Flerbis

Georgetown Voice Short Story Contest 2006 Winner

The oldest of Tessa Riley’s sons was fourteen when she started shaving her children’s necks. Every morning she lined her children up from oldest to youngest: Jacob, Jordan, Justin, and Jessica. They sat side by side in a row on wooden chairs that earlier in the morning had surrounded the breakfast table.

Tessa sat behind them in her rolling, leather desk chair and worked her way down the line, gliding across the tiled kitchen floor, quickly but carefully trimming the extra hair on the back of their necks.

She liked how they looked from behind. The sexual symmetry of her children deeply pleased her. Tessa felt she possessed a certain reproductive talent that had allowed her to turn out two boys and two girls, alternating gender with each child. Although she wouldn’t have told her friends, she looked down on couples who couldn’t produce gender balanced crops of children.

As she sat behind the four, Tessa smiled, admiring her work—both in reproduction and with the hair clippers. She liked how their hair rotated. Short, ponytail, short, ponytail. Four clean, respectable necks. The daily shavings had recently been initiated when Tessa Riley’s hatred of flerbis suddenly increased.

Tessa was admittedly not a creative person, but her anal retentiveness had encouraged her to create names for things that the English language had not yet addressed. When she coined flerbis, Tessa was curled up on the cracked ground of her local supermarket’s parking lot. After a late evening trip to get some groceries, a masked mugger pushed her against the door of her SUV. He ripped her purse from her frightened grip. Tessa fell to the asphalt and watched her assailant stride away with her money and her groceries. The faceless man removed his dark stocking cap, exposing the back of his thick neck. The flickering, orange glow of the distant street light illuminated the coarse, tangled hair on his neck. It fused with his body hair, forming a scratchy forest down his back. The curly, dark hair repulsed her. She blamed the hair for stealing her billfold. It made her hate the town. It made her hate mankind. Eventually it made her want to fix society, but above all else, it made her think of something to call the feral hair on the back of his neck. Flerbis was the ugliest word Tessa could imagine. She became quite content with the word, feeling it captured the essence of immorality the hair represented.

•

No less than a week after Tessa added ‘flerbis’ to her personal dictionary did she begin her efforts to erase it from the minds and necks of her community. She formed the Stop Flerbis Society and traversed the town looking for recruits. Tessa plastered bulletin boards and telephone poles with flyers advertising her first meeting. Other than her kids, the only person who came to hear Tessa attack flerbis was Megan Wilkins. Megan was thirty-eight, but everyone in town knew she was dumber than a child. She’d lived with her widowed father until he died three years ago. She stayed in his house and her father had arranged for her to receive $20 a day from city hall. She rarely spent all of it, and the money she didn’t use, she threw away, not understanding that it would still be good the next day. Usually her allowance bought a few meals and some days she would go to the cineplex to watch a movie two or three times, exiting and buying a new ticket for each viewing.

At the first Stop Flerbis Society meeting, Megan sat at the end of the conference room’s first row of chairs. She frequently attended the town’s events in the community center. She’d witnessed meetings on redistricting, financing and school boards, never contributing but carefully following the serious voices. Megan’s pony tailed black hair dipped past her caramel-colored shoulders. She sat with her hands folded and tucked in her lap, anxiously staring at six boxes of pizza.

Pizza was her favorite.

“Pizza is my favorite, Mrs. Riley,” Megan revealed in between bites. Tessa had finished her speech disappointed that none of her friends or neighbors showed up. No one seemed to come to meetings anymore.

“Pepperoni and olives is my favorite type,” Megan continued. “But it’s OK that there isn’t any of that here tonight. I still like pepperoni without olives.”

Megan turned to Tessa’s youngest child, Jessica, who was seated and silently eating. “My favorite is pepperoni and olives. What’s your favorite?”

Jessica looked at her feet dangling from her blue, plastic chair. Her mom had dressed her in the same shoes she wore when they went to church for the holidays.

“Cheese,” she answered.

