NINE by Matthew Feasley
A week before mom’s clinic burned to the ground, my older brother Sam brought home an octopus from the Greek grocery where he worked. After his shift, he had set the octopus on one of the shiny tables in the back and studied it beneath a wash of fluorescent lights. He looked at its hollow head, its body, and its missing eyes. Everything seemed ‘normal’ until he noticed its arms. Sam counted them again and again to be sure. Then he threaded the animal carefully into his backpack and hobbled out of the store to catch his bus.At home he staggered in a hurry toward the bathroom and I followed, certain something was up. I watched while he filled our tub and poured in the salt he’d retrieved from our pantry. He stirred the water with one hand and adjusted the hot and cold with the other, finally tasting a finger he’d dunked into the brine. Satisfied, he lowered the octopus gently into the water and it settled on the bottom. Sam rested his chin over the edge of the tub and waited. Later he slept there, snoring, both arms limp at his sides. I snuck away to the garage. I pulled Dad’s fishing net away from its hook, thinking I would fetch the limp creature from the tub, toss it into a trash bag and dump it into one of the neighbors’ cans. When Sam woke and it was no longer there, I would say he must have revived it. I would tell him that it probably escaped down the drain, that I had read this could happen with them sometimes, however unbelievable. But when I returned to the bathroom, Sam was no longer there. I stared at the octopus beneath the water before I heard a familiar sound behind me––it was Sam’s twisted foot as it dragged across the linoleum floor, followed by his good one coming down in its dull thump. Hissss...thump. Hissss...thump. The kitchen light sparked on overhead as I turned. Sam stood beneath it and rubbed both eyes clear with his large but frail hands. He gave an awful look, trying to figure why I held the garbage bag, dad’s net. Then without a word he shuffled slowly past me and up to our room.Sam slept through the morning and the next couple that followed. No one could wake him. The grocery owner called and our parents offered the excuse they had settled upon. “Well either way, he’s done here...and not sure we’ll hire another of them anytime soon.” He was still talking when dad hung up. A few days later, finally out of bed, Sam demanded to see it but dad told him he’d already buried it in the back. There was a mound of freshly turned soil in the garden but I wasn’t convinced he had. In any case, Sam drove a wooden stake through the ground there and painted the number ‘9’ onto a styrofoam plate he’d asked me to attach to it. Rain would wash the number gone only a few nights later as we slept. “A lot can come from messing with a wish or prayer or whatever you wanna call what your brother was doing with that thing,” mom told me in her car later that week. We were parked at her work, or what was left of it. Mom told dad she wanted to see it for herself and I asked to tag along. The metal parking signs were curled from the heat and letters that once spelled her name had bubbled and peeled away onto the asphalt. News trucks surrounded the blackened rubble while a large group waved signs and droned-on like insects. The news said someone had entered by smashing the front window with a large rock. Then there were kerosene-soaked rags stuffed into the open mouths of gasoline containers––eight in all. “Even if you meant well?” I asked.Mom rolled down her window. The swells of the opposing crowds filled her car as she lit the only cigarette I would ever see her smoke. The way she did it, I was sure it wasn’t her first. “Especially if you did.”