Dangling Feet at the Big un-Bang: Volume 1, Chapter 6
They were looking for a red goldendoodle.
“Daisy! Daisy!”
Noreen, widowed, retired, and afflicted with a weak voice, let Desiree do the calling on her behalf as she anxiously rubbed her knuckles.
“I know you’re coming off a long shift.”
“I’m fine, Noreen.” Desiree gathered her breath. “Daisy!”
The sky was turning the first dusky shades of orange.
“Ten years, she’s never got out,” said Noreen. “She sunbathes in the backyard. It was beautiful today. And she doesn’t bark out there. Other dogs around here bark all day long but she’s quiet. She’s very sophisticated like that. Try calling her.”
Desiree did and there came no return bark on the wind.
“I took a late nap is what happened,” said Noreen. “I was so mad at myself.”
“You go knock on doors. I’ll keep doing this. Maybe someone took her in.”
“She’s such a sweet girl. She comes right up to anyone.”
Desiree split from her elderly neighbor. Taking the sidewalk, she hollered after the dog and asked neighbors checking the mail if they’d seen an adorable reddish-brown pup. The answer was no. She continued on to the edge of the neighborhood, not where she’d found the design in the snow, but it’s other edge on the opposite side which ran along a main road. Traffic was light but vehicles often exceeded the posted forty miles per hour. Across the road was a ditch and another wide field. No animal bounded in the tall grass when Desiree called after Daisy. Dusk was turning the black road purple. Thankfully there was nothing smooshed on the pavement. She continued to the neighborhood entrance, marked by the welcome sign, Keystone Meadows. From there, the subdivision looped around, and she was heading back home. Just out of sight of it when her hysterical mother came running around the bend, through a tulip bed and onto the sidewalk, knees pumping high in a leopard-print robe.
“Desiree! Call the cops!”
“I don’t have my phone.”
“There’s a man in our house.”
“Another one?”
“A maniac! Wearing a butcher’s apron. With blood all over him! He had hair like—like—like a volcano!”
Of mother and daughter, the daughter remained calm; she huddled her mother to her side, scrubs to leopard-print, and suggested they hurry two houses down to the Wilson’s.
Then a third voice came calling; it seemed there were more people in the neighborhood looking for Desiree than there were for Daisy.
“Desiree!”
And as if she’d heard a volcanic eruption, Leighann screamed and broke away from Desiree’s arm, running off well past the Wilson’s and down the street.
So much for motherly instinct.
Leighann’s volcanic maniac was taking the sidewalk at a leisurely stroll.
“Desiree, don’t be alarmed. I’m just delivering a gift.”
In the authority of her scrubs, she instinctively stood her ground as he approached. He wore a white apron, and the splashes on it were too orange to be blood. Even as the sky grew darker, it more resembled a painter’s apron than that of a butcher. The man did have a bushy mane of long, wild, crackling hair, colored the burnt orange of a pumpkin, disrupted by thin streaks of brown. It looked to have almost been done upwards by a paintbrush, and was stiff as it rolled back like a dried orange paintbrush itself. He was older but not old, like a senior physician, strong-jawed and clean-shaven, with long gray eyebrows which were twisted and untamed, curling upward like forgotten cigarettes smoking themselves. Beneath the apron he wore a brown shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, unbuttoned at the collar, with brown corduroy pants and dark brown leather shoes.
But more than the hair and the orange splashes on the apron, it was the man’s eyes which struck Desiree the most. They were entirely white except for the small black pupils in the center. Circles of black ink surrounded by white space. Like a cartoon’s beady eyes rendered lifelike.
Leighann’s volcanic maniac’s lips were bleached white, too. They very nearly blended in with his perfectly white teeth.
“Only a gift,” he said.
In his hands, he held a soft, lemonade-yellow shoebox.
Desiree, though, stared into the small black circles at the center of those two white eyes.
As if obviously this pumpkin-haired man was what she’d been expecting on the other side of her back door, after following the footprints home from the strange design stamped in the snow . . .
“What?” he said. “Did I forget something?”
He blinked those black pupils centered squarely within the squishy white globes. He returned Desiree’s stare, not quite looking at her, or through her, but using her eyes like hazel-tinted mirrors to see his own reflection, turning his face side to side.
“My eyes! Look what I’ve done!”
He touched his long slender fingers to a splash of orange on his white apron and acted as if he’d touched wet paint. He rubbed his index finger over his thumb, passed his hand over his eyes and revealed a new pair of tiger orange irises. The pupils now looked like small shadowy moons passing in front of fiery twin suns. He pretended to flick paint off his fingertips at the grass.
“What else did I miss? Can you show me?”
The change—of what were clearly special contact lenses—grounded Desiree. Her morning had started with the lady in furs, demanding to see her feet. Now there was a volcanic maniac with a shoebox.
They were on the sidewalk. There were homes, witnesses on either side. Curtains were drawn, doors had opened from Leighann’s scream. And every day Desiree was prepared to be shoved, scratched, punched, spit on, shit on, with a nurse’s unofficial oath that she had given up her right to defend herself. That, however, did not apply to her neighborhood. With a slow, contemptuous movement toward a face that expressed as much, she pointed to her lips.
The pumpkin-paintbrush-haired man puckered up and looked into her eyes.
“You’ll have to apologize to your mother for me.”
He touched his apron once more and passed his fingers over his bleached-white lips; and like sliding a new color-tube in place from corner to corner, they became pinkish orange before bending into a smile.
Desiree scratched her nose.
“I saw that trick in Vegas.”
It had been done with a glove—white to red—but Desiree was done with majesty and all forms of magician-ship and all these strangers and stalkers that were turning her sanity checklist into an insanity registry.
Therefore, she was unimpressed.
“Then it must be astounding to see it up close on your own street between,” the man looked to the mailboxes on either side, “houses 629 and 631.”
“A friend made me go to the show. I’ve never been attracted to a man that does card tricks.”
The man smiled like a pumpkin carving and presented to her the shoebox.
“But Diotima, does this look like a pack of cards? I made these just for you.”
Next week on Dangling Feet at the Big un-Bang, Desiree is locked in a standoff with a pumpkin-haired man. What’s in the shoebox he’s so desperate to give her? Can the box be closed once the lid comes off? Find out September 14.
Author: Zachary Ryan
Zachary Ryan is just a guy who is excited to entertain you for a few short minutes.
