Four Stories — David Kuhnlein

The Shape She’d No Longer Take

I decided to buy the most expensive mattress on the floor. The technology claimed to cool the bed down ten degrees, there was a vibrating massage controlled by a small battery powered remote, and the head and foot would tilt on command – better than life inside a hospital.

“Nice for watching TV,” my wife said. “And my POTS.”

She’d recently been diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome after they strapped a swiveling torture device on her and aimed her frail body wrong-side round to chart if she’d faint. Scrambled by her blood pressure over almost every physical position, my wife went to great lengths cherishing this new diagnosis. For many thousands of dollars, she was told to eat more salt.

The mattress counter guy said most people just come in here to browse, emphasizing “browse” as if it were a slur. He eyed a couple prostrate on a king-size, shook his head, and then actually said, “Let’s get down to brass tacks.”

My wife shuffled with her cane towards the door.

“You’re a good man,” the seller continued. He said this because she was disabled, and I was seemingly not.

“I wouldn’t mind sleeping on the floor,” I said. “You understand. This is for her.”

“Bless your heart.”

I shouldn’t have encouraged him. His comments unnerved me. Like the organs that hung inside us they meant nothing. Their empty pulsing. Their unconscious processing. I was inclined to leave judgement to the experts. I had my obsessions. If only Christ would come.

My wife’s jaw surgery went as planned. The bed was purchased for all kinds of recoveries. I waited for her on a C-shaped couch alongside fellow relations. The blue cushions looked like a floatation device, and I felt surrounded by water. I closed my eyes. Rescue should never cross the mind when humbly and eagerly contemplating God.

No trumpets from the edge of another world when my wife summoned me to our expensive bedside to observe her phone. No clouds split open to reveal a halo of sun. Cracks tessellating her screen made the image less crisp, something to peer beyond to see what must be seen. I followed her finger following a woman around Disneyland. What I saw wobbling on two stick-thin legs, chatting at the camera as if alive, frightened and aroused me. Bodily sickness too often increased one’s love for the Lord, but there’s such a thing as too much love. I left the room.

My wife was in the habit of grabbing my pants during sex scenes. I wasn’t in the mood to be teased. “Thinspo” I think she intoned, perhaps speaking Latin. I mumbled how a body that emaciated made me hungry, then winced, hoping she’d missed the Freudian slip, and forced myself to concoct a snack.

My attention elsewhere meant that I became careless with my anger, and I watched from a distance as it filled the gulf between us. “I’d rather you beat me to a pulp,” she said after I verbally defended myself against her. “Bruises fade.”

I had never hit a woman, despite having loved a few.

Once, the cops were called because I screamed. She blamed it on her autism while they isolated us, encouraging her to file a charge. I’m almost certain none of us believed her, but the cops did leave.

Campbell’s Soup lunches tasted like cat food and our cat was dead. In the backyard, I stepped on his headstone. One pace away from the grave and I returned to myself, as if waves of strong emotion did not well up from inside but were lodged externally. All I had to do to avoid certain feelings was to keep everything buried, where it belonged.

But I could not rid my head of the anorexic girl. I daydreamed her everywhere, swaying sexily, collapsing in my arms. I imagined teaching someone to walk on stilts, gripping the wood beneath them, feeling the ridges and motifs carved within, as they toppled. In my dreams, her arms burst apart to bring us closer, bones split like a sponge down the center. Not enough cheek to smile.

When my wife left, all I mustered was: “But you don’t drive!”

She was to be with her son for the foreseeable future. She’d had a son by someone.

We had different ideas about love, her crew accorded. I unplugged the bed. Then the humidifier. The bed became a desk. I scissored the cord.

I opened the girl in a couple tabs. Her name was Colleen. She was a streamer with endless fans, earning her money online. Wikipedia explained the content: “Beauty vlogs, daily life.” There was, if it could be believed, a book. Eating disorder had met internet fame, though I couldn’t care less about the contents. Would a return address accompany my purchase?

I rolled out of bed and pressed my hand into the impression I’d made in the mattress. It took a while for the bed to regain its shape, and I watched as this happened, slowly, as a ghost resembling a bleeding Christ rose from the space between the indented foam.

I started small. Swallowed pebbles, pennies, sand. Throwing up became necessary. A finger down the throat circumvented the ache but I’d held too many girls’ hair back over a toilet. I read about misuse of laxatives and then I sat upon my throne, weightless as my grandma in her coffin.

Grandma had always been thin. Under a hundred, and not just before death. Three coffees a day with large helpings of sugar, evaporated milk. A few bites at dinner. When I came home from school, she told me everything that had occurred out the front window. She looked like a Hindu goddess pawed to life through the sheen between worlds. Colleen wavered like her, almost floating across the sidewalk. I would peel her out of herself, penetrate an organ until her soul expulsed. She’d only have to trust me for a moment.

A game Grandma played: close your eyes and guess what I’m writing on your arm, your back, your palm. It was a secret deeper and darker than words, a language of blood and skin. There was something of Grandma in all the women I loved.

