The Newcomer - Part V
In Part IV, Brynn brings the mysterious clock home, convinced that if she can fix it she can mend the situation with Phoenix and this enigmatic newcomer. Rosemary comes over, answering her urgent call, but refuses to help. She admonishes Brynn for bringing home a clock from work and tells her to let Phoenix die. In the middle of the night, Brynn feels Phoenix leave the bed to join the newcomer and finds him desiccated in the morning, the newcomer licking his chops.
He knelt at the edge of the cat bed as if it were a food bowl. His head, paws and chest were covered in thick, sticky blood. He looked fatter now, but in a healthy, well-fed sort of way. The pouch of the newcomer’s belly swung a little the way I remembered Phoenix’s doing when he was young.
Horror and disbelief overwhelmed every part of me. The air felt thick and suffocating. I opened my mouth to scream but I couldn’t make a sound.
My phone rang. I ignored it, rooted to the spot, unable to think or move. The ringing stopped, then started again, and again.
Finally I answered it, my voice mechanical and stiff.
“Hello?”
The newcomer cat looked up from his feast, which it seemed he had now finished. All that was left was bones and sinew and tufts of fur. He sat back and licked his paws fastidiously, wiping the blood off his nose the way a person might dab at their mouth with a napkin after a very nice meal.
“It’s about time,” said my brother Jerry through the phone. “What the hell, Brynn?”
A tuft of Phoenix’s fur twitched in the breeze from the open window.
“Jerry,” I choked out, unable to form a sentence.
“I’ve been calling you for days, if you haven’t noticed,” he said. “You’re still coming today, right? It’s his fucking birthday.”
The newcomer jumped onto the couch and curled up in a patch of sunlight, looking thoroughly content.
“Brynn!”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m coming,”
*****
I pulled up to Twilight Ridge Memory Care Facility twenty minutes later with my mind still in a fog, my body still on autopilot. Jerry stood by the entrance looking impatient, in a similarly irksome suit to the one from his LinkedIn picture. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but his hairline looked like it had lost a couple of centimeters and the wrinkles on his forehead had gained some since I saw him last. He frowned at me as I approached.
“Late,” he said, gesturing to the watch on his wrist, a brand our father used to deride as landfill fodder.
“Sorry.”
“What’s wrong with you? You seem off.”
“It’s nothing. I don’t want to talk about it,” I said as the image of Phoenix’s ribcage flashed through my mind like an electric shock. “Let’s get this over with.”
I walked past him and led the way inside. The memory care facility was like a quiet, pastel-colored tomb. Everything and everyone inside of it seemed to be in a realm separate from the one that existed just outside. The lobby consisted of a large, open space with a reception counter and many armchairs occupied by elderly people in varying states of consciousness. The smell of bleach and antiseptic mingled unnervingly with the pine scented candle at reception. I hadn’t been here since we had moved him in six months prior; a feeling of lightheadedness overwhelmed me as I walked towards the counter. I felt Jerry’s hand on my shoulder.
“Wait,” he said. “It’s been a while since you’ve seen him.”
“I don’t need the guilt trip, Jerry.”
“No. I just mean that you should be prepared. However it is you’ve been remembering him, that person doesn’t really exist anymore.”
For a moment he seemed like he might say more, then changed his mind. Jerry nodded for me to follow him. We passed the receptionist, who greeted him with a friendly smile of recognition. Down a long, bright hallway with dozens of doors, each with a mounted chalkboard and a name written on it. Just when I thought I had slipped into some off-kilter purgatory where I was doomed to walk the same hallway endlessly, Jerry stopped. We stood before a door with Bill on its chalkboard. Someone had drawn a little smiley face beside the name. Jerry led the way inside.
“Hey dad,” he said cheerfully. “Look who’s here!”
In a bed by the window, my father lay staring at the ceiling with his mouth hanging open and a blank expression on his face. He was smaller than I’d ever seen him; he’d lost most of his hair, and what remained was white and thin. The skin of his hands was nearly translucent. I could almost see the blue streams of blood trickling slowly down to his fingertips through veins that were half the size they should be.
