Bob could fold sheets. He could do it real swell. Crisp. He would spend upwards of two hours on a flat sheet. Those fitted sheets were a humbug and sometimes he’d spend all day getting it right. The counselors and nurses didn’t mind because it kept him out of trouble. Sometimes I think they gave him a fitted sheet just so they’d have time with someone else.
When Bob didn’t have a sheet, he was a handful.
Elegant Larry could bend the pictures in his mind to do whatever he wanted. Say he saw a real goody-goody nurse with tight buttons, starch, and a bullet bra, you know, the whole package. All he had to do was see her once. The rest of us would spend weeks trying to get her to undo a button, splashing her with water, flailing, making nuisances of ourselves as if we had no pride, all for the hope of five seconds of warm skin and saintly forgiveness. We just didn’t have the panache to get a goody-goody nurse with that sweet tight skirt and the little paper hat to do what we really wanted, which was to tap us on the head and pronounce us All Well. Nurses were put here to heal us, but Larry was the only one of us getting that presence. Larry wasn’t a pest because he could see into the beyond. He’d look her over, clamp his jaw shut, then go sit in the corner. Heaven help anyone who interrupted him, because when he really got going, he didn’t just see her how she was anymore. He could remove clothing at will, make her blush, make her posture, make her purse her lips and go Oooooh.
We were all jealous. Especially when two days of staring revealed sea green panties and a matching bra. We never could prove it, but it was so naughty and it had taken him so long, you just knew it was accurate.
Elegant Larry tended to worry new nurses with his unresponsiveness. Nurses are like the protégés of Miss Florence Nightingale and a nurse faced with a seemingly catatonic guy must save him‘cause we’re all saints with poor mental hygiene. But if you break Larry’s mind bending, he lashes out and grabs the closest thing to him, which is usually a breast. Once he grabbed a head. Larry with his non-presence of mind, he managed to kiss that head. That one’s name was Maude and we never forgot her, even though we’d only known her two days and never at the pool.
French Fry was just a kid. He lisped pretty bad, yet his parents had named him something awful like Samson Schasser or something. It was no wonder he lisped. He was eighteen when we got him, and the only thing he ate the first week was French fries. Like he was Pavlovian, all you had to do was say French fry and he’d come running, so we started to call him that. Once the name stuck, he started talking again.
Turned out he came to stay with us because his mother found him a nice girl—meaning that, wholly, she was not a slut. French Fry knew that nice girls not only didn’t put out, but they also didn’t put up with a fella with a lisp. He was doomed. And the gal was five-foot-ten. It was safer for him here.
He was real good at being invisible. Lots of times I walked into an empty room, turned on the television, waited for it to warm up, watched Howdy Doody and The Love Boat, mostly in my head, because that’s what I could do: turn any TV show into a puppet phantasmagoria; and then several hours later I’d find out French Fry had been there the whole time.
Plus it was like he could see what I could. With the puppets and the strobe lights and the neon. Not only was he invisible, but we suspected he could take our powers, at will, and use them, maybe even against us, or for us. We were nice to him, just in case he ever saw the insides of our heads.
I hadn’t always been able to replace the world with puppetry. That didn’t come about until one day when I was all grown up and the world had long since turned gray—not that I had noticed. That day, the superintendent took me by my arm and had another man grab my other arm, because I needed all the support I could get. They brought me here. See, sometimes you think you’re not special. Then a man in a suit sits down behind a very large mahogany desk (it must be mahogany) and tells you that you are. On that day, you must listen and believe.
The last one in our group was Consuela. But seeing as she was a great big Mexican lass with the power of persuasion—just wait until she starts screaming; you’ll do anything for her, and fast—I usually replaced her with a puppet. I could do it in real life as well as on television, and when I did, it negated her power.
You might think Bob was the most pathetic of our group, and useless to boot, and he was. But then, everyone needs a patsy. A scapegoat. An innocent. When Bob was around, calmly folding his sheets, the nurses and counselors rarely suspected our ulterior motive. That together, us five, we were going to create the first ever kiddie amusement park in a State hospital!
You might ask me, Whatever for? and you would mean it with your confusion and dull eyes. But the truth of the facts is that there are two or three worlds all overlapped, and although we’re meant to be in all of them at once, sometimes you slip in between one and the other. I was in that between place and getting very intimate with it, when the superintendent found me. I had fallen and I was sad, and then I woke up special and I was glad. There’s this one very dangerous moment when anyone can just slip between those worlds and get stuck like you’ve fallen between the bed and the wall. If you fall out of the great big overlapping balloon of a world with its happy and sad and jingle bells, and you verily get stuck behind the bed in the gray, then what? Toodleoo and bye-bye, you’re just lost.
We’re here separate from the world above the layers and that is a blessing.
Bob and Elegant Larry and French Fry and I are all safe now, and we can look backwards. And French Fry, who was not going to have to get married, had the forethought to think about the foresight. He looked into the future and he said we should save the children from growing up and we should not be selfish, that we should close that gap between the bed and the wall. Only, French Fry managed to say all that without using a single S.