SUV headlights bobbed over the pine. Sunset was begging earlier and earlier. Thirty-six hours since I ingested anything. Her street had put their garbage out. Bags with yellow ribbons collected snow that travelled sideways on the wind. I parked in a vacant lot a few houses down, address mangled on paper in the center counsel, and dozed. I felt myself arranged within the fading darkness, as it replaced everything about me one piece at a time.

The sky layered into itself and those layers became light.

I awoke inside her bones.

If this moon was beyond the expanse of my grip, I’d build a miniature of its ruin. 

She emerged in my wing mirror, waltzing on ice. Each step impressing the newly fallen snow. I wanted to print those footsteps out and nurse them into a fluid.

Her hands were in her pockets. She walked toward the snow-covered play structure across the field, and I could sense her thinness beneath all that outerwear, squeezing past downy material onto something solid, rigid, warm.

Colleen.

I crunched across the field, shrieking with the wind. I would go on and on, across the field and down the sky, to meet her. I closed one eye and reached out my arm. She fit in the palm of my hand, exemplifying every literal – and angelic – sense of that expression.

The Pharmacist

“I tell my daughters to avoid med school and all three of them go,” she said. He understood her name after two asks. Hannan — a name he had to taste for himself. His was Alex, but it wasn’t really Alex because, while Hannan watched the encounters and graded, he acted the part of “Alex” — a typical gender-neutral name, a role that he or any of his coworkers could play. They worked at the pharmacy school in the heart of the city. One by one their students knocked, entered, and passed the clinical skills exam. Between Alex’s script and Hannan’s checkmarks they chatted.

“Thought about it myself,” Alex-not-Alex said, picturing Hannan’s daughters.

“It takes your whole life. Especially hard for women. I don’t mean to sound sexist, but…”

“I know,” Alex said. He was particularly agreeable nine to five, though he tried turning down the decorum when his coworkers were attractive. He wasn’t immune, but he couldn’t afford seeming interested. Everything they did and said was being recorded.

He glanced from the recording equipment behind him to the floor. From its bubble on the wall, the analog clock ticked. A large percentage of students could read time only if it had been digitized. Alex wondered how phased out his training already was. Between Hannan’s body and his was a display of ultra fine pen needles (sized from nano to original), a mock insulin pen filled with saline, and a skincube — built to be penetrated from the top. The salt water could be seen shooting from the needle into the absorbable bottom of the cube through its translucent walls. A very specialized, and oddly sensual, piece of equipment. An assortment of stethoscopes also accompanied a sphygmomanometer, and removable bladders for the blood pressure cuff.

Awaiting the next tepid entry, he realized the room might be the exact size that a human biome could expand to, and it was happening in the air around them — one of the many things the audiovisual equipment couldn’t capture — a cloud of their mingling bacteria. Away from work he attended microbiology lectures. He pretended they were fun, but really they were a distraction. One of his cousin’s had recently suicided over two unfilled prescriptions. The suicide had contributed to his overall feeling for pharmacists. Yet here he was admiring Hannan’s pleated pants and crow’s feet. Her moisturized hand wheeled through an Instagram landscape.

“Do your kids let you follow them on social media?” he said.

“My rule is no phone until they get their license. Their friends come over and they’re all glued to them,” Hannan laughed. “I can’t say anything about it without sounding like a nut.”

“I get it,” he said, his smile a mockery of his insides. Hadn’t she said her kids were in med school? Maybe she had said nieces? Was she trending younger as they spoke? He continued: “I can’t imagine growing up now. How people think they’re supposed to look. It’s all fake.” 

“I get caught in that as an adult,” she said. “I can’t imagine.” 

The lines on her face emphasized beauty’s passing quite well. He usually based himself off the anticipated reactions of another, married or single. On the morning radio he had heard that several men speaking Arabic and wearing keffiyehs had been shot.

“I’ve been putting off this sleep study,” he said, breaking the silence. “Every morning I wake up feeling hungover — dry eyes, dry mouth, exhausted.” 

“Do you breathe with your mouth open?” she asked. Her mouth moved softly. He was dueling with the urge to lean into it. He unconsciously licked his lips which she seemed to notice.

“Not when I’m conscious,” he said, ready to scream, or weep. They settled into a kind of relaxed heartbreak in their black rollie chairs.

“I’ve heard of people,” she whispered, “taping their mouths shut.” She pressed a black rubber button on her phone and the screen clicked off. His dreams were drawn by a needle from the days before and discarded into the legs of the days ahead. He removed a very hairy sock for the next student’s diabetic foot exam. There were a number of exhausting dogs at his house. Frantic, he wondered if pain itself was a conspiracy, all sensation — his exhaustion included — a test for some other double life, one lived in dreams, after death…

Regardless, he was sweating.

He would continue to help his students become mommies signing chemical permission slips, everyone’s spastic muscles a gunshot away from help. They’d have to condone a reasonable body count.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s genuine,” he told his students in feedback sessions. “What matters is that the patient perceives a modicum of empathy.”

