Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Mold

A fat red honeycomb sat on the grass in the backyard like something God had made and then left, for people to figure out what to do with. It was a red sand box.

"We have to keep that if we get this house," Megan Roth said.

"That sand box? I'm looking at a house. You're looking at a sand box?" Jeff asked.

Megan saw she was behaving irrational but what the hell, she was pregnant, and by all the laws of man, if anyone had a free license to act irrational it was a pregnant woman. Right? She felt the baby kick when she saw the sand box and took that as a premonition. Luke or David or Aaron if it was a boy. Mirah or Lana or Gretchen (she'd always liked that name since elementary school when she'd been jealous of a popular girl named Gretch).

Baby would like that sand box, pure and simple. One baby kick meant yes. Two meant no. One baby kick, big and energetic meant hell yes.

"I just like it," she told him.

"I like the house," Jeff said. "You like the sand box. I guess we have a winner."

Jeff had printed out a checklist and a scorecard and made her use her purse pen to put big check marks next to this one.

It was big, this house on Two Harbor road in Lake Lewiston, Iowa. It was so close, you could smell the lake. The house was a hundred years old if it was a day, with a flat porch splashed with new white paint, windows with pointed arches, trimmed with grey. The interior of the house was rustic, like a sort of magic cottage. Dick Martin, the realtor, said the owners were a retired couple living in Florida.

"What's the day's scores?" Jeff asked, driving back to Des Moines.

"I know you want that house," she said.

He didn't say anything and that was ample evidence she'd been right. As she expected, Jeff called her from work the next day and told her he'd made an offer on the house.

"Mr. Martin says they'll accept it. It's a low ball figure." That last part was his excuse for not discussing it with her first. "It's a buyer's market, Meg."

She surrendered.

Dick Martin called the next day with the news that their offer had been accepted.

***

She walked the house, planning out in her head where everything would go. Might as well make this the baby's room. Our room's next door. There'll be baby monitors and I'll be able to respond if the baby needs anything without walking down the hall. She opened the closet in the baby's room.

She recoiled. The closet was dusty, the carpet stained. Over the air conditioning register a rope of mold clung like the saliva string of some swamp monster.

The air was ripe with it. Mold-air. Hot and sweaty. Megan immediately felt the baby kick.

The mold was green-black and looked like algae rotting on the side of a fish tank.

She called Jeff's cell. "You need to come to the new house on your lunch. Thanks."

The thanks would piss him off, she knew.

He called her right back. "What do you need?" He asked in his patient (she's pregnant) voice.

"There's some kind of mold in the closet."

"So?"

"We're having a baby," she hissed.

"Meg, we've already bought the house. That's our house you're in." He was wearing his calm voice, the one she hated.

"A moldy house," she countered.

"I'll call someone," he said.

"You do that."

***

She followed the man from room to room. He looked a little like Clint Eastwood in the face but got rounder than Clint Eastwood in the wide buttocks. The Dirty Harry of Professional Mold Cleaners.

He introduced himself as Dale.

He poked around by the air conditioning register. "Musta' gotten hot in here over the summer. Mold likes it hot." He pulled the register off. "There musta' been condesation in here when they shut the air conditioner off. They didn't run it all summer?"

"I don't know. We just moved in. The people we bought the house from live in Florida."

"Well, that 'splains it. The people probably left in high summer, right?" He continued without waiting for her answer. "They probably just shut the air conditioner off and it had a leak, and it got humid up here. See where it's discolored right here on the wall."

"Yes," she agreed.

"Lady you got black mold."

"Is that bad?"

Dale shrugged. "Nah, a little bit like that won't do nothin'. You oughtta see an infestation. You gotta wear a mask to clean that because in large amounts the spores cause all kinds of breathing problems. Spores get in the skin and the food in your fridge..." he trailed off at her look.

"I can do this up with a bit of bleach," he said. "No problem. You just might wanna' have a look to see if there's a leak after you run the heat or the conditionin'."

