Featured in Splatology 3.0
Edited by Chisto Healy
When I was a preteen, I was a bit of a degenerate. Most 12-year-olds in this day and age are past the need for a babysitter. Maybe it was because of the strange porn my parents found on my laptop, or the cigarettes in my locker that had gotten me a week of in-school suspension, which I had frankly found to be overkill.
“Morgan is sweet, you’ll love her. She goes to college up here. Smart girl,” my mom explained on her knees. I felt short next to her.
“Okay,” I said lamely.
“She’s a nursing student. She’s on top of it. She knows all the tricks. You can’t be trusted to be alone, so this is what you get.”
That was when my father popped into the room.
“You know, being a nursing student doesn’t mean anything. Some of the biggest bitches I’ve ever met were nursing students, and that means-“
“Hank!” My mother said.
“What your mother is trying to say is make the most of it. Have fun with it. You could learn a lot from her.”
I didn’t have a clue what I could learn from a college student, and so when we were interrupted by a gentle tapping at our front door, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of dread at the incoming draconian rules.
“Whoop! That’s her!” My mother exclaimed, “Hank! Can you get that?” My father sulked out of the room.
“Mr. Richardson! How are you?” A feminine voice called from the end of the hall. She had a light southern twinge to her voice.
“Good, Morgan. How was the drive?”
“I about got pulled over three times on the way over here cause of my distracted driving, but not bad.”
“Right,” my father said, leading her into the living room.
I stared her down. She was just as tall as me, maybe a bit shorter without shoes on. I could probably outrun her. She let out a big smile. Even from up close, she smelled like girls do. Floral. Gentle. A spritz of something I couldn’t identify. She was dressed nicely but casually: a white pullover that looked knitted, blue jeans. A respectful neighborhood girl. She was holding a purple insulated bag from her shoulder.
“Hi! Are you Ethan?”
I was tempted to call her a dumb bitch for even asking. Did it look like I had a brother or sister? She only had one name to memorize.
“Yeah. Are you the new babysitter?”
Morgan looked to my mom, who sheepishly smiled.
“Who was the old babysitter?”
“I haven’t had one since I was like six.”
“Was she nice?”
“Yeah? What did y’all do for fun?”
“We used to play brain teasers and eat KFC.”
“You know, it’s funny you even say that, ‘cause you know what I got in my bag here?”
“KFC?” I asked.
“Looks like you’ll get on just fine,” my mom said, shuffling to the door. I didn’t care; I was too focused now. My father had already left.
“I got a recipe that’ll make you never want KFC again. It’ll blow it out of the water.”
—
Begrudgingly, I sat at the kitchen counter with her. Our tactical positioning was simple: Morgan dunked the chicken in buttermilk, and then my job was to dredge the drumstick in the flour bowl, where Morgan had mixed in hot sauce and various spice mixtures. Then I’d pass the drumstick back to her for a double dip, and it would get another coating of flour before it landed on a tray. After we had a dozen drumsticks, she grabbed a steel pot from the pantry.
“Your mommy and daddy told me bedtime is 9:00 pm.”
“Did they now?” I asked, watching her pour the contents of a plastic bottle of peanut oil into the pot until there were about 3 inches of oil.
“I’m a negotiator though,” she said, clicking the large front burner of the stove to life with a satisfying click.
“Oh yeah?”
She took a pair of tongs, silently smiling at me as the oil began to sizzle.
“I made too much chicken for just two people. I’ll be having a third over. The deal is that you can stay up till 10:30. I won’t say a word, you don’t say a word about my friend coming. Okay?”
I liked her.
—
“We share the same fabric of the cosmos,” Damien announced to Morgan, “our minds have evolved from the same nuclear stew of the universe. I’ve learned that all we feel is love. That’s what connects us in the fiber of our being.”
I stared at the two as he took a bite of the fried chicken, the grease dribbling down his chin. We were sitting in the living room, a deck of Cards Against Humanity sprawled over the coffee table. I had learned quickly that Damien and Morgan were more than friends, but it didn’t take a genius to realize that once they French kissed in front of me.
“Society likes to preach that we’re different when in reality, we’re one and the same. We aren’t doing mind reading. We’re just sharing one mind,” he said.
“Huh,” Morgan said, “that’s really profound. Is that from a Grateful Dead song?”
Damien smiled like he wasn’t offended, then reached into the pocket of his khakis, pulling a Ziploc baggie of a parsley-looking substance. He looked over at me.
“Sport, think your parents would mind if I lit up inside?”
“What’s that? Weed?”
“It sure ain’t tobacco,” he answered back.
“Babe,” Morgan interrupted, her voice stern, “no. Outside.”
“Want a rip, little man?” He asked me.
I looked over to Morgan.
“I ain’t saying shit to your parents, but you better be upstairs in your room by midnight. They said they’d be back by then.”
“What the hell are they even doing?” Damien interjected, leading us to the door on the back porch into the cold early spring air. I could distantly hear crickets chirping. The first of the season.
“It’s date night. Dinner and a movie.”
“For fuck’s sake, didn’t they leave at like 5? What are they watching, Gone With The Wind at .5 speed?”
“Maybe they just want to enjoy each other’s company and have some privacy.”
Damien pulled a Zippo from the front pocket of his Hawaiian shirt, then pointed to his greasy, dirty-blonde hair.
“Don’t do too much of this,” he said, “you’ll start balding like me.”
“Babe, you aren’t balding.”
