Grinder Recliner

I slow my cart parallel to rows of sealed meat. If my ring finger was to pop, it would have done so by now. Should have popped ten seconds ago when the pressure that became a throb became hot iron. I let up only when another buggy T-bones mine. An overdressed woman in a snug A-line dress says, “Oh my God, I am so sorry.” Her toddler whispers, “Eat shit.” Their shared sincerity touches me, and I remember why I’m here: cream cheese for the filling, filling for the pies. But first, meat.

I don’t buy as much as I used to. I’ve grown sour on meat since we’ve started feeding the carnivorous sofa chair that lives in our house. For the one night a week when Marshall wants meat, I buy the occasional steak, but only the cuts that have begun to lose their red. The dye goes first along the edges.

I text Mr. Hartfield: Checking out. Be there in 20. 

I’m back in my car when he responds: Only cash this tim.

timr.

*time.

Ten miles away, in Cyprus, I turn down a road spotted with pothole puddles. The backstreet ends behind a gas station. This is as far as Mr. Hartfield will drive into town, and I make the trip because he’s the only person I’ve found who will keep them alive.

He arrives and waves me around to the bed of his truck. Same routine as always. His grandson follows. I scratch the leather on my fake designer belt and spot a lilac bruise pooling beneath my knuckle. 

“Sister Ashcraft,” he says. “You bring that cash?”

The boy unties a tarp strap. 

Hartfield adds, “I can’t fool with that phone.”

I say, “Thirty?”

“Thirty, right.” His shoulders rise and fall like someone conscious of every breath. “New price. It’s a real pain keeping these coons alive. Shooting them in the head is the…” He trails off in a croak of air.

“Sorry?”

“Right. Shooting them in the head.” 

The boy lowers the tailgate and throws over the rotted tarp to reveal two caged raccoons.

I ask, “Why are they so poor?”

He says, “No coons getting fat on my corn.”

Without further comment, he begins to lift the snarling cages, and there are his hands, patchy with dried paint but otherwise smooth and untouched by age. These fingers will surely scratch Mrs. Hartfield’s back as she’s saying her prayers tonight, and she’ll slip in thank you, Bubby, thank you.

“Pop the trunk,” he says.

I ball up my fists. “Popping!” Tighter now. My nails, habitually chewed down to their pink wicks, leave no crescent moons.

*    *    *

I wrap the couch in thick plastic. Wrap the coffee table. Wrap the curio of my mother’s glass bears, and double a layer on that TV. Marshall will say keep the chair, but a drop of its squirt gets on my 65, it’s gone as if I don’t remember.

Before I carry in the cereal and the detergent, I haul in the raccoons to give it time. The recliner isn’t shy, but it’s been taking longer to feed. Dead prey no longer does the job. With the dead, it will just toss the carcass around, gnaw the joints loose, and spit as soon as its tongue is touched by the flat and cold blood. When I brought home the first living things, a possum family, it got messy with the mom. Mucus-covered bones jostled from the seat where its mouth is. I’d pick them up with my dishwashing gloves and shove them back between the cushions; the bone twigs bobbed as it sucked them dry before pulling them in for good. Marshall and I kept the baby O’s for ourselves. We fashioned them a cardboard home and dangled them from our fingers like yo-yos. The next morning, they had left.

When Marshal makes it home from his day at the feed mill, I’m cutting up carrots for a stew and singing a shadow song that my memory refuses to forget. He slaps my ass and looks in the living room.

“Jesus, we can’t keep this up.” He’s referring to the living meals and mess of torn cages left behind.

“Looks worse than it is. Picked up a magnet at the store that’s going to suck all that metal up.”

He kneels. “It’s already scratched the paneling.”

“I’m not having a live animal climb my curio,” I say. “Besides, I think it likes the challenge of the cage.”

“We can’t keep this up.”

Later, we sip our stew and watch TV. During the commercials, we set it to mute and listen to all that raccoon churning inside.

“Scratch me here,” I tell Marshall in bed. I turn my back to him and scoot.

“Here?” he asks.

“Like all over.”

“I know where this is headed.”

The scratching ends, and his rough mill hand slides to my hip and around.

