COMMUNION | Fiction by Barrett Bowlin

It is the winter of 1989, and you are ten years old, due soon at Ozarks Elementary for first bell, so your father wakes you like he normally does: by lifting you from your bed and placing you in the blue cloth La-Z-Boy, the one that perches in front of the family’s cabinet TV. For the next few minutes in the dark, you rouse slowly in the stark light of the violent cartoons he’s turned on, things like Merrie Melody classics and Hanna-Barbera shorts. This is your hot cup of coffee, your cold splash of water to the face: watching clips of Tom the cat being squashed to death by a piano while he’s chasing Jerry the mouse with a carving knife. Moving images of a now-ghostly Tom trying to sneak his way past a feline St. Peter into heaven, of a demon dog named Spike in the fiery caverns of hell below, encouraging Tom to give up his hopes for redemption, to resurrect and have his last moments of fun on earth by killing Jerry with a fireplace poker.

Your friend and classmate and next-door neighbor, Peter, tells you he sees a demon, too. One that also tells him to do terrible things. Like slicing open his mother’s and father’s necks with his own carving knife, taken from the wooden block that sits on his kitchen counter. Like bashing in his sister Lacy’s jaw and the rest of her skull with something heavy.

He tells you these things on the walks to school, after your morning cartoons. After weekends spent together in the woods in play battle, after hitting each other with swords made of tree branches. After cracking open with your teeth the pristine acorns, you find in the woods, and after church each Sunday. He tells you these things because he can.

*     *     *

One morning that January, you watch your neighbors, the Torbetts—Peter and Lacy and their mother and father, too—load up into their black GMC Jimmy and drive to Table Rock Methodist, which is also your church. The Torbetts sit straight up in the third or fourth pew most weeks, but here in the last few rows, your parents are able to slip in late, take seats near the stained-glass windows, where the cold draft hunches right up next to you on the wood. The chill is God’s small punishment for tardiness, or that’s what you tell yourself, and so you stare from the back as the Reverend blesses the goblet of Welch’s grape juice and the loaf of bread, and as your neighbors take communion, and then as your parents receive it, too.

“The body of Christ,” the Reverend says when it’s your turn, placing a thin tear of the saltless bread in your mouth.

Amen.

“The blood of Christ,” the Assistant Pastor next to him says, letting you sip from the rim of the goblet. After each congregant drinks, she wipes the lip of the cup for the person next in line.

Amen.

That taste of the sacrament in your mouth right after? It’s exactly what it’s supposed to be: a swab of flavorless bread, a rinse of sweet juice. Nothing that’ll stay on your tongue or get stuck in your teeth. You wonder what Peter tastes each time he receives the body and the blood.

That Sunday, your mother drives home after the service while your father sleeps in the passenger seat. The Torbetts pull in next door, and then no one ever sees them alive again.

For four days in winter, the two cars in their small driveway don’t move. The mailman comes and goes each morning, starts frowning at the fliers spilling out over the lip of the box, sticks the new letters into the black metal box anyway. On the third afternoon, someone dressed like the vice principal of your school—gingham shirt with the sleeves rolled into cuffs, dark slacks, thin tie, glasses—pulls up to the Torbetts’ driveway, rings the doorbell, scratches his armpit, drives away. Your father makes an announcement.

“Carbon monoxide,” he says. “It’s gotta be. Place your bets.”

“Poison,” your mother says. “Arsenic or selenium in their well. I just wish they were hooked up to the town water like we are.”

Your family stares out your kitchen windows into their kitchen windows. The Torbetts have left an overhead light on, a beacon for anyone within who might make their way down onto the ground floor in the nighttime, a warning against anyone who might be prowling outside. Someone’s here, the light says. Someone’s home.

But beyond the scoop of the soft yellow bulb in their kitchen, there’s just the empty black shadows of their dining room, which spill out as far as you can see into their home. Upstairs, the curtains are drawn. No lights on up there. Or if there are, you can’t see them.

“We should call someone,” your mother says that third evening. None of you pick up the phone.

