FICTION: “It All Goes” by Nicholas Maistros

Illustration by Maura Walsh / Black Nail Studio.

FICTION
It All Goes
By Nicholas Maistros

You’ll stay close, his mother had warned, with her voice that squeezed his nine-year-old neck. Devon could see the city, through the layers of his mother’s concern, as a growling thing, hungry and waiting for her vigilance to drop.

You’ll want to take pictures of everything, his cancer father had told him, rising from his own depths at the reminder of their trip. The city was a creature still, to Dev’s father, but a splendid one, rare, luminous, and shy. He’d have to be quick or he’d miss it.

Devon and his mother were sitting now in an air-conditioned diner in the middle of that city—his father had been too weak to do any sightseeing, so he’d stayed behind at Uncle Reggie’s apartment. Devon watched batches of strangers ascend the subway stairs just outside his window, into a bright world of busses and glass and gassy odors and shouts in other languages, of floating trash and shoes, everywhere shoes of all kinds and the legs that moved them. Devon examined the endless faces as if for bad ones who meant to do him wrong, who would suddenly stop and meet his eyes and say You. He held a disposable camera, one of several they’d brought with them. He’d already filled one camera with the trifles of his uncle’s apartment, his cousins who demanded he snap pictures of them doing various stunts, but he’d yet to take a single picture out here in the heart of the city. He’d forgotten that he should.

There were sirens, and he turned to ask his mother who was hurt. His mother’s face was in her hands. The sirens passed, and she crumpled further, her head falling into her folded arms. When this happened in East Carlyle, she would be in another room, and, without thinking, he would turn up the television, or go out back and practice standing on his head, but here in this diner full of city people, he could only sit low on his side of the booth and watch. No one asked if she was all right. No one gave her a reason to still her trembling shoulders, and so, without thinking, Devon slid from the booth. He weaved through a line of paying customers. He left the diner.

For a while, all he had to do was keep stride with the moving bodies around him. If anyone noticed him, they said nothing, likely assuming he was with an adjacent group, catching up. Above them all, but below the hot white sky, giants on screens stared down at Devon, danced for him, enjoyed massive plates of spaghetti, invited Devon to sit next to them, the pulled chair impossibly tall and far. One giant was a muscular man running through city streets in his underwear, again and again, before he found the right pair of jeans to pull on. Devon at first looked away, as though he’d seen something violent, but then stood and watched that giant man in his underwear, watched him find again and again, with relief, his pair of jeans, until Devon was pushed from behind, propelled forward.

Eventually the crowd thinned, and Devon was able to see, instead of legs, the path ahead of him, the infinite replication of streets and signs, the sense that he was getting farther and farther away. He was afraid to continue, but he did, and increasingly faster, more afraid of the punishments awaiting him should he turn back.

His legs carried him past mounds of bagged garbage, past tarps piled high with ladies’ purses, past hip-hop tracks from open windows. Men dressed like royalty stood at the entrance of a building with cool air sliding out. One waved at Devon and then pointed a gloved finger, saying, perhaps for fun, perhaps because he was nine with no adult, “There he goes.” Devon moved a little faster. Not wanting to appear afraid, he called back in his dumb tiny voice, “Can’t talk right now.” He skipped past another man who tried, it seemed, to catch him in a spray of hose water, past a soccer ball that landed just ahead of him and the voices on the other side of a

fence shouting, “Hey kid! The ball!”—fingers rattling the chain link. “Shove it,” Devon called back to them. Past great smoking craters in the street, exhaling volcanic steam and emitting the rock-splitting noises of impending eruption; past the row of honking yellow cars lined up as though they wanted to enter the smoking pit.

He was dizzy. He stopped to catch his breath, placed his hand against the warm steel of a parked pickup truck. When he regained his balance, he noticed, just above his splayed fingers, the pointed black toenails protruding from the edge of the truck bed. He rolled his head back to see, beyond the swell of the monster’s belly, the sun balanced between open reaching claws. He moved to hide the light behind the beast’s head, its painted snarling mouth, its two hanging buck teeth and sun-reddened ears. It was a colossal rat, poised to attack or climb the building before it. It wasn’t alive, Devon knew. A seam of folded and stitched plastic ran along its great haunch; its tail was attached to a humming box. But this was not the kind of inflatable creature he’d seen at the carnivals in East Carlyle—a very different life surrounded this rat. Devon turned to see that life, a gathering of people holding signs.