Today, the chair is irritable. The best I can do is rub the soft crown of its backrest. Silence until I stop, then the grindstone screech of its anger returns. I ignore its song for as long as I can. In our bedroom, I move Marshall’s socks from the bottom drawer back to the top drawer. He moves them because he likes to squat for them and count that movement as exercise. But his long johns and toboggans go in the bottom; socks go up top. I open a book, but close it for the noise that doesn’t allow me to put two and two together and move on. Like I should be able to. Like the ladies I started it with did. I close the book and grab boots. Boots because of my own snares, which I fashioned in hopes to one day relieve Mr. Hartfield.

Two live traps are located back behind the garage near the creek. Marshall brings me bait from the mill, and I check them one, two, three, four times a day. This morning, same as always, the miniature salt lick lays unlicked. The grinding whines of the chair can’t be heard from outside.

I text Mr. Hartfield: Anything today?

He replies some time later: Sell you a live chicken for 50.

I forward the message to Marshall, write: On my way to bring you lunch.

Marshall’s waiting outside when I pull up to the mill. He shouts something back into the open storefront, laughing.

“Guess what Randy and Johnna are teaching that kid to call his private,” he says to me before my window finished its drop. “Teeter. They’re calling it a teeter.”

I want to roll up my window and drive. “What did you call it?”

“Goober.”

“Teeter rhymes with wiener.”

“A teeter isn’t a goober.” He reaches over me and grabs last night’s leftovers. He smells like sweet feed. “And don’t buy shit from that old man. I can have you a chicken by Saturday.”

It’s hungry today. I have to feed it today. As I’m driving off, I reply to Mr. Hartfield: I’ll take two.

Back home, the chickens run and cluck and slam and flap against my furniture. The hens have been clipped. I hear a glass bear fall through the plastic, and I hope it’s not the 20th Anniversary Boyd. I say a prayer for the bear and for swift deliverance from this madness. I say amen and cast it over these flightless birds.

They were robbed of their God-given dignity as birds, as I have been robbed of the last of my garage sale earnings. I handed Mr. Hartfield a loose roll of twenties and watched his hand transfer the birds to my open trunk. Once home, the chair wanted nothing to do with the caged meal I offered. Thirty minutes passed, nothing. I rattled the tied metal to get the chickens moving, nothing. I opened the doors and overturned the cage. And that’s where I am now, watching the chair’s stitching heave in anger as it watches the free-roam birds dash around in taunting circles. The surface rises and tightens as the chaotic dance brings the chickens close enough to smell.

Marshall is off in two hours, and I will have this place cleaned before he can come home and kneel for scratches. I cup a bird from underneath, pinning its wings. I grab the neck with the intent of shoving it beak-first into the armrest crevasse, but quickly release the animal out of fear I’ll break its neck. I can’t let fifty dollars go to waste. I cup it again, and it pecks my hand. I lunge, and its branched toes scratch. Again, another fail. Blood this time. At last, I snatch the legs and break them both. I snap them like a bundle of spaghetti noodles over boiling water.  Blood drips on the seat. The crimson spots soak into the canvas and disappear. A foghorn groan rises from the chair, and for the first time, I see its mouth open from above.

Marshall tears through the garage into the kitchen, says, “Turtles.”

“Are green,” I say.

“Some. Know what they all are? They have green turtles, yellow turtles. They have snapping turtles, and the ones that just want to chew on lettuce until we all fuck off. But you know what they all got in common?”

He’s enjoying this more than I am. “Shells.”

“They’re slow. All the bastards are slow.”

“No cages,” I realize.

“No cages,” he says. “Randy’s pond is crawling with snappers. If you want something bigger, I’ll make some calls.”

My text is sent to Mr. Hartfield before a self-satisfied Marshall props his brown-bottomed socks on my clean coffee table: You ever caught a turtle?

A knock on the door causes the chair to emit a low-humming purr. I stroke its side and whisper shushes, but the continued beating only makes the purr rise to a moan. Marshall motions toward a door he could easily answer himself. Why won’t he see its fear, its hunger? I slip one last reassuring whisper to the chair and dart for the door before the unwelcome stranger can resume his rhythm. I see his black slacks and name tag before the door is opened.

“Jesus,” I say.

“Is the name of our Lord. Praise!” He smashes me with his Latter-Day-Saint Crest smile, and for a moment, I do feel lighter.

