The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [48]
He pushed away the covers and tested the floorboards beneath his feet. His long underwear was baggy and unwashed, a uniform he refused to shed while he was in the house. As he walked down the hallway, the repetitive sound of a phonograph needle rubbing against the edge of a record filled the living room. His parents, still masked but sleeping, lay across the sofa. Scattered on the floor were books about fire manipulation and pyrotechnics, a fine coat of black ash across the coffee table. In the kitchen, his sister, two weeks returned to the Fang household, fried some bologna in one pan and an entire carton of eggs in another. While she moved the food around with a spatula, she took deep, serious sips from a sweating tumbler filled with vodka and tomato juice. “Morning,” she said, and Buster responded, “Yes.”
Buster slid two slices of bread into the toaster and, when they emerged toasted, he placed them on a plate and sat at the table, chewing softly, trying to keep the soggy scraps of dough out of the gap that used to hold his tooth. His sister walked over to the table, the spatula balancing a slice of bologna with a fried egg atop it, and deposited the meal on Buster’s plate. Buster, uncertain of when he last ate, mashed the food into a paste with his fork until the food resembled some kind of cut-rate pâté. His sister returned to the table with her own plate, the size of a ride cymbal, heaped to overflowing with bologna and eggs, charred pink and sickly white and bright yellow.
“You have any plans for the day?” Buster asked Annie.
“Watch some movies,” Annie replied, taking careful sips of the Bloody Mary. “Take it easy.”
“Me too,” Buster said. “Take it easy.”
They had been taking it easy since they had returned. Annie had settled into her old room, stocked a full bar under her bed, and Buster would pass her as they walked back and forth through the house, their parents working on various artistic projects in which the Fang children tried not to take any interest. Buster would share his medicine with Annie and they would watch silent films and read comic books and avoid any mention of the parts of their lives that existed outside of this house. Buster and his sister might have been turning into shut-ins but, thanks to his sister’s simple presence, they were now doing it together.
Their parents entered the kitchen and complained about the smell of grease in the air. “Just breathing the scent of fried bologna will ruin my stomach,” Mr. Fang said. Working as a team, the routine imprinted on their muscles, Mr. and Mrs. Fang assembled the makings of their breakfast: spinach leaves, orange juice, plain yogurt, bananas, blueberries, and ground flaxseed. They dumped the contents into the blender and, thirty seconds of whirring later, they came to the table with their glasses of purple-green liquid. They each took a heavy swig of the drink and then breathed deeply. Mrs. Fang reached across the table and lightly tapped her children’s hands. “This is nice,” she said.
The phone rang but no one moved to answer it. There was not one person that the Fangs wanted to speak to that wasn’t already sitting at the table. The machine took the call into its own hands, Mrs. Fang’s voice flatly saying, “The Fangs are dead. Leave a message after the tone and our ghosts will return your call.” Mrs. Fang, the one at the table, holding her smoothie, began to titter. “When did I leave that greeting?” she said.
Once the tone sounded, a man, seemingly thrown off by the silliness of the answering machine greeting, said, “Urmm . . . yes, this is a call for Mr. Buster Fang.” Buster immediately assumed that it was the hospital in Nebraska, looking for its money. How had they tracked him to Tennessee? he wondered. Had they placed a chip in his head when he had been unconscious? He touched the eye patch, concentrated, and tried to detect something alien inside