House of Endless Skies – T.J. McIntyre

House of Endless Skies

by T.J. McIntyre

’I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’ – From “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

My dad would never believe this place. This is not the kind of house where you would expect to find a Findley. In fact, few people in my family could even claim to be homeowners. I’ve come a long way since the drafty, roach-ridden trailer out on Highway 89 just outside Cropwell’s town limits. I can’t wait to show photos of this place when my ten year high school reunion rolls around. It’ll feel great to shove this in the face of some of those preppy assholes. None of those kids with their McMansions in the suburbs whose daddies all worked for the Mercedes plant can even imagine a house like this.

Marrying Jasmine was the smartest thing I ever did. All the guys called me nuts – said she was just a whore – but I know they were jealous once her first video came out. And her hits kept coming. Those singles, that silly little album of banjo-driven dance mixes, built this place.

I felt the house before I saw it. Even before I stepped off the little plane, before I stepped into the jeep that drove us up the wide trail, the island’s only road, I could sense it. The house was expecting me, and it looked exactly like I imagined.

It sits alone on an island a few hundred miles west of the Florida Keys. We are surrounded by palms, tropical gardens, and miles of beach. It is our house. It is our island. At least that’s what Jasmine tells me. She uses that word, “ours,” to make me feel better. We both know that the house, not to mention the island it sits on, is hers. It was bought with her money and her fame. So, in truth, it is her house, but all the same, I feel welcome here. The house fits me, if that makes sense.

Besides, she brought me along for the ride. Who am I to complain?

We arrived on a water plane – the same plane that Jasmine uses once a week to get to and from New York or Los Angeles or to whatever recording studio she has scheduled for that week, the same plane that drops off our weekly supplies. That plane is the only way on or off this island. I have nothing to do but sit back and sip beer and margaritas while listening to Jimmy Buffett.

Life is good.

***

I understand why we’re out here, of course. I was part of the problem. There were all those incidents. I’d get a little too angry about her press, about the photos of her with all those chiseled and manicured celebrities. I hated Los Angeles. Those months there were not my finest. Another arrest is the last thing I needed, not to mention it could really fuck up Jasmine’s career. Her primary audience is the tweenage girl set. Having a hard-drinking brawling husband make the tabloids was the last thing her image needed.

She promised she would make things better. She said I was just stressed and needed to get away from it all. And I think she might have been right. At least out here I don’t have to see her face and those rumors plastered across every single magazine stand or on display in the check-out lines.

Jasmine moved us out here on the island to give us a home away from the spotlight. With her career as it is, she said we could never have a normal family life if we didn’t move away from the city. I guess that makes sense. The paparazzi did stalk us pretty hard in LA. We couldn’t even stop off at White Castle without having some joker flashing his camera in our faces.

After the incident with that one photographer, when I smashed his camera and broke his stupid little nose, she made up her mind. She said we were leaving the city.

I hated leaving behind my job, but I don’t miss LA. Not at all.

***

Even after Jasmine became successful, I kept my job as a mechanic at the little body shop in East LA. It didn’t pay that well, but I enjoyed it. I miss working with my hands. I miss the smells of gasoline and motor oil. Sometimes, I even miss the dark grime that used to cake in the creases of my hands. My hands look too pale now. Too white. They look fragile, like porcelain.

There’s nowhere to work on this island. I puttered around some in the shed, working on the little four cycle lawn mower engine, but it just didn’t feel the same. Besides, my tinkering bothered the groundskeeper. He made this pretty clear by the way he cold-shouldered me every time I said hello. I even tried to say it in his native Spanish once. All I got for my trouble was a mean stare. I shouldn’t mess with Jorge. He’s just out here to do his job. I know he sends every check back home to his family in Cuba.