Ghost Story

When Wallace returned home after scattering his mother’s ashes, where red clay had demarcated her from the earth, his wife and children were eating lunch. Three pairs of eyes looked up from their meal without a word.

“Did you get my messages?” the wife said.

“I was a little busy...”

There was no welcome home that made the pangs of staying away worth this tribulation. He used to look forward to filial minutia. How many times did the dog soil the carpet? Which choice expletive had mommy whisper-screamed, never escaping the hungry ears of their boys. Beneath the table, the boys resumed kicking each other.

“I really can’t do this again, Wally,” she said. “The boys agree. Don’t you boys?”

The youngest impaled a forkful of potatoes and closed his eyes, as if being erased from the table via sensory deprivation. The oldest looked silently at his father.

“Hey,” the wife said. “You guys were supposed to be on my side here.”

The dog, who’d been curled up by the heating vent, shook out and stretched. Tinkling bits of metal of his collar, then a long sigh as it bent in chest toward the floor. The nails were already clicking excitedly across the laminate. 

“I’m sorry, mom,” the oldest said. “I missed dad.”

“Go,” she said to the boy, pointing at Wallace, the door, or both.

The boys and the dog flocked to him on one knee. Arms outstretched to embrace whatever was in store.

“Maybe you forgot I buried my mother,” he said, getting changed.

“Of course I didn’t. You know how it is. They drive me crazy when you’re not here. That’s all.” Her face was illuminated by a phone.

Wallace pictured a flashlight under her chin, a very modern ghost story. The laugh he luxuriated in hopefully embarrassed her about living, a laugh that wouldn’t mix with the dirt. 

He was cracking himself up when he stepped in something wet. He looked down. The bottom of his white sock had yellowed.

“Who peed in here,” he said.

“Obviously the dog, Wallace.”

“Wrong. He hasn’t left my side.”

His mom’s clumped ashes had refused to blend in with the roots of an ancient magnolia. He’d tried to step on the clumps, much whiter than he imagined they’d be, but they ended up stuck on his shoes. Had to wipe her off like dog shit. What had life become? Now phantom piss? He was still in his airplane clothes, holding piss-wet socks, and blame was to be placed.

“Don’t trouble yourself, I’ll take care of it,” his wife said. With all her deep nasal breathing, Wallace thought maybe she’d learnt something in those barely attended yoga classes that he paid for. He set his socks in the washer then ran to watch her clean. Instead of soaking up the liquid, she sprayed an insoluble solution, piling messes.

“Aren’t you going to soak it up?” He couldn’t resist.

“Why don’t you trust me?!” she said, then returned to bed. 

The piss soaked deeper. Were they really lying down now? Would it sit there for ten hours while she peacefully slept? Must he traverse this puddle every thirty minutes whenever his prostate forced him, shuffling, to the toilet in the name of trust?

A trickle echoed from the hallway. Clearly, she heard nothing. The shell of what they used to call love had hatched into another darker container. He charged from the room. Both boys were pulling up their jammies, stained patterns of baseball. Wallace sidestepped where their streams had comingled. The figures seemed lit from below, the angle of Wallace’s jaw was extreme, as if seen from the puddle, and his blood pressure arrived, at last, to the story’s goriest closure.

The Bouquet We Become

During my mother’s mitral valve repair, a chemical cocktail stopped her heart and upon restarting it, one of its two sides refused to get back to work. My questions grew soft and voluminous between us, cloudlike, reflecting the blur in her eyes.

“How did this happen?” I asked.

Everyone said it was hard to say.

I got a call that week telling me that the machine she’d been put on to save her heart was doing the opposite. I yelled at someone whose job it was to be yelled at then hung up.

I couldn’t take as much time off as I’d have liked, so the next day I was back to work on the farm. I started my day by fixing the washing machine, rinsing my mind so to speak, which had backed up with suds. I uncorked the filter at the bottom. Dirty water spilled across the floor.

The floor sloped toward the drain, which caught most of the hairy grey fluid, but the warp of the asbestos tiling clung to the rest in rivulets. A towel under my foot soaked up the remainder.

My boss stood at the sink with his back to me. Soap bubbles danced across his overall straps. I was crying, but he didn’t look. He continued to scrub the metal bins in which we kept raw milk.

“Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a creature is turn them into a flower,” he said, referring to the mischievous raccoon that I’d drowned then dumped in the garden. I’d submerged the cage I trapped her in until the thrashing bubbles stopped. The compost pile was ripe with the bones of our pests.

Turns out, my mother’s tubes had backed up and fluid had collected in the sac around her heart, what they called a cardiac effusion. I hated that I was supposed to learn from this, bypass the clog, the pest, or the hair in the drain into some sort of arterial connection. I didn’t want a flower. I wanted my mother.

***

David Kuhnlein is the author of a horror book: Bloodletter, a sci-fi book: Die Closer to Me, a poetry chapbook: Decay Never Came, and his book of Michigan horror stories Ezra's Head is forthcoming. His writing has been featured in NOON, Bright Lights Film Journal, Juked, and others. He hosts a reading series at cafe 1923 in Hamtramck, Michigan.