When Althea’s husband, Aldo Barker, got taken, it was with the wail of a rusty gate and the crack of a car trunk closing. Folks in Desire say that the worst is when you don’t even hear them go.
But absence needs voices to give it shape. Fears need sound like veins need blood. Desire District is a body that lives by its voices.
Folk talk on street corners and they talk on porches. They whisper in the back room of the two dozen churches and they cry in public. They yell from window to window from their houses.
“She took another one last night!” come the cries. “Last night, she got another man.”
The women of Desire rolled Piety Street with their laughter when she took Grady Davis. When she took Donald Washington, they wept into the hot dog casseroles and gumbo they made for Bonnie and the five young ones Donald left behind. When she took Pastor Carson, they could only yell at the streets.
They call out, and other sounds answer. The one who takes their men, she only answers with other sounds.
Sometimes, a window breaks in Desire and the women all sit up in their beds, startled from sleeping and knowing who broke it. Sometimes, they hear a heavy dragging in the rubbish of an alley. Sometimes, the rattle of that long, faded-black car.
“Get up,” they’ll rush to the window and yell. “Get on up-she’s taking another one!”
Sometimes, it’s the sound of someone running, and the women know that only one person could make a grown man run so fast. It’s never the sound of a dog.
“That’s cause dogs like her,” the women of Desire will say, watching another mother tack up a hand-written missing person sign to a telephone pole. “That’s ’cause she’s a bitch.”
Sometimes, it’s the sound of a man sobbing like a tiny boy.
Nobody rushes to the window then. They just stay awake until silence comes. And when the silence comes, it fills up with heavy mysteries that press the eyelids open and hold them there until the sun intrudes. Then the women of Desire will rise from their beds, to meet a day that feels sewn to the one before it with a scar, and to make coffee and to talk in hushed voices on their porches about how it’s worst when she does her work in quiet..
They say that, even though the result is always the same: A man is in the Emergency Room in Bywater, with machines and drugs keeping what’s left of him alive.
The result is always the same. A boy will be found dragging himself with broken fingers and shattered legs out of the weeds by the old Projects site. A man will be found crying in an alley with eyelids glued closed over what caustic lye has left. A grandfather will be curled on a church’s steps with blood coming from the absence cut between his legs.
And Desire’s women will pick up the pieces of their men as they say what’s on their minds: That it’s worst when you don’t hear her. You don’t hear her work the pliers on flesh. You don’t hear the sizzle of the lye and the gasoline and the acid. You don’t hear the fish hooks go in or how she plucks the lines attached.
But perhaps they say it because when they see her-the one who takes their men-they say nothing.
They see her buying ramen at the Louisa Mini Mart, her shoulders hunched up in her black leather NOPD jacket, and say nothing. They might spot her on a corner by a church, watching everybody and rubbing fresh scrapes on her knuckles, and they say nothing. They say nothing when they see her patrolling in that long, faded-black police cruiser, and she nods to them.
The only women who speak to Detective Jurgis are the ones who find her in private and whisper, “Thank you.”
Those women will only whisper. They will whisper about the cracks that the broken men put in them, and they thank her. They will talk about cigarette burns on their cheeks, and beatings brought on by cold dinners, and sometimes even about what the men did to their own daughters, after story time or during before-school showers.
They thank her. She says nothing in reply.
Detective Jurgis does what she does for the silence. The women of Desire understand this. They talk on the fear and the loss and the pain, but they do so to keep it alive, not to kill it.
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© 2011 Matthew C. Funk
Matthew C. Funk is a social media consultant, professional marketing copywriter and writing mentor. He is the editor of the Genre section of the critically acclaimed zine, FictionDaily, and a writer for FangirlTastic and Spinetingler Magazine. M. C. Funk’s work features at numerous sites online, indexed at his Web site, and in print with Needle Magazine, Howl, 6S and Crimefactory. He is represented by Stacia J. N. Decker of the Donald Maass Literary Agency.
Tags: Matthew C. Funk
March 22nd, 2011 at 2:59 pm
Scary good story, Matthew. Now there’s raw, real life horror for you.