"Thank you Dale," she said.

She waited for him to finish on the front porch. There were kids playing in the street, tossing a ball back and forth. As it got closer to late afternoon, the reason people wanted to move to a prime location like Two Harbors became absolutely clear. The setting sun, the sparkling breeze from the lake, the way the trees dropped their red leaves and the branches seemed to stretch all the way to heaven, their knotted limbs dancing in the sun. It was a pastoral scene. This was the kind of place you could let your kids roam free without worrying about some molester snatching them up and taking them back to some secret molestor's body dump.

Dale tapped her on the shoulder interrupting her train of thought.

"All done, Ma'm. Good as new up there." He was wearing heavy gloves, and he followed her glance. "Just bein' careful with the bleach."

"Thank you Dale," she said.

"'s my job. M'am let me just say this is a beautiful house. Nice property, too. Big yard." He looked at her stomach. "I see you and your husband have the right idea." He smiled.

He waved as he left.

She had to look. She went up the stairs into baby's room. She swung open the closet door. Dale hadn't missed a spot. The register was clean.

At dinner, Jeff looked harried but he still found the time to tell her his thoughts.

"Meg I know you are preoccupied with making sure everything's perfect. That man cost me one-hundred and eighty-nine dollars. He called me and told me it was just a little mold from a leaky vent. I understand that you're pregnant, and I know that sometimes pregancy causes some extreme feelings...you let me handle the muckups, from now on. I know you know how much this house cost...closing costs alone."

Everything's gonna' be perfect, she thought. Him sitting there with his smug look. Just one of those episodes you've told me about in the baby books Meg dear. I know what's wrong.

"Jeff Roth I am so glad I married you," she told him.

The next morning she watched the news and then went outside to the backyard to look at the wide green triangular swatch of grass they now owned. "You're going to love this," she told her stomach. Her belly felt warm. The baby kicked.

She walked to the sand box. It wasn't filled with sand like she'd expected. It was filled with wet gravel, grey and black stones, piled like it was a child's cairn. She toed the loose gravel. There was dark mud underneath. The sand box probably hadn't been used for years and years. The old couple who had lived here had moved to Florida. Maybe they had kids, and maybe those kids had played in the sand box, she thought. Maybe kids had once sung songs to each other like she had done when she had been a little girl, and dug with red plastic buckets in the sand, sometimes moistening it a little so the shapes little hands designed would keep longer.

She put her hand on her belly. The baby was active. Her whole body felt flush and she patted her stomach. "There, there," she said. Mirah or Lana or Gretchen. Luke or David or Aaron.

Probably with the force of those kicks I'm having a boy, she thought.

She ran herself a bath. The water pressure in the house was good. It was clear. There were no strange particles flitting through the water that filled the bath.

She sighed and leaned back in the tub with her foot by the drain under the water. The hot water was baking steam on the bathroom window. She hadn't turned the fan on because she wanted to luxuriate in the heat and the feeling of loosening the tightness over her belly. She could write her name in that mirror if she wanted, she thought. Megan. Married To Jeff One-Time Dream Man.

She snickered.

The water was suddenly too hot. She pushed out her toes to turn the faucet down a bit, but unlike her last tub in the apartment, this one was a little tougher to turn and she finally decided to sit up and just do it manually with her fingers.

Her hands slipped off. The water was growing hotter. She stood up, arcs of water falling back into the tub. She got out of the tub, her ankles burning. Her feet hurt. They felt flayed. She felt like one of those people who run over burning coals.

Naked, she opened the bathroom door, to let the steam out - which was now ninety-nine percent of the atmosphere. She looked back at the tub.

It was black and green and shiny.

It was not clear water. It was not water at all. Whatever it was lapped the sides of the tub like a gentle tide from a lake. It bubbled. The water started churning and leaping over the sides of the tub spraying to bathroom tiles and running through the channels that interconnected the tiles.

