The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [49]
“This is Lucas Kizza, and I teach English here at Hazzard State Community College. I recently became aware of the fact that you are back in town and I wondered if you might be interested in meeting with some of my students to discuss the creative process and perhaps even read from your work. I’ve been very much impressed by your two novels and I think the students would benefit from talking to you. I can’t offer any financial compensation, but I hope you still might consider my offer. Thank you.”
Buster immediately looked at his parents. “Did you set this up?” he asked. Mr. and Mrs. Fang held up their hands as if to defend themselves from physical attack. “We did not,” Mr. Fang said. “I don’t even know who this Kizza guy is.”
“Then how did he come to learn that I was back in town?” Buster said.
“It’s a small town, Buster,” Mrs. Fang answered. “When you got here, you had a grotesquely swollen face. It attracted attention.”
When they first arrived back home, Buster, still adjusting to the high dosage of the medication he had given himself, woke in the van and demanded that they stop for fried chicken. “Buster, I don’t think solid food is a great idea yet,” his mother had told him, but Buster had leaned into the front of the van and reached for the steering wheel, saying, over and over in a strange monotone, “Fer-ide chick-hen.” The Fangs pulled into a Kentucky Fried Chicken ten minutes later and walked inside the restaurant. Buster swayed unsteadily as his parents directed him to a table. “What do you want?” they asked him. “Fer-ide chick-hen,” he said, “all-you-can-eat.” They left the table and returned a few minutes later with a breast, wing, thigh, and leg, a mound of gravy-soaked mashed potatoes, and a biscuit. Everyone in a five-table radius was staring at the Fangs by this point. Buster, oblivious, unpacked some bloodstained gauze from his mouth, picked up the chicken leg, extra crispy, and took a ravenous bite. He felt something come loose inside his mouth, his muscles stretched beyond comfort after so much time in atrophy, and he began to moan, a funeral dirge, dropping the leg back onto the tray. The barely chewed scrap of chicken fell from his mouth, stained a foamy red with Buster’s blood. “Okay,” Mr. Fang said, sweeping the tray off of the table, dumping it into the trash. “This little experiment is over. Let’s go home.” Buster tried to pack the gauze back into his mouth, but his mother and father were already carrying him into the parking lot. “I’m a monster,” Buster bellowed, and his parents did nothing to dissuade him of this belief.
“Well, I’m not going to do it,” Buster said.
“I think you should,” Annie said. Mr. and Mrs. Fang agreed.
Buster did not want to talk about writing. It had been years since his last novel had been published, a spectacular failure at that. His literary career was encased in ice, held in suspended animation, lost to future generations. And the thought of working on something new, in this house, surrounded by his family, seemed like the worst possible idea. His writing had become, like a stash of rare and troubling pornography, something that must be kept hidden, an obsession that other people would be mystified to discover.
Mr. and Mrs. Fang finished their drinks and returned to the living room to continue working on their latest project. Buster, his appetite having never appeared, gave up the pretense of eating and scraped the remaining food into the garbage. “See you later,” he said to Annie, who looked up from her rapidly diminishing plate of food and nodded.
Two hours into a nap that he had taken for no reason other than he was bored, Buster was shaken into consciousness, his muscles aching from the effort of staying asleep for so long, by his sister. “I found something weird,” she told him. “How weird?” Buster asked, unconvinced that it warranted getting out of bed. Annie held up a tiny oil painting, the size of a dental dam, which featured a small child with his arm, up to his elbow, inside the mouth of a wolf. Around them were gleaming surgical instruments,