Plumi Moos

by Shauna Friesen

It gets to be that my favorite days are the ones when Loretta Lutz thinks I am her son.

I am knocking on doors for a quarter cup of sugar the first time she makes the mistake.

I don’t need the sugar. I just want something to do after school besides go home.

From the cul-de-sac, the old woman’s house might be easily taken for abandoned. The windows are mostly papered and the porchlight sputters like the strobe on the fire alarm I pulled after class last month. The overgrown garden sags under a stratum of fresh snow and the rusted mailbox is so stuffed with letters it won’t close.

I track the glitter to her sagging porch and brace myself before rapping twice with a fist.

“Who’s there?” I hear a rasping voice after a whole minute passes.

A deadbolt grinds.

A chain rattles.

The door is a creaking jaw that exhales a warm, stinking breath as it opens.

Before I can fumble the measuring cup from my coat pocket, Loretta Lutz releases a croaking, inhuman shriek and yanks me forward into an embrace.

“Allister!” she howls.

My chest instantly swells with terror. I am rigid in her arms, steeled at every joint in my shock. I can’t seem to breathe. The old woman reels back, gripping my shoulders and blinking rounded, milky eyes at me. My flinch is automatic when she raises her bony hand, but it is to stroke my hair gently and hold me close again.

“Where on earth have you been, Allister?” she demands, graveled voice quavering like she is close to tears. I am desperate to shove her away, to call her crazy, and take off running, but her skeletal frame feels so fragile I am afraid she’ll fall to pieces if I move at all. “I’ve been waiting up for you, sweetheart,” she goes on. “I was getting worried. I’m glad you’re home.”

And I’m not sure why, but there is a hitch in my exhale, an itching, heating of my eyes in their sockets as she continues to hold me. Like if I allowed myself, I could cry, too.

Maybe because as much as I try to, I can’t remember the last time I was hugged.

*****

Loretta keeps me tucked so close against her side that I feel her jutting ribs through her dress. The heat is nearly unbearable, and the rancid smell intensifies as she steers me down the dim throat of her hall. When my eyes adjust to the low light, I am startled to see the resemblance I share with her son. Pictures of him are pasted to every wall, frames propped against every surface, his trophies lining shelves and window ledges. He is a newborn with my dark eyes. A toddler on a tricycle, uncanny mop of curls on his head. He is close to my age, twelve or so, a blue ribbon held high or a toad in his palm or a baseball bat propped on his shoulder, and I tongue the gap between my own front teeth that matches his.

At the hall’s end, my stomach drops. Allister Lutz poses in an infantry uniform, eighteen at least. He looks like an older me, a crew-cut, broad-shouldered, bully-boy big brother I don’t have, scowling in the portrait hung beside a tri-fold flag and string of military tags.

“I’m making your favorite,” Loretta announces, spinning me to face her, her eyes cloudy and her smile all silver fillings and missing molars. “For your birthday.”

My collar is already damp with sweat.

*****

The sick-sweet stench of decay lingers so thick in the kitchen that every breath I draw tastes like a bite of spoiled fruit. Drain flies jitter in the air. I clamp a hand over my mouth to keep from choking on the rank.

Loretta is oblivious, shuffling through her cupboards. “Tell me about your day, sweetheart. How was school?”

I sputter a cough. “Um.” I can’t recall the last time the question was put to me. “It was okay.”

Loretta sets a saucepan at the burner that is blackened at its bottom by something burnt. If she notices the way the cream she pours comes out in plopping lumps from its carton, she does not let on. I watch in uneasy fascination as she sprinkles cinnamon, dumps granulated sugar, gathers boxes from cupboards overflowing with stacked packages of raisins and prunes and dried apricots.

It is not until a drawer scrapes and the metal of a blade chinks that my apprehension sharpens to panic, and I stumble back against a wall in fear. Something soft as dogshit gives under my heel, sticking in a lump to the bottom of my boot.

“Want to help me chop, Allie?” Loretta says, gnat-haloed when she turns, smile reassuring, a knife brandished in each hand.

I catapult up the hall for the door, falling over my feet in the snow outside and scrambling up again, only stopping when I’ve put a whole block of houses between us.

When I lift my shoe, I have to fingernail a sticky black prune from the tread.

*****

A week passes before I return to her house.

Three before I dare to knock on the door again.