“Down with,” someone shouted, and they all responded in unison, “Corporate greed!” The one shouting stood on the bed of another pickup truck, parked in front of the rat’s. She held a megaphone: “Up with…” The congregation bellowed: “The people’s needs!”

“You want a flyer?” another woman asked Devon. She handed him a piece of paper. She winked at him.

“He don’t want a flyer,” a man said. “He wants a sign.” The man handed him the staff of his sign, which was heavy. “Both hands,” the man said, and Devon obeyed, tucking his camera under an arm. He chanted along with the group. Corporate greed! People’s needs! This, he felt, was much preferable to his own church. No one here was dressed up; they all sweated in T-shirts and jeans and sneakers and outside, unlike the people at his church who sweated in the heat of an airless sanctuary in their Sunday finest—the sweat spat from Pastor’s mouth, the sweat that formed a ball on his cancer father’s nose when he bowed his head. These worshippers had a breeze at least. And though there was a feeling, in his East Carlyle church, of something approaching, stirred up by their music and reaching arms, ready to drown them all in blood and granted wishes, nothing ever did; they never made it happen, whatever was to happen. They failed every week, despite all his personal work in his vinyl stacking chair next to the cancer father he wanted gone, his squeezed eyes, his knowing every word and never slipping, not once. It didn’t matter. Sad, handsome Christ and his church and everyone in it would not be able to dunk his cancer father into the baptismal tub and recover, simply, his father, as he’d been, with hair and smiling a wet, clean smile. His mother knew it. She would help his cancer father to his pew, then sweat in the car instead.

Maybe it wasn’t the church’s fault. Maybe the words Devon had learned by heart were the wrong ones. Maybe these people were stirring the right things up. Their faces were stubborn and sure. Devon’s arm muscles burned, but he held on. Something was about to happen. The rat was about to come to life.

“Come up here,” the woman with the megaphone called down to Devon. She had a round face that exuded, beneath a ballcap, an intense pastoral kindness. “Yes, you. Hop on up.” The man took the sign back, which made Devon feel instantly buoyant. He climbed as though floating onto the truck bed. The woman knelt down next to him, bringing with her a warm scent that Devon would not, years later, be able to describe but would simply recall as the first time he’d noticed, absurdly, the smell of a woman—not perfume, not makeup, her. She whispered in his ear: “When you hear me say ‘What’s disgusting,’ you’re gonna say, ‘union busting.’ Got it? At the top of your lungs. ‘What’s disgusting,’ those are the magic words. And you say…” Devon whispered it, these new words he was ready to learn by heart. “You got it.”

The woman stood, and Devon looked out, seeing nothing but waiting, praying faces. Into her megaphone, the woman called the magic words: “What’s disgusting?” She lowered the megaphone to Dev, but he’d been so anxious, he started to say his part before the device reached his lips, so only the second word rang out after the b, “usting!” He heard his magnified but still small voice, an exaggerated smallness, a mosquito passing his ear, and was immediately seized with a spiritual terror, the knowledge that he’d done it wrong. He’d only spoken one of the words into the megaphone, and he’d spoken it with the same useless voice he’d used to sing the wrong words in East Carlyle.

The rat people cheered. The explosion of their sound electrified the truck bed he stood on and brought tears to his eyes. He turned from the crowd. He leapt off the other side of the truck. He ran.

____

Devon stopped at the edge of a park, next to what appeared to be a clothing rack out of a department store. His mind went to shopping trips with his parents and the worlds he’d created for himself buried inside the circular racks. He pushed aside a sparkling dress. This rack was not circular, but he hid himself nonetheless behind the draped fabrics, sitting on the grassy curb inside, wrought iron at his back. He’d not yet gained his breath when someone called to him through the clothes. “Baby, you gonna buy something?” He didn’t move, even to pull himself into a tighter ball, which would risk disturbing the fabrics around him. “I think you’ll see better from this side, don’t you?”