She retreated, slammed the door, and put her back to it. She looked at her midriff, the round perfect rise of her belly. There was nothing black on her, no extra shiny to report.

She reopened the door. The tile, laid fresh by the last owners before they put the house up for sale, gleamed, it's criss-cross grid cleanly caulked. There was no sign of sludge-water, of black green mold water dribbling and sparkling. The tub was slightly overspilling though. Clear water. She hurried and turned the faucet and pushed the drain lever. The water drained in a bubbling echo.

She didn't mention the bathtub incident to Jeff. (Having a hallucination he'd say. Perhaps you're not good with pregnancy if you're susceptible to such illusions) Perhaps she should just deem it a hazard of the trade - the baby-making trade. She told herself that while she brushed her teeth before bed, dressed in sweats. Pretty soon the generous looks she got from others, who looked like they wanted to reach out and touch her belly would disappear, replaced by annoyed grimaces as she dragged a screaming child through the grocery store. She smiled in contemplation.

Jeff lay in bed under the sheets reading a magazine, a car glossy with a NASCAR driver holding up a trophy. He smelled like cinnamon.

She sat down on the bed next to him and swung her feet under the sheets, manuevering her bulk quietly, so as not to disturb his reading. She reached under the sheets.

She found his penis. It felt wet at the top. Wet and sticky. One thing about pregnancy Jeff claimed he liked was that her sexual desires had grown near insurmountable as the pregnancy wore on. She was like an animal.

She flashed Jeff a mischievous smile. She felt him growing even larger under her fingers, moist, the route easier, the friction less. She knew what he liked. Her eyes slowly moved up the sheets from the bulge of blanket pumping up and down to his face, her own flushed.

Jeff turned the pages of his magazine.

His expression was distant.

She released his penis.

She withdrew her hand from the sheets. She looked at it. She felt sick. Her eyes rolled up and she nearly fainted, at what she saw.

Her hand was covered in sticky black. She had to pry her fingers apart, they were so encrusted with black matter. It gave off a sickly sweet odor, swamp flies and cats in heat, bug spatter, hot smoky microwaved hot dogs twisting and twitching, bologna and cheap processed meat.

She gagged.

"Meg," she heard him say, as she crouched on the bed holding her mouth, trying to keep the puke in. She inadvertently got some in her mouth from her fingers. It tasted vile. It tasted exactly like it smelled. Fly shit. Hot dogs. Fornicating cat.

Her lips covered in shiny black and green mold like a fashion model from the underworld, she ripped the sheets back.

There was nothing there.

There was no black mold penis, the shaft leading to a thatch of rotten weeds. No rictus mold man, bulbishly waiting. (Have a glass of wine. It's an 1877 black rot. For proper taste sniff the glass first, before taking a small sip. Hold it. Roll it in your mouth. Let it sink in. Experience the hot ripe sensation as it excavates your taste buds to the max. Here's a Hand of Glory to nibble on while you wait for your main course of elk rectum).

- Nothing but white sheet.

"I think I'm having an anxiety attack," she told him. The room was whirling, the walls spinning.

"Let me call the doctor," he finally said. She saw he had waited, watching her. He was seeing what I was up to. He thinks I'm up to something.

He picked up the land line phone, a small cheap unadorned phone from somewhere like Korea, and pushed in the digits for her Doctor. She reached over and clicked the hang-up button. He sighed. He hadn't really wanted to call, she knew. Just Meg the pregnant gal acting out again. I just have to get through this, she thought. If he did call the doctor, I'd babble and spill my guts to her about these fantasies. They'd put me in a hospital. She felt her heart beating in her chest like a semi truck honking across a superhighway.

"I think I'm fine," she told him. She put on a fake smile, not caring how weak it looked. "Let's just go to bed."

