The Factory

Leo Khan knew who paced along the alleyway at night. He raised his head from the bamboo mats around his pillows and over his mattress and shuffled barefoot over the floor tiles. At the second story window, he pushed his face between two bars. She was there, waiting.

It had been happening for four years, ever since his father was taken away. Usually the woman appeared in the street and watched for Leo to come closer. When he did, she would stop and twitch her hands at her sides, shuffle her feet, as if waiting for some signal. This time she scaled up the side of the house and clung to the window’s security bars. Her hands were bluish gray and ensconced with grime. And this time it wasn’t the pleasant, intoxicated smile that fractured across her face. Her face contorted in muted warning. It was the first time, up close, Leo witnessed the inside of her mouth. It opened to nothing: no fleshy gums or teeth. It was shadowed vacancy, tar-black absence. The woman dropped away, then appeared on the street again. She slunk back and crouched against the wall of a neighbor’s house. Her bluish dress blended into inky shadow. Something was coming. 

It was the men from before. They weren’t in the uniforms and gray caps they’d worn the last time. They had rolled up the back alley, all the police cruiser’s lights off. Their shoes clacked, and their dark-fabric coats swished over their knees. They were both short men, the one in front with black, slicked hair that gleamed in a slant of streetlight. The other was stalky and balding. He had fingered his hair over a patch of sunburnt scalp. Something swung from his hand. It was the black baton he’d used one week before, when they had pushed Leo’s mother against the wall and shouted those questions. The baton had landed against her hip. The bare-headed man had swung it while the other one yelled loud enough for everyone on the street to hear.

“Shemne mai, xiao jie?” he had said. What do you sell, little sister?

The men walked around the corner of the house. Leo threw his face back toward the woman. She was lifting her arms as if encouraging a fire to blaze. The men hammered on the steel door downstairs.

Leo’s mother shouted: “Shei ya?” Who’s there?

Leo’s feet slapped over the chilled tiles. When he’d climbed downstairs, into the light of the living room, the man with the slicked hair was standing over his mother. She was sitting on the couch, and the officer had both hands around her neck. She tried to shrink away.

“Shenme mai, xiao jie?”

The officer with the baton noticed Leo. His eyes were bloodshot. The skin of his face was flushed red and sagged in pouches from his cheeks. He lifted the weapon.

“A dog!”

He shifted his weight and lunged forward. Leo turned and ran into the bathroom. His foot slipped over urine on the porcelain foot ridges of the squat toilet. He crashed into the plastic stand that held soap bars and bottles of shampoo and drinking cups. The man stumbled in after him and paused in the entryway. He filled it with shadow, then threw the door closed and flicked on a light. For a long time, he watched.

He didn’t look away as he clanked the stick on the sink. The bathroom wall was cold against Leo’s shoulder and face. He pushed himself into the corner and crouched. His throat tightened and he screamed for his mother. Her voice came to him. Something was happening. It wasn’t what happened when other men went with her into the bedroom. The man blocking Leo in, his face and eyes red, reached behind to grip the cuff of one jacket’s arm. He undulated a shoulder free and slipped the coat off. He draped it over the sink, over the black rubber baton.

Shenme mai, dog of a whore?

The man stepped forward and reached up for the detachable shower head. He pulled it free from the clip and squeaked open the cross handle. It was positioned above the toilet. It was where Leo and his mother took showers. Freezing water sprayed.

Leo gasped and couldn’t breathe as it stung his face and ran over his scalp. He pushed himself into the corner. He shouted again for his mother and tried to crawl to the door. The man blocked him with his legs.

The man was fumbling at his belt. Leo’s eyes stung when rivulets of water burned in his eyelids. He bent over, blinded.

The bathroom door opened, and that second man walked in. The water stopped.

When the men were gone, Leo’s mother stumbled into her bedroom. Capsules rattled in the bottle, the ones she usually took before visitors arrived. Her feet swished as she entered naked into the bathroom. She was sobbing and didn’t see him. 

She straddled the squat toilet, refastened the shower head onto the clip, and turned on the water.

She hunched forward and pressed both hands together to scrub. Runoff from her body trickled to the indented drain in the middle of the floor. It pooled over to Leo and was cold against his feet.

“Mom?” he said. 

Her black hair streaked down and hid her face. Water gurgled down the drain.

That night, the woman who came to Leo’s window at night (sometimes just to watch him, sometimes to reach in and knead his head and body) paced on the street below.

She threw her arms out. Her mouth moved as if she were shouting, though no sounds wafted up. Words, it seemed to Leo, had long been extinguished from her.

A wound blistered on the side of her head. Leo liked to think that was why she never spoke. Purplish-crimson seeped through her thistle bands of hair, shiny against the gray-blue of her dress.

Leo knew where she stayed. It was where his father used to work.

The woman lived across the street, in the abandoned factory Leo could just glimpse from his window. It had once been a family-owned business that, during the revolution, manufactured mortar round shells. When the Party came to power, soldiers arrested Leo’s grandfather for aiding the regime. The family had then transformed it into an industrial laundry.

