Anonymous Jay

A Story by Mike

Flash Horror.

Jay peeked beyond the blackout shades and security bar windows of his West Baltimore flat.

An empty pocket park sat across from his bus stop; the swing set a pigeon perch since a drive-by shooting claimed the life of a teen mother three months before. Jay needed to stand at the littered stop in ninety seconds or miss his ride to the industrial park. He grabbed his lunch bag, threw the deadbolts on his door, and hurried along the tenement hall.

Wary of gang members, he looked left and right before starting down Liberty Heights Avenue, breaking into a jog as the bus passed him and pulled to the curb.

He climbed the steps, dropped a token in the box, and started down the aisle, a gauntlet of deceitful faces, all of whom were jealous of Jay’s easy charm.

He sat next to an attractive black woman and pinched the end of his bulbous nose. A large blackhead squirmed out and she turned quickly to the window as Jay picked at it and the dirt under his nails.

He scratched his thinning hair, and a cascade of infected flakes settled on his shoulders. The bus pushed into traffic as Jay grinned at the back of the black woman’s head, considering the possibility of making her his f**k-puppet.

The puppet’s sexual arousal helped Jay forget his other self and the deformed baby both of whom lived in Jay’s bathroom mirror. His other self wasn’t as handsome and had a speech impediment that left spit spots inside the mirror. The baby was burned, mostly, and its fingers were welded together with scar tissue. Jay didn’t understand why the mirror-Jay had so many blackheads. His own complexion was clear.

The other Jay was a baby killer, too, a thing that the real Jay mustn’t allow anyone to know.

Jay’s coworkers at the widget factory didn’t know about his other self because the real Jay was a well-bred, sophisticated man, honest and industrious, pushing a cart of ready-to-assemble boxes to the widget lines or secreting himself in toilet stalls for hours, tucked comfortably atop a shitter while scrawling his misogynistic dissertation on the walls around him.

Jay was well-loved by all apart from two women he’d overheard talking while hiding in a stall in the ladies’ restroom. Trixie, one of the factory’s custodians, had come in with Ilene, a lead line worker, and complained about Jay’s dissertation. She cited race-baiting and misogyny as the basis for her complaints.

Ilene advised Trixie to steer clear.

“You leave God to sort that man out,” she said.

“I know, I know,” said Trixie. "Ole’ Lester told me that crazy sonofabitch was unnatural with his sister and a baby come out of it."

“Say what?”

“And that ain’t the end. That baby was deformed, and the mother and baby died when their shack caught fire. The police suspected Mr. Jay went and set that fire, but they couldn’t find enough proof.

After that, Mr. Jay come up to Baltimore from Mississippi. On top of it, Ole’ Lester says Mr. Jay is like a movie he saw once called 'White Dog.' You know, a hateful man raises a dog to hate black folk just for being black. Don’t you fret none about Mr. Jay, Miss Trixie. He won’t be coming to a good end.”

At shift’s end, Jay rode the bus home, locked himself in the confines of his cracker box, and logged onto an erotic website.

He read slowly, mouthing the words while his other self dragged a finger along the lines, lingering on erotic passages, saying,

“That’s what your sister did, remember? Call her, Jay. I’m sure she’d love to hear from you.”

“Sister and Mother?”

“Call the baby, Jay. Do you remember how it smelled with its little claw hands?"

Jay smiled at his other self.

“Like powder? Powder and gasoline? Mother? No, not my mother. Sister Samantha.”

“That’s right, Jay. Samantha.”

“Mother?”

“Mother and child, sister and little Jay.”

“With hook hands?”

“Go to the shed, Jay. Get the gasoline.”