***

She woke up with a start. Jeff was gone to work. Her lips were dry. She looked at the alarm clock. It was ten in the morning. She got out of bed slowly, holding the bottom of her stomach and levered herself to the bathroom. She looked in the mirror. She looked haggard in the mirror slash medicine cabinet.

She went in the kitchen. Baby was hungry. Her stomach felt hot, another heat flash.

She opened the fridge.

Black and green spores covered the food. A can of grape soda half-exploded, the moss had somehow pierced the top of the can like it was thirsty. Spores writhed on a plate of saran-wrapped meat loaf like living caviar. They crawled on the non-fat milk. A black mass loomed inside a translucent vegetable drawer.

She closed the fridge door.

She went to the laundry room and got the bleach and a sponge. She put them in a bucket.

She returned upstairs.

She opened the fridge. The mold was still there. If anything, it had gotten even worse. It rubbed shiny green streamers across the fridge's automatic light, giving the refrigerator a pale green marshy look.

She poured the bleach in the bucket.

She ran the sponge over the mold.

Baby kicked against her oven-hot belly.


***

She called her mom to discuss pregnancy. Alice Long was retired but before Megan Roth was Megan Roth she was Megan Long and her mom had worked as an appointment coordinator for a doctor.

After a little small talk she broached the subject.

"Mom when you were pregnant with me..."

"Yes?" Her mother asked.

"Did you ever have - you know, did you ever see things that weren't really there?"

Her mother hrmed as she thought.

Finally, "I don't remember honey. Why, is everything okay? Is Jeff treating you okay?"

"Everything's fine, with Jeff I mean. I've been having these hallucinations."

"Hull nations," her mother tripped over the word.

"Yes," Megan said.
"Honey I have a good doctor. As good as you can get. He's Doctor Elijah (sound of her rooting through her purse)...Stephen Elijah. He's Protestant."

"Mom I already have a doctor."

Her mom harrumphed. "I know you do. But she's a woman doctor and if you ask me, a doctor should be a man. Women are too worried about their day to day worries. Men have better concentration. Women ---."

"Okay ma, I've got to go. Someone's knocking."

"Okay honey - if you want to talk I'll be gone in an hour to visit Mrs. Beck. Do you remember Mrs. Beck? Oh, I meant to tell you: the neighbor girl Darcy is pregnant. Fifteen and pregnant. She's getting rid of it I hear. Getting it abort-.."

"Bye mom, say hello to Mrs. Beck for me," Megan said hanging up the telephone with a rewarding click.

She went out back with the sack of trash. It was filled with the contents of the refrigerator. The white sack was bulging with drippy mold. She decided to throw it in the sand box. She'd sneak it into the trash Thursday so Jeff wouldn't see.

She was halfway to it, when she heard a noise. The noise was coming from the sand box. It was the sound of sand being dumped, the fine granules sifting.

The sky was cold, overcast; grey clouds slid against the cold pale sun. She approached the sand box, slowly. She thought perhaps it was a neighbor boy come to play in the sand box, perhaps it was one of those neighborhood artifacts like she'd had as a little girl. Like the swings Mr. Baker kept in his backyard long after his kids had grown and had families of their own, so that neighborhood children had a safe place to swing - safer than the park; and you just didn't know these days. There was a boy in the sand box. She saw his head, a rich black mat of curly hair moving in time while he dug in the sand. She couldn't see anymore of him. He must be reclining in the sand, his only focus the thing he was creating. Perhaps he had a cup of water in there and was using it to shape the sand into the things that were in his fantasies.

She got closer. She could see the head was fine, the curls glamously blue-black, the hair ruffling a little in the wind. The head went deeper. He was digging a hole to China, she thought. She should tell him he'd come up somewhere in the ocean if he was digging right here.

He looked up.

It was not a boy's face that looked up, that caught all the shadows of the fall day in his sharp-as-razors cheekbones. The fleshy lips, black. The eyes too wide apart that sat on the outside of his forehead, like a fish. The lack of a nose. The boy had teeth though. Rows and rows of shiny metal teeth. His skin was black and green. He stood up. He was completely in the nude.

