The Rat Bucket Wizard
A story
The Santa Ana winds blow in from the desert in the east, and out across the coast in the west, bringing an arid heat to everywhere in between. They scrape the clouds out of the sky and shred the Glad trash bags in the brush; they rattle the sign outside the corner Chevron and make Thomas the clerk suck his lips into his mouth. When they come out again they’re red. And wet. The Santa Ana winds turn the air hazy, so that even looking to the end of the block feels like seeing the end of a long dream. Everyone’s hair is matted and their faces are shiny. The women tug out matted shirts from under their breasts and the men pin their arms to their sides to hide the musk. Both apologize to each other, sheepishly, and from above, the sun keeps bearing down. Everyone’s animal natures are rubbing up against each other. Soon, in this heat, the world will reveal itself to be all love or all vice, for those who know how to look. For certain special people though, the winds change nothing at all. I am the Rat Bucket Wizard.
The alarm on my iPhone 11 rang at 6:00AM, but I turned it off and lay there until 6:30. I had thought I was getting a call, and I needed a second to recover. It was a Saturday. I needed to get to the Seafoam laundromat before all the washing machines got taken up.
There’s a man there sometimes who brings these two kids, and he sleeps and drools into his goatee while they run around and yell. They do this thing — they stick their hands down their Cat & Jack pants and slap each other — and then they start crying but the drooling man never wakes up. When that happens I walk out from the air conditioning into the heat and look at a tree planted in the center of the parking lot. The bark is peeling off on that tree, and its skin is smooth and pale. There’s a sharp elbow in the middle that reminds me of an arm, and then I think that the whole tree looks like arms and legs, all gamboling and playing together, holding up little fans and lanterns to catch the sky. The leaves quiver in the heat. I am the Rat Bucket Wizard. My sister was calling me but I ignored her.
I put my clothes in a Glad trash bag in the trunk of my Pontiac Grand Am and drove out. It was only 7:00 in the morning that day but it was already hot and I was sweating from having to carry my clothes to the car. Every day has been hotter than the last recently, but I don’t mind. It’s nothing to me either way. One of the lights on the dashboard was beeping but I was just going to the Seafoam laundromat so I ignored it. Then my iPhone 11 beeped because my sister was texting me now and suddenly I was very hungry. I ate all my glove compartment snacks — chocolate chip Clif bars and Reece’s Big Cups — but I was still anxious. My hands were shaking. I couldn’t drive. I pulled into the corner Chevron to load up on Skittles.
The kid at the counter was named Thomas. He had a shiny face, even in the air conditioning, and soulful eye bags, but I really remembered him from his British accent. It was so slight as to only show up when he talked fast. His hair tickled his forehead from underneath his Harley Davidson baseball cap, and his acne made his face glow a little. He was extremely short. I don’t like men, but he didn’t seem like a man to me. He was a kid with heavy eyelids and drooping shoulders, a rat blooming from a flower and falling down into the bucket.
“Just the Skittles today?” He asked me, and I grunted. I wanted to pay more attention, but my Sofra cotton brief underwear was sliding up my crack and it was itchy. I ate all my snacks under the awning outside — my sister texted me again — and then I got back in the Pontiac Grand Am. It wouldn’t start.
I’m Thomas. I don’t like my last name so I won’t say it. I’m nineteen years old and I still have three baby teeth, one of which is in the front of my mouth. I like it that way. Sometimes, when I go home in the morning, I stay up late and think about my other baby teeth — the ones that fell out. I think about them lying somewhere in a Dover or Los Angeles landfill, and then I want to cry about the times I haven’t taken care of myself. I’ll never go home again, but it’s too late now. Between my baby teeth, my fingernail clippings, and all the hair I pulled out in high school, there’s probably a physical map of my failures across half the globe. Even after I’m dead, the earth will still remember.
I was really tired that Saturday when that weird woman came into my Chevron. The heat always knocks me out. The register was melting upwards into the isles and the isles upwards into the LEDs on the ceiling. Before I understood what was happening, my head would slump and I and all I could see then was a gigantic bird flying through the gas station soup. The bird had no feathers, and wings made of smooth, fin-like human skin, and it looked at me — bored — before flying off into the storm. It had thick, feminine eyelashes, like a face model from the billboards. The bell above the door rang and the junk food lady walked in.
