Cousin Tina Disappears

By James Hoby

Cousin Tina Disappears is a convoluted story about an isolated family living in a small, American town. When Aunt Shirley returns home from a lengthy visit to a quack doctor, one in a series of painful treatments for an imaginary tumor, she finds Tina crawling in a heap of garbage on the kitchen floor. An argument ensues and Tina is killed by her Aunt, probably by accident. Tina’s cousin, a long-time guest in the home, acts as narrator: describing the murder, an infestation of flies, the humiliation of selling shoddy Christmas cards, a failed attempt to enlist in the Army, and his role in the disposal of Tina’s body.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hesitation Press
• Release date: Sep 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465996800

James Hoby

James Hoby is originally from Ellensburg, Washington, but after moving around a bit, he now lives in Alexandria, Virginia. He has been employed as a dishwasher, a fry-cook, a teacher, an investigator, an analyst, a program specialist, and then an analyst again. He is the author of two short, comic novels: "Cousin Tina Disappears" and "A Year with the Hoopers." Writing as E.D. Foxe, he is also the author of a third short novel, "Waking Up Naked On My Mother’s Grave," and "Rosamund," a collection of 80 poems.

Book preview

COUSIN TINA DISAPPEARS

By James Hoby

Copyright 2003 James Hoby.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part 1 — Aunt Shirley got home pretty early that afternoon . . .

Part 2 — Back at the start of this I was talking about an afternoon . . .

Part 3 — Anyway, on the day Aunt Shirley got home all damaged . . .

Part 4 — I have no idea how long we stood and stared . . .

Part 5 — Rabbit Lake’s public library is just south of its phone company . . .

Part 6 — One summer, a very long time ago, I was taking the garbage . . .

Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep

Clos’d o’er the head of your lov’d Lycidas?

— John Milton

Aunt Shirley got home pretty early that afternoon from what must have been one of the most brutal tumor therapy sessions she’d ever had. She could have gotten home as early as 1:30, but it certainly wasn’t any later than 2:00 or 2:30, and she was in a spectacularly ugly mood. Even for her. Right from the microsecond she came through the door, she was growling and howling and grunting and snarling at little Cousin Kathy and me as we sat in the middle of the floor in the living room, innocent and stupid as two torpid, waterlogged, fleshy lumps of wet cardboard. We were watching a shrill and flashy science fiction movie on the television. We’d dimmed the lights, pulled the drapes shut, and turned up the sound as loud as it would go, and we had a huge bowl of popcorn, loaded up with half a pound or so of melted butter, extra salty and greasy, on the carpet between us. It seemed like both of us looked to our left at exactly the same moment, when the front door slammed and Aunt Shirley stomped past, through the hallway, toward the stairs, shrieking, Does that goddamn thing have to be so goddamn loud and can’t you goddamn kids go outside for one goddamn minute into the clean, fresh air and turn that goddamn television off, or at least turn the goddamn thing down a little, unless of course you’re too goddamn selfish if you can’t even do that one goddamn thing for me, or a similar large clump of nasty, bitter words that were something along those general lines.

But you really couldn’t blame Aunt Shirley or criticize her for her heavy-handed, uncompromising attitude, because you could see the severe damage her bloodthirsty, and probably unlicensed, doctor had done to her that morning at her session. You could even see it if you were looking at her from twenty feet away, like little Cousin Kathy and I were, sitting together on the floor in a dark room, distracted by mobs of fingernail-clicking robots, exploding universes, monkey-lipped alien double-crossers being spit out of airlocks, and flying saucers buzzing and spinning two or three feet in front of our eyes and ears. Even though Aunt Shirley was wearing the same yellow baseball cap she wore to all her therapy sessions, you could see that about three-quarters of her hair had been burnt right off her head. The smell of her burnt hair was overpowering. And you could see the spots on her forehead, over her ears, and at the base of her skull, in the back, where the electrodes had burned almost all the way through her flesh and left bloody dots with those charred, spiked edges.

One of her nostrils was split open up the side of her nose. It was caked with dark, dried blood, and it didn’t even look like her doctor had put a bandage on it or tried to wipe it off. Her lips were cracked and bleeding. She’d explained to me before that this happened after just about every treat-ment she had, because either her fear or the microwaves evaporated most of the fluids and salts and vitamins that were in her skin and left her as dry as a mummy. Her neck and her back, below the electrode scars, were covered with blisters, and they weren’t those timid, half-hearted, half-baked blisters you’d think might be the result of some responsible medical treatment. No, these were odd and freakish, fried-egg-sized blisters, crusted with charred flesh and oozing with blood and thick, yellowish, stomach-turning, nose-pinching pus, smelling bad and looking worse.