You remember how, right before the Christmas break, your teacher Mrs. Beech walked over to the left side of the room, to the squat bookshelf stuffed with thin paperbacks on how catapults and battleships work. You remember how she pulled down a multicolored chart with little squares on it, the colors lined up mostly in rows and columns, like the label on the Tetris cartridge perched in your Nintendo.

“Our world is made up of many different materials,” she explained. “This chart gives us the names of these materials and how they relate to each other.”

Students around you—Peter, too—started turning their chairs to the left so they didn’t have to twist their necks.

“The water we drink in the fountain?” she continued. “Every molecule of water is made of two parts hydrogen—here—and one part oxygen, way over here. We call these individual parts ‘atoms,’ and while you can’t see them with the naked eye, they make up everything we’ve ever known.”

You remember how Peter swiveled and mouthed the word ‘naked’ at you, how you stifled the laugh in your throat.

For the rest of the period, students asked Mrs. Beech what each element did. “That’s helium, which fills our balloons and is light enough of a gas to make them float,” she said. “Over here’s aluminum, which we can stretch way out into sheets and form into soda cans.”

“Beer cans, too?” someone in the front row asked. The bodies in the room giggled like birds chirping.

Mrs. Beech continued. “And that’s carbon, the fourth most abundant element in the entire universe—right behind hydrogen, helium, and oxygen—and it’s what makes you you,” she said. “Our bodies take it in and breathe it out, and we use it in different combinations for food and fuel. And when you mix it with iron, here, you get steel, which is what we use to make cars and machines and buildings and kitchen tools.”

You watched Peter’s face as he looked back at you again, as he mouthed the word “knives” in that pregnant pause in the room.

He turned, raised his hand, asked, “On the chart there? What’s peanut butter?” Mrs. Beech lifted just her left eyebrow. This was a magic trick she was able to do.

“You know, peanut butter?” he said again, pointing. “Pb?”

Mrs. Beech turned, leaned back so she could see. “‘Pb?’ Oh, sweetheart, that’s the atomic symbol for lead.”

“What’s it good for?” someone asked.

“All kinds of things,” Mrs. Beech said. “Construction, plumbing, batteries. We add it to our gasoline. When I was a little girl, I’d use a lure weight made of lead each time I went fishing. We used it in paint, too, but these days, we have to be more careful.”

Peter sat up again, straighter now in his small chair.

“It’s poisonous, you see,” Mrs. Beech said. She seemed lost in the cold sunlight that streamed in through the back windows of the classroom. “If we consume it, it makes our bodies break down. Does terrible things to our brains, our minds. These days, we try to use less and less of it, especially in houses. It’s safer that way.”

“I’m going over,” your father says on the fourth morning. “To see if they need help?” You mother asks.

“To see if they’re dead.” You watch as he takes his car keys with him.

Through the kitchen windows, you see the thin strip of grass between the driveways is yellow, dry and thin in the cold weather. Your father hops over the line like it’s a river of lava. Behind you, your mother watches, too. Waits.

Your father rings the doorbell, rubs his hands together to stay warm. It’s cold enough to see his breath in the morning air. He rings it again, knocks, waits. Mutters something to no one. After a minute, he treads back over into your driveway and starts up his ancient Volvo.

“Nothing,” he says, stamping his feet as he comes up the side stairs. “The same thing happened to my mother. Grandma fell down the stairwell, broke her hip. Couldn’t reach the phone in the kitchen from where she landed. She’d been there awhile.”

But for this to happen to the entire family? You stare up at him, hoping he’ll do something, anything.

He bends down. “I’ll go back over tonight,” he says. “Now go get ready for school.”

Where Peter should be in each of your classes is an empty desk. Two of your teachers ask if you’ve seen him.

“My family thinks they’re dead,” you explain. “I’m going to find out after school.” And you do.

