Homunculus
by Meredith L. Patterson
Originally appeared in Jackhammer
After Dave had shaved and gotten his cup of morning coffee, he noticed that he was missing his pinky toes.
The discovery caught him far enough off guard that he stood, motionless, at the kitchen counter, puzzled and staring at his cleanly maimed feet. They had been there, he knew, the night before; he had washed them himself during his shower. Now, though, they were quite definitely someplace else; there was no hole, no scab, no scar, just two smooth patches of skin where pinky toes had, to date, been attached. The image distracted him so thoroughly that he failed to notice for a good thirty seconds or more that he was still pouring a steady flow of sugar into his coffee mug.
"Darn it," he said, mindful that Stevie was watching cartoons in the living room and could probably hear him. He righted the sugar canister and stared, frowning, at the mound of wet sugar in the cup. He pushed it toward the sink and turned, leaning against the wall to keep from wobbling too much on his way into the den.
The Saturday morning cartoons were on, but Stevie wasn't watching them. A long, lumpy, human-shaped figure -- too male to be Ellen, too tall to be one of Stevie's friends -- lay in front of the television, with Stevie seated, in pajamas, at what would logically have to be its feet. Dave took his glasses out of the pocket of his bathrobe for a better look, twisting the frames to try to get them to sit properly across the bridge of his nose this time.
It looked, for all intents and purposes, like a man. A tall, smooth-skinned, jut-jawed, brown-haired, high-browed, more-than-adequately-endowed man, lying naked on his living room carpet next to a pile of Lego, either asleep, unconscious or dead. And Stevie was messing with its feet.
Dave lurched forward, aiming to catch Stevie by the arm and pull him away from the stranger on the carpet. Instead, one foot rolled to the left, his sense of balance expecting support from the toe that wasn't there, and he staggered, arms waving for some kind of purchase on the air. He managed to stumble forward, a wavering half-run that ended with him on both knees at the coffee table, looking over it at his son and the man on the floor.
Stevie turned around and grinned, his face the perfect image of nine-year-old smugness. "Smooth move, Dave."
"Stevie, get away from that!" Dave levered himself up on his elbows, his bathrobe slippery on the polished glass tabletop. "How did a naked man get into the living room? What do you think you're doing?"
Stevie put one of the man's feet in his lap, jamming something small and oblong onto the end of it. "Trying to get these stupid things to fit. Yours are too funny-shaped, they go on crooked."
Dave felt a twist in his stomach, but asked the obvious stupid question anyway: "Son, what do you think you're doing with my toes?"
Stevie tossed the toe onto the coffee table and crossed his arms. "You can have your stupid toes back anyway, they don't fit right. I'll have to get some other ones."
Dave fidgeted with his glasses again, trying to get the damn things to stop sagging on the right and throwing everything out of focus. It was a pinky toe, all right, lopsidedly clipped nail and all. He picked it up, bringing it close to his nose to examine it; just like the end of his foot, the bottom of the toe was completely straight, flat and unscarred. When he set the thing down on its end, its base sat flush against the tabletop, while its tip slanted sharply to the right.
Damn. It is crooked.
The thought struck him that perhaps he ought to be more upset about his own body parts being strewn across the living room -- that this had to be some kind of attention-grabbing stunt on Stevie's part. He wants you to start shouting, the Parenting Guide in his head told him. He's acting out to get you to react, hold it in, don't give it to him. He snatched the other toe from where it lay next to the body, making a mental note to find a good plastic surgeon and soon.
The man still lay on the floor, unmoving. In fact, Dave realized, he hadn't even breathed in the time that he'd seen him. "It's not about the toes, Stevie," he snapped. Don't give him the satisfaction. "Where did this ... this guy here come from?"
"I built him," said Stevie, plopping the man's leg back onto the floor and curling up against it for a backrest. "And now he's all finished, except for his little toes."
"You built a robot?" My son built a robot?
"Nuh-uh," Stevie said, pulling the thing's other leg into his lap like a favourite stuffed animal. "I built a better dad."
"That's ridiculous! You can't build people. Where would you get the parts from?" Dave blurted out, leaning over the table and staring at the mannequin-like body. He had expected a waxy tone to the skin, or bruisemarks where blood had pooled under the surface like in photos on Unsolved Mysteries, or a carved-on look to the face, or something -- but there was nothing like that. If it was a dead body, it was a fresh one. That, somehow, was a more comforting realization than the other one itching at the back of his mind: that Stevie preferred a lifeless body to him. What the hell does that say about me?