The chair gurgles behind me—a new sound. “Now’s not really the best time, swee—”

“This will not take long, ma’am.”

I’m thankful he interrupted me before I allowed myself to call him sweetie.

He places a poorly-rehearsed hand on his chest and says, “I come not to give, but to take.”

I let that sit for a second.

He retrieves a crumpled index card from his back pocket and reads, “I come not to take”—still no eye contact—“but to give.” He shoves the card back into his pocket and pulls a Bible from a duffel by his feet.

“We’ve got those out the a—out the butt.” That sounds worse.

He says, “They really prefer I come back with the bag empty.”

I take the book.

*    *    *

The next morning calls for blueberry pancakes. Marshall draws circles in the mill’s purchasing catalog, asks that I give the knuckle-popping a rest. I show him the stubborn grocery cart bruise. Bacon has become his new desire. I tell him, “Be thankful for the blueberries.”

Above the silence grows a rhythmic gag not unlike the sound a cat makes before it vomits a long pile of chunky orange. The noise rises from the living room. We share a glance, but not before the sound of damp explosion fills the next room. We run. A shallow wave of milky slime races to each corner. Mounds of digested meat lie here and there. Caught in the currents are little bone darts, tubular innards, dashes of brown and red. Feathers fall like the powdered sugar I sprinkled on the pancake stack. Marshall calls them flapjacks. Marshall sees the feathers, heavy with moisture, stick and slide down the television screen. I see him see. I reach for him but find the chair instead; I want to pet him but pet the chair instead.

I’ve been reading the chair the pocket New Testament. Each day, we read about Jesus breaking bread and dragons devouring the lost. It likes the bits with energy, where things do things. We read the Bible and sing Cat Stevens. “He goes by a new name now,” I said, “but we can call him whatever.” It likes Cat Stevens, who writes songs about sons, more than Stevie Wonder, who writes songs about daughters. I’ve decided it’s a boy.

“I know you’re hungry,” I tell him. “We’re working on the turtles.”

A soft gurgle.

I hear Marshall on the phone in the garage. He’s still pouting, though his TV cleaned up fine. I slid my toe across his ankle last night in bed, and he didn’t pull away. He said, “I’ll follow up with my guy tomorrow morning,” before pulling himself to the edge.

*    *    *

A text from Mr. Hartfield: Found a turtle hole with bush hog, followed by At least 2 in there.

I stop folding sheets and call. He tells me I could have them if I wanted them—$20 each—he’d rustle them out and feed them. Says he could spare a head of cabbage.

One last thing: he won’t bring them to Cyprus. In fact, doesn’t really see himself being able to make that drive any more. Mrs. Hartfield gets worried. I jot down an address on the cover of the unread book and tell him I’ll be there tomorrow morning.

A saw squeals inside the barn. The sound is either calling for help or begging for more.

Mr. Hartfield silences the machine when I enter. His lips lay steady, neither welcoming nor annoyed. His left hand motions me closer; the right pushes his grandson away from the table top. “Get me a cough drop,” he tells the boy. “Next to the washers in the duct tape drawer, rear wall.”

The grandson grabs his elder’s cell phone.

“Hurry up, son. I got a tickle.”

A large wooden crate rests in the nearest corner. Lazy scratches stop, start, stop. I point; he nods. Inside, three turtle shells, all about a foot long from head to tail, rest like stones. A beak slowly extends, retreats.

“Good-sized gopher turtles,” Mr. Hartfield says. He rubs a speckled hand across a shell. I do the same with half the grace. I poke and push, like checking for soft spots in cantaloupe skin.

“Do they bite?”

“I wouldn’t put my finger in their mouth,” he says.

The stumpy toe-claws tickle and squirm. 

I open my mouth to speak, but my voice disappears into a familiar squeal. A breathy hiccup of shock. Then the saw returns, angrier. By the time Mr. Hartfield and I push open the door to a tool closet, the jigsaw has been silenced for good, unplugged and swung to the ground. The grandson, paling, squeezes the wrist of a three-fingered hand.

“I’m sorry, Papa.”

Mr. Hartfield, already on the ground, wraps the hand in a scarf. To me: “Towels!”

“I’ll call 911,” I say, finally, and throw myself at the old man’s phone, dropped at some point near a workbench.

“No!”