The voice was unserious, even playful, adult yes but with a quality of chiming make-believe, the marvelous imaginary people who’d populated his daydreams, happy to have him observe and, without expectations to perform—to be cute, to be polite, to sit better, to sing, to recite, to throw better, to wash, hug, eat, to read better, to stop making that noise, to come here, to stop squirming, stop asking so many questions, stop embarrassing me, to stop—safely satisfy his curiosity about growing up.

Devon leaned forward until his head breached daylight, his hands on hot cement. He looked to his left, and there she sat, on a bench at the end of the row of clothes. Maybe his mother’s age, maybe younger, she wore a shiny silk robe as if this were her front porch, her head tightly wrapped in a high towel as though she’d just showered, perfectly situated above her red- rimmed sunglasses and bright yellow lipstick, like lemonade in a glass with the sun behind it, glowing lemonade against her brown skin, against the sweat-shine of her upper lip. On her feet, which were nearly level with Devon’s gaze, she wore high heels covered with yellow fur that floated like the tendrils of sea anemones, anchored to her twisted ankles. In her hand, she held a black high-heeled shoe, which she was marking with a black marker, examining her work through the smoke from the cigarette in her lemonade mouth, next to which was painted a tiny black mole. She appeared to Devon like a heron who’d landed where a heron was not expected.

“Well,” she said, confirming that yes it had been her chiming voice, and yes she was real, “what’s it gonna be?”

“I don’t have any money,” Devon said.

“You don’t, huh? Where’s your yard sale?”

“I don’t have anything to sell.”

“Everyone’s got something they can sell. What’s that in your hand?”

Devon realized he was still holding his disposable camera.

“You can take pictures,” the woman said. “No, portraits. You can take people’s portraits for a tiny little fee. Now that’s a gig. Here, let’s try it. Come and take my picture. I should be charging you, sweetie—you make a hard bargain. Come, come. And don’t ask me to take off my glasses. My eyes aren’t done.”

Devon scrambled out of the clothes and stood before the woman. A cardboard sign propped against the bench read, IT ALL GOES.

“Pardon me, but baby, you smell like shit. I think you stepped in it. You didn’t get feces on my garments, did you?”

Devon checked the bottoms of his shoes, scraped them against the sidewalk. “I don’t think so.”

“Good.” She set the black shoe and black marker down, put out her cigarette, fixed the front of her robe, and sat tall, her legs crossed, her lemonade lips parted as though caught unawares. “Go ahead, baby.”

Devon wound his camera and took the shot.

“Lovely, now what do I owe?” She reached down to the bottom of the clothes rack and pulled back a purse that was just as furry and alive as her yellow shoes.

“It has to be developed.”

“Of course, of course. You’ll get it to me later.” She handed him two dollars. “In fact, you should say that—processing fee for development, that sounds good. I’d give you my address if I had one right now. My poor sweet Flavio died and left me with the rent, so now here I am.” She plucked the cigarette from her mouth and stretched both arms into an impressive wingspan, her face high and beaming a smile so big her gums showed. “Take another,” she said through her teeth, and Devon did. “You gotta know when you see gold, baby. Listen, that was my last two dollars. I’ll have to owe you, how’s that? Oh, a customer!”

He stepped aside to allow three women to come forward. The saleswoman’s energy changed from showy customer service to swallowed disgust, reeling in slowly her long arms until they were folded before her. They were roughly the same age, Devon guessed of the three, as the woman selling her clothes, also wearing sunglasses. One of them said, “Hey, Snitty.”

“Hi, Clarita,” the saleswoman, Snitty, said back, making extreme the name’s Spanish sound. She did not stand.

“That bad, uh?”

“It all goes. If I’m left naked, you may pick away at my dry bones.”

“So dramatic. How’s Flavi?”

