Chimera, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Preface: The Note
Chapter 1 - The Fat Lady and the Big Man
Chapter 2 - Hannah and the Pink Phone
Chapter 3 - Mr. Anderson's Story
Chapter 4 - Frank's Meat Market
Chapter 5 - Santa Claus and the Old Woman
Chapter 6 - 30 Seconds
Chapter 7 - The Man From Upstairs
Chapter 8 - Catherine's Story
Chapter 9 - The Man in the Suit
Chapter 10 - Road Trip
Chapter 11 - The End of a Theory
Chapter 12 - Crack. Ping. Floomp.
Chapter 13 - A Rustic Getaway
Chapter 14 - Conversations
Chapter 15 - Competition
Chapter 16 - Complications
Chapter 17 - The Boyfriend
Chapter 18 - Mystery Solved
Chapter 19 - The Dead Parents Society
Chapter 20 - War
Chapter 21 - Jealousy
Chapter 22 - On the Road Again
Chapter 23 - Bullet Proof
Chapter 24 - The Truth
Chapter 25 - The House in the Woods
Chapter 26 - Revelations
Chapter 27 - A Parlor Trick
Chapter 28 - Car Problems
Chapter 29 - Roger's Mistake
Chapter 30 - Joshua's Good Shirt
Chapter 31 - A New Beginning
Chapter 32 - Abby Pays a Visit
Chapter 33 - Promises
CHIMERA
by Debra Flores
In memory of my Grandmother Maria, who, for a hundred and one years, balanced out some of the evil in this world with her extraordinary kindness.
I miss you.
Preface: The Note
Sometimes things don’t go the way you plan them to. Sometimes things go a little awry. Sometimes they go badly. And sometimes they go very, very, wrong.
My plans for this evening had been simple. I was going to read a good book, eat some lasagna, and then go to bed.
But those plans hadn’t worked out so well. Things went… awry. Then they went badly.
And now it looks as if they’re going to go very, very, wrong.
Instead of my bed, I’d ended up here, alone, on an empty road, in the middle of the night, about to be murdered. Maybe even butchered.
By the time someone finds my corpse, my eyes will be gone. The birds will have gotten to them.
And as if eye-pecking birds weren’t enough, when no one claims my eyeless body, everyone will assume I was a prostitute, disowned by her family. Whoever’s job it is to zip dead people up into body bags will zip me up in a professional manner, I’m sure. They’ll have the appropriate somber look on their face but they’ll secretly be thinking that I probably got what I deserved. Just another junkie prostitute, turning tricks, should have stayed in school, off drugs.
Maybe I should write a note?
To whom it may concern: My name was Emi. Emile Warren. I was twenty-three years old, and I was a nice person. A little judgmental maybe, but nice. I’d like to think so, anyway. But no one will claim my body, I have no family.
If a Mr. Anderson shows up, please don’t let him see me in this condition, he’s a kind man and doesn’t deserve it. Also, I was not a prostitute, so please don’t go on TV and say that I was. I was meant to be reading a book and eating lasagna tonight, but my plans went a little awry.
P.S. My eyes were green. Ish.
It’s too late now though, I see headlights.
chapter one
the fat lady and the big man
eight hours earlier
“Mr. Anderson! I got a new book in the mail today!” I shouted across the grassy courtyard, waving at him and pointing to the box in my hand.
“Wonderful!” Mr. Anderson shouted, waving back at me. “I hope it’s got some racy sex scenes in it!” The woman standing behind him scowled at me, shoved him a few feet into their apartment and slammed the door shut.
Lovely.
She doesn’t deserve him, I thought, for the fifth time that week. He should be mine. I’d treat him a hell of a lot better than she does.
But he’s not mine, he’s hers. And there it is.
Once inside my own apartment, I plopped down on the small second-hand scratchy sofa donated to me by someone I don’t remember, and debated on whether or not to open the box. Not a big decision, I know, but I hadn’t been expecting the book to arrive until the weekend when there would be food in the fridge. No food in the fridge was a problem for me because when I read a good book, I get hungry. It’s almost as if I’m physically taking part in the book instead of just reading it, picturing the scenes in my head, burning calories climbing mountains, wielding bloody axes, dragging heavy lifeless bodies to shallow graves. That’s hard work.
Friday mornings is when I usually go food shopping, and today is Thursday, which means I’m down to stale cereal, questionable milk, and an emergency packet of ramen noodles. I really don’t want to go to the grocery store right now, not at this time. There’ll be traffic on the streets, and crowds at the market. Aisles and aisles of screaming children demanding that bucket of ice cream, this box of cookies, and howling that they DO NOT LIKE CABBAGE! Friday mornings at the grocery store are mostly peaceful: retirees in their soft-soled shoes and loose khaki pants shuffle around at a leisurely pace, a few bachelors with hand baskets keep to themselves as they stock up on canned ravioli and microwaveable meals, and babies in carriers gurgle or sleep in their young mother’s shopping carts disturbing no one. Babies who do not yet know the difference between cauliflower and candy, so do not yell or moan or go limp and droop to the floor sobbing that life just isn’t fair when their parents choose it.