On the day after Thanksgiving, Peter’s mom had crossed over the driveway to your house with him in tow. You remember this: how there were leftovers in the fridge, the floating stink of a rotting turkey carcass in the kitchen garbage, and then there was Peter with you in the living room, cutting up a waffle with a fork and knife and watching Tom & Jerry.

“We have a sleepover?” you asked. Somewhere in your mind, you started making a memory of this. It felt important.

“Lacy’s sick,” Peter explained. “Mom said she was vomiting this morning and had a headache. Said her stomach was killing her.” You watched him take a bite. “They went to the emergency room. Want some?”

In front of you, on the cabinet television, there was Tom, dumping pills into a saucer of cream he’d laid out for Jerry. Next was liquid from a purple vial with a skull & crossbones on it, and then one tiny drop from a bottle that made a red explosion in the bowl. When Tom stirred the cream with a spoon, he pulled back only a metal nubbin since the mixture had dissolved the rest. And then there was that smile of his, that evil grin that meant he thought he was going to get away with something terrible.

“Like the cat that got the canary,” Peter said, his face suddenly right next to yours. You jumped, you remember, and then you were properly awake. “That’s what mom calls that look.”

On the television, a fly landed on the bowl and took a sip of cream. You saw it recoil with a croak and die, rigor mortis setting in immediately.

“Poison,” you remember saying, and then there was the rich aroma of table syrup right next to your nose.

“If you want some,” Peter said, holding out a forkful of waffle, “you have to open your mouth.”

In January, the dark settles in quickly, faster than it did even in late November. The sun’s so low in the sky as you walk home from school that it feels like evening already.

There’s your house—your father’s car is in the driveway; you can see envelopes poking their heads out of the mailbox—and then there’s Peter’s. Their mailbox says ‘Torbett’ on the front, and, somewhere behind the front door that someone’s painted blue, everyone is dead.

So you push the doorbell and wait. And you wait.

And no one comes.

You know that Mrs. Beech has talked to your class before about bravery. You know, too, that this is a time to be brave, and that’s when you see your hand turning the Torbetts’ front doorknob open.

In Tom & Jerry, it seems like every door the cat or mouse opens creaks. Bedroom doors, doors that lead outside, doors that go down into basements. The door to Peter’s house creaks, too, as you step into the little foyer of his home.

In the dimming afternoon light, you head into the bright kitchen. There’s the solitary overhead light burning that your family can see through their own kitchen window, and it throws shadows past everything it touches. The frying pans the Torbetts have hung up on hooks. The boxes of Froot Loops and Pop Tarts in the corner. The wooden hutch where the Torbetts store their cookbooks on a shelf and their mixing spoons in an upright ceramic jar: each of these objects cut through the overhead light and makes dark fingers on the peeling paint of the walls.

There, at the border between the lit kitchen and the curtained living room is an open doorway. At the edge of the casing, you see the rough patches of where the paint has cracked. Little, flat strips that have now started to open up into curlings. White leaves on a tree in autumn, waiting to fall off and float down to the floor. Lozenges of poison.

You touch one of the bigger shavings at eye level and it comes off in a flake, fat and wide in your hand.

Before your family moved into the neighborhood, your mother’s explained, there’d been an argument.

“I was worried about the paint,” she says when the subject comes up.

“It was just paint,” your father says each time. “We grew up with lead in the walls and turned out fine, didn’t we?”

These are the arguments where your parents rile each other up and then spend the rest of the day in different rooms.

“I wanted it removed,” your mother says, “so we got it removed. I wasn’t going to move my baby into an unsafe house.”

This house. Your house feels safe. You feel safe. You hope Peter feels safe in his home, too, but you’re not sure.

That weekend you moved in, you remember crossing onto the neighbors’ driveway, over the four-foot strip of grass that ran between the two lengths of blacktop. You marched up their steps to the front door and rang the doorbell. Asked the woman who answered if she had any kids you could play with. This was how you met Peter. Before you ate strawberry Pop Tarts together without the icing you liked on yours, before you watched cartoons on the TV up in Peter’s room.

You came home and your family asked you about the neighbors, took their cue from you to come over and ring the doorbell themselves.