Snitty’s face arrested itself as though awaiting another snap of Devon’s disposable camera, lemonade lips parted against set teeth, though Dev thought he detected the flutter of eyelashes beneath the shades. “I do not know of whom you speak.”

“He kick you out, uh?”

Devon decided he did not like these women who were already fingering Snitty’s clothes. Theirs was a more reasonable stylishness, inconspicuous compared to Snitty’s wardrobe. Devon would not have noticed these women had he passed them along his dash through the city; they were a part of the city’s architecture; they towered and judged. The two who were not Clarita giggled, holding this or that piece mockingly before the other and slamming it back onto the rack. Some items missed the rack entirely. Devon circled them and scooped those items into his arms.

“I didn’t know you had a kid,” Clarita said.

“I don’t have a kid,” Snitty said. “I have an assistant.”

“I’ll take your picture,” Dev said, holding a bundle of clothes, surprised at himself for saying it, “for two dollars.”

Snitty clapped her hands together and smiled. “I changed my mind; he is my boy.”

One of the women found a wig in the rack to put on for the photo. The other found a jacket with exaggerated shoulder pads, shimmering with rhinestones. They gathered and leaned so their behinds were high in the air and Devon, having set the pile of clothes on the bench next to Snitty, snapped the photo.

“He’ll mail it to you,” Snitty said.

“Two dollars?” Clarita said.

“Six, my pet. Two dollars a head.”

Clarita gave him a ten, which ruffled Snitty further—she crossed her legs the opposite direction. “Keep it,” Clarita said, “a tip for Snitty’s boy.”

“I want this,” one of the other women said. She held a gilded belt whose cords entangled themselves like snakes, a slippery elegance that made Devon want to feel the thing in his hands.

“So sorry. I hadn’t meant to include that one. Here, I’ll just…” Snitty stretched from her seated position to pluck the belt from the woman.

“It all goes, uh?” Clarita said.

“Eventually,” Snitty said.

The women left, and Snitty announced that it was hopeless. “Help me roll this thing away, would you?” Standing, the heron was smaller than Devon had estimated, and quicker in her movements than she’d been at her bench, her lethargic poetry replaced with angular purpose. She made him smile, his make-believe friend. “They say ninety percent of businesses in this city close in the first month.” She took the helm of the rack. “I made it an afternoon. It’s a record!” As he pushed, Devon did not look about him for adults who might want to capture him, to bundle him away for devious purposes or perhaps to take him back to his sobbing mother and his cancer father. He listened to her. He followed her. He watched the weightless dancing of the furry yellow tentacles on her shoes.

They’d made it halfway around the park when Snitty stopped suddenly and Devon tripped over the wheels. His disposable camera clattered against the pavement but did not break. He picked it up and peered around to the front of the rack, where Snitty had exclaimed something, a floating chime, and was now kissing a much taller black man. A very pretty man, Dev thought. Almost as though he were not a man but was only dressing up as one. Like a boy he knew in East Carlyle, a couple grades older, who was fat and faggy-ass, a word the boys used that Devon did not understand but did recognize, like a color he couldn’t describe without comparison to other colors, fat, faggy-ass, and terribly ridiculed. This man, however, was grown and lean and using his faggy-assness like a power. A magician, Devon thought. “Snitty Nitty Vanilly,” a voice rich with the same queer magic, “you haven’t sold a thing.”

Snitty repeated her bit about ninety percent of businesses and found reason to again exaggerate the pronunciation of “Clareeta.” Then she turned and said, “Oh, I have a boy now,” beckoning him with a violent cock of her head. While he felt safe with Snitty, Devon was nervous to approach the magician. “My boy,” Snitty said, “this is Till. Show him your eyes, Tilly. But don’t get too close. The boy stepped in it, and I suspect it was human.”

The sun was situated behind the man, as it had earlier been situated behind the rat, a last low beam between buildings outlining the man’s waist, warmly blinding. Somehow, it all seemed the same to Dev, the rat, this magician, the smoking volcano, the beautifully-sculpted model in the sky running in his underwear—all of it reconfigurations of the same stuff, aiming to lure and mutate Devon as well. It was as though, should the sun disappear, Devon might see, instead of the magician’s face, his own looking back at him. But standing next to Snitty, her long fingers closed like a protective talon over his shoulder, Dev was no longer running from the mutating forces of the city.

