There just hasn’t been enough short stories in this thing lately and I warn you right now, this isn’t my strongest story, but I love it.
ABBY
I don’t remember ordering them, but they came in the mail today. A nondescript gray envelope, addressed to me, lying on my porch. It had probably been there for days; I never go out my front door for anything other than to water my front lawn, but today was different. I can’t explain anything, because it all makes me sound crazy. Okay, yeah, her picture moved a little bit this morning, and I will swear on everything that is holy, that her hair grew. It grew! She’s been dead and stuffed in that drawer over at St. Anthony’s that no one ever visits for ten years now, and yet on that crooked picture on my wall, the length of her hair was at least an inch longer than I remember it being (and I took the picture), but only on the side that the photo was slanted on. When I reached down to pick up the envelope, I heard someone talking in my brain. The sound wasn’t a sound at all; it was an image that I heard inside my head without vibrating my eardrums at all. It was like no sound I had ever heard before, because I didn’t hear it, and yet it wasn’t a thought, or the sound of my own voice. I couldn’t make it out at first, but then when I made contact with the package, it was distinct. It was my name in her voice. I knew it was she because my sister Abby would utilize all the sharp vowels in my name like a knife. I hadn’t heard anyone say it like that since then, and to be honest, I didn’t much miss it.
I dropped the envelope instinctively, and became aware of the world again when I heard it hit the ground with a soft clunk and a swish. I dismissed the sound in my brain, the picture, and the hair, and grabbed the package again and brought it inside. Inside the envelope, wrapped in white tissue, was a small pair of blue Aussie Bum Wonderjock Underwear. This was just not the kind of underwear I would usually wear, and no amount of Ambien could cause a black out so significant that I would order and buy a pair of underwear designed to push out my junk so that it looked bigger in jeans. As I looked around the opened package for a receipt or packing slip that would explain where these things came from I saw that noise again in my brain. I was louder, but still it was silent. It was Abby again; there was no doubt this time.
And it wasn’t like these underwear were possessed with the spirit of Abby, because that simply wasn’t true, since evil would no doubt take the form of a Jonas Brothers CD, or a pair of Abercrombie and Fitch cargo shorts. Somehow these Wonderjocks were, in fact, her. I don’t know how she did it, but she managed to sew herself into a pair of underwear made in the Philippines, sold from Australia, and then shipped to the United States, all without anyone but me knowing.
They were the purest blue I had ever seen with white accents, just like her eyes. Many of days were spent avoiding those eyes staring at me from across the room knowing that if I looked directly at them they would use the gesture as an excuse to pounce on me. A pair of underwear would be the perfect thing for her to come back as since she spent her whole adult life running behind her nine year old son symbolically holding on to his package, protecting his future manhood with her very soul. She held on it so tightly that she assured his future as the gayest straight man I will ever meet. It would be just like her to be a garment to represent the notion that I wasn’t man enough to fill out my own jeans, since she spent most of my childhood emasculating me by ridicule and beating me up. Or it could have been that she had wanted to call attention to my bulge, like she did so effectively when she would note the large amount of Vaseline left in my underwear as a youth, while simultaneously verbally documenting the vast amounts of time spent in the bathroom behind locked doors. I don’t know what her game is, but it wasn’t going to work since I simply could not take my entire rig and insert it into a pouch inside a pair of my sister and wear it around. It just wouldn’t be comfortable no matter how hot I would look in them. Tomorrow I will order a pair that isn’t her to wear around and she can spend the rest of her life in a drawer where she belongs.