Oh this is too much, she thought, her hand covering her eyes helplessly.

He put one foot outside of the sand box. It was an aquatic foot, the toes webbed. Another. Now he was out of the sand box entirely, his eyes on her. She dropped the trash bag and turned and walked back to the house as fast as she could without breaking into a run. He wasn't real, she thought. This was another one of her pregnancy deliriums, these visitations. She reached the back door to the kitchen, opened it quickly, quicker perhaps than if she'd really thought he was a phantasm of her mind and went inside. She locked the back door and looked through the blinds.

Mold boy was sniffing the trash. He was grinning a smile of little metallic-steel teeth, lips like the skin of a rotting melon. He had his arms at his sides but the fingers were grabbing. Those grabbesr wanted to hold her down, she thought, and rip the baby right out and hold it up like a NASCAR trophy. Hold it up like one of those kids gone bad in Lord Of The Flies. What had they done to Piggy? Put his head on a

She closed the blinds and picked up the phone to call the police but then decided to take one more look to see if mold boy was real. He was no longer there. Wait, was he real - or wasn't he? She stood silently debating. Megan decided it was in her best interest to hang up the phone and walk to the front door and lock it and draw the latch.

She peered out the front window. There was a kid out there. But it wasn't mold boy. This kid was normal. Dressed in cheap clothes and cheap sneakers, he bounced a tennis ball on the street. He wasn't being careful of the gutters, either, as if he were out there to lose that tennis ball on purpose. Sometime I'll have a kid, she thought. He'll walk these streets, perhaps with a green scuffed tennis ball, bouncing it aimlessly and dreaming kid-dreams. Perhaps waiting for Jeff to return from the office to play ball, or have a little brother or sister of his own, a nagging presence trailing him as he bounced the ball.

She sat down on the couch and turned on the TV.

She had an uneventful afternoon, considered taking a walk, but decided against it. She was getting closer to term and her doctor had told her in direct contrast to her advice of a month ago that she should take it easy and not do any strenuous exercise unless she wanted to spend the rest of her pregnancy on her back in bed rest.

Megan shuddered. Not her- with everything that had happened lately, these stupid delirious tantrums, the last thing she needed was to be ordered to immobility. She rubbed her stomach. It was so warm it felt like baby had a little bic lighter and was thumbing the flint against her womb. She was behaving like a lunatic but the last thing she wanted was to lay in bed all day long. (He wouldn't have a hard time getting me. I'd wake up with Dark Wet And Moldy caressing my stomach).

She cleaned a little before Jeff got home. She avoided obnoxious solvents, regretting the bleach earlier. You couldn't be too careful, she knew from pregnancy books. Her copy of What To Expect When You're Expecting was well-thumbed, well-thumbed indeed. Jeff called it her bible, when he caught her reading it, scrutinizing a section for tips or information she might not know.

"Meg reading her bible again," he'd say.

She heard his knock. He must have forgotten his keys. It had to be him. This was his normal time. She hadn't heard the garage, though. But it was quiet, the door had been replaced by the last owners. It ascended smoothly, the gears newly minted, the door oiled. She looked out the window at the garage hoping for a glimpse of the tell-tale light. No. There wasn't a light out there. There was nothing but darkness. The garage sat a little away from the house. The house had been built before they attached garages like they did these days and a previous owner had just built a standalone and built an attic on top, though it was mostly just insulation and a big coil of electrical wires, according to Jeff.

The knock continued, a hearty knock, a let-me-in-I'm Hungry mom - knock. She looked at the thudding door. She resolved to peep through the peephole. Maybe it was the boy she'd seen playing with his ball in the street, it was just a minute past six o' clock, and Jeff would be home any minute, and everything, would be the same as it normally was.

Boom.