"I ordered them. There are websites that sell kidneys and lungs and stuff. They take credit cards."
God damn. You really can buy anything off the Internet these days.
This, Dave realized, would explain why the bank account's been so screwed lately.
My son is insane.
"You took my credit cards?" he demanded, trying to fathom how he'd managed to miss something like that; did he really pay that little attention to the kid? "Why didn't I see the packages? Where did you keep them?"
Stevie shrugged. "UPS delivers in the afternoon. You and Mom aren't home yet. And nobody ever looks in my closet."
Dave fought to keep from scrambling straight to Stevie's room and excavating his closet, to force down images of murky glass jars and squishy plastic specimen bags buried in Styrofoam packing peanuts. Later. Focus on the situation. One issue at a time, the Parenting Guide dictated. "And what do you need another dad for?" he challenged. "Aren't I good enough?"
Stevie sniffed and wiped his nose on the arm of his pajamas. "If you hafta ask, then the answer's no."
"But you can't just have another dad because you feel like it. Your mother doesn't want a new husband."
"She doesn't have to marry him. I just want him to be my dad." He reached over the table, took hold of Dave's bathrobe sleeve, lifted it to feel the worn fabric, and dropped it with a dismissive toss.
"What kind of dad is that, though?" Dave asked, groping for some way to show the little brat the holes in his so-called logic. "He just lies there and doesn't do anything."
"I said, he's not finished." Stevie sniffed again. "At least this dad listens to what I say."
At that moment there was little that Dave wanted to do more than stand up and pace back and forth, but even that was impossible; like it or not, he was stuck, down at Stevie's level. I throw my life completely out of balance for my kid ... and he replaces me.
It's gotta be just one of those dad things. In a year, two years, he'd have started liking girls, or bucking for first string on the football team, and I'd feel the same way. I'll have to ask Ellen. Her mother must've had to deal with it too. Moms and daughters talk about these things forever.
"How do you know he's listening if he doesn't move?" Dave asked, checking quickly to make doubly sure that the thing in fact hadn't moved.
Stevie glared, a look that should have been far too withering for the average nine-year-old to pull off. "Because I made him."
Yeah. And I thought the same thing about you, kid.
If he'd had to put a name to the way he was feeling, Dave's number-one choice would have to have been somewhere between 'cynical' and 'helpless'. I made a kid. My kid made a dad. Or ... no. My kid made two dads.
"But how come my toes, Stevie?" Dave wheedled, trying the sympathy tack this time. "Why'd you have to take mine? Didn't you think about how I'd feel?"
"They shipped me defective parts. I didn't wanna have to bother with returning 'em, I just wanted to hurry up and finish putting him together."
I guess he's been working on that from day one, Dave realized. Since before that, since we started having to take him and Ellen to the doctor's every couple of weeks for those prenatal things, and then having to wake up at all hours to feed him and change him and stuff. Stevie made a dad out of me.
"He'll be needing your car keys, and your wallet," Stevie cut in. "And directions to your office, that kind of stuff."
"C'mon, Stevie, cut it out," Dave argued, reaching back to put his hand over the back pocket that wasn't there. "If you want a different dad, that's one thing, but for crying out loud, make him find his own job!"
"Sure, whatever, Dave," Stevie said, with his back to Dave and his arms crossed over his chest. "Put a little boy into a one-income family. See if I care."
Dave swallowed, knotted the cloth of his bathrobe between his fingers. He wanted to smack the kid, backhand him across the room and bury the new dad in the back yard -- I'll eat the credit card bills, just get the thing out of the way! -- but wouldn't that just compound the problem? Would a sensitive dad do that? The sensitive dad Stevie wanted hadn't once lifted a hand to block his way ....
"Stevie!" came Ellen's voice from inside the bedroom. "Are you bothering your father?"
"No, Mom," Stevie answered immediately, his voice tinged with that half-guilty tone that kids never can get rid of.
"It's eleven-thirty, you've watched enough cartoons for one day. Go get dressed and pick up the playroom," Ellen called.
Stevie got up, only reluctantly setting the new dad's leg back on the floor. He threw another one of those glares in the direction of the bedroom, then stalked off toward his own bedroom, leaving the mannequin-figure behind.
Dave stared, for a while, at the motionless thing that had nearly taken his toes. And it's going to keep going like this, he slowly realized, around and around until he feels like he's separated far enough. First from me, then his mother. Something's gotta account for it.
He glanced up at the hall to his and Ellen's bedroom, then down to Stevie's, rolling the toes back and forth in the palm of his hand.
Girls. I'll tell her he's getting interested in girls.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.