HOPEWELL

Graduate school was a disease the girl had contracted. She knew the program would leave her over-educated and lost. She wasn’t sure why she enrolled but it led her to him and she was grateful for that.

The program required her to put in a certain number of hours at an agency that said she would be doing critical replacement and fostering transformational relationships. The interview process–a formality really–was simple.

Would she be comfortable transporting clients in her car? Sure. Did she have tuberculosis? No, she didn’t think. What causes poverty? She didn’t know.

Her field instructor, Laura, was a kind woman. A recovering addict, she was weathered and brusque and warm. Laura explained that the organization worked with poor families in Appalachia and connected them to resources that made sure they didn’t starve or freeze to death. The first family the girl would visit were called the Snyders, Laura said.

The drive out to Hopewell, to him, was beautiful. The highway was lush and dripping with rain and billboards. One of the girl’s classmates, Nadia, was doing her field hours at the same agency. Nadia was the type of person stupid people are impressed by and think are really smart. The girl liked Nadia fine but she knew better.

The Snyder’s home was miserable. The wood was rotting and the windows were boarded with plywood and rusted metal screens. The porch was littered with damp stuffed animals and furniture that was meant to be kept indoors. The poverty on display caused Nadia to emit a series of sounds designed to convey her empathy, signal her humanity–she felt something and she wanted the others to know.

Patricia, the matriarch of the Synder clan, answered Laura’s knocking. A fleet of small, barking dogs surrounded Patricia’s feet. Patricia was skinny and fat with scrawny arms and legs and a big middle. She wore an oversized Bugs Bunny tee and her eyes were large and probing as she surveyed the three women.

“Hi, Patricia. I’m Laura, from the Service Project. We’re here to see how you’re all doing,” Laura said.

“It’s nice to meet you, I’m Nadia.”

“I’m Sara,” the girl said.

Patricia ushered the women inside, which was equally miserable. Something that looked like birdseed or kitty litter covered the floor. The house smelled damp and diseased.

“This here’s Feddie,” Patricia exclaimed. Everything she said, she shouted.

Feddie, who had been sleeping, was startled. Wearing only his underwear, his eyes widened as he looked at the three strangers standing in his living room. He covered his crotch and shrieked as the women introduced themselves.

Patricia led them down the hall. The further they went, the darker the house became. The only source of light came from a floor lamp in the living room and the plywood in the window frames blocked out the sun.

Patricia explained that her sister, Judith, wasn’t home. But Judith had something Laura wanted the three women to meet. She brought them to a baby, a little boy lying in a bassinet. His eyes were lifeless and he was remarkably ugly. As Laura held him, Sara saw that the back of his head was completely flat. The baby had hardly ever left his bassinet, it seemed.

Nauseous from the birdseed and the smells and the baby’s flat-head, Sara asked to use the restroom. Inside, she drank from the tap and gathered herself.

Waiting outside the bathroom door was him. He had enormous eyes, like a tarsier, one was half-shut and the other twitched. His whole body shook like hell and his teeth were small and translucent. He was thin and covered in sinewy muscle. His skin was blue. He was much smaller than the rest of the family; the runt of the litter. His face was scrunched, with a wide mouth that extended out to the far edges of his face. His t-shirt read STRONG IS THE NEW PRETTY in bold-face across his chest. He was decrepit and ugly and pitiful. As she looked at him she felt a weight on her gut and her pussy. Sara felt like she needed to pee.

“I’m Sara,” she said.

The blue man squealed excitedly and flapped his hands. He signaled for Sara to come with him and led her to the backyard. He pointed to a plot of earth in between two busted out Plymouths and grinned. Sara wasn’t sure what she was looking at, but the blue man insisted she look closer. Really look, his eyes said. She saw that the mound of dirt was freshly raked and that flowers surrounded it.

“Is something buried here?” she asked.

He grabbed her hands and brought them to his chest. Gasping, his mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water. Sara said they should probably go back inside.

Sara and the blue man found the others in the living room. They were gathered in a circle eating slim jims and nutter butters. Looking down at them, all together, Sara saw how large each of the family members’ foreheads were. Patricia’s brow was especially big. Her hairline was raised high most likely from menopausal thinning and malnourishment, she reasoned.

