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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue of cc&d (v223) (the August 2011 Issue, You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:						This is also in this 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback “Moving the Earth” Order this 6" x 9" ISBN# book:

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The Neighborhood

Bing Liu

    There was a beast that lived in the caves of the forest. The forest was behind a little neighborhood subdivision.
    The beast had four, large black cat-eyes and a serpent’s tongue that waggled out from between his white teeth. He was missing an arm, his left one. He lost it when he was rummaging around an old, abandoned car by his cave one day and got a gash from the charred, rusty metal of the car. He contracted a deep infection and tore his arm off to save the rest of his body from becoming infected.
    The beast made a living selling rainbows to the locals in the subdivision. People would bring him food and water: usually raw, pink pieces of pork and mop-buckets full of murky tap water. He swallowed the raw pork down his throat without chewing, making a slurping sound. And he lapped up the tap water with his little serpent’s tongue, taking him two hours and fifteen minutes to finish the mop-bucket of water.
    And business was booming for the beast. People needed rainbows all the time.
    Inside a house in the subdivision just a few blocks outside the forest where the beast dwells, some humans are preparing for dinner in the late afternoon.
    A mother is stirring up a large kettle of soup on the stove, wiping her hands on her black-and-white apron. She wipes her hands because they are perspiring a lot. The late afternoon light spilling in through the window sheers warms her face. Her husband is at the dining room table, reading the world news section of the Greenwood Gazette. He takes a drink of vodka, on the rocks, from his short, fat little glass and sets it on the table. “Russia’s at it again,” he grumbles. He smashes his fist on the table. “Damn Russians!” he shouts. The glass of vodka with the ice in it tinkles and sounds like bell chimes.
    “Oh Charles, cheer up,” says his wife. “I’m making your favorite.”
    “Not that lentil soup again, Marla,” says Charles. “I hate lentils. Can’t you make something with any taste?” he sneers.
    Marla sighs, wipes her hands on her apron, and brushes the sheers away from the window to peek outside. There are four rainbows in the sky above the forest that is a few blocks away.
    “Do you think it’s time?” she asks.
    Charles puts down the paper and looks at her, thinking. He gets up and walks out of the room.
    “Honey, where are you going?” asks Marla.
    “The basement.”
    Marla turns the stove-knob to simmer, then walks over to the dining room table where the vodka in the glass is still shaking a tiny bit. She picks up a polished silver picture frame. On it is a photograph of a boy, about seven. His face is pudgy with leftover baby fat. He’s standing dressed in a little sailor’s outfit next to a clump of bushes. She can hear the sound of his little chuckle as she runs her finger along his face. It leaves a wet, sweaty finger-streak along the metal frame.
    In the basement, Charles is standing in the dark in front of a large freezer all yellowed and mildewy. When he opens it, the orange light illuminates the dusty toolbench behind him, the rusty worn tools hanging on nails on the wall, and the junk he doesn’t ever want to throw away strewn about at his feet. It smells like dust and mold, a little like rotten fruit. He takes out some ziplock bags and closes the freezer door again quickly because he doesn’t want to see the mess anymore. He scurries back upstairs into the house, where he fills up a bucket of water at the sink.
    He walks past Marla, who is now ladling soup into large round bowls. She doesn’t say anything. She knows where he’s going. He’s gone there every Wednesday evening for months, years.
    As Charles heads toward the forest that looms over the neighborhood, he sees people sitting in their front-yards, in lawn chairs. They are looking at the rainbows that are arcing out from the depths of the forest. The sight-seers are all smiling. Some have koozies of beer in their hands.
    One old man sits alone in his front lawn, bringing a pair of binoculars with a string tied around his neck up to his pale, wrinkly face every so often.
    Charles sees a yellow, diamond-shaped dead-end sign posted at the end of the street. Past the sign, the pavement turns into a dirt-road. Beyond that, there is a foot-worn path leading into the forest. The innards of the forest are obscured in darkness. Beside the entrance to the forest is another dead-end sign, this one a lot more rusted and worn-down. Its corners are bent and the yellow sign has faded into a rough rusty brown.
    Charles stands at the edge of the pavement, where the sidewalk ends.