I sag against Loretta Lutz this time when she pulls me close. “Allister. Why are you knocking, sweetheart?”

My sigh is one of relief.

“You’re back just in time,” Loretta says, giving my shoulders a squeeze. “I’m making your favorite.”

I try to hide my grimace.

It is like stepping into a kiln when she pulls me inside, the furnace at an even more oppressive degree than I remember. I tumble ahead of Loretta, making straight for the kitchen drawer to be the first to draw a knife. “I’ll do all the chopping,” I say quickly, back pressed to the cabinetry, my knuckles white around the blade’s grip.

Loretta smiles and tousles my hair. “Only if you want to. It is your birthday.”

The crate of lemons she gives me to halve and juice are velveteened in gray-green and burst into slime at the slightest touch. Prunes are pulled from a cupboard for me to pit and quarter, mossed in a mold that blacks my fingers. When I flip the box, the expiration date reads from decades before I was born, but I don’t mention it.

Between swatting flies and making clumsy, uneven cuts, I am sure to keep a close watch of the old woman’s jilting movements beside me.

Loretta measures cinnamon with a teaspoon. She shakes a box of raisins over her stewing saucepan, and they come out in a single, gummy brick, landing in hot milk with a glop and a slosh. She takes out the cinnamon and measures it again. Puts it away. Thinks hard and takes it out, again.

Distracted, I catch a knuckle in the steel as I slice, knife clattering, and a curse coming from under my breath. I spin away to suck the fat garnet of blood beading on my finger.

“Allister. What is it? Did you hurt yourself?”

“No. It’s nothing,” I snap, stumbling away when she steps closer.

“Let me see.”

I am slow to offer my hand, and when I do, Loretta examines it like something precious, kissing my fingers as I stare in bewilderment.

“It’s not so bad. I’ll get this cleaned up for you.”

“I can do it myself,” I argue, hot with embarrassment.

Loretta rummages in a cupboard even as I protest. She holds my hand under the gentle stream of the faucet to wash the blood away, and something like a pit lodges in my throat that I cannot swallow. She smooths a bandage over the small cut, and when she is finished, I don’t quite understand why, but I burst into tears.

*****

We sit down with porcelain bowls, ladled to their brims with what looks like vomit.

“Happy birthday, Allie.”

I force a smile.

“Go on.” Loretta nods.

A line of sweat runnels down my temple. I reach for the spoon with my freshly bandaged hand, trying not to gag.

I almost choke on the sour slime of it.

On my way home, I grip my sides, doubling over to retch all the contents of my roiling stomach into the snow.

*****

It is not long before I am at Lorreta Lutz’s door every day after school. Some days she is feral, foaming at her mouth, shrieking, and waving her broom so I am vaulting over banks of snow to sprint away.

Some days I am familiar, but she cannot quite place me no matter how she stares and stares.

On the lucky afternoons, I am Allister, and I let my look-alike mother hold me on her porch steps for as long as we can bear the cold. Inside, I let her measure me against the notches in the doorframe, holding my breath while she nicks my height into the wood with a butcher knife. I let her give me dollars from her billfold, let her trim my hair crooked, let her put the project from my shop class on display on her mantle. When she lights birthday candles, I pick the fruit flies from between my teeth before grinning wide for her Polaroid camera. When she offers seconds of her sickening soup, I hold out my bowl. When we scrub the dishes together, I wait until she is looking away to drag the blade in the sink all the way across my palm. Her gasp of concern, when she spots the bright crimson of the cut, is a relief, and I sit back unresisting while she makes a fuss over the wound.

Afterward, she tucks me in for bed the same sweet way I’ve seen the moms on television programs do.

“Will you tell me a story?” I whisper, Allister’s quilts at my chin despite the thermostat running at its maximum. “From when I was younger?”

And she tells me how she used to sing to me when I was in her stomach. She tells me about the abandoned, baby bluebird I rescued, the bicycle she taught me to ride, the wings she sewed me when I got the part of the archangel, Gabriel, in the church pageant.

She tells me about my first time seeing the ocean, and though I haven’t been, I can taste the salt of it at the back of my throat, feel it scorching in my eyes.

“Do you remember when you came down with that awful fever? I was going out of my mind. Thinking I was going to lose you,” Loretta says, and she can perfectly recite every bargain she made with God before her son’s temperature finally broke. “I would’ve done anything.”

