Dangling Feet at the Big un-Bang: Volume 1, Chapter 11

2 days ago

5 min read

Desiree pulled up a dining chair to better patiently stare at the wall.

What did she expect the wall to do? Open magically into a stone archway? Turn into a mirror through which another vibrantly dressed, electric-haired eccentric would stride into her home?

The house was over seventy years old—that first stranger, the wet man, in his painting of the layers, seemed to know its whole history, color by color.

Maybe there was also some strange ownership—nefarious ownership—of the property within those layers. Alterations and renovations that included secret doors and trap walls of which Desiree was unaware. Watching her. Spying on her. Privy to her titillating side-life. And the design in the snow was the symbol of a cult . . . a dog-stealing, dog-sacrificing cult . . . she’d left the collars on the floor.

Her imagination was running away with her. Right? Already she’d removed a lampshade and lightbulb from a heavy brass lamp—a dated piece of décor hidden away in Leighann’s bedroom—and with it as a weapon, searched under the beds and in the closets. Presently the brass lamp lay across her lap, and she leaned on it as she stared hard into the wall, at the original mustard-square, copied by the wet man.

What it would do, she didn’t know. But what she would do, Desiree had a plan.

The sour-faced cosmopolitan, the trinity of shifting colors: they all wanted to see her feet. And still in her scrubs, sitting in the chair, Desiree had removed shoes and socks and rolled up her pant-legs. “Sure, you can see my feet; they’re right here,” she would say while wiggling her polished toenails, whatever the wall did, and then whammo! Down comes the brass lamp across the intruder’s head! She curled her precious toes in anticipation.

And in the constant staring, as if the old saying of staring a hole had turned true, there came the tiniest speck on the wall where she bore her eyes. Small enough to be mistaken for a gnat. She rose from her chair, brass lamp in hand, for a closer look. As Desiree did, the speck grew bigger. Not from a simple matter of perspective, or shortening the distance. The speck was growing. And while it wasn’t an insect, it was more related to an insect than a hole. Budding two slim arms and two slender legs and walking on those legs, getting larger as if walking toward Desiree from just over the horizon of the invisible road that she couldn’t see in her wall. There came a slanted line across the figure’s head like a saucer. A dark cloaked figure in a wide-brimmed hat, growing to an inch, two inches, three inches, five inches, ten, and twenty, and Desiree dropped the lamp, and it clanked on the floor. She scampered backward and toppled over the dining chair she’d positioned center of the living room, scooting back into the kitchen with her eyes on the dark figure flat in her wall, getting to her feet and bracing herself against the table, paralyzed with fear, stuck in the position of one caught on a mountain’s edge.

The cloaked figure in the wide-brimmed hat never broke stride. Yet as he seemed to reach the edge of wherever he was coming from, his body unfolded in an unnatural way. A kind of birthing feet-first of a fully dressed man in dusty brown clothes. The heavy boots poked their noses through and were followed by the tip of a wide-brimmed hat. The brim briefly kissed the toes of the boots, and soon the figure’s knees were out with his whiskered chin resting between them. His arms rose through the flat dimension and pushed against either side of the wall. The scruffy-faced man under the hat was bound up like an accordion, stuffed in a drawer with the clothes that he wore. In the final unfolding, there were no pops or cracks from bones and joints. His back uncurled straight with a spine like a serpent as he landed a brown boot in a cloud of dust. Continuing forward, he muttered, “Master my ass. Bum could’ve made it a little closer to the ground.”

The scruffy man could’ve been taken for a panhandler; the long brown cloak was worn, patched by darker cloth at the elbows. In scooting away on the gray shag rug, Desiree had brushed the wool from gray to gold, rubbing a golden path on the rug which the scruffy man followed. He didn’t stop but glanced at her bare feet as he passed, and rolled his jaw to make a face unimpressed, mouth snidely aside and brows sneeringly lowered, and with a light scoff reached into a pocket and removed a large gold coin. He flipped it off his thumb, and it spun to Desiree. Braced against the dining table, she caught the shiny object on instinct, while the cloaked man shut the front door on his way out.

Desiree slowly centered herself in the room. Oriented not to where the cloaked man exited, but to where he’d entered: the wall. It remained like the wet man’s illusion, being only the wall it had always been, with the layers of paint included beneath it and nothing else.

Stillness seemed to vibrate through the house until it burst through Desiree in a sudden sprint to the brass lamp. She picked it up and launched it at the wall, hitting a bullseye in the wet man’s square. The lamp bounced off; the wall was unharmed. She grabbed it again and struck the wet man’s inspiration with the base of the heavy object, striking, clanking, Desiree screaming, and when she was out of breath and dropped the lamp to the ground a final time, there wasn’t a dent, not even a mark, in the mustard-color she’d rolled there herself.

Undeterred, hiking her pants further to her knees and stomping away, she opted for a chef’s knife, unsheathed from the kitchen.

She drove the point at the wall. Pressing all her weight into the handle. Pressing forward until her face was flush with the wall, and she could see the tip of the knife, its sharpest point, not needling into the wall but standing on it like a single-toed ballerina.

In a frustrated flail, she swung the knife outside of the wet man’s square, where the pressure gave way, and the knife slid through.

Desiree drove it to the handle.

It wasn’t the whole wall that was impenetrable. There was another way in.

Her knife-work took on a new strategy, stabbing in two places, one in and one out, one in and one out, trying to find the exact line of demarcation between the painter’s portrait and the rest of the wall. When she found the edge, it was as if she’d found a valley, and she pulled the knife down the seam. For the bottom, she switched to a carving knife and sawed horizontally. After she found the other corner, she carved vertically to the top, and the rectangle completed itself easily after that.

Crumbles of drywall had fallen onto the empty dog collars.

And in the center of this minor demolition, a pristine rectangle of the dark mustard wall remained, floating there in the wall itself, with a sharp, stark outline of black surrounding it, a hollow frame, this hanging bridge into Desiree’s living room.

Next week on Dangling Feet at the Big un-Bang, Desiree’s demolition of the living room proceeds long into the night. Will another visitor come striding over the mustard-horizon? And where exactly does it lead on the other side? Find out October 19.