“Just the Skittles today?” I asked. She looked someplace behind me, grunted, then took her Skittles and left. The junk food lady was fat, and she smelled kind of bad, but I still liked her. Most people seem happy at first and get sadder the better you know them, but I always felt somehow that deep inside, this woman was happy. I don’t know what it says about me that I believed that. I don’t care.
The bell rang again and the fat lady shuffled back in.
“So I think my car is broken,” she said. She had a kind of hollow voice, like the air was getting trapped in her throat before the words could come out.
“Like, it won’t start?”
“Mm-hmm.”
I thought about it. We sold jumper cables and jump packs, if the issue was her battery, but it felt mean to make her buy those just to use them once.
“I guess I can take a look at it, if you want,” I said. “Save you some time.”
She pointed me at her car and then waited under the awning watching me. I opened up the hood and recognized the engine. I unclipped the jumper cables from my belt and hooked them up to the battery, but while I was attaching them to the jump box, I think the two cable ends touched each other. I felt a surge of current through the rubber and a couple sparks jumped out of the fuse box. I wiped my forehead and put my hands on my hips.
“I actually don’t know what any of this stuff does,” I told the junk food lady. Hopefully she wouldn’t notice I had broken her car.
I don’t know why Thomas offered to help me carry my things to Seafoam. But it didn’t matter. The winds weren’t blowing that morning but I could feel them anyway, leaving their stains in dripping sweat and quivering air. I felt like I had been trapped in some kind of atmospheric current, like something had gone wrong and now I was drifting downstream to some place I didn’t know. I was sweating through my Andre’s Pizza t-shirt and even I could smell it.
“Your phone’s ringing,” said Thomas. He smelled like warmed-over Kroger’s chicken noodle soup, smelled like a man. We each carried one Glad trash bag full of laundry since I didn’t want to get in a man’s car. I almost swung my laundry at him for bringing up my sister, but then I remembered I was the Rat Bucket Wizard and I felt better.
Suddenly, Thomas stopped. “Where are we?” I looked around. The road was gone. We stood in a field that stretched out into the haze, all dirt and dried shrubs. Instead of leaves, torn-off bits of trash bags and paper towels fluttered in the wind, sickly white. An old chain-link fence ran along our right side.
“Dunno,” I said. “The city’s different when you walk it. I’m sure I’ve driven past this a bunch.” Overhead, the sun was flat and dull, like a Roman coin. “Come on.” I didn’t know what time it was, but Seafoam would definitely be filling up by now.
We walked on, following the chain-link fence. Thomas’ hair had turned the color of mud and was sticking to his brow like seaweed. He kept checking his iPhone 15 to get a map, but it was too hot to get a signal. On the horizon, an orange REI tent shimmered in the heat.
“Aw, no!” The homeless man yelled as soon as I opened my mouth. “Kid’s got fucked up teeth!”
“They’re baby teeth,” said the fat woman. I hadn’t told her that, but I guess it was cool that she noticed. “He has the cleanest teeth in the world.”
“Nah,” said the homeless guy. “You’re a weird lady.” The junk food lady made a face. I waited for her to say something else or at least grunt, but she was totally frozen. With the heat and the sweat, it looked like she was melting.
“Hey,” I said. “Do you know how to get back to Central from here?”
“In this weather?” Said the homeless guy. “Forget it.”
“We’ll be walking anyway,” I said. “Just… do you know where we are?” I could hear my accent coming out, even though I was trying my best to hide it. I wanted to cry and the fat woman wasn’t helping me.
The homeless guy unzipped his tent and moved to crawl back inside. “There used to be a mall here,” he said, “but they took that away. You can still hear it though, if you listen. All that pushing. Heels on the ground, squealing. You can hear the cars outside.” He slipped into his tent, out of sight, and when he talked again, it was like the open, orange door was his mouth.
“You should listen to your sister, Jenny,” he croaked. “Go visit him. What are you so scared of?” I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.
Sometimes, when I’m walking around after work in the morning, trying to avoid going home, I have this thought. I imagine that since the moment I was born, I’ve been leaking a trail of invisible gasoline everywhere I go. It’s on everyone I’ve ever met, every couch I’ve slept on, every document with my name on it, and when I’m ready, I’ll drop a match and the whole thing will go up. First I’ll burn, behind the Chevron counter, then everyone who knew me last, then the people before that and so on and so forth until my parents go up and my childhood home with them. Nothing will be left to show I ever existed. Nothing, except — maybe — the happy sad woman who bought junk food in the morning.