For the first few weeks I swam a lot. I sat on the beach and watched the sun curve overhead. I fed gulls and tried my hand at fishing, but it didn’t take long to realize that my body wasn’t really equipped for this environment. My white, freckled Irish skin burns too easy. I’m still peeling on my shoulders from two weeks ago. It still hurts a little, to tell the truth. Not to mention, I got tired of the feeling of sand everywhere. I could feel it against my skin, grinding away. Jasmine said I was being ridiculous when I told her. She said there was no sand on me, but after going to the beach I’d feel it for days afterwards.

Having grown tired of life on the beach, I spend most of my time up here in my room. There’s a great view. I can see the ocean. The westward facing bay window gives me a picture perfect view of the sunsets. I love sunset. I love watching the globe of light fall away to the ocean where it is extinguished, allowing the stars to take over the sky. But once the stars come out, I have to turn away. I can hear the sound of the surf pounding against the sand. I can see scattered moonlight creeping over vast ripples, and I sometimes can’t tell where ocean and sky meet. They seem to become one massive void. When I hear the waves pulled by tides, I think about how easily those powers could drag me away. I think about those unseen tides pulling us in all directions. They pull us apart.

At night, I have to close the curtains. The sight makes me ill. Jasmine says I shouldn’t be so dramatic. When I finally built up the strength to tell her these things, she laughed at me. She opens the curtains, opens the windows, and talks about how romantic it is. I feel the void of sky and surf. I feel it in my heart. My heartbeat matches the pulse of the waves crashing against the shore, but I force a smile.

***

Jasmine decided I shouldn’t drink alone anymore. She cut off my supply, and I’m just waiting for her to come back. She said when she comes back I can drink. We can drink together. I guess that’s wise. I was probably drinking a little too much. She gave me an ultimatum after I got into a fight with Jorge a couple weeks ago. He left and hasn’t come back. There was no use in arguing with her. I know she had my best interest at heart. She always has.

All the same, Jasmine’s been gone for weeks. How is this in our best interest?

The kids are here for the summer. They’ll be here a couple more weeks before they go back to their boarding school in Boston. Sometimes I can see them playing on the beach with their granny. I hear them playing downstairs, but I don’t really feel like leaving my room anymore. There’s sand all over the floors downstairs. I can sweep up my room. I can keep it clean, but there’s too much grout between the tiles downstairs to ever wash all the sand away. The kids don’t ask about me anyway. It’s not like I’ve ever been the best dad. Better than my dad, perhaps. At least I recognize how angry they make me and limit my exposure. I don’t want to end up beating them the way Dad beat me.

Granny comes up here from time to time. She drops off fresh trays of food and takes the dirty dishes away. She says Jasmine’s doing fine, and I guess that should be good enough for me. All the same, I wonder why Jasmine hasn’t called to talk to me.

I hate it that when Granny enters my room, she always brings sand.

***

I’m not sure exactly when the nightmares began. I know it must have been sometime after coming to the island. It’s hard to say for sure, because I don’t really remember ever dreaming before we made this place our home. Sure, throughout my life I’d wake up sometimes with a fleeting memory of something – a residual image or voice, but my dreams were never vivid enough or strange enough to remember.

Nothing like the vivid dreams I experience now. Not only can I remember them upon waking, sometimes I don’t feel like they ever end. It’s tough some days to tell if I am in a dream or in a waking state.

Last night, I dreamt about Jasmine. We made love, holding each other and murmuring tenderly. It was like it was back when we were in high school, when we were nothing more than living, breathing, sacks of hormones who happened to be in love. I smelled the salty breeze coming off the ocean. I heard the lapping of waves. The sound of roiling tides matched the beat of our shared pulses. We were one. We were one with the world. We were together. I felt at peace

She held me closer. Her grip on me strengthened. Then the waves came crashing through the window. We were swept away and slimy things and sea snakes slithered their way around us in the briny depths. I tried to get away from Jasmine, to swim away, but her limbs clung tight. I looked to her face, and she only resembled Jasmine in the most superficial of ways. Her body was a mockery of my wife. Her eyes were beady and lidless. Slits opened and closed beneath her earlobes, and I realized those slits were gills. Her hair became tentacles and hungry suckers coursed over the skin of my face.