    “You better get in there quick,” yells the old man, his binoculars shaking in his old, palsy hand. “It’s getting dark out.”
    Charles looks back at the man. “Mind your own damn business,” he barks.
    Bob smiles and puts his binoculars up to his eyes and looks at Charles through them.
    “Stop it,” Charles says.
    Bob focuses the binocular lenses on Charles’ face, looking at his angry expression that makes the old man belch out an old man laugh: a little like a wheezing heavy breathing, almost like he’s dying.
    “I said stop it,” Charles says again, more seriously. He walks up to the old man, slaps the binoculars off his face, and grabs him by the shoulders.
    Bob, scared, puts his hands up to his face. “Go away,” he pleads, shaking with fear.
    Charles now realizes that everyone on the block is now looking at him. “What do you want?” Charles cries defiantly at the whole block of people. He lets the old man go and walks into the forest.
    In the forest, the trees form a thick wall around Charles as he walks deeper. The trees absorb the sound of the outside world and distorts it into watery frequencies and airwaves. It seems to envelope him, the distorted sounds of cars driving by, lawn mower motors spinning devilishly, water faucets dripping down onto hard surfaces in booming resonances. The atmosphere is cooler in here, where the shadows of the trees seem to suck the light out of everything, so that there isn’t even a twinkling of a bug in the air. The cold wind that whips through the heavy tangle of trees slashes around his face like stinging scrapes that redden his cheeks. He holds onto the bucket of tap water tighter, he clutches the ziplock bags of meat closer to his heart that’s beating heavier. The leaves underneath him are half-dying, indistinguishably black within the mucky, soggy dirt. They are soundless against Charles quickening steps.
    Charles hears the panting of the beast as he gets closer to his lair; with each step Charles seems to lose the use of his legs as he begins to be guided onward almost against his will. Suddenly he sees the beast, crouched over at the entrance of the cave, its hideous face turned away from him. The beast brings his head up, slurping down a wet piece of meat with a ferocious shaking of its powerful neck. The beast is huge, almost twice the size of Charles. The beast’s four eyes emanate no light, his pupils have overtaken the whites of his eyes from years of living in this dark, soggy, damp forest-cave. The beast turns and looks at him, all four eyes blinking sideways. His wild, tangled, dirty, putrid black hair shake from his movements.
    Charles throws the meat at the beast, and puts the bucket of tap water on the forest floor. He tries to kick the bucket toward the beast, but it falls over and spills. The beast snarls a deep, low growl that makes the branches of the nearby trees bend away from the beast, trying to escape the rotten, dead air coming out of the beast’s flaring nostrils.
    “I..I want a rainbow,” Charles says.
    “Shut up,” says the beast, in a thundering, demonic voice. “I know what you want.”
    “I’ll take it right away then,” says Charles.
    The beast tears open the ziplock bag and wolfs down the meat, his four unblinking eyes never leaving Charles face as he guzzles it down.
    “You make me sick,” Charles mutters under his breath.
    The beast suddenly spews out the unchewed meat and charges up to Charles in a flash, who covers his face but stands his ground. The beast smacks Charles hands away from his face with his one arm and breathes deeply right up against him, their noses almost touching. “You made me this way, remember?” the beast growls.
    Charles’ face and spine stiffen now, and he looks deeply into the top two eyes of the beast. “You’re nothing to do with me,” he says. “You make rainbows for us, to make our neighborhood a better one, that’s all.”
    The beast puts his one remaining arm around Charles, trying to hug him. Charles coils back. “Get away from me,” he screams, “You monster!”
    “I don’t want to do this anymore,” cries the beast, in a child’s voice, in a sobbing voice that sounds like a pudgy child’s laughter.
    “It’s for your own good,” says Charles. He brushes his shoulders, wiping away some of the beast’s tears and turns to walk away.
    The beast gathers up the remnants of the regurgitated meat and licks it off the forest floor. He defecates onto the dead leaves outside of his cave and blows at it, making it spin and spin. His excrement starts emitting a white light that grows up like a beanstalk, separating into the colors of a rainbow.
    That night the neighborhood sleeps under a high arcing rainbow that lights up the neighborhood in a glowing red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet mosaic. The sounds of slurping coming from some deep dark part of the forest keeps Charles awake until three in the morning. He goes to work tired the next day.

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