I turn to the wall to keep her from seeing the tears that blur my vision.

She kisses my shoulder and shuts out the light. After I slip out and run home, I am up all night clutching a belly that feels like it is full of knives, vomiting violently into the toilet, flushing regurgitated raisins and apricot chunks down the pipes.

*****

“Where is he? Where’s Allister?” Spittle flies when Loretta Lutz screeches the words. She has an arm held out to bar her entry, and she is craning her neck to look past me to the street, her creamy eyes wild, her questions growing more and more frantic. “Where did he go? Why won’t he come home?”

“I’m right here,” I tell her, and make no effort to conceal my desperation. It was a bad day. I really need to be Allister today. More than anything.

I almost get down on my knees to beg.

Loretta Lutz slams her door in my face.

*****

The next time Lorretta Lutz and I cook her strange stew together, I gulp sips straight out of the carton of curdled milk. I scarf down whole handfuls of the rancid dried fruits I chop. Test spoonfuls of our concoction as we work. Shovel down bowl after bowl of the oozing, lukewarm muck, until the pain in my gut is unbearable, until I am sick in the washbasin, and Loretta finds me sweating and shivering and fetaled on the floor. She tsk-tsks and worries and pushes my damp hair back to feel my clammy forehead.

“I think it’s a fever,” I manage to murmur. “Like before.”

*****

Weeks at a time pass without Loretta recognizing me, and when she finally does call me by Allister and allow me inside, the house is so full of gnats I could bite mouthfuls of them out of the hot air. Every step I take down her hall is squelching, the soles of my shoes caked in prune by the time I reach her kitchen. Stove burners are on, the faucet is running, the bar of soap has a bite taken out of it. The cupboards hang open, and everything has been swept from the shelves. Bags of sugar, flour, and rice have been upturned onto the table.

“Allie. I got you clementines,” Loretta says, pointing to a box in the corner. “I know how much you love them.”

The mass of mold and sludge inside the box is unrecognizable when I lift the flap. The realization strikes me as forcefully as the putrid stench. When I glance back at her, Loretta Lutz is digging through her silverware drawer, forks and spoons clattering onto the floor.

“Where is it? Where is it?” she mutters under her breath.

“Don’t you have anyone to look after you?” I ask.

*****

On the last day, I see Loretta Lutz, I think she might be dead.

My worry knots to dread after knocking on her door three days in a row without an answer, and on the fourth I circle the perimeter of her house, jamming my nose frantically against every window, calling her name, rapping at the panes. When I spot her between the chinks of a kitchen curtain, my stomach drops.

She is lying on the floor.

She isn’t moving.

To shatter the glass, I claw a stone out of the snow, wheel back, and bash with all the force I can muster. My hands get sliced to bleeding hoisting myself through the shards.

Loretta is still breathing but in shallow, rasping breaths. She is in a fog of flies, eyes closed, lips cracked and dry, her leg bent at an unnatural angle. I catch the stale scent of urine and excrement in the sweltering room and wonder how long she has been lying there alone. How long she might have kept lying there before anyone besides me noticed. A nearby chair is toppled, and a trail of spoiled fruits is slimed to jelly in her wake from trying to drag herself toward the telephone.

I go to lift the receiver from its mount, and my hands shake. Blood smears. I dial for an ambulance. When I give the house number to the operator, my voice quivers and breaks.

“Please. Promise you’ll take really good care of her.”

I wait with Loretta until I can hear sirens approaching, gripping her skeletal hand, crying into her sleeve, and leaving the front door swinging open for the paramedics before I duck away. From the shrubs in the next yard, I watch her being carried from the house on a stretcher.

 *****

 The next week, when I am knocking on doors for a quarter cup of sugar, I ask for cinnamon, too. Milk. Raisins. Dried apricots. Prunes.

“Prunes? Why would I have prunes laying around, kid? What on earth are you making?”

“It’s a family recipe.”

BIO: Shauna Friesen (she/her) is a mountain climber, rock collector, and writer living in Los Angeles, CA. Her words have been featured in Gone Lawn, Pithead Chapel, Chestnut Review, Foglifter Journal, and Flash Fiction Magazine, among others. Twitter: @friesenwrites Instagram: @shaunaexplores