The boy was to play the devil in a third grade children’s play loosely based on The Portrait of Dorian Gray. His devil outfit was a red union suit and his makeup, red food dye and Vaseline. He carried a curtain rod his mother took from his father’s study, spray-painted Rustolium red, with the tip of an old meat carving fork—which his father had never used, not even at Thanksgiving—wedged into the top. For the forked tail, his mother had cut the red powercord to his father’s electric mower.
His father no longer lived in the house. His mother now hired a high school kid, who used his own gas mower, to cut the lawn. It seemed she got this kid to do everything his father used to do.
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The boy was a devil for only one night, but he did not like the thought of it, as though the devil might get under his skin. So he was relieved that his mother had missed the performance. And after the play, when a neighbor dropped him off at his house, he went straight into the bathroom, washed his face, then threw the costume in the kitchen trash. As he was getting a glass of milk, the clothes and staff seemed to rustle in the trash, as though they were alive. So he sealed up the bag and took it out back, walking carefully along the red brick path to the trashcans in the alley.
He let the bag fall to the bottom of the can, as if it were a deep well. As he shut the metal lid, he sensed that he was being watched. The night was dark, the alley empty. He peered in all directions until he saw what he saw, through his mother’s bedroom window. The two headed beast.
He raced back to the house, his small white feet running over the newly mowed lawn. The hair-like cuttings clung to the bottom of his feet; the wet cold grass felt like tiny snakes.
© 2008 Nathan Long
grew up in a log cabin in rural Maryland. His work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Indiana Review, StoryQuarterly, Tin House, The Sun, and other journals. He has received a Virginia Commission of the Arts grant, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and a Truman Capote Trust Fellowship. He lives in Philadelphia and teaches creative writing at Richard Stockton College.