It was empty now. Leo’s father, like his grandfather, had also been arrested (a second emasculation), this time for murder. The factory was seized and neutered of any salvageable materials. Costs were charged to surviving family members. Leo’s mother could keep only the house.

In the morning, he crawled from bed while muted sunlight seeped through graying smog. His throat was dry, but he knew there’d be no bean-juice, no steamed bread or sour cabbage before school. His mother slept in the downstairs room. She’d gone there dripping from the shower and fallen into bed, and after she’d gone, he had shifted to stand and a brown spider had shot from the nook beside his soaked feet and wriggled into a crack in the caulking. Water that had soaked through his shirt and shorts and beaded on his skin had tapped to the tiles as he’d hurried up the stairs to his room.

Leo put his shoes on and lifted his backpack. He slipped his arms into the shoulder straps and turned the steel door latch.

Chilly morning air blasted into his face. He pulled the door closed, careful not to make noise, because if he woke his mother, she would be waiting for him when he got home, and she would look at him. The last times she had turned her face upon him were times when, after he had slipped and made some mistake, she had reeled back and creased the skin around her eyes as if he were some spider wriggling along the floor. Then the kicking to the shin or knee and slaps to his ear would come. When a chicken his mother had left squirming in burlap outside the door had struggled free and trotted into traffic, she’d dragged him by the hair into the bathroom. She had kicked him, and when he had gnashed his teeth while urinating painful shoots of blood, she’d finally taken him to the hospital. “Bike accident,” she’d said.

The walled maze of apartment buildings and single-standing houses led Leo down one narrow road. Shreds of blasted firecracker paper twirled along the pavement. Up the sides of buildings, plants and drying clothes dangled from barred windows. No red doors with the red good luck strips of paper, signaling hopes of prosperity for the year, interrupted the wall around the abandoned family factory. The main doors were chained shut. Because the old steel door handles had been stripped, the doors jangled on chains and a rusted lock. A gap of black shadow opened to the building. As Leo walked by, moaning wind poured over his body. The air was warm and smelled of enclosed rooms, of rat feces and rotting beams. The woman who visited him at night never appeared during the day, but Leo stepped toward the crack in the double doors, just below the flaked smears of paint that used to be the laundry’s sign, and put his face close. The wind that rushed through hit his eyes and dried them out. He rubbed his face with the back of his hands. 

Up against the door, he shifted the backpack to one side and reached his arm far in. The fastening chains stretched taut against the holes where handles once were.

He groped, far inside, and squinted with the exertion. He opened his hand to the oncoming current of air and imagined that it was a river and that standing there, he was swaying in the dashing body of a river dragon. In his mind the dragon whipped its body and engulfed him (the ridged underbelly, the whisper of thrashing razor-scales), and when the wind that pulsed from the factory stopped, eddying in its finality with the sour smell of wood-rot, he snapped his shoulders back and opened his eyes. He had to get to school.

When he came home that evening, he reached down under his T-shirt to fish up the key necklace. Two keys were attached there, one to the front door and another to the house’s security windows. The necklace reminded him, after he’d learned about it in school, of a newborn’s fleshy umbilical. As he rounded the corner of the house, he let the keys drop to his chest. The door to the house was wide open. He was sure he was in trouble.

He dropped the backpack to the floor just inside the entryway. Sheets of homework assignments swished inside and books thumped. Some smell was heavy in the house. It almost tickled his nose. Behind the closed kitchen door, food was sizzling on the stovetop. The scent of garlic and peppers, and of slices of chicken retaining their juices and flavors on bones, mixed with the clinging, sticky smell of steamed rice. It had been a long time since Leo had come home to food.

He hesitated in the living room. No man’s shoes were plopped together by the cracked television. No cigarette-stinking jacket lay across the armrests of the white-leather couch, stained with grime and torn across the backrest. The door had been left wide open, and whatever his mother was doing spilled aromas throughout the house. He kept his shoes on and tiptoed toward the kitchen door.

At the doorway to his mother’s bedroom, he stopped. The room had changed. Just one lavender sheet spread across the mattress. Pillows were fluffed up at the headboard. A bottle of what looked to Leo like white liquor balanced there. All this meant a man was coming and Leo should go to his room upstairs and be quiet. He couldn’t do that. The smell from the kitchen was too salty and strong. He’d eaten just a single bowl of one kuai noodles for lunch, no breakfast. His stomach burned. 

He inched closer. The sound of the sizzling stir-fry intensified. He swallowed back saliva.

Nobody seemed to be moving inside. All he heard was the food.

Before he could reach for it, the door swung open, and his mother stood over him.

“There’s no choice,” she said. “Not now or ever before. It’s this or no house. It’s this or into the river together.”

The river dragon? Leo thought.