I’d made the mistake once, of going grocery shopping on a Saturday afternoon, and I accidentally hit a little boy who was running around, trailing a paper kite behind him, trying to get it airborne in the windless store. He’d been tearing up and down the aisles, whooping, knocking down several boxes and cans on display. When I’d turned a corner, he came crashing into my cart, his head turned to the side, trying to see if the kite had somehow taken flight. He hit the cart, took a few steps back, stood stunned for a second, disorientated, a Fruit Loop stuck to his grubby cheek, and then he let out a wail I thought was way out of proportion to the situation. Two seconds later a large woman came galumphing toward us from three aisles away, her huge arms wobbling as she held them out to the little boy. He disappeared into her flowery housedress as she wrapped her hands around his head and asked me accusingly, “What’s wrong with you?” as if I had deliberately mowed down her perfectly behaved angel made out of glass. When I didn’t answer, she snorted, turned, and walked away. The little boy, holding her hand, was still dragging the kite behind him, and as they disappeared into the next aisle over, she turned and glared at me one last time over her meaty shoulder and I wanted to yell after her “Hey, he ran into me! The Fruit Loop didn’t even fall off his face!” But I didn’t. I’m not good with confrontations. They make me nervous. I like calmness, orderliness, and rules. So after that little fiasco, I stuck to my Friday morning routine. I don’t need the aggravation.
It wasn’t a sure thing, though, the book. It could turn out to be a dud. It was written by one of my favorite authors, Angela Hawtrey, but her writing had gone down the crapper a few years back. I blamed it on one of two things: either she was trying to write “serious books” now, or the magic had left her when she quit the booze.
When her first two books sold in the millions, critics started calling her shallow, inane, a hack. The three books after that sold even better, and the criticism got worse. Many reviewers accused her of writing for one reason only: money. I doubted it, but even if it were true, so what? I couldn’t care less. Everyone does things for money don’t they? Do people love emptying trash cans or cleaning toilets? Probably not, but it’s honest work, it pays the bills, and someone has to do it, or we’d all be living in filth. I didn’t think any of these critics would mind that much if their beaten up old clunker hearts were about to give way and their surgeon (the best in the business) who was about to save their lives didn’t love his job. What he really loves are Bentleys, Rolexes, and Picassos. He just happened to have the talent and work ethic to become the best surgeon in the world and it was a means to an end. Would they really rather another surgeon, a bumbling, kind-hearted, old man with cataracts and a tremor who truly loved what he did perform the surgery? Nah, probably not.
I’m not fond of hypocrites.
So, for love or money, it made no difference to me, Angela Hawtrey wrote the kind of books I tended to gravitate to: good old-fashioned scary campfire stories. No high-minded symbolism, no deep meanings, no abstruse themes. I wouldn’t get any of it anyway, if she did sprinkle some of those extra bells and whistles into her books. Most symbolism went right over my head. Even plot twists almost always caught me by surprise. I’m not good at deciphering little clues meted out throughout books, so complicated symbolism would be wasted on me. Lush green landscapes do not make me think of innocence, they make me think of summer. Bare, dry, crumbling trees, to me, are either winter or a forest fire, not an empty soul. So when I’d tried to read her last book, a 900 page tome spanning three days in the life of a heartbroken man in the middle of a divorce, I couldn’t get past page 322. In all of those three hundred pages, the man had done only one thing: write a letter to his dead daughter. When I closed the book, he wasn’t even halfway done.
If it wasn
What the hell, I decided, I’ll open the box. Just to look at the cover. Just to feel it in my hands. Maybe read the jacket cover – that doesn’t mean I’ll read it.
The sleek crisp cover was a beautiful slate-grey matte, and on it, a picture of an orange and white striped circus tent, the canvas flap openned just enough to see a large leg with an impossibly round calf and a plump doughy foot stuffed into a shiny, red sequenced shoe disappearing into it. I felt the minute bumps of the title “All the Shiny Nickels” stamped into the thick paper in a fancy cream-colored font under my fingertips. I lifted the book and fanned the clean white pages under my nose. Mmmmm, new book smell. Intoxicating. A Kindle would never be intoxicating. Of course, a Kindle won’t cause carpal tunnel syndrome either, but, eh, you take the bad with the good.
Without even deciding to, the pull of a new adventure too strong, I opened the front cover and began to read.
Crap. It’s good. Really good.
Whatever the reason, be it Ms. Hawtrey remembered that it wasn’t the critics who pay for her luxury vacations, or she’d once again picked up a bottle, I didn’t really care, I had a good book in my hands because of it. A good old-fashioned campfire story.
According to the jacket cover, it was about a 1930’s traveling circus, whose sideshow fat lady lures children into her tent, kills them, and then eats them. And even though I’d only read the first two chapters, I was already rooting for the woman. Children can be cruel, and when you’re labeled a freak by adults, it gave them license to be even crueler. So they laughed, pointed, jeered, and insulted her as she sat on the small chair specifically designed to accentuate her bulk, while she knitted or simply sat, trying hard not to let it get to her, not to cry. A fake smile on her face all the while. I could see why she would resort to murder. People can only take so much before they crack.
