Aaaiiieee!

Family Matter

I’ll tell you this about my family and me, but please, I must insist that you don’t repeat it to anyone. I think I can trust you…

Early one evening last autumn my dead father came knocking on my door. For a moment I didn’t recognize him; for one thing, I hadn’t been expecting him…and also, the massive injury which had killed him had left a gaping hole in his head from hairline to mid-nose, as if the top half of his face, eyes and all, had crumpled to fall inside like the cracked rubber head of an old doll. A spiked corona of split and creased flesh surrounded the dark pit like the rim of a blasted lunar crater.

Indeed, the object that had killed father had fallen from the heavens; his two hunting companions had seen a small bright flare descend from the violet dawn to strike him in the forehead. I had never seen father’s injury, as he had been given a closed casket funeral. Those who did examine him had never found a trace of the object that struck him.

I drew father inside before someone could see him on the step. He was uncommunicative then and remains so even now. I washed away the remnants of the obligatory efforts the mortician had made to cap that monstrous orifice. In the lamp light I could see the gray features inside his nearly hollowed head, some crusty dry and some slick. I did my best to pick the pebbles and mop the soil out of there; father had clawed his way up from his grave. I live directly behind the cemetery, in my father’s old house, so fortunately he hadn’t had far to come.

I called immediately to complain to the police that I had been visiting his grave only to find that sick vandals had disinterred my father and removed him for perhaps ungodly uses. I sounded properly distraught and outraged. They never came to investigate the condition of his plot.

When my wife arrived home from work she was dismayed to see that father had come to stay. Oh, but things changed. I had always wondered about them while father was alive; we had all lived under the same roof then, too. One afternoon I came home early to find father squirming atop my wife, he a grotesque hairy bloodless slug with his rump pulsing and she with her legs clamped around his fatty waist. She was running her tongue along the inner rim of his wound, then burying her face entirely within it, so that her moans and licks were muffled. This was why she didn’t see me. But I wasn’t angry, and after that often watched them.

One evening that winter she was bathing father and called me in to look at a tumor growing on his abdomen. In mere days, tadpole-like, rudimentary limbs began to sprout from it. Soon it was as though father had one of those half-formed twins growing out of his side. During this time he also started sneaking out of the house at night. I caught him at this, finally, having chased after him into the graveyard. There he stood over a fresh grave, naked in the night-blue snow, his whole body shaking violently as if in convulsion, a grin of wild rapture on his half-face, and black pus bubbling up over the lip of his wound.

I thought that he might be desiring a return to earth, but when the snow melted and my wife and I strolled in the cemetery as we often did we saw that the ground over that same grave had hollowed a bit—as if something below had been sucked away and the earth had settled into a depression. When spring came the grass was yellow in this spot and, by that time, in a dozen others.

Father’s excursions nourished the birth of my new brothers. They all grew from his lower body, starting out as tumors like the first, two of them forming simultaneously one time. The little figures broke off and reached adulthood in just weeks— though they cried shrilly throughout this growth period, as if it were agonizing for them. It was an exhausting time for us all. Uncles, perhaps they were, rather than brothers, for they were all clones of my father right down to the mole on his chin. Unlike him, they had intact noses and unmarked foreheads but none of them had eyes; there were barely even the cups of sockets there. We let their dark gray hair grow long to hide the absence of eyes and it grew at an amazing rate, as did their nails. My wife trimmed their hair somewhat and tried to keep up with those long nails.

By now my wife had also been producing off-spring, these also sired by my father but in the usual way. They were simply translucent semen-white salamander things, embryonic and again eyeless. She began to pass three or four of them a day, had to heap them into some old rabbit cages in the cellar with bricks to hold the covers down. We did our best to keep them confined but one morning before work I noticed one of them smashed in the road and I rushed to scrape up its remains before a curious driver could pull over to inspect it.

My wife became very attached to the wriggly little creatures. She would lie back and part her legs wide while I fed one into her head-first; the squirming of the thing in that place from which it had originated would amuse her greatly. She found it even more rewarding when one day, experimenting, I cut the head off one of the fetuses with shears and then pushed the remainder of it inside her. Its movements were much more energetic that way.