She opened her arms as if to clutch his shoulders, and he shot his arms out, but her stare, the bloodshot whites and black-bruise pouches under her eyelids, seemed to push them apart. Leo’s chest burned. A sensation of panic rushed from his stomach and spread out, itchy under his clothes. His mother twirled around and rattled a bowl from a cupboard. She spooned out rice, then hurried to the dining room table, where the men sometimes played cards and split open sunflower seeds with their incisors while waiting. She pulled out the chair, lifted her face toward the door—though nobody stood in the entryway—and clanked the rice down. She went into the kitchen again for chopsticks that clicked in her hands. She told him to sit. He positioned himself on the edge of a chair, ready to run. She came back with a steaming wok of spicy peppers, green and red, and fried cuts of chicken that had wrinkled up from the pan’s heat and juices. It radiated heat over his face.

“Eat,” she said, coming out to the edge of the living room and facing the gaping front door, “then go upstairs.”

The rice heaped in the bowl. He didn’t touch the chopsticks. He watched at the doorway with his mother until she stumbled into the bedroom and collapsed into bed.

He lifted the bowl in one hand, the chopsticks in the other, and sucked in salty rice.

***

He watched from the window while the sun edged behind buildings. The smog-gray sky purpled, then rolled toward black.

The woman wasn’t there, though as he watched, corners of whitish blue peeked from behind the edges of buildings, and some mass slithered along the alley where trash heaped in dirt mounds. If she was there, it wasn’t to warn him, or even to explain.

They came this time on foot, with the police car from the night before parked far away. Their shoes tapped the concrete, and jackets brushed against their legs. Down in the slimy edge of the alleyway, the woman wasn’t there. She wasn’t watching. The two men disappeared around the side of the house. With the door wide open, no fists banged on the steel to make dogs bark. His mother hadn’t come out of the room yet, so there was the sound of light switches being tried. The door was eased closed. They were in.

They shuffled to his mother’s bedroom. One of them muttered something about the food on the table. Leo had left only onion slices clinging to the oily wok.

He had his back to the window when the woman from the street, as if she were a bat that had collided into the window, clutched the security bars. Her face broke open into a muted scream. The exertion oozed bubbles of mucoid blood from the split in her skull. No sound spilled from her vacuum-black mouth. She threw herself away from the window, back to the concrete street, and drove her nails into her face when Leo’s mother called up from the bottom of the stairs.

“Khan Leo, lai ba.” Come now.

Leo threw his head in the direction of his mother’s voice. She slurred because she’d been sleeping, but also because she had probably eaten those pills that deadened her face. One of the men mumbled. Leo’s mother called for him again, this time shouting in the voice she used only before the stinging crash of her hands or blunt jabs of her feet. Leo stepped back and bumped into the window. When he turned around and closed his hands on the bars, the woman from the street was crouching on her knees. She cupped both hands over the blistering wound above her ear.

“Leo!”

There was more muttering. Someone was coming up. It wasn’t the sound of his mother’s footsteps.

He twirled around and gripped the bars again. He shook them but they were bolted into the wall. The woman was below. She raked her nails through her face. She hammered her chest with her fists.

Whore’s dog.

Even in the dark, with blue-gray streetlight canting into the room, Leo knew who it was. The man stopped in the doorway, and for a long time, he watched. He held no black baton. His hands were moving but Leo couldn’t tell why.

Shenme mai?

Leo pulled the umbilical necklace up from around his neck. He fumbled for the key.

He was waiting for the man to crash forward and almost screamed before the padlock clicked over and rattled loose from the latch.

As he threw open the groaning security window, the man shifted his weight and lunged forward.

Leo scaled the ledge and slipped over.

Leo ran. 

It was black. In corners, rats nested and squealed. Swallows huddled together and slept in rafters. He edged along the walls looking to climb. When he groped past a window, a nail scraped his hand. 

Then the light, from some stray bulb, illuminated a staircase in the middle of the room. Water was rushing somewhere upstairs. 

“I want out,” he said. 

The water persisted. He went up. 

On the second floor, with her back to him, the woman had stripped and stood under a dangling water hose. Steam lifted off her body. Her hair fell down her back and was bare over the side of her splintered skull. 

“Mom?”

She turned and it was her face. Her breasts were fat, black nipples hardened. The wound reddened under the pouring water. The liquid spread out in a puddle over the wooden floorboards, and he realized how fragile the entire level was. Some boards were missing. They balanced on an attic webwork of beams. Water was pouring down and splattering to the concrete bottom, to leaves and papers and filth. He walked closer. Droplets splashed off her body and against his face. Her skin had blued. She was freezing. 

“Why?” Leo asked, and reached out his hands.

He pawed at her body, the fleshy stomach and thighs. She was hot against his touch, until the liquid squishing between his fingers made him realize the truth. In tremendous trenches, his fingers stripped skin. Flesh pulsed as the woman, like his own mother, melted into blinding rivulets.

Bio: Justin Nicholes is the author of Ash Dogs, a finalist in the First Novel category in the 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. His fiction has appeared in Karamu, SLAB, and Slice; his essays, in Narrative and Dark Sky Magazine. He is a fiction editor at Our Stories and is editing a forthcoming horror/surreal fiction anthology to be entitled Red Blood Black Sky for Another Sky Press.