“I like cheese, but pepperoni and olive is my favorite. What’s your favorite?” Megan directed her question at Justin. She couldn’t remember any of their names.

“I like cheese, too.”

“I like cheese but pepperoni and olives is my favorite.”

“Megan, what did you think about what I said tonight?”

Tessa made Megan’s mental record player stop skipping.

Megan hadn’t really been listening to Tessa during her speech. She had stared at the unopened pizza boxes the whole time, trying to smell olives.

“Well, do you agree that flerbis is ugly and a sign of moral descent? I see you don’t have any. Your neck looks really quite nice.”

“Oh, thank you.” Megan touched her complimented neck.

“Do you think you’d like to help me out with my campaign against flerbis?”

Megan was not sure.

“I’m not sure. But you have always been nice to me, so I suppose I could help you.”

Tessa waited in the conference room for another hour, until she thought it was clear no one else was coming. She sent Megan home with four boxes of pizza, all of which were still without olives.

•

Nobody else came to the second meeting. On the night of the third meeting, Megan walked into the community center’s conference room and happily took the same seat she had sat in for the previous two meetings. She sat quietly with her hands clasped and did what she did whenever she was bored. Before he died, her father had discovered that Megan not only thought and behaved differently from everyone else, but that she saw differently, too. Whenever she didn’t deeply focus her attention on something, her eyesight began to disintegrate. Somewhere in her mind, the images of her surroundings crumbled into elementary pictures. Details washed away and her brain reverted her vision to connect-the-dots fragments. If she relaxed on a bench and stared at a store across the street, eventually all she saw was a series of unconnected points, brokenly outlining the buildings bricks and windows.

As she sat alone in the community center’s white-walled conference room, the forms of the tables and chairs faded away. To her, the room’s objects looked like a vast expanse of overlapping constellations. Everything around her began to spread apart. The tables, even the chair she sat on, floated to opposite ends of the limitless room. Only she remained together. Her body looked the same. Her fingers remained securely attached to the same hands they always did. The dots of the room drifted around her. Everything was everywhere at once in her mind. Shape, color, depth did not distract Megan until the Riley children noisily walked into the room and returned her to their reality.

•

Right behind her kids, Tessa entered the conference room carrying several dozen cardboard signs. Disappointed to see only Megan, she remained undeterred. She was convinced the lack of supporters was a result of a lack of exposure. She knew her friends would support her if only they knew what needed support. So, she printed signs and buttons with slogans like ‘End Flerbis Now’ and ‘I Support Clean Necks’. Her arm pinned a phonebook to her side. She planned to solicit the local barbers to remind their customers to shave their necks in between haircuts.

Tessa handed the signs to Megan and explained to her where she wanted the signs to be placed. Megan accepted the signs, leafing through them to check for pizza boxes. She was happy to have a task, but she forgot what it was.

“Listen, Megan, just walk along the road and place the stick into the ground so the sign faces the road so people can read it. Put one about every fifty feet.

Megan didn’t know how many fifty feet was.

“Just when you take a step, start counting, and when you get to twenty-five steps, put a sign in the ground. You can count to twenty-five, can’t you?”

“Oh yes, well I’m quite good at counting.”

Megan marched off with the signs, happy to begin her task, now that she remembered what it was. Lugging the thick cardboard signs, her light steps barely displaced the cigarettes and gravel that littered the side of the road. After carefully counting off twenty-five steps, she bent down and forced the thin, metal poles into the ground to hold up the first sign. Another meticulously measured twenty-five steps and another sign was placed in the ground. She proceeded along the dirt roadside, following its curvy weave through the forest. Another twenty-five, another sign. Getting up from her crouch, she rubbed the dusty dirt off her finger pads.

