father made fumbling around the foot of his bed, staggering and grabbing at the tall bed post. Morgan shut his eyes except for a slit.
The old man stared awhile, then went to the side of the bed. He looked at Blue, reached out his hand, then pulled it back and left the room.
A little later he was back again, a gun in his hand.
He crawled on top of the bed, straddling Morgan with his heavy legs. Morgan still pretended to be asleep.
His father pointed the gun at Morgan’s head. Then his father broke his silence, whimpered, cried out loud, and turned the gun around and began beating Morgan in the face with the handle.
It hurt. Morgan could feel things mashing, breaking, giving way in his face. But he refused to cry.
His father was screaming now, pulling the gun back so Morgan couldn’t see it, then slamming it down hard into Morgan’s nose, chin, the top of his head. The blows made dull wet sounds. Morgan could barely see, large red spots growing on his father’s shirt. He began to cry.
He wondered if his father was going to drive his nose through the top of his head, so that he would really look strange from then on. Different. He went to sleep for awhile.
He’d been lucky; they’d just had to rebuild his nose a bit. Morgan squinted into the darkness of the tunnel. How long had he had this headache? It seemed to have gotten worse.
…The nurse has given him the wrong medicine! He tries to call out to her. His voice is a whisper. He can’t breathe. Something is terribly wrong. Pressure in his head. He puts his hands to throbbing temples. His head is swelling; the skull is pushing his fingers out at an angle from his wrists. He tries to call her. She won’t listen. He follows her up one corridor and down the other, his head growing. The skin around his eyes stretches. His eyes stare. His mouth contorts to a silent scream. His nostrils stretch to slits. He can’t breathe. Hard to see. A horn like protuberance pushes its way out of his skull. He chases her around and around the nurses’ station. He wants to scream from the pressure but can’t. His head explodes.
* * * *
Something had touched his hand, something coming out of an adjoining chamber. Something whimpering.
Hydrocephaly is a condition caused by an increase in the volume of cerebrospinal fluid within the skull. It enlarges the head, the pressure forces the brain to the base of the skull, and the cranial bones begin to separate. Vision and hearing may be lost; paralysis may ensue. Morgan knew the symptoms well; he’d been fascinated by congenital defects since his college days, and especially by hydrocephaly. He’d visited the back wards in the state home and been disturbed by the vague sense of belonging he had felt.
Again it touched his hand. At first he wouldn’t turn, thinking that it would be too dark to see the thing anyway. But again the touch; it was persistent. Morgan turned slowly.
The creature had a globular head maybe thirty-five inches in circumference. Excess brain seemed to be riding the top of its atrophied shoulders in a membranous sack. Its eyes were like giant silver dollars. Veins were prominent in the scalp.
The child had no legs, just an elongated trunk it dragged around by means of too-short crutches. Its eyes stared up at Morgan; its tiny toothless mouth pursed inquisitively.
It wore a ragged blue bandana around its almost non-existent neck.
It burbled at him through distorted throat and nasal passages.
“Noooooo! I’m almost thirty years old; you can’t be here!” Morgan screamed, balling his fists at his sides. The baby remained calm, betraying no reaction. “She…she loves me! I don’t want you! You’ve…you’ve been waiting for me, looking for me all this time, haven’t you? Trying to hold me back, always wanting to pull me down. I don’t need this!”
Morgan sat down in front of the child and began to whine, moaning the words. “I can’t live with you. You won’t let me have anything. You hold me back; I have to take care of you. I can’t go on with my life because you won’t leave me alone!”
Still the baby just burbled and nodded, watching Morgan with those enormous white eyes.
Morgan suddenly realized he hadn’t heard Alice’s pacing for some time. He looked down at the hydrocephalic, up at the tunnel ceiling, and started his run.
“Alice!” He pushed his way through the narrowed tunnel.
He was tripping over boxes now, spilling and tossing their contents through the darkness. Clothing fell into powder and greenish sludge, toys and bottles and rotting household goods scattered, insects moved into the dark corners out of his path.
Had it been here all this time?
Morgan reached the bottom of the staircase. “Alice!”
Had it followed him all these years?
He took the stairs two at a time, stumbling, clutching the creaking rail. Gunstock, beer bottles, cans, boots, tire, driftwood, decaying underwear came rushing out of the past, whirling around him.
He stumbled over each landing and leapt to the adjoining step.
“Alice!”
Alice would make him forget.
Morgan tore open the cellar door and stepped out into the living room. “Alice?”
All the lights in the house were on.
He walked quickly from room to room, but Alice wasn’t in any of them.
Returning to the living room he noticed that the front door had been left open. He walked out to the edge of the porch. Looking past the gray bulk of the barn he could see a few lights from the town in the valley below. He breathed deeply, feeling small and childlike. He could imagine what she might have said. Even trade: one fantasy for another.
He could feel the tiny knotted fists clutching his pants legs at the back of his knees.
He could feel something, not quite bone and not quite flesh, pressing into the backs of his thighs, then the small hands reaching around his knees for an embrace.
TAP DANCING, by John Gregory Betancourt
Martha Peckinpah sat alone in the back of the theater, watching a dress rehearsal for Stardust Whammy. Floodlights bathed the stage in silvers and blues, glittering on the sparkle-sewn tuxedos on both dancers. Computer-synthesized Brahms swelled to dizzying peaks as the men rat-tat-tatted to a stop.
Brilliant. That’s what the critics would say, Martha thought. Only she knew better. There hadn’t been anything new or fresh in the choreography, and the kid on the left had been a half-beat slow on at least a dozen of his repartées. But nobody else had noticed. Standards had fallen, and tap had died a lingering death. This revival was the best she’d seen in the last five years, though, and it might run all of a week before closing. She felt a hollowness inside as she thought of how television and movies and vapid theatrics like Cats had replaced dance and theater as the American performing arts.
But the house lights would be coming on in a minute and the dancers might see her. She had to hurry. If the manager caught her again—
It would be: Miss Peckinpah, you know you
