The Little One
By
Scott Urban
Deirdre was sorry she had mentioned anything to Jeremy about going to De-Lish for lunch. By the time she had finished Saturday morning errands–clothes from the dry cleaners, books back to the library, payment on the phone bill–she was ready for nothing more than returning home and seeing if her son would hold still long enough to curl up with her and let them both enjoy a mid-day nap. But Jeremy knew that De-Lish was offering a Rockin’ Roller metal collector’s car with their children’s meals, and he had to collect all eight of them. He had seven–the special silver-flecked roadster remained elusive.
With what seemed like the fiftieth repetition of “Please, Mommy, pleeeeze,” Deirdre discovered her fortitude was weaker than a three-and-a-half year old’s. She turned to the right into the restaurant parking lot.
She told herself it wouldn’t be so bad. Not only did De-Lish offer fairly decent fast food at low prices, they also provided an outdoor children’s play area where she could turn Jeremy loose to run himself ragged for perhaps an hour. She could catch up on some phone calls and texts her friends had sent earlier in the morning. While she publicly protested her girlfriends trying to set her up with a new man, she had to admit she secretly relished each new prospect, wondering if he might be ‘the one.’ (Especially since Hector, by walking out on her, had proven himself to be the ‘Number One Bastard.’)
Oh sure, she admonished herself. On the far side of thirty–with a son and a shit job–I’m the catch someone’s waiting to make.
Jeremy tugged Deirdre’s hand as they crossed the parking lot and entered De-Lish. Its interior was a garish palette of neon yellows and reds that made her eyes throb. But it’s a visual appetizer for young boys! Jeremy jumped up and down. Deirdre asked him if he needed to go to the bathroom before they ate.
He vigorously shook his blond curls. “No! I’m just excited!”
“Are you sure? You haven’t gone all morning.”
“Mom! Please!”
They were ahead of the lunch hour rush and walked immediately to the service counter. Deirdre knew by now to check which car was coming with the meal. Jeremy wouldn’t eat if he didn’t get the toy he had his heart set on. Luckily, on this last weekend of the promotion, Jeremy would be able to complete his collection with the silver roadster. Deirdre ordered a salad (to try and control the carbs) and a vanilla shake (to prove to herself it didn’t matter).
Jeremy danced around her legs as she poured drinks from the soda fountain, gathered napkins and straws, and squirted ketchup into tiny paper cups.
“Can we eat outside?” Jeremy was already pushing the door that led to the gated play area.
Deirdre nodded. “Sure. Why not.” Rain was forecast for later that evening, but for the moment the autumn sky was blue with clouds like giants’ pillows on the horizon. The breeze was cool, but in the sun one didn’t need a jacket.
There weren’t many customers in the play area. A young couple with a baby in a stroller were throwing away their trash and gathering their belongings. A woman sat alone at a table, looking up at the plastic modular climbing gym. Her son or daughter must already be playing inside it.
Deirdre and Jeremy located their preferred table. While he ate, Jeremy held his new car in his right hand and vroom-ed it through the air, swooping over cheeseburger wrapper, fries, and serving tray. Deirdre couldn’t help but smile at his un-self-conscious pleasure and wondered when was the last time something so small had made her so happy.
It might have been when Hector showed me the engagement ring. But aside from her son, that first gift would practically be the last. And the ring was years in the past.
Her son’s legs were pumping up and down as if working a treadle. It’s almost as if it hurts him to sit still, his mother thought.
“Mom, I’m done. Can I go play?”
“Can’t you finish your fries?”
“Let me play for a little bit, then I’ll come back and eat the rest.”
“All right. Put your shoes in the cubby over there. Remember to go down the slide the right way. I don’t want you to get hurt.” Even as Deirdre spoke these words, Jeremy had slipped out of his sneakers and was running away from her.
She swept the hair out of her eyes. Her gaze fell on the other solitary mother she had noticed earlier. Noticed–but not truly seen. Because now, as Deirdre’s gaze took in the figure, she was struck by the woman’s dissonance. She simply did not fit the surroundings. The woman was covered, head to toe, in a garment fashioned from a coarse, dark brown fabric. Deirdre had initially taken her for Arabic or Indian, and the garb a burkha or sari. There was something wrong, either with the robe’s drape or the woman’s physiognomy itself. She bulged, not at her bust and hips, but her shoulders and her shins. Her hair was covered, but her face was exposed. Her complexion was swarthy. Her eyes were too far apart, and her mouth was set at an oblique angle.