I screamed and released a torrent of bubbles before all went dark.

Then I was in my bed. A wet darkness soaked through the sheets over my crotch. Something beneath that thin veil of fabric moved. It pulsed. I lifted the covers and looked down. My dick was gone. In its place was a flower, an orchid colored in violent hues of deep purple and red. The bloom was covered with bees. Their wings were sticky with blood.

I awoke shivering in my bed, covered in sweat. Catching my breath, I reached over for Jasmine, wanting to feel her human touch, but she wasn’t there. I looked up to the ceiling and stared at the designs in the molding. I know it was just my imagination, just a play of light and shadows, but I thought I saw things dancing in the darkness. Faces smiled, their mouths full of fangs.

Sometime after that the sun rose, but I could still hear the buzzing of bees.

***

Granny left to take the kids back to school today. I forced myself to go downstairs and hug them goodbye. I knew it was the right thing to do.  Seeing them, feeling their little arms around me, I realized I don’t know who I am anymore.

The kids hugged me as if it were a duty. Their bodies felt stiff against mine.

I watched the way the children leaned into their Granny as she walked them down the trail towards the waiting Jeep. They seemed to mold right into her.  They fit.

I stood in the doorway and watched them leave. I stood there until I heard the plane start up in the distance. I watched the skies as it flew away towards the clouds, until it became indiscernible against the harsh void of blue sky. I stood there until the sound of distant engines was drowned out by the sound of the surf.

I looked down and saw that sand clung to me in the places the children had hugged me. It was imbedded in my clothes. Grains ground against my gut and hips. As I walked, the sand crunched beneath my bare feet. I ran upstairs cursing, dragging my feet, anxious to run a scalding shower and scrub the sand away.

***

“What did you do?”

I can hear her, but she sounds distant.

“Grant! Oh shit! Grant! Open your eyes.”

There’s just a blur, but she’s there. She’s watching me, looking down from above, and she looks worried.

“Jasmine?”

I know it’s her. It’s hard to see her, but I can smell her. There’s the scent of her favorite perfume. It fills the air and comforts me. There is also another smell. Something else, something rotten, something sweet, something hard and cold and mineral, and I know that this other smell is coming from me

My body feels like it’s on fire. Bees buzz all through my head. Every time I move, tiny grains of sand cut into my skin.

I can hear Jasmine. She is sobbing. She’s yelled something to someone else. She’s dialed some numbers and asked for help. She’s crying and going on. She’s demanding a helicopter. She wants me flown to the nearest hospital.

“You came back.”

She doesn’t hear me.

I hear the sound of the ocean in the distance. Waves crash against the shore. I think about the hidden, unimaginable depths. I think about endless sky.

Then I see the sand covering her body.

I still clench the scouring pad tight in my bloody fist. I know I’ve removed as much sand as possible from my own body, but there is still so much on hers.

I reach out and try to scrub her. She shrieks and backs away. I try to get up but my body hurts too much. I slip in a warm, sticky puddle.

I look beyond my extended arm to the open bay window. The sun is sinking beneath the ocean. I can tell by the way the light plays on the clouds, by the contrast of color.

I feel weak.

I know soon the night will come and the beach will flood through the window. I will be buried in sand on that long private beach at the edge of the world where the endless void waits for us all and is always hungry.

 

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T.J. McIntyre writes from his busy household in Alabaster, Alabama. Recent publication credits include stories and poetry in Mbrane SF, Tales of the Talisman, and Illumen. His debut poetry chapbook, Isotropes: A Collection of Speculative Haibun, was released earlier this year by Philistine Press. In addition to writing fiction and poetry, he also regularly contributes articles for the Apex Books Blog, reviews for Skull Salad Reviews, and produces Author Spotlight pieces for Fantasy Magazine.

© 2010 All rights reserved T.J. McIntyre

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