Spun
Tim Hanson
“Mr. K?” I hear a child’s muffled voice say. It sounds like it’s coming from the closet. I look around to see if everyone is here. Where’s Devin? There he is, in his seat for a change. All present. “Where do we stop?” the voice persists.” The kids are in small groups reading Charlotte’s Web, and I’m circulating about the classroom, watching, listening to Charlotte moan, my head buried deep between her legs in a cozy Ste. Genevieve B&B, where the wind-whipped tree branches lash the side of the old wood building in sync with the thrusts of my tongue into her pussy. Yes, Devin, of course Charlotte has a vagina. It tastes sweet and sour, like Chinese dipping sauce. Devin falls out of his seat, right on cue. It’s cold outside, below freezing, there’s a light dusting of snow on the ground, and a fire crackles in the fireplace. “Mr. K,” the little voice pleads. “Not yet,” I reply, “Don’t stop yet,” Charlotte cries to the spider-like shadow of my head between her knees on the ceiling, her body squirming with each thrust and swirl of my tongue, a squeal choked in her throat. I lie back against the creaky bed’s footboard, licking my lips.
The phone is ringing. Shit, I forgot the attendance again. I’ll do it now, I tell the office. Who’s missing? Is someone in the closet? No. All present. I checked already. Didn’t I?
Recess finally arrives, and I sit alone at my desk and wonder, like Wilbur does in Charlotte’s Web, what it is like to be alive. I’m never more alive than when you touch me like that, Charlotte murmurs, on her stomach now, peering out the frosted window at nothing but whorls of snow on a deserted street. We are safe. No abusive husband to beat Charlotte with a phone book because she isn’t at work when he comes to look for her while she’s giving me head in the cab of my Dodge Ram parked in her office building parking garage just two spaces away from where he parked. He looked straight at me when he got out of the car. Who is it? Charlotte asked. Just some guy with a horseshoe mustache, I told her. She told me later the man was her husband. If the truck windows had been open, he could have sniffed her out. And no suspicious wife, either. She took our twin boys to visit her mother in Chicago. I caress Charlotte’s feet, her calves, all the way up her thighs; the tip of my tongue brushes her ankle. Her skin bristles, she gasps.
My son Jack’s gasps went unheard, so he suffocated inside that dry-cleaning plastic in his mother’s closet. Who knew hide-and-seek could kill? Poor Sam, no longer a twin. No one to hide from, no one to seek. Sweet Jack beamed at the dragon kite the three of us flew on the boys’ last birthday, the last time I saw him alive.
“He forgot us again,” I hear Devin say. My class is lined up behind the assistant principal standing at my door. I didn’t hear the bell ring. This can’t be good. I’m on thin ice around here already.
Charlotte’s pale body glows in the dusky firelight. Outside, the day loses its way in the dark. I switch on the overhead projector and start the math lesson. The kids are wound up, restless, unruly. They sense my vulnerability and take advantage. But not Emma–reliable, responsible Emma, whose long auburn hair resembles Charlotte’s. “Mr. K,” she says, “you forgot to lower the screen. Can I do it?” I look up and notice the word fuck in the jumble of Charlotte’s Web vocabulary words and the text from the math book projected on the white board. I pull the screen down fast before Devin sees it and alerts the other students. He falls out of his seat. The kids laugh. His act never grows old. Someone’s left a closet door open. I wish Jack had.
I get drunk, drunker than usual, and plow the Ram into a tree on my way to Charlotte’s house. Blood is dripping from a gash on my forehead and my left arm is broken–in several places. I walk the rest of the way to her house. Her husband answers the door. He’s shirtless, wearing Christmas-themed pajama bottoms. I know he threatened to kill Charlotte if she ever tried to see me again, so I fall to my drunken knees and beg him to let me say goodbye to her, to ask her forgiveness, to take one long last look at her. It’s an act. What I really want is another chance to bury my head in Charlotte’s pussy. She’s alarmed by all the blood and tries to help me, but her husband won’t let her. He elbows her hard in the ribs, sends her to her knees, face to face with me. God, you sonofabitch, don’t you ever try to see me again, she screams, I don’t know what the hell happened to you, but I hope you die on the street. No succor for me. I can see the hurt and fury in her eyes. She’s saying to me what she can’t say to him. I stand up and stagger away, leave her there, moaning, at the mercy of her brutal husband.