Half the buttons on Aunt Shirley’s rose-colored blouse had popped off with all her twists and jerks and struggles in the chair as the electric arcs, acid ointments, and white-hot needles were flicked and squirted and poked at her. One of the blouse’s elbows had frayed and separated as a result of all the frantic rubbing and smacking against the arm of her plastic chair, but at least the elbow itself wasn’t cut and bleeding, just a little bruised and scuffed. Maybe her feet were the saddest and worst-looking of everything else she had wrong with her as she stamped down the hallway screaming at us. She’d worn her sandals that morning, and now the paint was chipped off her toenails, and the gallons and gallons of gunk that had been squeezed out of her body at the session (the blood, pus, tears, snot, and everything else) had puddled and dried on her feet and between her toes and on her sandals. The clotted mess made her feet look and smell more like horse’s hooves than human feet. And to make it even worse than that, there was probably nothing wrong with her at all. Her therapy sessions were probably doing her more harm than good.

Somehow Aunt Shirley had gotten the idea that she had a tumor or blood clot in her head. And it wasn’t just a normal tumor or blood clot. Of course it wasn’t. It couldn’t be normal. Nothing could ever be normal for Aunt Shirley. It had to be a special, new kind of deadly, mutant tumor or blood clot. And she talked about it all the time. You couldn’t stop her (and believe me, after a while, you’d really wish you could). Even worse, there was no way to avoid her. Sooner or later she’d trap you in a car or in an elevator or in a line outside a movie house or even while you were stretched out on the lawn, trying to get a little sleep, and the words would pour out of her mouth: Oh, I’ve been just terrible this week. Terrible. It’s been agony. And yesterday was the worst. The absolute worst. I was lying there in bed trying to wake up, you know, groggy, disoriented, lazy as hell, and half-listening to those idiots chattering on the radio doing their contests and spinning their platters and then this pain just started up in my head. Out of nowhere. It was like a long, thin knife being stuck slowly in my eye, wriggled around, and pushed all the way back to the back of my skull. I yelled and jumped up and almost broke the bed kicking my legs and flailing my arms but that didn’t make any difference to the pain. It stayed the same as when it started. Eventually I had to just lay there and take it. Waiting. I mean, I’ve been through this a thousand times before so I know what to expect. Eventually the pain changed its direction. It started shooting down from behind my eye, through my neck, down into my shoulder, and then through that into my liver and my kidneys and all my other internal organs. I was like some kind of inside-out Christmas tree, all lit up inside with fire and agony and pain. The pain hadn’t gone down at all, but after a while at least I could open my eyes and drag myself out of bed. I was in the bathroom for hours. Hours. Until way past noon. Moaning and doubled over. It got worse. It really struck me down and held me there. After a while, the pain didn’t seem to be coming out of my head any more. It was coming from right above my heart. Swirling around inside me. Like it was holding me and crushing me. I fell over and laid there all twisted on the fuzzy, slightly-damp bathroom rug, moaning and crying. But not too loud because I didn’t want to get the kids upset, and besides, there was nothing they could do about it anyway. I knew it wouldn’t go on forever. Probably. You never know. But this kind of pain has never lasted more than three or four hours for me before. It was constricting, but it wasn’t paralyzing. You know? I mean I could roll my shoulders around and the pain didn’t change one bit. It stayed right in the same places and didn’t pulse or throb or jab. But even though I could move, I couldn’t. I was too scared to move. It was a sharp, frightening pain, the kind of pain that makes you stay right where you are. Frozen. So as I laid there, clenched in a full-body-fist on the bathroom floor with my eyes closed, I was thinking the tumor had finally moved down out of my brain. That it had broken free and washed away in an artery or a vein. And that it had gotten stuck somewhere near my heart, maybe blocking off the blood or pressing on a nerve or something under the muscle. Wedged into my flesh like a sharp pebble in a tire tread. So it couldn’t be affected by my movements. It would just keep shooting the same pains directly into the nerve endings until finally a protective scab built up around the nerve or the tumor broke away and floated free.

Aunt Shirley could talk like that for hours, describing the different pains she had. She could be pretty vivid and convincing. But when Aunt Shirley went to our doctor about it (to our real doctor, not the quack who gives her those treatments), he knew it was a lot of nonsense. That’s exactly what he said to her, Nonsense! You don’t have a tumor. Nothing’s shown up on the x-rays and nothing showed up on the CAT scans. There is no tumor! There is no blood clot! Maybe you had yourself a little headache. Maybe you pulled a muscle or bruised one of your ribs and had a few little chest pains. But that’s all. You don’t have anything that can’t be fixed with a balanced diet and some exercise. That’s all you need. Diet and exercise and maybe an aspirin or two. Stop worrying yourself to death with all these little aches and pains. He gave her a business card that he just happened to have in his pocket, to refer her to a psychologist, so she could get in a support group and work on some of her issues. Big mistake. That was the kiss of death. That was the last time any of us ever went to that doctor. Ever. Aunt Shirley may well be the most stubborn person on the face of the Earth. And she surely doesn’t like people treating her like she’s six years old. Or like she’s nuts. Ever. She was fuming after the doctor gave her that lecture. Smoke was practically coming out of her ears as we drove home. Laser-beam hate rays were flaring out of her eyes. "Where does that guy get off? The guy is