Perhaps she was born with some sort of syndrome, Deirdre considered.
Jeremy ran into the circular port of the climbing gym’s ascending tube. It looked as if he were being scooped up by a clichéd 50s UFO about to rocket to Mars or Venus.
Well, our kids will meet in that big red bulb at the heart of the gym, Deirdre thought. Might as well be friendly.
“So,” she called out, nodding to the other woman at the same time, “is your son or daughter up in the climbing gym?”
The woman turned. Her eyes rolled in Deirdre’s direction without meeting her gaze. “Yes,” she agreed. “The little one is already up there.”
The greasy food in Deirdre’s stomach threatened to rise back up her esophagus. The woman’s features, viewed straight on, were even more odd, more out of alignment. And yet Deirdre had no idea how she would describe them, later, to her friends.
The woman’s accent was distinctly foreign; her intonation, inverse from the expected. Not mid-Eastern or Hispanic. Perhaps South Seas?
The ascending tube had small plastic portholes in its side. Deirdre watched Jeremy climb to the onion-shaped red bulb in the center of the climbing apparatus, some thirteen feet in the air. The bulb had portholes too, but they were set high to catch the sun; one couldn’t see into them from ground level. The sound of Jeremy’s clomping footsteps came to a halt. Then there came a shrill, inarticulate cry. Deirdre wasn’t sure whether it came from her son or not. At the same time the red bulb began to shudder, the entire apparatus jiggling against its moorings.
Deirdre sprang to her feet. “Jeremy? Jeremy! It’s Mom! What’s happening?”
She sprinted to the climbing tube’s opening. She nearly gave herself whiplash as she yanked her head back from a rank, fetid odor oozing from the interior. The smell was more than young children’s sweaty socks; it was even beyond garbage left in the sun too long.
“Jeremy! Talk to me!”
She straightened up. The onion bulb continued to quiver. She turned to the other woman.
“What’s happening? What is your child doing to my son?”
The woman’s face cracked open with a diagonal smile. “Yes, yes.” She nodded vigorously. “Your boy and the little one. They are playing.”
Bitch is crazier than a barbed-wire toothbrush! Deirdre kicked the bottom edge of the climbing tube. “Jeremy! Get down here right now!”
No answer, and the red bulb’s rocking had ceased.
The words flashed like neon in her mind: Bad. Really bad. She ran back into the De-Lish serving area. This is worse than Hector-walking-out-on-you bad. The noon-time crowd had arrived, and the lines waiting to get up to the counter were six or seven people deep. Deirdre elbowed her way between mousy wives and clingy kids, mohawked bikers and tramp-stamped girlfriends. People gaped at her as if a carnival freak had been dropped in their midst. “Wait in line like everyone else,” someone stage-whispered. She positioned herself beside a balding man with a paunchy gut.
“I’m so sorry,” Deirdre told both the customer and the server. “My boy went up the climbing gym outside. I think something happened to him. Something bad. Can you please come help me?”
The server, who didn’t even look old enough to legally hold down the minimum wage job, looked from the man to Deirdre and back again, as if to say, Can you believe what I have to put up with? “Ma’am, what would you like me to do about it?”
Deirdre’s jaw dropped. “Can you come outside with me, please? Can you climb up in the gym and see if he’s all right?”
The server held his hands out toward the crowd, as if Deirdre hadn’t perceived them already. “Lady, as you can see, I’m a little tied up right now. If you’re worried about your son, tell him to slide down to the bottom. If he doesn’t come, you can climb up inside. It’ll hold you. Now, sir, what would you like to drink?”
Deirdre made a low, frustrated, animal growl in her throat and slapped the counter. She turned and pushed her way back outside. The solitary mother still sat at her table, now looking away across the parking lot.
“Jeremy! Jer! Answer me this second! Where are you?”
No response.
Deirdre swung toward the brown woman. “Your son hurt my boy! You’d better get them both down here right now!” She pulled out her cell phone. “Do it, or I’ll call the cops!”
The woman cocked her head, as if she didn’t understand what Deirdre had said. “Yes, they are playing so nicely. It’s very good.”
Her vision was going red. She drew her hand back to slap some sense into this feeble geek. Realizing how that would appear to the police, she dropped her arm and stalked to the climbing tube. She opened her phone as she lowered herself to the ground. She tapped out 9-1-1 as she forced herself to ignore the cesspool smell. Using her knees and free elbow, she awkwardly maneuvered herself into the tube.
