If Only a Heart and Other Tales of Terror by Caleb Stephens

Author:Caleb Stephens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Salt Heart Press
Published: 2022-10-01T21:11:13+00:00

Shadow Puppets

I’m not sure what wakes me. Maybe it’s the low thrum of the diesel engine vibrating the walls, or the cold cone of light spilling across my trailer park ceiling at two in the morning. Whatever it is, it pulls me toward the window, groggy-eyed and yawning.

I part the blinds, expecting to see some grumbling semi-driver clunking another mobile home into place, but instead, I see her. She climbs from an old Ford F-150—toeing the ground like it’s a thin sheet of ice, first one foot and then the other—easing from the seat with a quick glance up at the streetlight. I think she’s around my age, fifteen, or maybe a bit younger. Her eyes are encased in a heart-shaped face, her features delicate with an upturned nose centered over a chin that looks carved from glass. Something about her reminds me of the porcelain dolls Mom keeps stashed on the top shelf of her closet, the ones trimmed in lace with their skin glazed and shining.

A heavy thunk! pulls my gaze to the driver’s side door. A man stands there, huge, with a pair of meat-slab arms and a bald head glittering with sweat. He stares at the girl for a long moment, then spits and pulls a blanket from the bed of the truck, spreading it carefully over the girl’s head like he thinks the streetlight will give her a sunburn. A slow rising heat fills my chest as he shoves her roughly toward the mobile home.

I know his type: the kind of guy who posts up on the porch with a forty and a fat wad of chew stuffed in his lower lip, ready to have a go at his kids or his wife just for looking at him wrong. Light his fuse and watch him explode. Dad was that kind of guy before he abandoned me and Mom to the trailer park. It never took much.

I watch them disappear into the trailer with my breath fogging the glass. Something about the girl bothers me. The slack expression and the downcast eyes, the way she wrapped her arms around her chest like maybe even breathing was too much work. It made me want to rush outside and give her a hug, to tell her everything would be okay. And that’s what it is, I decide, identifying the thing bothering me: I’ve never seen someone so sad before.

✦

I’m up early the next morning and catch her dad, or whoever he is, hanging blackout curtains in the trailer’s windows. A thick beard crawls up his neck, one I imagine to be teeming with cockroaches and beetles and various other sorts of shelled insects. His eyes are crooked, buried too close to the bridge of his nose, and his cheeks are lumpy, like maybe whatever god put him together had a few too many drinks beforehand. His gaze twitches up and down as he works—glazed, one eyelid stretched wider than the other.

After a bit, I close the blinds and wander into the kitchen for breakfast.

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