“Welcome to the neighborhood,” Peter’s father said, jutting out his hand to shake. It was one of the only times you’d ever hear him speak.

You’d give their names here if you had ever needed to use them again, but it was always ‘Mr. Torbett’ and ‘Mrs. Torbett’ from then on. The only other member of the family whose name you knew was Peter’s sister, Lacy. She was five, loved watching episodes of Ducktales, and was the only person you knew in Arkansas who took ice skating lessons. On Sundays, Mr. Torbett drove the family to church, Mrs. Torbett drove home, and this happened each weekend until it didn’t anymore.

Now that you’ve seen it in one place in the Torbetts’ kitchen, you see it everywhere. Vertical fields of white flecks that rivulet into lines and cracks on the walls. Small chips of paint that bend out from the wood and the plaster. A little pile of bright flakes in the corner where someone’s missed it vacuuming.

It’s getting hard to breathe, but you don’t want to leave the light.

“Hello?” you yell into the dark of the living room. You hope that the noise might scare away whatever demon Peter’s told you he listens to. That the sounds can be heard below you, past the floorboards and into the basement, and up the stairs, into each of the rooms. You don’t know what you’ll do if there’s still someone left to hear it.

In the living room, the carpets the Torbetts have laid down eat up some of the sound coming from your footsteps. You look up, strain to hear anything from the second floor.

Outside, cars still drive past the house in the late afternoon, but now you can hear something over the rush of engines outside. A high-pitched whining? The sound of something electronic?

Curious as a cat, you think, and that’s when your feet start moving towards the stairs.

You’ve been here before, though. Lots of times. You know the third step from the bottom creaks and bends. You know on the second floor there’s a bathroom, Peter’s parents’ room, then his little sister Lacy’s. And then Peter’s room at the end of the hallway. When you first met him, you wished that his window would look out on yours, and now you don’t anymore.

It’s darker upstairs. You can see this from the little landing eight steps up from the bottom, four from the top. Something isn’t letting what little sun is left in the day stream in.

You pause at the top of the steps and realize it’s because the doors to some of the rooms are closed. Not ajar but shut tight. And there’s that high-pitched whining again, closer now.

At least the bathroom door is open. Inside, it’s one of the only spots of color in the otherwise white interior of the house. Pink walls in here around a white clawfoot tub. One accent wall of rose-red and ivy-green stenciled wallpaper. Above you, the ceiling tiles have warped because of the moisture and heat. Some of the paint, too, has come off and started to peel. In the sink, something brown or rust-colored has rivered its way down the drain.

“Hello?” you say again. The walls are so much closer to each other up here on the smaller, second floor of the Torbetts’ colonial. Sound bounces off the chipped paint of the hallway walls and the wood floor and the closed doorways, and that’s when you see that the shut doors belong to Peter’s parents and his little sister.

So when you hear the voice say, “In here,” you would leave your body if you could. You would depart from it forever.

“Peter?” you say into the darkness. In the gloom of the upstairs hallway, your eyes start to adjust, and you can see moving light. Peter’s TV flickers from somewhere down at the end of the hallway, from out of the catch of his doorway.

And just like it is at church, a little chill stands next to you on the wood, outside both Lacy’s room and Mr. & Mrs. Torbett’s. Like nothing warm might be found on the other side of the frame.

When you get to his room, there’s Peter on his bed, eating something out of his hand while afterschool cartoons play on the television. You wish it were Tom & Jerry. Something violent and happening within the screen and not outside of it. The world would make sense if you could see a house cat chasing after a mouse who lived in the walls.

You watch as Peter takes another bite from his hand, crunches something in beween his teeth. There are your feet below you, moving you closer to investigate.

“Hey,” he says, finally turning to you.

In the flickering light of the TV, you see the white flakes he’s collected in his hand. They might be chips or crisps or curls of coconut. They might be anything, but you know better.

“If you want some,” he says, chewing and crunching now, his fingers lifting towards your teeth, “you have to open your mouth.”

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