The line rang on the other end. Focus on Jeremy. Her rear rubbed against the tube’s upper arch. A cool voice said in her ear, “Nine-one-one, what’s the nature of your emergency?”
“My name is Deirdre Blanks. I’m at the De-Lish on Chesapeake. Something’s happened to my son Jeremy.”
The climbing tube made a curve to the left. She couldn’t see what was coming up.
Deirdre heard an odd chortling sound, like a can-opener breaking through reluctant metal. It wasn’t coming from her cell phone. It was coming from outside the plastic tube. That woman! she realized. She’s–she’s laughing at me!
“Is your son there, ma’am?”
“He–he climbed up inside the kids’ play equipment. Something’s wrong. He won’t answer me. I think he’s hurt.”
“Can you see your son, ma’am? Is he breathing?”
“I’m climbing up inside too. I’ll be there in a second.” The yellow tube disgorged into the red onion bulb. Deirdre poked her head over the edge.
In another part of town, the 9-1-1 operator stifled a curse and yanked the earpiece away from her head. The caller’s scream temporarily deafened the hearing in her right ear. Her fumbling fingers shoved the earpiece back in her left ear. She could discern plastic clatter–the sound of a cell phone sliding back down a playground chute.
By the time the police arrived, the manager had blocked off the empty play area. A small crowd thronged the vertical iron bars of the fence. “But I want to play!” cried one toddler to her mother. The manager held a cell phone that was not his own. The eyes of the onlookers were drawn to the spreading pool just below the slide’s bottom lip, fed by steady crimson drops.
Scott Urban has had fiction, poetry, and reviews published throughout numerous print and electronic outlets. Recent work has appeared in THE HORROR ZINE, MIDNIGHT TALES, BINDWEED, FALLING STAR, and BURNING WORD ONLINE. With Martin H. Greenberg, he co-edited the DAW anthology THE CONSPIRACY FILES. His early fiction is collected as BLOODY SHOW, available through Amazon’s Kindle Store. A former public school teacher and administrator, he now writes full-time in southeastern Ohio.
By
Scott Urban
Deirdre was sorry she had mentioned anything to Jeremy about going to De-Lish for lunch. By the time she had finished Saturday morning errands–clothes from the dry cleaners, books back to the library, payment on the phone bill–she was ready for nothing more than returning home and seeing if her son would hold still long enough to curl up with her and let them both enjoy a mid-day nap. But Jeremy knew that De-Lish was offering a Rockin’ Roller metal collector’s car with their children’s meals, and he had to collect all eight of them. He had seven–the special silver-flecked roadster remained elusive.
With what seemed like the fiftieth repetition of “Please, Mommy, pleeeeze,” Deirdre discovered her fortitude was weaker than a three-and-a-half year old’s. She turned to the right into the restaurant parking lot.
She told herself it wouldn’t be so bad. Not only did De-Lish offer fairly decent fast food at low prices, they also provided an outdoor children’s play area where she could turn Jeremy loose to run himself ragged for perhaps an hour. She could catch up on some phone calls and texts her friends had sent earlier in the morning. While she publicly protested her girlfriends trying to set her up with a new man, she had to admit she secretly relished each new prospect, wondering if he might be ‘the one.’ (Especially since Hector, by walking out on her, had proven himself to be the ‘Number One Bastard.’)
Oh sure, she admonished herself. On the far side of thirty–with a son and a shit job–I’m the catch someone’s waiting to make.
Jeremy tugged Deirdre’s hand as they crossed the parking lot and entered De-Lish. Its interior was a garish palette of neon yellows and reds that made her eyes throb. But it’s a visual appetizer for young boys! Jeremy jumped up and down. Deirdre asked him if he needed to go to the bathroom before they ate.
He vigorously shook his blond curls. “No! I’m just excited!”
“Are you sure? You haven’t gone all morning.”
“Mom! Please!”
They were ahead of the lunch hour rush and walked immediately to the service counter. Deirdre knew by now to check which car was coming with the meal. Jeremy wouldn’t eat if he didn’t get the toy he had his heart set on. Luckily, on this last weekend of the promotion, Jeremy would be able to complete his collection with the silver roadster. Deirdre ordered a salad (to try and control the carbs) and a vanilla shake (to prove to herself it didn’t matter).
