Dead Stones [manxman] [boyxboy]

Peanut Butter! Part I

After his phone call with Hao, Luke brindled up with the aftertaste of his awkwardness, dabbing him with a vague need for the metallic-tasting peanut butter cookies sold at the front counter.

Before he could stir, Brett informed him that Hao had amended his bargain, demanded the games be memorized in one week. Luke bristled, plucked on his moustache but chose to accept Hao’s viciousness. However, Zoë, red rising through her cheeks, hopped about Luke and demanded why she had to memorize stupid games of an old dead guy. Cindy replied Go Seigen was pushing ninety-nine years old and playing pro games would give her a better feel for gameplay, to which Zoë grumbled Hao was just a scaredy cat afraid to lose to a little girl.

Her blustering flew past Luke then back to his foggy mind, and his face lifted. “Let’s make it a game between us. If I memorize them, your mom makes me a dozen—two dozen peanut butter cookies. Homemade—I hate the carton stuff. And I’ll make you cookies too if you get them all.”

Zoë’s lips were puckering, the fine line of her brows edging low. “I don’t want cookies. I want an ice-cream cake.”

“Sure, a deal,” Luke said, happy he would not have to reclaim his kitchen from the dusts of the dead. Then he trotted off home, at last pleased but not to smiling, with the long lost pearl of a boon.

Memorizing the games was easy enough. These mechanical exercises had always been his forte like when his sister Carly died. His only chapter in the family tome of grief was locking himself in the bathroom and playing scales, nothing but scales on his cello. Or when he bought twenty different kinds of cheeses, and in one whirlwind of an afternoon, made twenty different plates of Mac and Cheese.

In the amber clove of his bedroom, replaying a memorized game on his laptop, Luke heard a groan beyond his shut door. He stiffened, his memory gagging over the twenty plates of Mac and Cheese, which had failed to please his mother’s rusty taste buds. The groan, again, trembled through the room. Then a vision unfolded of Lisa propping herself against the front door, cheeks like paper soggy with milk, her eyes tight and steady on Trent’s pickup backing away from the driveway for the last time.

Luke’s heart was rent, his mind astir. He closed his eyes and focused on the peaceful wisps floating behind the dark void of his eyelids. And still, through the sounds raging in his mind, the groan seemed to have solidified into a knock. “Luke, are you in there?”

Luke opened his eyes, and the orange tongue of his surfboard jutting out the closet coalesced into view. His heartbeat was escalating.

“Luke, are you there?”

Luke lifted himself off the chair and opened the door. It was Miranda, his house tenant, her face prickly fruit of pink lipstick and large teeth. She said, “Hey, can you watch him about an hour or so? I need to run some errands.” A slender shrub of a human divided from Miranda’s velvet trousers, jellybean eyes, his head an upside-down bowl of red hair. “Thank you so much. I appreciate it.” Already her voice was fluttering from down the corridors.

A distant door bang ringing through the walls, Luke peered at Jake standing with his mouth agape. Luke peered at his eyes, at the flat nose, then the open mouth—a spider could crawl out of its pink cave. He placed one hand on the head and another under the chin and tried to close the jaw shut. The mouth yielded under pressure to a wan close. Luke, satisfied, stood aside, but the mouth fell open. He closed it again, and when pleased with mouth seamed shut, returned to his desk. Just as he took a seat, the groan whispered behind his ears, jerking him out of the chair and to glaring at Jake’s squirming face.

His chest was tight, but his mind contorted for the order of reason. Yes, yes, phantasms of his mother long dead … misfiring of neurons… ghosts of the chemical kind. And the kid was shriveling smaller by the minute. Luke flurried to him and stooped over the small face drowning in a murky sea. Those bronzed pupils could be like Lisa’s. Suddenly he pulled Jake inside and shut the door purposely and scrambled him over to his bed. Flumping beside the kid, Luke wondered timidly whether the chemical imbalances would reset if he obeyed his mother’s instructions to scatter her ashes into the ocean.

He shivered with a deathly cold, and his spirits snapped shut in apoplectic protest. There was no way he would allow the hungry maws of the Pacific to claim her ashes, for it belonged with Carly’s ashes in her room. Lisa had cried for her so many nights and never forgiven his psychopathic act. Now the mother and child, he had separated cruelly, were together at last. She most certainly had to be happy now.

Luke drew to Jake’s mouth again agape, and damned himself for seeming strange again. A smile should to mend his dour ways, but his smiles were never human looking.

“I suggest we play go,” Luke said grimly.

Jake stared.

“Go then.”