I turned to the junk food woman. She was pale, wet, melting. The sun hovered directly above her head, and there was something so severe and intense in her expression that I felt I could hardly look at her. I saw that bird again — from my half-dream earlier. It was perched in the dead bushes with their ragged white leaves, its thick black eyelashes curving up and away from the earth. Now that it was on the ground I could see: It was huge, the size of a house. It pinched the sun in its dark beak, and then the vision was gone.
“A bird,” the fat woman said, and pointed at the sky. I bit my tongue. For a second there, I had really forgotten she wasn’t made of wax. But I looked up, and like she said, a little gray triangle was treading water through the sky, away from the chain link fence. “We need to put down the laundry,” she said. The orange tent shook a little and I heard the homeless guy chuckle. “Put down the laundry and follow that bird.”
I wiped my face with the back of my hat. I had too much hair. I wanted to shave my head, but then there would be more of my dirtiness left around the world. I felt trapped. “Okay,” I said.
I left my trash bag by the tent, but the junk food lady scraped the bottom of hers open on a branch and let the clothes fall out as she walked. I saw oversized t-shirts, tiny little ankle-height socks, underwear with stains I couldn’t place. Like the homeless guy said, as we walked I heard the noises of the mall, and then the sound of cars zipping by on Central.
“Where is it?” I whispered, and the fat woman grunted at me. The bird arced overhead, then, nearing the point where the sky’s blue turned to cream, it spread its wings, caught the wind, and streaked directly down into the earth. There came a squeal, and then the sound of a car crash. I stayed close to the fat woman.
Ahead of us, the shape of a building emerged from the heat and then a sign: “SEAFOAM: Coin-operated Laundromat.” In the parking lot, a gray Toyota Corolla had driven directly into a single white tree, and smoke from its hood played with the leaves above. I looked up at the fat woman. I realized I was shaking.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“I am the Rat Bucket Wizard.”
We’re on the edge of the bucket now, and its all coming up from underneath. Everything melts, everything rots, everything is the same. The heat had washed me up here like a river, me and the boy-man with his hungry rat eyes and carnivorous accent. His Harley-Davidson hat was gone now, and his shoulders looked broader somehow without it. Everything rots. I am the Rat Bucket Wizard.
We were in a building that looked like the Seafoam laundromat but wasn’t. The front was too flat, like a movie facade, and as if to make up for it, the inside just went back and back forever. I was hungry and out of snacks. But there was a wall-mounted FYHALE 12,000 BTU air conditioner here, and outside there was the heat and the river and the inevitable bottom of the bucket. If I’d washed up here on the way to my final destination, I could wait for a while, at least until the heat breaks and the river disappears. There was no reception on my phone, so no one could reach me. I could stay here forever, I thought. I’m not going to the hospital.
“Hello?” Thomas waved his hand in front of the sleeping man who drools into his goatee, but that man wasn’t going to wake up. I know because I’m the Rat Bucket Wizard. He wouldn’t wake up for the same reason there was no one in the crashed Toyota Corolla outside, the same reason our fake Seafoam was alone on an empty Central. “This is fucked up,” Thomas said. He was talking to me, but he wasn’t looking at me. His baby teeth were small, but his accent curled the corners of his words. It curled up the word “fuck” like a long, overflowing pube, crooked and curving at the same time. He made the word smell like rotten milk.
When I had told Thomas that I was the Rat Bucket Wizard, he had asked me what I meant. When I didn’t answer, he asked me if I knew any spells. I didn’t answer again, and then he had looked at the ground and jutted out his lower jaw. He had grown quickly since we left Chevron together. Back then he was a small rat, but now he was big and climbing. There was nothing hungry about him, externally, but all men are hungry, and when he looked at me now it was as if he was drenched in gasoline.
“That guy’s not going to wake up,” I told Thomas.
“Fuck,” he whispered again, under his breath, and wandered off. I stood underneath the wall-mounted FYHALE 12,000 BTU air conditioner. Everything is the same thing. Everything rots. I am the Rat Bucket Wizard. Why do I feel like I’m suspended above a bottomless canyon? In the parking lot, the pale tree was broken. Deep in the Seafoam laundromat, Thomas screamed.