“No,” he said, rolling the weed from the ziploc baggie into a white piece of rolling paper, then he licked the edge to seal it, “I just perfectly sculpt it. It’s an illusion. I just have the balls to admit it.”
I couldn’t tell if Damien was the smartest person I had ever met or the dumbest.
He flipped the Zippo open, bringing the joint to his lips. There was that smell of green. Dense. Vegetative. It curled around my nostrils.
“Puff, puff, pass, kid,” he said, handing the thing to me, the end now glowing red in the darkness.
It felt too hot in my hands. I nearly dropped it as I took it to my lips.
“Inhale,” Morgan directed me, “it’s gonna suck at first.”
She was right. The smoke was hot, like someone taking a tiny ice pick to my throat. I yanked the thing from my lips, a series of hacks escaping me. My eyes watered, but there was that warmth in my esophagus. Damien walked across the porch and put an arm behind Morgan’s waist.
“Not here,” she whispered. I kept coughing. Maybe she thought I couldn’t hear them.
“Do you want me to get you some water?” She asked.
—
I had been sent to bed at 10:30 as Morgan had promised, but my face tickled itself with numbness. My eyes felt too wet. The walls were swimming, and the bed felt like it was drifting through an ocean.
Their voices had been hushed beneath the floor of my room. That was the thing about teenagers: they always thought they were being sneaky. They never were. They knew what they were doing.
It had been similar to the first time I had heard my parents having sex. As a child, you have this peculiar urge to find out the source of the thumping, the moaning, the sweat that seems to pour through the walls. You feel sweaty just watching through the crack in the door.
From the crook in the staircase connecting the first floor with the second, I had the same feeling as I peered my head around the edge of where the top of the staircase met the bottom of the second floor’s floorboards, my view of the living room undisturbed. The TV flashed white, an old horror movie playing.
Morgan sat at the left end of the couch, and Damien was on top of her, his lips on her neck, a gentle sucking sound coming from the two of them.
“Babe,” she murmured, “his parents will be home soon. Not here. Not now.”
“Please,” he groaned, “it’s been so long.”
He stuck his hand beneath her shirt, cupping a breast as he did. She didn’t moan.
“Seriously, not here. You gotta get out of here. Now.”
“You know you want it,” he said, moving his lips to her mouth.
That was when it happened. It started as a cracking, like the sound of knuckles cracking. One by one by one by one by one by one, dozens of pops. Bones. Damien pulled off of her, looking up above him.
“What is that?” He asked a little louder than he should have.
Morgan rolled her head back, the bones in her neck popping, then her limbs followed the same pattern.
Her arms went first. At first, no thicker than pool noodles, they swelled beneath her pullover, like she had entered into a bodybuilding contest. Her forearms bulged through the fabric, as thick as 2-liter soda bottles, veins visible and as thick as cable for the televisions. Blood pumped through them like rats through a snake’s gullet. Her biceps stretched even more enormously, asymmetrical and oversized, chunky enough to make it so she couldn’t put her arms by her side.
She shrieked in agony, her neck twisting to an unnatural angle, slightly shifted to the left. A large pimple had formed on her neck, the surface of it pulsating and throbbing. The veins in her neck had thickened.
“Baby, what the fuck?” Damien shouted as her clothes tore away as she continued to expand and a pore in the middle of her neck pimple began to open. At first, it was no larger than a pen-point, but quickly grew to the size of a baseball, a hole that peered into her body.
Her ruined clothing fell to the floor, her skin tearing alongside them, revealing bruised meat that honeycombed outward. The veins and inner workings that formed her spider-webbed out, creating clusters of hexagonal pits that were arranged in uneven patterns. It was like large insect mouths had drilled holes through her, then her flesh had been expanded out. She ballooned until she was nearly four times as wide, taking up a large portion of the living room. She was a Swiss cheese woman.
Her head seemed to slink off, the spinal column more elastic than it had any right to be. It hung upside down from an exposed chunk of spine, tethered to her like a dog on a leash. On her crooked neck, the pimple had burst: an eyeball as large as a basketball grew out from her like a cyst. It was bloodshot and angry, furious even.
The coils of her flesh grew to the ceiling, the hexagons of flesh now like someone had drawn her meat with a pencil and made repeated circular motions. I could see through her: Damien cowered in fear on the floor.
“Please, no,” he cried, “I’m sorry.”
I stared in horror at the monster that was my new babysitter. She had grown to the point of being able to touch the ceiling. Her head hung uselessly alongside her twisted, sponge-like form, her face and hair still normal in stark contrast to the rest of her. It dangled, the eyes facing in my direction. I swore I saw one wink as she seemed to slide over the floor, meeting Damien and washing him in the flesh. He screamed: there was a wet sound, like sunburn being peeled from skin. I ran up the stairs next, not able to look anymore as I ran to my bedroom, locking the door behind me, then throwing myself beneath the covers.
—
“Honey,” my mom called, running her hand through my hair and pulling me from my slumber.
“Momma?” I asked sleepily. My heart dropped. Had it been a dream?
As if to answer me, she spoke, “Morgan texted me. Said you behaved very well.”
I stared, petrified.
“I’m not sure if we’ll have her again, though.” I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Why not?”
“She wasn’t supposed to leave till we got home. We couldn’t even get her paid up. Must’ve had a hot date or something. There were like twenty minutes where you were left alone!”
“I’m sorry,” I answered back.
“Are you saving that fried chicken downstairs for any reason?”