eyes were full of some awful meaning that Brian couldn't interpret.
     

Maybe he's just a dirty old man, he thought. Gross, but what could Uncle Frank really do?
     
"You're like me," Uncle Frank said. When he said that he didn't seem drugged anymore. He seemed alive. Alive like death with a scythe, alive like death in darkness, alive like death just in a void.
     
"No," Brian said. "I'm not." But somehow he knew he was.
      
Uncle Frank came over again to where Brian sat and kissed him. It wasn't the kiss of a dirty old man. It was something more intimate.
      
 ###
    
Brian Sr. and his wife were driving back from Kentucky Fried Chicken. He had complained so loudly about the chicken and credit card the manager had agreed to take three dollars off. He said it was to prevent him from upsetting the other customers, but Brian Sr. liked to think Kentucky Fried Chicken knew when they were wrong. A small victory, but he felt good about it. He was celebrating slightly inside.
     
Brian Sr and his wife were driving their car back to Frank's when they saw their son run naked across the street. He began to haphazardly weave in and out of the green lawns of the small suburban neighborhood. Brian was sweating in the heat. He gleamed and glistened.  
     
"Brian?" his mother asked the rolled up car window.
     
Brian Sr. didn't say anything.
     
Brian didn't hear his parents. It was now a blue twilight nearing dark. He didn't see the car.
     
If it had been sunny and his parent's car windows had been rolled down, he wouldn't have noticed these things, either.
     
Brian Sr. knew what was going to happen before his wife did. He flinched, gritting his teeth in a kind of despair so deep it felt numb.
     
Brian started to scream.

© 2007  David  Alan Richards
This story can not be reproduced without the author's permission.