The scream was loud and rough, like it was being dragged across sandpaper, and hearing it, I was suddenly a kid again. I needed a snack so bad.
“Thomas?”
“Help!”
I followed his voice into the back of the fake Seafoam, down a tunnel of Speed Queen Front Load washers and stamped concrete. Now it was getting dark, and the tunnel kept going.
“Thomas?”
“Where are you?” He yelled.
I smelled a musk like Kroger chicken noodle soup, heavy and pungent and warmed over. Man smell. I saw the open maw of a rat with seaweed hair and no Harley Davidson hat and then I came out into the halo of a lightbulb and saw Thomas crying.
On the stamped concrete floor between us was a pool of blood. It was spreading from a kid’s head in an oval and the kid was face down like he had tripped. His brother sat next to him against a washing machine, eyes wide, licking his own palm over and over like a stuttering machine. I recognized them: It was the two kids who come to Seafoam sometimes, the ones who rub their hands on their crotch and play tag. Their dad was still drooling into his goatee at the entrance, and he would never wake up. I couldn’t think. I didn’t recognize any of the brands in this scene.
“Call someone!” Thomas yelled at me. “My phone is still down! Call someone! He’s still breathing!”
Instead, I sat down next to the licking boy. Everything rots. All things are the same thing, everyone is a rat melting in the bucket. The red-brown oval was almost touching the licking boy’s shoe. I watched him lick and lick, and then, as the blood met the creases of his Adidas, I pulled him into a hug. The heat and the sweat had turned my skin into raw, shiny blubber. My Andre’s Pizza shirt crusted over; my Sofra cotton brief underwear swelled with crotch moisture. I could feel it clearly then, since the first time since I was a teenager. I knew what it meant to be the Rat Bucket Wizard.
“Why did you do that?” Thomas whispered. The boy on the ground wasn’t breathing anymore. “What did you do?”
“He’s like us,” I said. “Don’t you get it?” He just stared at me, small and droopy-eyed.
I made a throat noise to tell him the conversation was over. “I’m gonna visit someone in the hospital,” I said. “Walk with me?”
The hospital was sixteen stories high and I was still shaking. It had two art deco wings that framed a gigantic, manicured courtyard, but I was still shaking when the Rat Bucket Wizard said goodbye. I waited a long time in that garden for her to come back. The sun was still high when she left, but as time passed the shadows got long and I hid in the shade of a hedge tree shaped like a salamander. My eyelids were drooping again — goddamn it — and in the edges of my mind, I could hear wailing and the squeaking of wheels on a tiled floor. I kept picturing the Rat Bucket Wizard’s back as she left — her bun, the strands of hair glued to her neck, the giant diamond of sweat that seemed now close, now far away. I pictured the kid who had bled out on the floor in front of both of us, and we had done nothing. I jolted awake again and the sunlight burned through the hedge salamander like fire licking the coals. I pictured my parents going up in flames.
More time passed still and the Rat Bucket Wizard was still in the hospital. The sun had dropped low, and now the salamander was the one eating the fire. The orderlies left the hospital building with their gurneys; wheeled their crying, strapped-down patients through the grass. One of them came so close to me that I had to move my legs from where I was resting, and when I stretched my legs back out, there was blood underneath. Now it was night.
In my dream, I was in my parent’s house in Dover. I was trying to get one of my baby teeth from under the couch, and then I fell between the floorboards into a crawlspace I didn’t know was there. There were rats down there with no skin and they were attacking me, and it was so dark, and then I had no skin and then no body and then I was the rats and there was nothing but war. I was red waves crashing into each other under a starless sky — me and the rats, forever and ever.
A thousand years passed, and I washed up on a grassy shore, on a courtyard hillock underneath a hospital. The heat had broken. I coughed, and my baby teeth landed in the grass. The horizon melted upwards into sunrise white, and the white into yellow and orange and then the palest blue. Overhead, a bird with no feathers and human skin drenched me in its shadow. It looked down at me with woman’s eyes that looked somehow familiar, and then flew off into the distance, shrinking to nothingness as it entered the sun. I was ready to go home. I am the Rat Bucket Wizard.