Elegant Larry had been bending the plan through his mind for a full year now, ever since French Fry had come to us and we’d thought it up. Once Elegant Larry had the whole thing run through, it would exist, just like he’d really seen it somewhere. We’d have to execute it in the dead of night, and that would make it both safer and more difficult. None of us could bend the nighttime to our wills, and Larry wouldn’t go out into a world where he couldn’t see everything, so that would leave us unprotected when we went to collect the kiddies we wanted to amuse.
And so then there was this one day in which Bob was lining up the corners of his sheet when I saw Elegant Larry’s right index finger twitch, and when that finger twitches, that’s our sign that he’s nearly completed a computation. I jumped ‘cause that meant tonight was the night and I bumped Bob and unaligned his corners and he was just about to bear hug me to death when I got him to understand that, with Elegant Larry almost done, we had to go get those kids! If Elegant Larry came out of his mind bending and we hadn’t done the easy part, why, he’d turn us into the lumpy mashed potatoes for tomorrow’s dinner.
I gathered up French Fry and Consuela—she has to be present for me to form her into a puppet. If she’s not and I don’t, there’s always a danger of her wandering in and making her siren noises. Then the jig would be up. We didn’t want the jig to be up. We wanted to make sleepy children ecstatically pleased. We wanted to save the happy and the sad and the jingle bells and shove us some pillows into that gap next to the wall so no kid would ever again find the space to slip on through.
Bob folded his sheet, got it wrong, started over. We didn’t dare interrupt Larry. Consuela sang a seductive ditty about a woodpecker; she’d been into the cooking sherry or the rubbing alcohol again. So it was up to me and to French Fry to finalize snitching plans.
A nurse stuck her head into the playroom, saw Bob calmly folding and Larry calmly staring and Consuela tap dancing and two of us nonchalantly standing, and she decided all was right in this corner of the world.
“Larry gonna be done tonight?” French Fry asked. He went out of his way, even if he sounded stupid, to say things without S’s now. I figured that made him real smart, to be able to use a language he couldn’t speak to make himself understood. But the nurses marked him as regressionary and took away his Christmas parole.
“Yuppers, Larry’s gonna finish any minute.”
“Did we invite children?”
“That’s up to me and you.”
“Okay.”
Now that he wasn’t in danger of getting married, French Fry was pretty agreeable.
“You go stand in all their bedrooms. No one will bother seeing you.”
He gave me a thumbs-up. “You puppet them. Make them lighter.”
“I’ll turn them into puppets.”
“I’ll carry them.”
“If they have bathrobes, use them. We don’t want them catching cold.”
Another thumbs-up.
Consuela sang a melancholy tune about living with a hooked nose.
I made a Consuela puppet with glittery eyelids and she was so heavy and fat we used her to prop open the side door to the State hospital. In thirty minutes, minus the commercial breaks, she would turn back into a real Consuela, so French Fry and I had to hurry or endure a bit of danger at the hands of a left-behind Consuela waking to herself. The lane to the gate that separated us from the world was long, but Bob laid down his sheet and folded it in half, and the street got halved, and he did it again and once more and a time after that and suddenly we were at the gate without having to move.
French Fry disappeared under a street light when I turned to see what was taking Bob so long to squeeze through the gate, and found him trying to recapture his sheet through the bars.
“What happens if you pick up your sheet?” I asked it like I was his doctor and I didn’t blink so he would make sure to answer me.
“I get my sheet. That one’s the flat sheet. I’ve got my fitted here. I have to have both. They’re part of a set.”
“But wouldn’t everything go back to how it was?”
“We’re out. We’re out and away and gone.”
“Can’t you leave that here?”
“Why would I leave my sheet?”
“So it’s here when we get back.”
“We’re coming back?” And Bob shuddered around in a tizzy and he tore at his hair and he said some words I had never heard this side of a soup kitchen. It took all the not-blinking I had to get him to realize there was only one answer. If he wanted his sheet, he was coming back.
While I argued with Bob, dragging him reluctantly beneath glass-bobbed street lamps, French Fry went into all the rooms of all the houses that had children, and I’d say he borrowed Larry’s mind bending technique because I didn’t even see him go door to door. He just led seven children out to us all at once and then all seven of himself turned back into one and we had seven kids to entertain. We gave the smallest to Bob to curl up in his fitted sheet, as it was too young to walk. Once Bob had the task of fitting a sheet to an infant, he seemed to forget the flat sheet he’d left behind. Some of the children walked in bathrobes just like they were sleeping and some of them I turned into puppets and French Fry stuffed them in a backpack for easy carrying.
We squeezed through the gates and Bob unfolded the flat sheet once and twice and twice again to get us back to the side door without wearing out the kiddies. Consuela had reverted back to full-sized and human, but she was still holding the door to the center open. She jiggled up and down and back and forth to make her breasts bob. It was her version of dancing.
We took them down to the kitchen and Consuela awoke them from their puppet and sleep states by singing a rousing tune.
French Fry told them, “Go play.”