Boom.

The I'm hungry knock kept coming.

Boom.

It stopped before she got to the peephole. She looked out into the cold fall night. Twin Harbor street looked back at her, the faces of the neighboring houses, the people she had yet to meet, yet planned on it - perhaps a house warming party - normalize things and get used to having these people around and them used to having her around - the houses were merrily lit with golden dinner lights.

Maybe a prank, she thought. She'd go back and watch TV.

Boom. Boomboomboomboom.

The rapid knock, with no one there.

She darted back as the peephole glass broke and tinkled to the foyer floor. Behind it came a thin runnel of black liquid. The liquid splashed on the red flagstones in front of the door, filling the cracks. It filled her Keds, her husband's spare pair of Dexters.

Boom.

The knocker relented. The black liquid slowed to a trickle.

She jerked when she heard feet on the stairs. They were coming from baby's room. Tap. tap. Tap. Taptaptaptap.

Someone running in place with a jump rope, an athlete doing a bit of training upstairs.

Mold boy shoved his head over the railing halfway down the stairs. Black pupils rotated in his fish eyes. He grinned. He must have crawled through the window in baby's room. Or seeped up through the air conditioning vent, she thought. She got up and tried to go out the front door but it would not open. The knob was coated with the vile black mold, and she thought the inner workings of the door must be, too. That must have been what he was doing; spitting as he knocked, the green and black shiny slime breaking the door's mechanism. I'm like a bug trapped in a jar, she thought.

Mold boy was crawling down the stairs like a sperm, slick black and green spreading, enveloping the stairs. He carried his own Slip N' Slide with him, she thought hysterically.

She ran for the back door, one hand holding her belly. She opened the door and took one look behind her. He was crawling, but he was slow, and without running she should be able to outdistance him. She went out into the backyard, barefoot, holding her belly with her hand.

She ran into the backyard of their new house, spying out of the corner of her eye, the yellow of her husband's headlights. She saw his taillights redden and the garage door swinging up. She ran toward him and averted her course, when mold boy crawled out of the door. If she went that way she'd run right into him. Instead she decided to take off behind the house and circle around the neighbor's and head back in this direction. She'd get in Jeff's car and tell him to take her anywhere but here. She couldn't live in this house. She didn't want to live here. She could never sleep in its walls, with the memory of all these horrors, put her new baby to bed, the musical chug-chug of its spinning toy levitating above it.

She took a big breath, felt the baby kick. She looked at the sand box as she ran. It wasn't a sand box. It was a hole. The sides were pulsating with shiny black and green. Fine hairs split the black and green mold. She smelled pickels and peanut butter. She fainted.

She woke up to a flashlight. Jeff. He knelt with the flashlight stabbing her eyes. "Mmmmm," she said. He withdrew the flashlight.

"What are you doing out here?" He asked her. He looked toward the trash bag, its plastic sides rippling in cold wind.

"Someone was chasing me," she said.

"Who?"

She couldn't find an answer. He helped her up.

"I thought," she said.

"Meg, what is it?"

"Nothing," she said.

Her stomach hurt. The baby kicked. It was hot to the touch.

***

Her doctor (still a she - and how do you like that fucking shit, momma?) told her the baby was crowning. Jeff held her hand. He had been steady gaining weight. He's been talking about layoffs, she thought crazily. He clutched her hand with his own wet warm one. A tremor passed through her. It had nothing to do with labor pains; this tremor was of a different sort entirely, and she wondered if that boy hadn't gotten to her while she'd laid unconscious. Had opened her legs and crawled inside her like a tampon. Maybe she had a mold boy in her belly, laughing and spitting inside her. The liquid spilling out in rivulets on the bed - the doctor's transparent gloves covered in the stuff.

Push. Pushpushpushpushpushpush.

(One spurt of motor oil later).

"Oh God," her husband said.

She couldn't tell if this word was a word of joy or a word of horror.

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