The magician positioned himself to block the sun and to reveal, bending over the boy, his pretty face. He lifted with a flat hand the braids from his forehead, closed his eyes, and there, painted on the magician’s eyelids, was another set of eyes, their too-white corneas stretching up to the magician’s brow, the irises a brilliant peacock green, the pupils taking in their light when the magician’s real eyes were closed. Devon was hypnotized.

“Till has a brilliant show on,” Snitty said. “What’s it called? Till Morning?”

“Till Tuesday.” Till closed his peacock eyes and let his braids fall.

“Can I see them again?”

The magician laughed. “A fan!” He leaned to allow the boy closer vantage.

“Can I touch them?” Devon asked.

The peacock eyes snapped shut. “Don’t. You. Dare.” His face shined laughter. Devon didn’t laugh back, but he didn’t mind either. Unlike the laughter of adults, aloof with higher matters, or that of the kids at his school, which excluded him, this laughter was an invitation, a joke he was meant to be a part of; it was hot on his face and smelled of his mother’s lipstick.

“Smeared anyway, darling,” Snitty said. “You need a touch up.”

Till stood and asked where these clothes were going now that poor Flavio had taken a dive off a cliff. “No idea, Tilly. I was thinking while I was pushing. Can I come to yours?” But Till had guests from Michigan. “Michigan? Forget it. God.” They made a list of people she could call—that is, Till offered the names, and Snitty scratched them off as a name tried or already deemed ineligible. This should have excluded Devon, an adult conversation of higher matters, one of logistics, like utility bills, like doctors, but Dev followed easily, listened and understood. Snitty was as lost in this city as he was.

It was then that Devon noticed the woman at the clothes rack. She had a face with many wrinkles in it—somebody’s grandmother. Her arms, exposed in the summer heat, drooped and wobbled as she took off her own sun hat and reached for one of Snitty’s. It looked ridiculous on her, its dramatically wide brim piled with feathers and fur and flowers and lace, yellow to match Snitty’s shoes and purse, and just as resistant to gravity. Ridiculous, but Dev thought the hat was wonderful, and that it gave this grandmother an elegant strength, a lovely helmet with which to fend off the city’s grotesqueries.

Devon also wanted to prove something to Snitty. That he could be a useful partner. That he was worthy of the laughter she and the magician offered him. So he left Snitty and Till to their logistical discussion and approached the grandmother. “You should get it,” Dev said. The grandmother looked at him with her hands still on the feathery brim and smiled with gray teeth. “You look like a million bucks. Can I take your picture?” The grandmother mugged like someone in a movie getting her picture taken at a much fancier venue with fancy acquaintances all around to watch. “If you want the picture, that’s two dollars. I’ll have to send it to you.”

“That’s okay,” the grandmother said, and as though wanting to give him something for his flattering attention, “How much for the hat?”

“Um…” Devon looked back to Snitty to see if she’d noticed and might be able to give him a hint—she hadn’t noticed. “Five?” The grandmother took out her purse. She plucked from it five ones. He held out his hand to shake hers. He felt remarkably accomplished and worthy. But as the grandmother walked away, having already made it across the street, Snitty shouted, her chime now a cymbal crash, “What did you do?” Running toward him while holding her head wrap in place, hers was the urgent picture of a woman leaping from a still-running shower to prevent a catastrophe. Her bony chest shined with sweat or un-toweled water. “You gave that woman my hat?”

Dev shrank into the clothes rack at Snitty’s approach. He held out the ones, which his new friend snatched, her fiendish talon nearly scratching Devon’s wrist. Snitty examined the paper money for answers.

“You sold the most absolutely beautiful hat I have ever made for five dollars?”

It was Snitty’s unmade eyes, which he could now see, the sunglasses sliding down her nose, and the magician behind her, advancing as a henchman would, that sent him full speed to the street. Running again, running back the way he came, but Snitty and Till, he knew, would be fast; the magician had his queer magic after all, and who knew whether Snitty was a bird with wings.

