Close Encounters by Jen Michalski Read Free Book Online

and the cause. But this would not matter, because it would no longer be a body that was hers. Later that evening, her mother at work, Lincoln stroked the hard cylinder of the gun on the inside of her thigh as she heard Harmon turn the knob of her bedroom. When he appeared over her, a dark, heavy form, it went off.

DISCOUNT
    WHEN SHE SEES THE GARBAGE TRUCK heading down the alley, Helen thinks of her electroshock treatments back in the fifties. She was nineteen or twenty had had what the doctors had called “premonitions” that kept her inside the house. Visions of Baltimore City being bombed or Saint Stanislaus Church burning brighter than the sun, angels shooting out of the steeples and becoming gentle white clouds. Except the visions never really came true. And after the treatments, she stopped having premonitions, but began hearing voices. Although she didn’t tell anyone about those.
    The garbage truck also reminds Helen of a furniture store truck that Francis Kopeck used to drive around town back then. It was metal painted green with the name of his family’s business, Kopek Furniture, stenciled in neat white script. Francis used to give her and her sister Beatty heavy discounts on scratched and dented items.
    â€œYou like this wardrobe, Helen? It would look great in your bedroom,” he would say, pulling a pocketknife from the pocket of his short, trim waist. He nicked the corner off one of the doors. “I give you thirty percent off now, huh?”
    The rowhouse that Helen and Beatty shared was full of handsome cherry wood furniture, each piece having some nicks or small scratches. Francis would sit on the couch next to Helen, paring his fingernails with the same knife that sometimes had a fleck of Brill Cream on it from where he would smooth a wayward lock of hair with it.
    â€œSo you wanna go to the movies, Helen?” he would ask. “They got the new Elvis movie down at the Patterson.”
    Helen could not speak. The voice in her right ear was telling her when the world was going to be invaded by creatures that looked like sea monkeys, only they were taller and skinny and communicated via telepathy, the way they were communicating with her now. She needed to start eating and get fat, the voice told her, so that when they did come, they would recognize her as their queen.
    â€œHelen? The movies?” Francis nudged her foot with his.
    â€œYou want some ice cream?” She asked, standing up.
    Helen gained one hundred pounds in six months. She went back to the hospital. It was an old Victorian structure with recent additions fabricated mostly of cement block. The ECT room was in one of those additions with lime green walls. Slowly the voices began to fade, but Helen did not lose the weight, no matter how much she stopped eating. When she was released again, Francis came by. He wore a wedding ring on his finger.
    â€œYou look good, Helen,” he said. “I can get you a discount on a queen-sized bed if you need one.”
    The aliens never came; she was no one’s queen. Her sister Beatty died in an accident down at the cannery in the sixties. Francis died of cancer ten years ago in New Jersey. Helen has lived in the house alone for fifty years now. The knicked cherry wood furniture still gathers dust in her bedroom. A new voice speaks to her. It is quiet and feminine, mousy, unlike the others. It is her own.
    â€œI am a queen,” it says to no one in particular.
    As the garbage truck lumbers by, scattering the rats in the alley, Helen takes the paring knife from the utensil drawer and begins nicking herself, starting with her soft, marshmallow thighs. The blood is dark, rich, like cherry wood. She runs into the yard, stained from the neck down, knife still in her hand.
    â€œYou like this?” she asks the startled garbagemen. “It’s nice, huh? I can give you a discount.”

THE ASSISTANT
    I HAD HER FOLLOWED. It wasn’t that I was suspicious of her