“I’m looking for food. Do you have any?”
He had on a skintight superhero costume spotted with black and white spirals contracting and expanding like breath.
“I know you’re hiding some.”
His red tinted goggles flashed testily, but his masked mouth betrayed no movement. She looked up at the heater vent above her door, thinking a sound like that could only have come from there. It reminded her of when Dad led her into the empty silo at Uncle Josh’s farm. Their voices were gigantic, hanging in the air long after their words. She screamed to see how loud she could be. When she turned around Dad was covering his ears.
“I’m talking to you.”
It was definitely him speaking, then. His voice was like that scream.
“Come in,” she said to the guest. “I have some Doritos under my bed.”
This was not her first encounter with the imaginary, so she was prepared. There once was a miniature elephant that lived under the couch cushions who liked to watch TV with her. He was mute, so she never knew if he had a name. He went missing when Ma vacuumed the couch with the long extension wand, Beddy screaming at her to stop. How would they know if he was crying for help? She assumed he was dead.
The adult-size guest entered her room and immediately dropped to his hands and knees and fished for the Doritos bag. She checked left and right down the hall before shutting the door. It appeared that no one saw him come in. With his head beneath her bed, she tiptoed closer to observe his incredible costume.
At least she assumed it was a costume. It ran the length of his body as one piece, without fibers, lint, zippers, buttons, or snaps. The spirals didn’t just contract and expand, but swirled and drifted around his body like the satellite graphics of hurricanes she saw on the news. The ones that had yet to hit her hometown, but didn’t keep her from wondering when.
He shot from under the bed and she stepped back in fright. Had he seen her staring? Sensed it?
But his focus was solely on the bag, which he hugged against him as he turned around and fell into a crouch against her bed. He grasped the edges with gloved hands and pulled. A dusty cough hurled chips skyward, and he grabbed at the air frantically. What hit the floor he scooped to his face with cupped hands like he was quenching his thirst. The spirals, which up to this point had drifted at random, bouncing away from each other right before the moment of collision, like objects in a screensaver, now started to fray. Their tails broke and their bodies unspooled, but as they did, they were already respooling, gathering into one single spiral.
She realized what was happening. The costume was his skin, and this was him opening his mouth.
He brought his cupped hands up to his face and tilted them. Then he was reaching into the bag for more. She blinked. Where did they go?
She watched more intently, her mouth forming an “o” of astonishment as he brought each chip up to his face and, without seeming to bite, or chew, they vanished, drawn in by the core of that lone spiral where his mouth should be.
Almost like each chip was made into nothing.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“How do you not know your own name?”
He shrugged.
The longer she watched him, the queasier she felt, like when she stared too long out her window on car trips. It was the constant movement of his skin. She tried to focus on his goggles, his only feature that was still. They were bulky, blocky, reminding her of both safety goggles and a fly’s eyes. He continued to gut the bag, stuffing handfuls into his black maw. Other than the crinkling of the bag, his eating made no sound.
Did he have to think about it? Could he only eat through that mouth?
He turned the bag upside down and orange particles and dust spilled over his face and shoulders. It stayed only for an instant, then sank into him like into quicksand.
“This isn’t enough,” he said. “This tastes like more.”