A burst of laughter erupts in the room. “Devin, stop falling out of your seat.”
I fly back to St. Louis for my boy’s funeral. My ex-wife doesn’t want me there. Her new husband pulls me aside at the cemetery. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t come to our house after the service, he tells me. I know Sam would like you to be there, but–”
“He was my son.”
“I know. I understand, believe me. If I were in your shoes–”
“You’re not, I tell him.”
“It’s just that, well, Laura is inconsolable, almost hysterical with grief. She blames herself, of course, but mostly she blames you.”
“Mr. K?”
“I was in California when it happened. How I could I be…”
“Mr. K?”
“Grief and reason aren’t necessarily compatible. Please, don’t come. She and Sam need some peace now.”
He’s so calm, so rational, so, compassionate–I want to smash his sympathetic face.
“Mr.K?”
I look at him and at Laura and at Sam standing beside his brother’s little casket, and I know he’s right. I sweep Sam into my arms and hold him tight. I choke back tears. I tell him that Jack’s death wasn’t his fault, that everything will soon be all right, that I love him with all my heart. I sob in the car all the way back to my hotel, alone with my grief.
“Mr K?”
There are a few friends I could call, but the number I dial is the one I’ve tracked down for Charlotte. I’m not sure who will answer.
“Vic?” a timid voice asks.
“Mr. K? Mr. K? Mr. K?”
The moment I hear her voice I know I want to see her, to touch her, to taste her.
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Sarah needs to go to the bathroom,” Emma says. Sarah’s beside her.
“OK,” I tell her, “Will you take her?”
“Can you talk?”
“Meet me for a drink,” I say. “I need to see you. Can you get away?”
There is a long silence, as if she’s holding her breath. When she finally speaks, I exhale.
“Yes,” she says, “I’m free.”
A gust of wind flings leaves against the window, making the fire crackle. Charlotte arches her back, lifts her legs onto my shoulders…
“We’re back,” Emma announces. They scoot past me to their seats.
Charlotte was once a knockout–a willowy beauty with emerald eyes, an ivory complexion, and long chestnut hair. Now, when she walks into the bar, I barely recognize her. She’s limping, her hair’s chopped short and her face looks like it’s been dismantled and reassembled incorrectly–like a Cubist portrait.
We sit at a cocktail table in a dark corner of the bar, the same bar where we used to meet. We drink gin and tonics. I don’t want to know because I already know that whatever happened to her face wasn’t accidental. I drink my G&T fast and order another round.
“Aren’t you going to ask about my face?” she says. “The monster in the room?”
I don’t know what to say. I grip my glass. Look away.
“Don’t worry, Vic, I don’t blame you. You didn’t do this to me.”
She sips her drink silently, taking me in, maybe trying to see through to what’s distorted my face. She doesn’t make small talk, though, doesn’t ask about me, how I am, where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing. She’s polite, but businesslike, like a character on a TV police procedural.
The kids are talking. I can see their mouths moving, but there’s no volume.
“I met a woman in an Al-Anon meeting who helped me get away from my husband,” Charlotte tells me, “into a woman’s shelter at first, where I filed for divorce, and then into an apartment of my own. I had no contact with him at all, and I was confident he didn’t know where I was.”
I close my eyes to try to reconcile Charlotte’s voice with the woman I used to know, in between whose legs I’d strayed and gotten lost, so turned around that I had to go looking for her all over again and now she was nowhere to be found. She must sense what I’m doing because each time I open my eyes her smile seems to mock me. But because it’s no longer a familiar face, I can’t trust what I read there.
“I was mistaken,” she says. “I’d underestimated his rage. I thought I was safe.”
I close my eyes and listen to Charlotte spin her tale.