Devon stopped in front of the first man he saw, leaning against a yellow car and enjoying a sandwich. He was not startled by the boy’s approach. He wiped his chewing mouth, having missed a smear of mayonnaise, and said through his food, “What’s up, kid?”

Devon could only breathe and scan the reflections in the car’s windows.

“Need a ride?”

Devon gave the address of his uncle’s apartment, which his mother had made him memorize—You’ll stay close. The man took another slow bite. “You got money with you?”

Devon produced the twelve dollars he had, the two from Snitty and the ten from Clarita. “That’s a start”—spitting bread crumb—“but it don’t cross the bridge.” The man looked up then, and without turning back, Devon knew what had snagged his attention. The man slapped the back door. “Get in,” and as Devon scrambled into the backseat, “you smell like shit, kid.” The man closed the door and walked, as slowly as he ate, around the car. He’d not made it to the driver’s side when Snitty clicked at the window with her nails.

She tried the handle, but Devon had slammed the lock as soon as the door was closed. The window was lowered an inch, and Devon could not raise it until the car was started, so he could hear easily Snitty say, “Baby, I’m sorry. Honestly, I’m not even mad. I’m not. I was only…taken by surprise.”

Devon scooted to the opposite side of the car. The leather was hot against the back of his legs, as was the close baking air he had to breathe. The driver was now situated in the front. He looked at the boy in his rearview.

“Sir, please,” Snitty said. The fingers of both hands were curled over the top of the window, framing her face. “He’s my son, and I just need to tell him something.” Her lemonade lips bumped the glass. “Baby, I appreciate it, I do. You see, I lack conviction. I’ve worked very diligently at my talk, and it’s lovely talk, but it’s only melody. What am I saying? I’m saying—there are things I know I need to do. I know it. But there’s so much distance, it’s easier, most of the time, just to gaze from afar. Excuses. La la la. You, though, I can tell. Already, I can tell. You make things happen, baby. And you run beautifully. Here.” She slid a dollar through the slit in the window. It fell like a dry leaf to the hot seat. “Your cut.” She kissed her hand and pressed it to the glass—another smudge. She rose from the frame and was gone.

The driver started the car. “Woo! That was a case right there. That your mom or dad or whatever?”

Devon turned and lifted himself to watch, out the back window, Snitty walk away. She did not glide to her rack of clothes; her silky robe did not flutter; her furry yellow shoes dragged. Watching her, the nightmares that had stalked his journey here evaporated. The city’s minions were not trying to capture him, change him—there were no minions. He thought of his mother, having lifted her eyes from her arms to see the empty booth across from her. His mother believed in minions and gargoyles. Devon knew better. And he liked knowing better. He thought of his cancer father, receiving the call on Uncle Reggie’s couch, and using what strength he had, a strength he’d pay for later, to rise from that couch, to march the five blocks to the subway, forcing his legs down those subway stairs and managing not to vomit in the trashcan at the bottom. His cancer father on a crowded train. His cancer father running, knowing that running would be best, terrible but necessary, his face one of pained determination as he ran beneath the same giant model in his underwear, also running, forever, across the sky. Running and calling his name, the voice his father had once used to soothe or scold smothered now by the new voice. The city had not taken his father. The city had not transformed his father. His mutation had begun well before, but it would be completed by the time Devon was found. What punishment would he receive for killing his father, and would it ever be enough? You run beautifully, Snitty had said through smudged lemonade.

The man put the car in drive.

“No,” Devon said. He scooted back across the burning seat. He collected his dollar, unlocked and opened the door. “I live here,” he said.

Nicholas Maistros’ stories have appeared in Best Small Fictions, Boston Review, The Baltimore Review, Witness, Washington Square Review, The Literary Review, Sycamore Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, and Longleaf Review, among other publications. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Colorado State University, where he taught courses in literature, composition, and drama. He has also worked in Broadway merchandising and nonprofit finance. He lives with his partner in Dayton, Ohio.

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