The Dark Dark: Stories
Samantha Hunt
For Norma Stallings Nolan Santangelo,
the bright bright
Then she raised the hoe above her head.
—Eudora Welty
THE STORY OF
In a coffee shop on Dead Elm Street, Norma arranges chicken bones on her plate, making an arrow that points to her stomach, where the chicken now resides. She once saw a picture of a hen in a science book. The hen had been split open down the breast, unzipped like a parka. Inside was a chain of eggs, rubbery as tapioca, small getting smaller until they almost disappeared. Nothing like the basket of fried chicken Norma has just finished eating, but sickening all the same.
The waitress says, “If it’s all the same to you I’ll—”
“It’s never all the same.” Norma’s thinking of the eggs. “It changes a tiny bit every time.”
But the waitress keeps talking. “—just close out your check, ’cause we’re switching shifts.”
Outside, cars slow to the stop sign. Dead Elm Street is not a dead-end street, but Norma imagines a remedy, a couple of concrete barriers that could cut Dead Elm in half, leaving behind North Dead Elm and South Dead Elm, two streets instead of one. Inconvenient for getting across town, but satisfying: Dead Elm the dead end. Procreation by division, just like the amoebae.
“Wait. Do you have any walnuts?” Norma asks.
“Walnuts?”
“Walnuts.”
“No. No walnuts, no pecans, no filberts. No nuts. Walnuts?” the waitress asks again.
“They get you pregnant.”
“Walnuts get you pregnant?”
“I read it on the Internet.”
The waitress curls her mouth into a half-smile like she’s saying, I doubt it. She’s a pretty waitress but all of her good looks didn’t make her a genius, so Norma wonders what the heck the waitress knows about the health benefits of walnuts.
Norma eats lunch here every day since she lost her job. She and the waitress often talk. They are used to each other the way people are used to their TV sets, a hum that keeps them warm even if they aren’t listening to the broadcast.
Norma slides out of the booth.
The stalls in the ladies’ room are made of aluminum. Norma rests her head against this coolness while she pees. In the stall wall she can see a distorted reflection of herself. The dark chestnut hair dye she tried last week makes every minor bump and blemish on her pale face bright red, raw as a goth girl. The hairs on her cheeks seem unnaturally white and furry next to her nearly black hair. While she picks at her skin she feels something familiar—a peeling, a pain. In the toilet a streamer of blood sinks to the bottom of the bowl, a dark, dead fish.
Yesterday Norma asked the waitress how long it took her to get pregnant and the waitress said, “I don’t know. Fifteen minutes?”
“No. I mean, how many times did you have to try?”
And she said, “Try? What do you mean, honey?”
The waitress has three kids. She doesn’t seem to like any of them.
Norma’s been trying to get pregnant for over two years, and each time she gets her period a small bit of strength leaks out of her. Iron and blood. Each month she thinks maybe it worked this time. She’ll walk very carefully up stairs and avoid lifting anything heavy. Just in case. But then, every month her period comes, a cellar door slamming shut. Something is not working and Norma does not want to go to the doctor to find out what. She doesn’t want medical confirmation saying she’ll never be able to have children. She’d rather keep some hope intact. But hope is very hard to do.
Norma’s shoulders have begun to slump. Her eyes often shift between what she is looking at and the ground. It’s cold comfort, but Norma imagines the deaths these non-babies would have had to die had they ever been born: car crashes, heart disease, cerebral hemorrhage. At least she has spared her non-babies all that dying.
And no one needs a baby. The survival of the species is not at risk, so Norma says nothing about all this wanting even when Ted, her own husband, acts like an asshole.
“I’m ovulating,” Norma will tell him while staring at the bedroom carpet, humiliated. And Ted groans from a place so low in his belly, a place where he stores the worst pains, as if to say any chore would be preferable, taking out the garbage, vacuuming the basement, regrouting the tub. Please. Norma stands on the sides of her feet to feel the ache all the way down in her skeleton.
In the bathroom stall, she zips her pants up, grabs her stomach, shaking it a little, poking her belly. “Hey,” she says in the empty bathroom. “Wake up, ovaries.”
There’s a message, graffiti on the wall. GIVE ME A CALL. 1-800-FUCKIN’A. She dials the number on her cell phone.
“Hello?”
“Hi. 1-800-FUCKIN’A?”
“No. Sorry. We’re 1-800-DUBL-INC. Doubles Incorporated, providing goods and services for the Procreation by Division Industries.”
“Procreation by division?”
“Yeah. You know. Like the amoebae.”
Norma hangs up so quickly it may be possible that the phone call never even happened.
*
On the way home Norma walks past a number of construction sites and some old farms where the grass grows as high as her waist. Strip malls, hills, grasshoppers, people, they all multiply. Norma bites her nails and spits the bits into the rounded, ripe fields. She leaves a trail of her DNA.
A rustling speeds up behind her like an enormous snake. Norma turns. A woman is pedaling quite furiously on a tiny BMX bike with fluorescent green tires, looking like some half-mad delivery person. Her chin is stuck out in front of her like an ape. Her face is sharp. The blades of her cheekbones have been accentuated by two brutish swaths of rouge. The woman wears her dark hair feathered back with a bandana rolled and tied across her forehead as if fashions had not changed since 1981. She looks tough, dirty, terrified. Perhaps even a little bit retarded. Her eyes are watery and distracted as an addict’s.
Though they are the only two people on the road, the woman stares straight ahead. She clenches her lips around a cigarette while she pedals, one hand on the handlebars. She doesn’t blink. She glides past Norma and is gone.
Creepy, but creepy like a humongous pile of insects crawling all over one another, a pile of insects Norma would want to stare at or poke with a long stick.