“Well that’s Gregg-Dean,” Patricia shouted, pointing stupidly at the blue man.

Nadia was still and probably in shock. Laura explained that something needed to be done about the windows, especially now that the summer was ending. Laura brought in canned foods and clean blankets from the car and asked Patricia a series of questions about the baby and Judith’s behavior as a mother.

Before leaving, Patricia handed Sara a ziploc bag stuffed with nutter butters and slim jims. Sara’s eyes watered from the gesture but also from the stench emanating from the kitchen sink. As she thanked Patricia, she glanced at Gregg Dean, whose gaze remained fixed on her.

The three women drove back to the office in silence. Halfway there, Laura stopped for gas and Nadia began to cry.

“It’s just so sad,” she whined. “They didn’t choose to be like this. And poor Gregg Dean. He can’t even speak? You can tell he has so much to say. He’s really smart, you can just tell. The way his eyes would completely light up? You can just tell. And she’s going to lose that baby,” she said.

This irritated Sara. Dean wasn’t smart, he didn’t have anything to say. He was pitiful and empty-headed and she loved him for that. Nadia stopped crying when Laura got back in the car. To deflect, Nadia started showing Sara photos of her French Bulldog, Lucas. He was gray and white with blue eyes. Sara liked the eyes.

“Those dogs can’t mate on their own,” Laura said.

“What?”

“Yeah, they have to be inseminated. And the babies’ heads are too big for the mothers, so they’re all c-section babies,” she continued. Nadia said she didn’t think that was true but Laura said it was true and that a male English bulldog is unable to mount and enter his female mate without a human’s assistance.

Sara drove home from the office that evening and thought about calling her boyfriend back. But she mostly hated him and decided against it. The next morning she had class and her professor made the students wear masks labeled with their respective mental disorders and traumas: anxiety, body dysmorphia, bulimic, molested, depression, raped. She felt ill from all the proneness and thought she could sense everyone getting horny from oversharing. Nauseated, she left the classroom early and thought about never coming back.

Sara’s boyfriend’s texts had become increasingly irritating. He just wanted to know if she was okay, he pleaded. She called him from her car, thinking she needed to end things.

“I’m thinking I need to end things between us,” she said.

“Is there someone else?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“God,” he cried, “well, what the fuck? Does he sleep in your bed?”

“Well, he will.”

She thought about how she probably could have had a baby with him, the boyfriend, if she had wanted to. He really did love her.

Driving home, she thought of Gregg Dean, and continued to think of Gregg Dean when she got to her apartment. His big eyes and his blue skin. How her hand felt against his chest and in his palms. How he, much like Lucas, was a consequence of the expression of recessive traits brought on by a lack of genetic diversity. He, like Lucas, was a total innocent, born from a perverse reduction in the genetic load. Sara washed her dishes, grateful that her boyfriend would never eat off them again. She made her bed and thought about how she’d like to someday make Gregg Dean’s bed.

She spent the rest of the afternoon packing and made the drive out to Hopewell. Feddie answered the door. Unlike Gregg Dean, Feddie spoke.

“In the yard,” he screeched.

Feddie led Sarah to the backyard, where Gregg Dean sat by the mound in between the Plymouths. He squealed at the sight of her. In turn, Sara’s heart swelled at the sight of him.

“Would you like to leave with me?” she asked.

Gregg Dean flapped his hands, she managed to grab hold of one and walked around to the front. Would he need anything, she wondered? She could always buy him new and better things, she reasoned. Gregg Dean sat in the passenger seat as Sara drove. Occasionally, he would point out things on the road.

“Mattress stores are a scam,” Sara read aloud from one of the billboards.

They got to the lake and Sara parked the car and guided Gregg Dean out. It was dark now and no one was out. She took off her clothes and then undressed him.

“Is there anything about you I need to know?” she asked, knowing he could not answer.

He trembled and his skin was cold as she led him out to the lake. She assumed he didn’t know how to swim because he wrapped his body around her tightly, and she knew he was frightened. Intertwined, they waded into the water. She thought about what it would be like to breastfeed Gregg Dean as his soft, blue stomach pressed up against her thighs.