Jeremy danced around her legs as she poured drinks from the soda fountain, gathered napkins and straws, and squirted ketchup into tiny paper cups.
“Can we eat outside?” Jeremy was already pushing the door that led to the gated play area.
Deirdre nodded. “Sure. Why not.” Rain was forecast for later that evening, but for the moment the autumn sky was blue with clouds like giants’ pillows on the horizon. The breeze was cool, but in the sun one didn’t need a jacket.
There weren’t many customers in the play area. A young couple with a baby in a stroller were throwing away their trash and gathering their belongings. A woman sat alone at a table, looking up at the plastic modular climbing gym. Her son or daughter must already be playing inside it.
Deirdre and Jeremy located their preferred table. While he ate, Jeremy held his new car in his right hand and vroom-ed it through the air, swooping over cheeseburger wrapper, fries, and serving tray. Deirdre couldn’t help but smile at his un-self-conscious pleasure and wondered when was the last time something so small had made her so happy.
It might have been when Hector showed me the engagement ring. But aside from her son, that first gift would practically be the last. And the ring was years in the past.
Her son’s legs were pumping up and down as if working a treadle. It’s almost as if it hurts him to sit still, his mother thought.
“Mom, I’m done. Can I go play?”
“Can’t you finish your fries?”
“Let me play for a little bit, then I’ll come back and eat the rest.”
“All right. Put your shoes in the cubby over there. Remember to go down the slide the right way. I don’t want you to get hurt.” Even as Deirdre spoke these words, Jeremy had slipped out of his sneakers and was running away from her.
She swept the hair out of her eyes. Her gaze fell on the other solitary mother she had noticed earlier. Noticed–but not truly seen. Because now, as Deirdre’s gaze took in the figure, she was struck by the woman’s dissonance. She simply did not fit the surroundings. The woman was covered, head to toe, in a garment fashioned from a coarse, dark brown fabric. Deirdre had initially taken her for Arabic or Indian, and the garb a burkha or sari. There was something wrong, either with the robe’s drape or the woman’s physiognomy itself. She bulged, not at her bust and hips, but her shoulders and her shins. Her hair was covered, but her face was exposed. Her complexion was swarthy. Her eyes were too far apart, and her mouth was set at an oblique angle.
Perhaps she was born with some sort of syndrome, Deirdre considered.
Jeremy ran into the circular port of the climbing gym’s ascending tube. It looked as if he were being scooped up by a clichéd 50s UFO about to rocket to Mars or Venus.
Well, our kids will meet in that big red bulb at the heart of the gym, Deirdre thought. Might as well be friendly.
“So,” she called out, nodding to the other woman at the same time, “is your son or daughter up in the climbing gym?”
The woman turned. Her eyes rolled in Deirdre’s direction without meeting her gaze. “Yes,” she agreed. “The little one is already up there.”
The greasy food in Deirdre’s stomach threatened to rise back up her esophagus. The woman’s features, viewed straight on, were even more odd, more out of alignment. And yet Deirdre had no idea how she would describe them, later, to her friends.
The woman’s accent was distinctly foreign; her intonation, inverse from the expected. Not mid-Eastern or Hispanic. Perhaps South Seas?
The ascending tube had small plastic portholes in its side. Deirdre watched Jeremy climb to the onion-shaped red bulb in the center of the climbing apparatus, some thirteen feet in the air. The bulb had portholes too, but they were set high to catch the sun; one couldn’t see into them from ground level. The sound of Jeremy’s clomping footsteps came to a halt. Then there came a shrill, inarticulate cry. Deirdre wasn’t sure whether it came from her son or not. At the same time the red bulb began to shudder, the entire apparatus jiggling against its moorings.
Deirdre sprang to her feet. “Jeremy? Jeremy! It’s Mom! What’s happening?”
She sprinted to the climbing tube’s opening. She nearly gave herself whiplash as she yanked her head back from a rank, fetid odor oozing from the interior. The smell was more than young children’s sweaty socks; it was even beyond garbage left in the sun too long.
“Jeremy! Talk to me!”
She straightened up. The onion bulb continued to quiver. She turned to the other woman.
“What’s happening? What is your child doing to my son?”
The woman’s face cracked open with a diagonal smile. “Yes, yes.” She nodded vigorously. “Your boy and the little one. They are playing.”