My hands barely have a hold on the phone when I see the two orphaned digits under the bench. “What’s your code?” I say. I think I say. The child wails alone. The old man tosses chains, welding rods, boxes, gloves, greasy rags, gas cans, bottles from the other side of the shop looking for something. He’s gone. He’s stopped moving, apparently spotting what he’s been looking for. I stuff the fingers in the back of my waistband.

Mr. Hartfield’s weathered body slides to the ground. “You.” He points in my direction. “My keys. My keys are at the house. Tell--"

“I’ll take you,” I say.

“Tell Vera to start the car.”

“Let me--"

“Tell her.”

The little blood left in the fingers has begun to make its way down my leg.

On the ground, the broken jigsaw’s thin, red ribbon of blade peeks out of its quiver.

*    *    *

Maybe I shouldn’t have given him the fingers.

Even if I could get him those turtles I promised, he’ll have a taste for better meats. We’ll be lucky if he bats a figurative eye at turtle shells now that he’s tasted the boy. Cold-blooded slop. He’ll want red meat, warm red meat. And more next time than the bit of pink that sticks to finger bones. There will be no going back after that meal. I’ll have to put Marshall on accident watch at the mill, have him scour the place for the occasional slivers of pinched-off hand that get snipped at the conveyor of grain elevator two. “They never wear their damn gloves,” Marshall always says. He says that at least once a month. I’ll start working on my hangnails again, work them till they branch off my cuticles. I was able to stop once. And still, nothing will satisfy him. See if anyone gets full on hangnails, pinched-off slivers, and finger pink. We’ll have to figure something out. Maybe stake out at dangerous intersections. Maybe pay off ambulance drivers, like television vampires.

What’s done is done, as they say. I knew as soon as I positioned the first one on the head rest and pushed that gory domino into the seat. I waited for the sound of it hitting the cushion, of him opening up and groaning, like he does with ground beef and racoons and chickens and probably turtles, but I heard only a short suck of air followed by a low mechanical hum of satisfaction. Second one down, and the sound dropped lower still. Deeper. Scarier. Black water sounds.

Marshall can’t hear it, but he sees it. He sees the ripples in the bowl of ramen I’ve doctored with egg and sesame. He comments on the way the seeds phase in and out as they shake. The couch pulses from the same waves, and I imagine he fears more furniture will wake.

But me, it’s all I hear. Marshall kisses me bye to that hum. I dust the curio to that hum.  

Tonight, Marshall tunnels from the foot of our bed to the soles of my feet, which he parts with patience. His tongue traces a line from my knee up my inner thigh to my boy shorts. He breathes warm air slow, waits for the heat to sink in low, and then blows cool and soft.

He saw me. After we’re finished, he tells me he passed my car on his way home, parked in a ditch watching the Jones men clear fields.

I tell him, “Oh.”

He tells me, “I like the way they hit the ground, and then you hear them hit the ground.”

I tell him I don’t hear anything at all.

He tells me I don’t understand why you need the chair.

I say, “Some things aren’t supposed to be hungry, but he is.”

Marshall and I hold hands and discuss tomorrow’s supper: white bean soup, jalapeño corn biscuits.

Doorbells. Marshall doesn’t ring the doorbell. Neither does the mailwoman, nor does the UPS guy, who brings me the Like-New books I keep ordering and not reading. But Mr. Hartfield rings doorbells, does it twice before the digital tones fade. He clips them short. Or so he does outside my door today, not yet seventy-two hours since I made off with his grandson’s fingers. A visit was always coming, I even told Marshall that he might stop by, but we live seven red lights, a Walmart, and an interstate from his acres of baled hay. He’s here, and his dong dong dong dong dongs cut through that low hum.

“I guess I’m getting the door,” Marshall says from the hall bathroom. He stamps into the foyer, tucking his bunched boxers down into his Saturday sweats.

I hide. For whatever reason.

“Brother Ashcraft,” Mr. Hartfields says from around the corner. “Your address is still in the church directory.”

“How can I help you, Harold? Turtles? You found some. I knew you would.”

“Turtles.”

“Nature Man.”

“Okay.”

“You’re the nature man.”

“Is Sister Ashcraft in?”