I know exactly what the critics will say: it’s too over the top, too gory, too unbelievable, the vocabulary rudimentary, the imagery too gruesome.
I hope Angela makes a buttload of money on this book, and to hell with the critics.
I was going to be up all night. I had a fat lady who needed my help. Children are squirmy. They run, they yell. If I was going to help the fat lady stay fat with children meat, I needed food. Good, hearty, energy-packed food. Because I needed to keep the parents at bay. I needed to keep them…preoccupied.
I needed to go to the grocery store.
I glanced at my watch: 4:56 p.m.
Rush-hour traffic. Screaming kids. Moms in flowery housecoats. Sigh.
I got up anyway, grabbed my keys, and hoped the grocery store wasn’t having some sort of triple-value coupon extravaganza deal going on. I’d take kids with kites over crazed couponers any day. It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t all carry around those giant handbags with them. I have a sneaking suspicion that’s a strategy they’ve cooked up in one of their meetings. “Put a nice solid brick in there Marge and go for the thigh. You know that nerve in the thigh? Drops ‘em like a bag of sand. That’s how I got that 84 roll pack of toilet paper out in the hallway. Little slip of a thing was going for it, but one good thwack and she was down for the count.” Children with kites were nothing compared to that.
Despite traffic, I made it to the store in only ten minutes. Instead of the mega food store that took up nearly an entire city block (where you can purchase not only canned peaches and bananas, you can also pick up a futon and an entire pre-built fence if you want to. And why not, who doesn’t have a need for a spur of the moment futon?), I chose to go to a smaller, closer, corner market: Dave’s Food ‘n Stuff. The name isn’t very appropriate (or even appealing). I’ve never actually met Dave, so I don’t know if he’s an honest man or not, but I believe he may be misleading the public. He sells food, yeah, but I’ve never seen any of this “stuff” his sign promises, unless you counted fruit flies as the “stuff.” But I could deal with fruit flies. Easier to deal with than the aforementioned couponers.
While walking to the front of the store, I noticed an elderly woman parked in one of the handicapped spaces struggling to get a watermelon out of her shopping cart so I stopped to help her. Once I finished getting the watermelon and the rest of her bags into her trunk I had to stand there, trying to be patient, nodding, while she talked. Somehow, she went from complaining about the high price of watermelons to Watergate and then to her neighbor. She was sure he was stealing her underwear from the clothesline she had in her backyard. When I told her that I really had to get going, she tried to pay me for my help with a quarter. This could be me, I thought, looking at her gnarled hands, her threadbare clothes, this could be me in fifty or sixty years at the rate I’m going. Alone, lonely, desperate to talk to someone. No one to help me get a watermelon out of my cart. I’d noticed that all her food was very cheap and there wasn’t much of it. There were no meat packages at all but she had bought several cans of generic cat food. I really hoped she had a cat. I don’t want to get old and eat cat food. It’s not even brand name cat food. It’s probably all ground up horse hooves and chicken beaks. I took the quarter, only because she looked as if her pride would be hurt if I didn’t, but before I closed her trunk, I slipped a twenty dollar bill into one of her bags. I could ill afford it, but still, that could be me.
A crate of shrunken, wrinkly oranges was being used to prop open the broken electronic door and as I walked into the store a whoosh of mildewy, musty, old mop odor hit me. The sooner I can get out of here, the better.
Ordinarily I only shopped at this market when I needed something very specific and un-exotic like a bag of rice or a loaf of plain white bread because the variety was definitely lacking. If you came here with the idea of buying the ingredients to make a seven-bean soup, you’d be sorely disappointed. Two different types of beans was the most you could hope for in here, anything above that was a pipe dream. But for my purposes today, it was fine, I didn’t need much: cheese, noodles, meat, and sauce. Enough to make a simple, yet calorie-packed lasagna. And at this store, that’s exactly what I was going to get, a package that simply said “MEAT” on it. I’d better look for a USDA stamp just in case.
I tend to trust government officials, like meat inspectors, implicitly because those are the rules right? Someone from the government can’t tell you something’s okay to eat if it isn’t, could they? Of course they can’t. Society would break down otherwise. Hospitals wouldn’t be able to handle the overflow of greenish vomiting patients, all moaning from stomach pains and passing out from dehydration, dropping dead in the hallways like flies. Empty houses would be looted, policemen wouldn’t show up for work, garbage pick-up would come to a halt. It would be chaos. Anarchy. Somehow I pictured the earth on fire, as if the lack of integrity in government meat inspectors might lead to a meteor shower, causing the entire earth to be consumed in flames.
I realize it’s naïve, this notion that all (or even most) government officials are trustworthy, I’m not stupid, but I had to believe that at least some of them were, that those few were the ones who kept the world from being demolished by flying space rocks or deadly food-borne bacteria. After all, the world was still here. Garbage pick-up was still up and running. The mail was still being delivered. It was men and women in suits and ties who wore official badges with bold initials like FBI, CIA, NSA, written across them on their lapels who kept everything going. I was sure of it.