Jerry gave me an odd look from his chair beside the bed, and I realized I was still standing. I sat stiffly.
“Brynn’s here, dad,” Jerry said loudly.
Dad turned to look at me slowly, blinking hard.
“I want to play outside,” he croaked. Each word sounded like it was pried painfully from somewhere deep within him.
“Maybe later,” said Jerry. “Right now Brynn is here.”
“Can she play outside with me?”
“Just go along with it,” Jerry muttered.
“Sure, dad,” I said. “I’ll play outside with you.”
“Need to ask my mom first,” Dad said. “Where is she?”
I looked at Jerry.
“How old does he think he is?” I said quietly.
“It changes day to day. Sometimes he’s in his twenties and he just met mom. Sometimes he’s sixteen working at the pizza place. I guess today he’s five.”
Dad began to babble, childlike and incomprehensible.
I stood up.
Before Jerry could say another word, I turned and fled from the room. Back through the endless bright white hallway, past the receptionist and the old people sitting lifeless in the armchairs, and right out the door to the parking lot.
*****
I stood outside the door to my apartment drawing deep, desperate breaths and formulating my plan. I would walk straight through the living room without looking at the carnage. I would pack a bag, open a window for the newcomer cat to leave through, and I would go to a hotel for as long as it took to figure out how to keep going.
Of course, when I finally opened the door, my eyes went straight to the place where Phoenix’s remains had been—
But they were gone.
The cat bed, which had been soaked in blood and viscera, was completely clean. No sign of fur or bones or carnage. Instead, I found myself staring at the curled and sleeping form of the newcomer cat. He was resting right where Phoenix’s remains had been; his tongue stuck out the way Phoenix’s always had during a peaceful dream.
In shock, I closed the apartment door and looked around the living room. There was no indication that anything violent or unusual had happened. Everything looked exactly as it always did.
My phone rang; I answered without thinking.
“Hello?”
“Brynn, are you fucking serious?” Jerry said angrily.
The newcomer cat woke up with a chirp. He stretched his arms out lazily over the edge of the bed, looked up, and meowed at me in greeting: a meow so familiar I would have recognized it anywhere. With a rush of overwhelming emotion, I finally realized:
He wasn’t a newcomer after all.
“You can’t run away from this forever,” I heard my brother say from three thousand miles away.
I dropped to my knees on the floor beside the cat. His amber eyes glinted knowingly in the sunlight. He came close to my face, brushed his head against mine, then gave me a gentle, soft-toothed bite on the tip of my nose. My eyes filled with hot, grateful tears.
“Phoenix,” I whispered. He blinked at me slowly: an affirmation.
Jerry’s voice emanated indecipherably from the phone where I had dropped it on the floor. I could hear children playing in the street outside. And the ticking of the backwards clock, still in its velvet bag on the table nearby.
I stood up with a new sense of purpose and undid the golden drawstring to let the velvet bag fall away. As I lifted the heavy contraption of brass, wood and glass, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the clock face, looking familiar and foreign all at once. With a bit of effort, I maneuvered the clock onto the mantel above my little electric fireplace, where it sat proudly looking out over its new home.
Phoenix meowed and I looked back at him with a teary smile. He let out a playful chirp and darted off across the room, racing back and forth with an energy I hadn’t seen in him in years. I could still hear Jerry yelling at me through the phone, but I ignored it. Instead I collapsed, delirious with relief, into a fit of joyful laughter. I sank to the floor, cackling like a madwoman, while Phoenix raced around and around in a loop that seemed unending.
Amy Monaghan is a queer writer and visual artist. She is a graduate of the MFA Screenwriting program at UCLA, where she was a winner of the 2019 Screenwriter's Showcase, and also holds a BFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology. In 2024 she was selected as Grand Canyon National Park's Artist in Residence.
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