Bitch is crazier than a barbed-wire toothbrush! Deirdre kicked the bottom edge of the climbing tube. “Jeremy! Get down here right now!”
No answer, and the red bulb’s rocking had ceased.
The words flashed like neon in her mind: Bad. Really bad. She ran back into the De-Lish serving area. This is worse than Hector-walking-out-on-you bad. The noon-time crowd had arrived, and the lines waiting to get up to the counter were six or seven people deep. Deirdre elbowed her way between mousy wives and clingy kids, mohawked bikers and tramp-stamped girlfriends. People gaped at her as if a carnival freak had been dropped in their midst. “Wait in line like everyone else,” someone stage-whispered. She positioned herself beside a balding man with a paunchy gut.
“I’m so sorry,” Deirdre told both the customer and the server. “My boy went up the climbing gym outside. I think something happened to him. Something bad. Can you please come help me?”
The server, who didn’t even look old enough to legally hold down the minimum wage job, looked from the man to Deirdre and back again, as if to say, Can you believe what I have to put up with? “Ma’am, what would you like me to do about it?”
Deirdre’s jaw dropped. “Can you come outside with me, please? Can you climb up in the gym and see if he’s all right?”
The server held his hands out toward the crowd, as if Deirdre hadn’t perceived them already. “Lady, as you can see, I’m a little tied up right now. If you’re worried about your son, tell him to slide down to the bottom. If he doesn’t come, you can climb up inside. It’ll hold you. Now, sir, what would you like to drink?”
Deirdre made a low, frustrated, animal growl in her throat and slapped the counter. She turned and pushed her way back outside. The solitary mother still sat at her table, now looking away across the parking lot.
“Jeremy! Jer! Answer me this second! Where are you?”
No response.
Deirdre swung toward the brown woman. “Your son hurt my boy! You’d better get them both down here right now!” She pulled out her cell phone. “Do it, or I’ll call the cops!”
The woman cocked her head, as if she didn’t understand what Deirdre had said. “Yes, they are playing so nicely. It’s very good.”
Her vision was going red. She drew her hand back to slap some sense into this feeble geek. Realizing how that would appear to the police, she dropped her arm and stalked to the climbing tube. She opened her phone as she lowered herself to the ground. She tapped out 9-1-1 as she forced herself to ignore the cesspool smell. Using her knees and free elbow, she awkwardly maneuvered herself into the tube.
The line rang on the other end. Focus on Jeremy. Her rear rubbed against the tube’s upper arch. A cool voice said in her ear, “Nine-one-one, what’s the nature of your emergency?”
“My name is Deirdre Blanks. I’m at the De-Lish on Chesapeake. Something’s happened to my son Jeremy.”
The climbing tube made a curve to the left. She couldn’t see what was coming up.
Deirdre heard an odd chortling sound, like a can-opener breaking through reluctant metal. It wasn’t coming from her cell phone. It was coming from outside the plastic tube. That woman! she realized. She’s–she’s laughing at me!
“Is your son there, ma’am?”
“He–he climbed up inside the kids’ play equipment. Something’s wrong. He won’t answer me. I think he’s hurt.”
“Can you see your son, ma’am? Is he breathing?”
“I’m climbing up inside too. I’ll be there in a second.” The yellow tube disgorged into the red onion bulb. Deirdre poked her head over the edge.
In another part of town, the 9-1-1 operator stifled a curse and yanked the earpiece away from her head. The caller’s scream temporarily deafened the hearing in her right ear. Her fumbling fingers shoved the earpiece back in her left ear. She could discern plastic clatter–the sound of a cell phone sliding back down a playground chute.
By the time the police arrived, the manager had blocked off the empty play area. A small crowd thronged the vertical iron bars of the fence. “But I want to play!” cried one toddler to her mother. The manager held a cell phone that was not his own. The eyes of the onlookers were drawn to the spreading pool just below the slide’s bottom lip, fed by steady crimson drops.
Scott Urban has had fiction, poetry, and reviews published throughout numerous print and electronic outlets. Recent work has appeared in THE HORROR ZINE, MIDNIGHT TALES, BINDWEED, FALLING STAR, and BURNING WORD ONLINE. With Martin H. Greenberg, he co-edited the DAW anthology THE CONSPIRACY FILES. His early fiction is collected as BLOODY SHOW, available through Amazon’s Kindle Store. A former public school teacher and administrator, he now writes full-time in southeastern Ohio.