These tailed fetuses were what we fed to the uncles, which numbered four by spring. Though all alike physically, one of them seemed more intelligent and would sit with my wife and I at the dinner table, smiling at our conversation, turning his head from one to the other of us to listen while he chewed his own slippery meat. Finally I grew a bit daring, and perhaps for his benefit or perhaps to amuse myself I took this uncle out on some errands with me. He wore black glasses as a blind man would and my wife had tied his hair back in a ponytail. He smiled politely at people in the stores, but I saw him quiver his upper lip at a small boy who kept curiously trying to peer around the glasses.

Leaving for home, I could tell by uncle’s fidgety behavior that he had to use the bathroom, so we pulled into a café with its small men’s room on the outside—unlocked. We went in and I listened to the lumpy semi-solid splashing of uncle’s gelatinous urine while standing in the cracked-open doorway, smoking a cigarette. My mind had wandered but I heard a kind of gagging that caused me to look around, and there was uncle with his mouth stretched open so wide I thought it would tear at the corners. At first I thought he had found a child’s ball and crammed it into his mouth like a snake swallowing a large rat, but I stepped closer to him and saw it was a black metal globe or sphere with odd markings grooved into it. Uncle gave one good retch, and the orb dropped free. I put my hands underneath instinctively to catch it, but it never fell more than a few inches. It hovered there soundlessly in the air between us, and that was when I had the intuition that this was the same sort of heavenly object which had struck and killed father. In fact, I had the intuition that this was in fact the very same orb.

The black metal sphere floated past me, nudged the door open, was gone into the twilight. Uncle just zipped his fly nonchalantly and I told my wife what I had see over supper that night. She agreed that it might explain things. She told me that her sister had called while I was out to say that she had had a miscarriage. Depressed, my wife retired early for the night and all the uncles piled into bed with her to comfort her. I set up the video camera on a tripod and sat with father on the parlor couch watching them on the TV screen until they eventually dozed off, and then I switched to some gray old musical that father listened to raptly— rocking forward and back during the production numbers.

It was a mistake taking uncle out that day, I admit it now. Soon he began stealing out on his own as father had, but this time the authorities took notice. Live persons were disappearing in town, leaving only scenes of bloody struggle in the woods and in the graveyard. I didn’t see any of this for myself, but I read in the papers that in the most recent instance a victim had finally been found at the scene. This teen-age boy had been beheaded behind a boarded-up gas station a few streets from my house, and some strange markings within a rough circle had been scratched into his forehead, and his eyes gouged out—all this apparently rendered with the jagged end of a nearly stripped leg bone.

At last, in late summer, the police spotted my uncle in amongst the slanting older cemetery slates, kneeling by the corpse of a teen-age boy partly devoured. Uncle rushed at the men, snarling, his lips peeled back clown-red with blood, as I envision the scene based on newspaper accounts. An officer was so terrified that he fired a twelve gauge shotgun into the face of the unarmed madman. Thus it was that my uncle’s eyeless deformity was not discovered and in death he came to resemble my dead father even more, for lack of most of his face.

Soon the remaining three uncles took to pining and curled morosely in corners and in the cellar. They grew gray, seemed to wither, then died off one by one. I turned all the salamanders free in the cellar so they could feast on the crunchy mummified remains with great relish, clearing away all traces, but shortly after that those slithering creatures also began to mope, to vomit, and grow very cold to the touch…then to wither and die. It is fall again now, and I have been burning the last of the fetuses in piles of leaves.

Father no longer wants to pulse atop my wife. They both seem to brood, apathetic. Will they, too, wither and die, leaving me alone? Perhaps then to die, myself? The house is so empty now, so quiet and lonely; a sepulcher. A family vault. But families sometimes do die out utterly, leaving no progeny behind. Of course, my selfishness aside, I know that sometimes this is for the best.

I realize this is all quite embarrassing to hear and it’s awkward to tell. Family matters often are. But your family is your family and you love them, no matter what.

Again, please, I must insist…don’t tell anyone this story.