Invisible Men

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Eric Freeze. Invisible Men

Duplex

The Invisible Invisible Man

Lone Wolf

Pictogram

The Virgins

Sasquatch

Our Shared History

Tabernacle of Flesh

The Chameleon

The bigamist

Mr. America

The Ice Woman

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Invisible Men

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I shrunk into my seat as I watched the smoke curling out from Chelsea’s mouth. She was right, I knew. Once, a couple days ago, we saw my mother on the local news with a group of activists in the rain. She wasn’t the one talking, but we had a good enough view of her holding part of a picket sign. I said, “Mom is on TV!” and I felt proud for a moment. Mom held the sign and the newswoman talked of their vigil and the rain kept pouring so that Mom’s face was slick with it. Then I realized that Mom hadn’t been home all day, that I had seen her on TV before I had seen her here, at home.

A footprint. That’s what his foot stuck to when he opened the window. Why hadn’t he noticed it before? Had he not opened his bedroom window since he got back from his sabbatical? He knelt down and touched the fresh tar with his fingers. The tread was small, a child’s, he had no idea what size. The kid could be anywhere from three to ten years old for all he knew about children. To have this child’s footprint in his bedroom was enormously disconcerting. He hadn’t lived in the apartment long, a little over a year now, but he was sure he would’ve noticed it earlier. And the tar was fresh, still sticky, not hard and caked on. In any other frame of mind, at any other time in his life, this footprint, this child’s footprint wouldn’t matter so much. He would write it off as an anomaly or something he may have overlooked when he first rented the place. He brought his hand to his face and rubbed where his cheeks met his lips. He wanted to chew on his fingernails, a habit he had until he was a teenager. Stick his fingers in his mouth and suck. Maynard jumped down from the bed and shook, the tags from his collar clinking as his ears thwacked his neck. And stretched. Yes, Garvey would take him out. He needed to get away from here, from this spot. When Garvey described himself to the police he said, “I don’t even like kids.” It was unsolicited information, not the kind of thing you mention when you state your name and address. He’d only been thinking ahead. He knew he looked suspicious and so he wanted some declaration to exonerate him. “We didn’t say that you did, Mr. Garvey,” the officer said and from then on Garvey felt like they were on the alert. Now a child’s tar footprint was in his bedroom, like a signature, a stamp. And he did like children, really. Even though Darla cited his reluctance to have a family as one of the primary reasons for their divorce. It was more that he was afraid of them. They had a kind of perspicacity that made him uncomfortable. A child could look through you, past the degrees and office talk and inanities and know what you were thinking no matter how you tried to cover it up. Like you were a bedtime story and all they had to do was open the book and turn the page.

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