Larry stood in the corner, muttering an incantation. I guess the world was still unsteady. I could see that this was a trial run, ‘cause it wasn’t a full park with big tents and there wasn’t even a Ferris wheel; it was half of real and half of false. It was almost like we failed. There was a teeter totter over a coffee barrel, swings from the pan racks, calliope music from the microwave. The metal counters had been tipped and polished with lard to make slides.
The children awoke and stared. Everything still kind of looked like a kitchen, so I can’t say I blame them. Children aren’t supposed to play in the kitchen. There are knives and stuff.
Consuela had a knife. “Go play.”
Well, I guess you can’t have half an amusement park without half a test.
The children got into teacups. They rode atop the elephant Larry had so elegantly removed from a rice bag. They slid the slide, swung the swings, rode the water in the sink when we pulled the plug, then they crawled back out of the colander, dizzy and dripping.
Consuela laughed until she cried. “They play, they play.” She wiped at her eyes. She’d missed out on her own children because she was crazy. Although her husband loved crazy sex, he apparently didn’t like leaving her alone with the heirs to his throne.
Bob, too, had missed his children. He rocked the littlest one who was just too small and too big for the rides we’d created. He didn’t fit in a teacup with his nighttime diaper and yet we’d have lost him down the drain of the sink for sure. Bob folded him up so carefully and flatly in his sheet you almost couldn’t tell the baby was there.
The lights flashed, the microwave beeped and chimed, the kids started to get into it, forgetting they were playing by knifepoint, and squealed and hollered.
The dorm mother found us. “What on earth?” She may have been wearing a bathrobe, but she just didn’t fit in because her mouth went down and her voice was low, and everyone here had mouths going up and voices high. “Stop this at once!”
We had children in the garbage, children crawling mazes in the cupboard, children shoving large forks into the disposal and watching pretty sparks erupt.
The housemother’s hair was braided and tied to the top of her head. Her bathrobe was pulled tight over her breasts, making her the shape of a sausage.
I quickly turned her into a puppet. Consuela started screaming, “My toy, mine!”
The dead were starting to wake. All State hospitals are built on ancient Indian burial grounds.
The children were getting scared and clinging to each other. I just wasn’t thinking right, or I’d have turned them into puppets and we could have spirited them away to their beds without the bugaboo that followed. See, Bob was supposed to be chaos control, but the dead were rising and they were jittery and the children weren’t so acclimated to the impossibilities that the world shoved in our faces every day, and they started crying for their mommies and running every which way and so Bob unfurled his sheet. But then the ghosts were grasping at him and rushing him as he took his sheet, he took the housemother, he took the children, he took the spirits of the long-dead and disgruntled, and he rolled them up and smooshed them into one great big sloppy goopy snowball of a people-filled jelly doughnut. It dripped a little.
“Oops,” said Bob.
Consuela stopped screaming once the housemother was out of her sight and she pouted about not getting to play Hair and Clothes.
“We need to take them home,” French Fry said.
Larry looked away from the wall, his concentration broken, and the kitchen returned to itself. “What happened?”
“We got interrupted,” I explained.
Larry took in our great big dripping mess we’d made of the whole night and he’s got that power so he saw right away what a great big problem it was. “Aw, Bob, not again.”
Bob set down the leaky ball in the sink. He looked sad at what had become of his sheet set. He started to unfold it, but a leg fell out and an Indian laugh escaped and his sheet was just plain old ruined. He’d have to wash it and iron it to ever get it to fold flat again.
Bob without his sheet started banging his head with a colander that had once been a fun water ride. Larry and I took his place at the sink, checking out the damage.
“Can you fix it? Unbend them?” I asked Larry.
“It’ll take months. Look at all the noses.”
Bob had to sit in time-out with Consuela. But you know, just because you have a mess is no reason not to make use of knowing just exactly what you did wrong. French Fry and I returned puppet children to the beds of our too-excited-children who were busy being all smooshed together. Maybe no one would notice that these puppets didn’t do much and could only say things like ‘Yes, Ma-ma’. It took months for Elegant Larry to complete the process of unfolding the kiddies, like wet paper dolls, being careful not to tear them. Anyway, these kiddies would never be the same, so we couldn’t use them again after we set them free. But next time, Bob learned. He took one of his fitted sheets and wrapped all the nurses and counselors in a great big bindle, not smooshed, and we kept them in the freezer until after Christmas so we could enjoy the kiddie amusement park. Just for a while, it was sleepy-time dream paradise for all the new kids we stole and returned every night to their beds. Too bad they could never talk about where they’d been, or they’d have given away our powers.
A graduate of Bath Spa University in England, Dawn Wilson has had the pleasure to dabble in kitsch, surrealism, and espièglerie. Her work can be found in Rabbit Catastrophe Review, Gone Lawn, Paper Darts Magazine, Metazen, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Drunk Monkeys, and Punchnel’s, among others, while the author herself can be found dismantling the kitchen for wearable items, or at nightdawn.wordpress.com. She is at work on a madcap novel.