I say “I’m here” as I round the corner. “Sorry, out back checking our traps. Caught a possum. Soon I won’t have to bother you anymore.” The grandson. “How’s that baby’s hand? We’ve been worried purple here.”

I catch Marshall’s eye, and I see him pass the lead.

“Babe,” I say, “run out back and finish cleaning that possum.”

“You want me outside?”

“Cleaning possum.”

Mr. Hartfield and I remain in the doorway, alone. The hum begins again, runs through my feet, and fills my shins.

“Doctor said,” he says, “they could have reattached the fingers had we brought them with the boy. Little mobility, even less feeling, but present.”

“Would you like some tea?”

“I can’t figure out why.”

“Come in. I make it like Marshall’s momma does.”

I grab him by the hand, scrubbed clean of paint. He doesn’t flinch. The hum transmits from my fingers to his. I squeeze his joints. The hum falls. Not quieter, thicker.

“That sound,” he says. “What have you fallen into?”

Some things aren’t supposed to be hungry.

“Let’s sit down. Talk this through,” I say. “Right here.” I hold his hand, lead him the whole way down into the chair.

“I haven’t told the wife, but I’m going to have to. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Ask why? Call a lawyer? Tell the deacons? Talked myself near out of coming here at all.”

“I haven’t told Marshall, either.”

“Is this one of those electric chairs?”

“If you could blame my hands, do that. They grabbed them up before I did.”

“I don’t know if I blame you. At least it’s not what I reach for first. You’re a good woman, used to be. Nice looking. Come from good people. People don’t collect little boy fingers, like rats. That’s what I told Vera: momma rat must have gotten off with ‘em, served them to hungry babies. Wouldn’t even find the bones then.”

“I don’t have them.”

“Is that what happened, Sister Ashcraft? Some diseased little rat took my boy’s fingers?” He gets up. “I’m going to need you to come with me. It’d make Vera feel better if she knows I caught the thing that took her grandbaby’s fingers.”

Marshall rounds the corner with a full pot of coffee. “Pour you a cup? These are good beans.”

The seat, now vacant, opens up and releases a slash of ropey tongue that coils and binds Marshall’s chest. He pulls at the velvet cable bunching below his arms. The cord constricts; I hear Marshall’s rib cage pop dull. Not once. Tightly sequenced like submerged fireworks. The sounds aren’t unlike those my fingers make, but sharper, more urgent. Blood spits from his nose. Forced open, his mouth welcomes the tip of the tongue. It’s at least two feet into his throat when the chair lifts him effortlessly from the ground and into the spinning, jagged cog wheels, the ones I saw only once deep inside. The gears spin through Marshall, never catching or slowing down.

The hum disappears. The hum is gone for the first time in days and, in its place, I find unrecognizable silence. 

On the ground spread coffee and glass.

Mr. Hartfield runs to the door, but his old feet lose their ground, and he falls to his knees not far from the chair. His pain comes out a squeal, which he continues as he resumes escape.

I am faster than Mr. Hartfield. I pull him closer.

“You are a good man,” I say as I run my fingers through the coarse hair on the back of his head, securing my hold. “Brother Hartfield, you are a good man.” I dunk his face into the seat’s cavern still misting blood from consuming Marshall. 

The old man doesn’t make noise, nor does he struggle, for long. His head is removed save the flap of hairy nape I hold. I fall back on my bottom. Marshall’s blood soaks through to my skin before I let go of the body.

The chair sings. I hum and harmonize.

I make my way into the kitchen. The sink’s cold water makes me jump, but I lather up and begin to scrub off the Hartfield, the Marshall. I remove my shirt, my leggings, my socks, twist and squeeze out red until it goes pale. From the laundry on the kitchen table, I grab a shirt.

The chickens. He never used the tongue to stop the chickens.

The living room is quiet, but not completely so. A continuous exhale blows from him. I brush my hand over the seat and feel it, a warm draft that smells like farm and coffee grounds.

“Are we full? Finally full?”

I sit down on his cushions, now closed. The bruise on my finger has healed.

The decapitated mess of Mr. Hartfield’s corpse lies twisted in scarlet. But his hands, his hands still look strong in their rest. They are speckled, spotted red by work and effort. I lean forward in the chair, hook Hartfield under his arms, and pull him up against the chair. His hand in mine. I trace lines, trying not to smear the blood.