“One night, after drinks with two of my girlfriends from work, I drove home and pulled into the underground parking garage. It was darker than usual and there was water everywhere. I got out of the car as I usually did and started for the elevator. I never made it. The first blow was to my ribs. Then I was on the slick garage floor, treading water it felt like, while he kicked and stomped on my head. I don’t remember much after the first blows, but I do remember him pulling my head up by my hair and spitting in my face. I either lost consciousness after that or I’ve blocked the memory, because the rest is a blur. When I came out of a coma a few days later, the police told me that a plumber had been in the garage repairing a burst pipe when he heard my screams. By the time he got to me, Larry had already done plenty of damage–well, you can see–and this is three plastic surgeries later.”
“Devin’s bleeding!”
Charlotte, you mean. Charlotte’s bleeding.
“My jaw and nose were broken, I had multiple severe lacerations and contusions on my face and head, and I almost lost sight in my left eye.” She speaks without affect. Her feelings seem to be as absent as her former face.
“He’s bleeding a lot,” kids’ voices yell. Through the dim light of the bar I can see blood streaming down Devin’s face onto his white t-shirt. He fell out of his chair again and cut his chin on the edge of the desk. Emma hands me a wad of paper towels. I press them hard against Devin’s chin. I try to calm the class. Emma remains at my side, like a nurse awaiting instructions. “Do you want me to take him to the office?” she says. “Sit down,” I snap at her. I lead Devin to the room phone, call the office, tell them to call 911–he’ll probably need stitches. Within a minute, both the principle and the assistant principal are in my classroom. The A.P. looks at me as if I were responsible, as if I’d hit Devin in the face.
I peer into the open closet. I want to crawl into it and hide like Jack did.
I manage to restore some order to the class. Emma’s crushed. I’ll have to deal with her later. I overhear Sarah whisper to her seat mate that Devin’s injury is my fault, that I wasn’t paying attention, that I’m going to be in big trouble. I look at Devin’s desk; his copy of Charlotte’s Web is splattered with blood.
The A.P. comes to my room after school. Devin not only cut his chin, she tells me, but he also bit off a piece of his tongue. She orders me to write a detailed report about the incident and have it on her desk tomorrow morning. I stare blankly at her. What will my report say? We read Charlotte’s Web today and there was a casualty? I stare at the open closet door. She waits for me to respond.
“It was good to see you, Vic,” Charlotte says. She’s standing now, looming over me. “I hope your boys are well and that you’re doing well yourself. Take good care and have a good life.”
“Don’t go. I–”
“You what, Vic? You want me? Even now, looking the way I do?”
“Yes,” I say, “Yes, of course I do, I never–”
“Goodbye, Vic,” she says.
“No. Please. Don’t leave me here alone.”
Her eyes are wet, and they drip on my face as she leans down and brushes my cheek with her disfigured lips. I sense she has more to say, but she chokes back whatever it is and walks away. I wait for her to stop, to look back, to come back. She doesn’t.
“Mr. K?” Emma calls from the doorway. “I think I left my homework folder.”
I gesture her into the room to look in her desk. The A.P. repeats her demand for the report. “First thing,” I say to her back as she leaves my room. Emma’s folder is not there, of course. She never forgets anything. “Did you look in your backpack?” I say.
“No,” she says, and throws her head back to let me know that she’d be helpless without my guidance. She hesitates for a moment on her way out. “I’m sorry I got in your way with Devin. I was just trying to help.”
“I know,” I say. “I know you were. Thank you, Emma.” She smiles, and as she walks out of the classroom, she closes the closet door. In the empty room I lift my head to look into Charlotte’s eyes, suffused with dying firelight. She too smiles and brushes away a strand of hair from her face, wet with our mingled sweat. “You make me feel alive,” I say. “Don’t stop. Not yet.”
Tim Hanson lives in Santa Monica, CA. His short story 'Broken Bottles' appeared in great weather for MEDIA's 2014 anthology I Let Go of the Stars in My Hand. His flash fictions, 'Smoke 'em if You Got 'em' and 'Mercy' appear in Coffin Bell Journal's October 2019 issue. 'Tiny Marilyns' can be found on Cease, Cows, and 'Blown' appears in the August 2020 issue of Into the Void. His audio drama podcasts can be found at: https://aptfprods.podbean.com/
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