When the ice-cream man handed Sam his vanilla and strawberry ice cream, I looked at his hands. There’s something reassuring about old people’s hands. As I imagined how their delicate, elaborate mechanism had functioned and obeyed this fellow without him thinking about it, for such a long time, and as I thought about the tons of ice creams they had made, without ever letting him down, it gave me faith in something I couldn’t define. It was reassuring. The hands were beautiful too, the skin so thin over the tendons they were almost bare, the blue veins like streams.
He looked at me, eyes twinkling:
“And for you, my little darling?”
It was my turn. I’d been repeating the line in my head for the past five minutes. I didn’t like to improvise when ordering an ice cream, I don’t know why. There had to be someone in line ahead of me, giving me time to choose what I wanted and to put together my sentence. So it would come out right, with no hesitation. We were the last that day, the rest of the kids having had their ice cream and left already.
“Chocolate and stracciatella in a cone with whipped cream, please sir.”
“With whipped cream, my little lady! But of course …”
He winked as he pronounced the words whipped cream to let me know it was still our little secret. Then his hands, his two faithful dogs, set to work, repeating their little dance for the hundred-thousandth time. The cone, the ice-cream scoop, one scoop of chocolate, the tub of warm water, one scoop of stracciatella, then the siphon, a real siphon, containing homemade whipped cream.
The old man leaned forward to put a pretty whirl of cream on top of my two scoops. His blue eyes were open wide, tightly focused on the cloudy spiral, the siphon against his cheek, the movement gracious, precise. His hand so close to his face. Just when he had reached the summit of the little cream mountain, right when his finger was preparing to ease off and he was about to straighten up, the siphon exploded. BANG!
I remember the sound. It was the sound that petrified me first. It slammed into each wall of the Demo. My heart skipped two beats. It must have been heard as far as the depths of Little Gallows Wood, as far as Monica’s house.
Then I saw the kind old man’s face. The siphon had smashed into it like a car through the front of a house. Half of it was missing. His bald head remained intact, but his face was a mash of meat and bone. A single eye hung in its socket. I took it all in. I had time. The eye looked surprised. The old man stayed standing for a couple of seconds, as if his body needed time to realize that it now had mincemeat for a face. Then it crumpled.
It seemed like a joke. I could even hear laughter. Not real laughter, and not coming from me. I think it was death. Or fate. Or something like that. Something much bigger than myself. Some supernatural force that decides everything and that was in a mischievous mood that day, and so decided to have a little fun with the old man’s face.
I don’t remember much after that. I screamed. People came. They screamed too. My father came. Sam stood motionless, his big eyes open wide, his little mouth agape, clutching his cone of vanilla and strawberry ice cream. A man puked up melon with Parma ham. The ambulance arrived, then the hearse.
* * *
My father took us home, in silence, then returned to his seat in front of the TV. My mother gave the floor by Coco’s cage a quick sweep. I took Sam’s hand and led him to the goat pen. He followed me like a sleepwalker, staring straight ahead, mouth half-open.
It all seemed unreal—the garden, the swimming pool, the rosemary, the night that was falling—or rather it seemed tinged with a new reality, the savage reality of flesh and blood, of pain, and the march of time, linear and relentless. But above all, it was the reality of that force I heard laughing as the old man’s body crumpled to the floor. That laughter which was neither within me nor outside me. That laughter which was everywhere, in everything, as was that force. It could find me wherever. No place to hide. And if I couldn’t hide, then nothing existed. Nothing but blood and terror.
I wanted to go see the goats because I hoped their ruminant indifference would pull me back to reality and that this would reassure me. The three of them were grazing in their pen. A bunch of parakeets perched on the branches of the cherry tree. Nothing made sense anymore. My reality had dissolved into a vertiginous void from which I saw no way out. A void so palpable I could feel its walls, its floor, and its ceiling tightening around me. I felt stifled by a primitive panic. I would have liked someone—an adult—to take me by the hand and put me to bed. Reposition the markers of my existence. Tell me there’d be a tomorrow after this day, and then another day after that, and that my life would eventually look like it had before. That the blood and the terror would dissipate.
But nobody came.
The parakeets ate the still-green cherries. Sam maintained his wide-eyed stare, mouth agape, little fist clutching the ice-cream cone covered with melted vanilla and strawberry. I told myself that if nobody was going to put me to bed, I could at least do that for Sam. I would have liked to talk to him, to tell him something reassuring, but I was unable. Panic hadn’t loosened its grip around my throat. I took him to my room and we both got into my bed. My window overlooked the garden, the goats, and the wood. The wind set the shadow of an oak tree dancing on the wooden floor. I couldn’t sleep. At one point I heard my mother coming upstairs. Then my father, an hour later. They never came up together, but they still shared the same bed. I imagined this must have been part of the “normal family” package, like the meals. I wondered sometimes whether there were moments of tenderness between them. Like there were between Sam and me. I wished it for them, without much conviction. I couldn’t imagine a life without tenderness, particularly on a night like this.
I watched each minute chasing the last on my clock radio. They seemed to get longer and longer. I felt like puking. But I didn’t want to get up and risk waking Sam if he’d been fortunate enough to fall asleep. His back was toward me, so I couldn’t see his eyes.
Around five in the morning, something called me outside, a kind of intuition. I went down into the garden. The darkness terrified me even more than usual. I imagined there were creatures crouched in the shadows ready to gnaw off my face—the way the ice-cream man’s had been. I went as far as the goat pen. Nutmeg was standing a little apart from the others. A long, viscous thread hung beneath her tail.
-
I WENT BACK up to my room.
“Sam, the babies have come.” Those words, the first I had uttered since ordering my ice cream with whipped cream, sounded quite odd, as if they had come from a vanished world. Sam didn’t react.
I went to wake my mother, who came downstairs, quite beside herself. I don’t know how to describe an overexcited amoeba; it’s all messy and clumsy, and it talks fast and loud, dashing all over the place: “Warm water, camphor-alcohol, Betadine, towels, a wheelbarrow, straw …”
I pulled Sam out of my bed so he could come see. By the time we got down there, two little hooves had already appeared. Then a muzzle. Nutmeg pushed, bleated, pushed, bleated, pushed. It looked painful. And hard too. Then, all of a sudden, the kid slid out of her body. Nutmeg began pushing again, and bleating, pushing, bleating, pushing. There was a strange smell. A warm smell of body and guts. A second baby appeared. Nutmeg got up and, while she was licking her kids, a large brownish slimy mass spurted out of her and splatted on the ground. Nutmeg turned and began to eat the brownish mass. The warm smell had grown stronger. It seemed to emanate from Nutmeg’s belly to fill the whole of the earth’s atmosphere. I wondered how such a small goat could contain so much smell.
My mother got down on all fours and began to hug and kiss the baby goats. Two males. She rubbed her face all over their sticky little bodies. Then, still on all fours, she turned to us, her face smeared with residue from the amniotic sac.
“They will