Before picking up the rest of the signs, Megan stared out at the trees to the right of the road. The pines near the roadside stood out to her. She could see their bark and the vines tangled around the thick trunks. The kudzu, as she didn’t know it was called, wrapped itself around several of the trees like spiraling sinews. Many people had glanced out from their cars, fearing the vines were suffocating the trees. She stepped into the inviting forest. Walking up to the trees, she touched the vines and the rough bark they tried to cover. She bent down and felt some of the tree’s exposed roots and caressed the kudzu’s oily frills. She followed its ascent up the tree, staring up at the vine’s fibrous growth. The vine grew up and around the tree and connected to the neighboring elm. The kudzu infused itself in the branches of that tree and twisted itself down the trunk. As she opened her eyes, the whole forest seemed to be connected, one living entity, each tree a tentacle groping the earth.

“Where is your center?” Megan asked the woods, unsure where to direct the question.

The lack of response startled her out of her daze. She hurried back to the roadside and picked up the remaining signs. Embarrassed, she glanced around wondering if anyone had seen her forget about the signs. The road was empty and she returned to counting her steps.

•

She started counting out loud, to ensure that her mind stayed on her task and her feet stayed on the road. Marching along, her load continued to lighten. The distance between every sign was carefully measured. Nestling her heel against the pole of the last sign, she planted the new one at the tip of her toe on the twenty-fifth step. Tessa caught up with Megan in her car, following the trail of signs like breadcrumbs. Pulling her car onto the road’s shoulder, Tessa shouted over her oldest son to Megan, through his opened passenger window. She came to drop off another batch of signs, stopping on the way to reposition several that had been inadequately situated. She popped the latch to her trunk and instructed Megan to retrieve the new signs. Megan removed the signs, smiled at Tessa’s children, and shut the door. She watched the car’s rear lights colorfully switch from park to drive. The car faded into the road’s next bend. She took two steps in the tire tracks of Tessa’s car until she remembered she had lost count of her steps. Megan retreated to the last sign and began another measurement.

•

As her right foot touched the ground almost twenty feet from the previous sign, “Eight” was the last word Megan Wilkins ever said. The only thing that could have heard her was the rusty front bumper of a blue Honda. Her limp body flew through the air and struck the trunk of an elm tree covered with vines. The car’s driver had been trying to read the last sign Megan stuck in the ground. He was driving too fast to read the small slogan and looked in his rearview mirror to see if the sign had a backside. As he came around the gentle curve of the road, he never saw Megan until her body was flying over the road’s metal guardrail.

The paramedics and police arrived and removed Megan’s lifeless body from the wooded roadside. The driver leaned on the hood of the police cruise squeezing his thick neck with his trembling hands.

He threw up.

Tears swelled his eyes. On the road, near where his car skidded to a stop, he saw the scattered white cardboard signs that had flown out of Megan’s hands when he hit her. Curiosity temporarily trumped grief, and he stumbled over to the signs on his unbalanced legs. He read one of the blue- and red-lettered signs, and the first thought he had in an hour that did not regard killing a person was, “What is flerbis?”

•

Since Megan left behind no family members, Tessa had taken on the responsibility of planning the service and the burial. She also gave the only speech at funeral.

“I was the last person on this Good Earth to talk to Megan. We had been working closely these past few weeks and she was becoming an integral member of the Stop Flerbis Society. She probably considered me her best friend. But I was more.

“I was friend, counselor, leader, role model. I ensured that her life was not wasted. I introduced her to morality and brought her into a movement to spread it to the rest of the world. Tragic as her death is, she died fighting for what she believed in. And I know that would have made her happy. I’m sure she would have hoped that all of you could die with the same sense of fulfillment. Despite its first casualty, the crusade against flerbis shall continue. May Megan and the fight she died for never be forgotten.”

One by one, the town members who attended trickled past Megan’s grave. Tessa purchased the tombstone and decided on the engraving. She selected a rounded marble slab to peak out from the grassy ground. Carved into the marker in cleanly chiseled three inch letters were Megan’s full name and the dates of her birth and death. Below this, Tessa added four more lines:

IT NEVER SEEMED

TO BOTHER HER

THAT EVERYONE ELSE WAS

SMARTER THAN HER

•

And so she shall be remembered, as her grave became just another marker in a row of unconnected marble headstones.