They all looked, the firing squad and the uncles and the officer, and there in the dirt was half a cock. Shooo-rook, and the officer had cut off his own erection stuck down the throat of this dead woman. The zipper in the officer's pants was still erupting with his seed, exploding with blood. The officer reached one hand to where his cock lay coated with dirt. His knees buckled.

Then the uncles were dragging away his body to bury it. The next officer in charge of the camp, he wasn't so bad. Then the war was over, and the uncles came home. Without what happened, their family might not be. If that officer had lived, I might not exist.

That sound, their secret family code, the uncle told me. The sound means: Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things—they save you.

Outside the window, in the peach trees back of their house, the other cousins run. The aunts sit on the front porch, shelling peas. The uncles stand, their arms folded, arguing about the best way to paint a fence.

You might go to war, the uncle says. Or you might get cholera and die. Or, he says, and moves one hand sideways, left to right, in the air below his belt buckle: Shooo-rook . . .

12

It's Sister Vigilante who finds the body. She's coming down the lobby stairs, from the first-balcony foyer, from turning on the lights in the projection booth, when she stumbles over Miss America's pink exercise wheel gripped between two dead-white hands.

There, in the video camera's little viewing screen, the Duke of Vandals's stretched out at the foot of the lobby stairs, his fringed buckskin shirttails hanging out, his blond hair fanned out, facedown on the blue carpet. The pink plastic wheel is between his hands. One side of his face is stomped flat, the hair pasted down in every direction with blood.

The royalties to our story split one less way.

Sister Vigilante, she had the video camera. Getting around in the dark, Mr. Whittier had used a flashlight, but now the old batteries were as dead as him and Lady Baglady. Now Sister Vigilante used the camera spotlight, with its rechargeable batteries, to find her way up and down the stairs before dawn, and after dark.

“Subarachnoid hemorrhage,” Sister Vigilante says, her words recorded as she pans the camera over the body. “With partial avulsion of the left cerebellar hemisphere.” Saying, It's the most common sequela of massive head trauma. She zooms in for a close-up of the compound skull fracture, the bleeding inside the outer layers of the brain.

“As you press the skull in one spot,” she says, “the contents swell around that location and burst the skull in a rough circle.”

The camera roving over the sharp edges and dried red on the skull, Sister Vigilante's voice says, “The outbending is extensive . . .”

The camera comes up to show the rest of us, staggering into the lobby, yawning and squinting into the spotlight.

Mrs. Clark looks down at the sprawled buckskin body of the Duke, his cud of nicotine gum—plus all his teeth—knocked halfway across the lobby floor. And her inflated lips squeak out a little scream.

Miss America says, “The bastard.” She steps over to the body and kneels to pry the stiff, dead fingers off the black rubber grips of the exercise wheel. “He was trying to lose more weight than the rest of us,” she says. “The evil shit was doing aerobics to look . . . worse.”

As Miss America wrestles and kicks at the stiff fingers, Mrs. Clark says, “Rigor mortis.”

As Miss America pulls the body to one side, twisting the wheel to free it from the hands, as she pulls, the body turns faceup. The Duke of Vandals, his face is dark as a sunburn, but purple except for the tip of his nose. The tips of his chin and nose and the flat of his forehead are all blue-white.

“Livor mortis,” Mrs. Clark says. The blood settles to the lowest points of the body. Except where the face pressed into the carpet: at those points the weight of the body kept the capillaries collapsed, so no blood could pool inside.

From behind the video camera, Sister Vigilante says, “You sure seem to know a lot about dead bodies . . .”

And Mrs. Clark says, “Just what did you mean by partial avulsion of the left cerebellar hemisphere?”

The video camera still panning the body, taping over the death of Mr. Whittier, the voice of Sister Vigilante says, “That means the brains are leaking out.”

The pink wheel slips free from the Duke's hands, and the fingers seem to relax. Rigor mortis only goes away, Mrs. Clark says, as the body starts to decompose.

By now, Agent Tattletale has arrived, looking strange with both his eyes showing. Reverend Godless stands over the body. Mother Nature with her patchouli smell. The Matchmaker, his back teeth chewing around and round on a cheekful of spit and tobacco, he leans over for a better look.

The Matchmaker says, “Decomposition?”

And Mrs. Clark nods, frowning her silicone lips. After death, she says, the actin and myosin filaments of the muscles become complexed from the lack of adenosine-triphosphate production . . . She says, “You wouldn't understand.”

“Too bad,” Chef Assassin says. “If he wasn't so far gone, we might've had a big breakfast.”

Mother Nature says, “You're kidding.”

And the chef says, “No. Actually, I'm not.”

The Matchmaker is pop-eyed, squatting next to the body, digging in the back pants pocket.

Rubbing her hennaed hands together and yawning, Mother Nature says, “How can you be so awake?”

And, opening his mouth, wide, pointing a finger at the brown mess inside, the Matchmaker says, “Chaw . . .” He pulls out the wallet, slips out the paper money, and tucks the wallet back into the pocket, saying, “Kiss me, and you'll perk up, too.”

And, shaking her head, Mother Nature says, “No. Thanks.”

“Little girl,” the Matchmaker says. He spits a brown stream on the blue carpet, and he says, “you need to be a little sexier character, or no bankable actress is going to want to play you . . .”

And Saint Gut-Free pulls her away.

Sister Vigilante shuts off the camera and hands it back to Agent Tattletale.

To nobody. Or to everybody, Mrs. Clark says, “Who do you suspect?”

And Agent Tattletale says, “You.”

Mrs. Clark. She got up late last night. She found the Duke of Vandals alone, doing this stomach exercise. She crushed his skull. End of official story.

“You ever wonder,” Mrs. Clark says, “what you'll do after you sell your old life?”

And the Matchmaker licks the spit off his lips, saying, “What do you mean?” He hooks both thumbs behind the straps of his bib overalls.

“After you've sold this story,” Mrs. Clark says, “will you just look for a new villain?” She says, “For the rest of your life, will you be looking for someone new to blame everything on?”

And Agent Tattletale smiles, saying, “Relax. There's no point blaming one of us for this. There are victims,” he says, pointing a finger at his chest. “And there are villains,” he says, pointing a finger at her. “Don't create shades of gray that a mass audience can't follow.”

And Mrs. Clark says, “I did not kill this young man.”

And the Agent shrugs. He shoulders his camera, saying, “You want audience sympathy at this point, you're going to have to campaign for it.” His spotlight flickers bright, spotlighting her, and Agent Tattletale says, “Tell us one thing. Give us one good flashback to make the folks at home feel just a teeny bit sorry for you . . .”

The Nightmare Box

A Story by Mrs. Clark

The night before she disappeared, Cassandra cut off her eyelashes.