Neighborhood Association

The man who abducted my daughter lives in my neighborhood. Today, when I’m driving to the grocery store, I see him outside mowing his grass. I watch him as I drive by, but he doesn’t see me.

At the grocery store I buy a bottle of bourbon before grabbing a copy of the Pleasant Hills Neighborhood Association Newsletter. In the parking lot of the store, I notice one of the fliers from two years earlier stapled against an electric pole. The red word MISSING is barely visible, and the photograph is faded, my daughter’s face burned white by the sun.

When I get home, I thumb through the neighborhood association newsletter, and I learn that the man who abducted my daughter received the “Annual Christmas Award for Best Decorated Yard.” I call the number listed for the association, and I speak to the President of the organization, Peggy Marks. I tell her the man who’s been awarded the prize is the same man who abducted my daughter, that two years ago the police called him in for questioning, and that it’s quite possible he’s buried my daughter in his backyard. Peggy says she’s sorry about my daughter, but that the police never charged the man with a crime, that he’s a respected cardiologist, and that in America people are innocent until proven guilty.

Tonight at two am, half-drunk, I stand barefoot in the snow on the lawn of the man who abducted my daughter, dressed only in my white terrycloth robe, a rusty gasoline can in one hand, an icepick in the other. I stare at the straw manger, the glowing plastic Mary and Joseph, the Styrofoam angels dangling from the branches of the trees. I stare with dead, empty eyes, the way he must have stared at my daughter the day he watched her step off the bus.

While snow freckles my hair, I strangle the inflatable donkey with a string of red Christmas lights. I rip the Styrofoam wings off angels, pry Joseph’s eyes out with the icepick, stab the plastic Virgin Mary in the heart until the little white light in her chest flickers off. When I’m done, I douse the manger with gasoline, pull a book of matches from the pocket of my robe, strike the match, and toss it onto the straw roof. That’s when I notice the baby Jesus asleep in his crib.

As the flames melt Joseph’s nose into a black lump of plastic, I stumble over and grab the baby from his crib. I step back from the fire and kneel down, shivering in the snow, the heat of the flames warm on my face. I hold the baby in my arms, rocking back and forth. As I gently stroke his face, I hear what sounds like a baby whining off in the distance—the faint sound of a fire engine siren smothered beneath the cold, black air.

–forthcoming in The Southeast Review

Mean Blood

My wife wants a baby. She says twins run in her family, and that her gynecologist says she has a perfect uterus, but deep down I’m crossing my fingers that she’s barren. I read somewhere that a woman’s eggs start rotting when she turns thirty-five, and since my wife is already thirty-seven, I figure it’ll only be a few more years before her uterus is completely uninhabitable. Just in case, each morning before she leaves for work, I crush a birth control pill into a fine white powder and sprinkle it into her coffee. I changed from boxers to briefs, and I even started eating at Church’s Chicken once a week after I heard a rumor that the owner of Church’s was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and that he secretly laced the chicken with saltpeter in hopes of making black men sterile.

Each night, my wife slips into a skimpy little outfit she’s bought from Victoria’s Secret, her face painted like some cheap Mexican whore. She swivels her bony, narrow hips back and forth, pressing my face between her perky, non-lactating breasts. She even bought a stack of pornos from the ratty little sex shop down the street, but nothing she does works.

When I tell her I’d rather have a rectal exam from a doctor with ten thumbs than have some screaming bloody fetus crawl out of her uterus, she sits at the end of the bed and pouts, the edges of her thin lips sagging like a C-section scar.

“Aren’t there enough goddamn people clogging up the planet already?” I ask. “It seems like I spend half my life looking for a parking spot at the mall. When deer begin overpopulating forests, the Department of Wildlife kills off the herds to control the increasing numbers. Maybe we could start doing the same thing with humans.” I smile and tell her I think I could justify killing off a few hundred compete strangers if I knew it would cut my commute time down to thirty minutes.

My wife says I don’t want a baby because I’m scared it will turn out like my dope-addict father, who’s spent half his life rotting in prison. She says I have all my mother’s genes, and that I don’t have a violent bone in my body, but sometimes, I swear, I can almost feel my father’s meanness crawling through my blood.

Today, after she leaves for her friend’s baby shower, I nuke a frozen dinner in the microwave. I set the timer for five minutes, stand on my tiptoes and press my crotch against the warm glow of the glass window. As the microwave hums like an electric chair, I think of all of those sperm clumped together like inmates on Death Row. And I can’t help but smile, imagining them sizzle inside me, as one by one, they die their own quick little death.

–forthcoming in The Southeast Review