A Junkyard State of Mind

CW: Horror, implied gore/violence

Melanie took her time. There were candles to light and blinds to draw and a bath bomb to drop and a record to play. The undoing of the week came with a specific order of events in order to welcome in the weekend and wash away five days of dreck, the dust and the grit (both emotional and physical) that got under her nails and into her soul.

She took her time placing the rose-scented candle on the inside corner and the vanilla one on the edge of the sink. There was a knock on the front door right then, of course, and she wrapped her chenille robe around herself and walked down the hall and peered through the peephole, but saw nobody outside. Strange. Back she went to the Friday evening unraveling. She let down her long dark hair. She put Al Green on the turntable loud enough to hear from the bathroom. She unplugged the house phone and stowed her cell phone in the nightstand drawer.

All week long she worked at the junkyard, mostly in the main office, sorting through papers and calling the scrap metal purchasers and allowing random treasure hunters to sift through the wreckages looking for the proper bumper from a 1982 Ford Fiesta or that driver’s side door from a 1967 Camaro or an unshattered headlight or a pristine taillight. She showered every day, of course, because nothing in her life had ever made her dirtier than working at the yard. And she’d picked apples one summer and was a deckhand during college and flung fish at a market on the coast, but this—this was different.

“It’s like a spirit of its own,” said one of her coworkers.

She laughed, but he hadn’t.

Del said, “There’s a junkyard god, and we tithe to him with our tires and our floor mats and our mismatched screws. And every so often, with a person.”

“A person?”

“Well, you know Kylie…” Del grunted as he hoisted half a bench seat.

“Never met her.”

“Right, that was before your time.”

She’d heard about Kylie, blonde little pixie thing who wore miniskirts to sit in a trailer and who flirted with each and every tow-truck driver who entered the yard. Knew them by names. Sometimes disappeared with one or the other behind the trailer. There was a Polaroid of Kylie tacked up on a bulletin board in the back, making a face at the camera, dressed as a sexy bumble bee for the staff Halloween party.

And then one day, she'd disappeared altogether.

The men in the yard stood around smoking during breaks and played make-believe games. “Maybe she done run off with one of ’em dudes with his name embroidered on his pocket.” Del laughed. Like you’d forget your own name. “Or maybe she went back to her previous life of following that hippy-dippy band,” said Franklyn, “you know, living in caravans and smoking weed for breakfast.” They all talked like this because every last one of them had wished she’d go home with them.

There was no postcard, but people come and go at junkyards and the only true constant was Budd, the lovely junkyard dog who would turn your hands black if you pet him, but you’d pet him anyway. How could you not when he looked at you with those amber eyes and licked your face and told you he loved you with his tail and his whole wiggling body.

Melanie thought the men who bantered with her were just trying to scare her, or see if they could get a rise out of her, so she never flinched. Didn’t let on that she believed in ghosts and sprites and monsters and fairies and ghouls and fiends and that once very late at night she’d had to come back to work because she’d forgotten her wallet on the desk, and the place was padlocked but Budd didn’t mind her showing up and barked happily when she scaled the chainlink fence. He’d padded after her to the trailer. There was a window open in the back, and she hoisted it and tried to balance on an unstable box of old radiator parts and skimmed through and got her brown leather wallet with the colorful embroidery. Then right when she was leaving, she heard the noise. It was a strange sort of clanking sound, a bang and a whistle. Followed by what almost sounded like a train horn in the distance. And then a sound she’d never heard before and never wanted to hear again, and if you’d given her a whiskey and wrapped her in your big strong arms and said, “There, there, there baby there,” she might have told you that it had said her name.

That’s what she’d heard.

It had said MEL-A-NIE in a chorus of groans and bangs and grunts and metallic scrapings, and she said, “Go away!” before she realized it was her speaking. Shrieking. Crying as she tripped over herself and tripped over Budd and scraped her knee and ripped her pants hoisting herself over the fence, and falling to the other side in a heap.

She’d called in sick the next day.

But she’d shown up on Monday, after having convinced herself she’d made the whole thing up. Imagined the entire experience. Although her jeans were ripped. Although her face was scraped. Although she would never, not ever, forget that the junkyard knew who she was. The junkyard knew her name.

She started wearing little special protecting charms. She started holding pieces of metal she’d find in her pocket. A silver bolt. A shiny knob from a radio. These were her tiny treasures, each one a talisman, and she felt that they kept her safe.

The men still teased her. One said that the monster, it was a monster, was named CAL.

“Why?” she asked, and he said that it was because of all the California plates tacked up on the corrugated metal side of the trailer.

And she said bravely, “So what? If we were in Oklahoma, would he be called OK?”

Gray just shrugged and lit another hand-roll, and she shook her head and thought that some people didn’t even try to make sense, but that was in the daytime. And when the seasons shifted and it started getting dark when she was leaving at night, she would hear that whisper. She would think she heard the rumble. And then if she was too late, or too by herself, or too slow, she would hear it say… “Mel…”

And she’d run.

Hit her car, slam the door. Lock the lock. Hurry home. It was always on Fridays, she realized at some point. Always on Friday nights, and she started the rituals then. The candles she bought at a voodoo store. The incense. The soft music. She worked to get every bit of dust and grime out from under her nails and out of her hair, and clean herself and clean her thoughts, and soothe her troubled mind, and make the bad visions go away.

By Monday, all those worries and fears would have disappeared. She’d be Melanie again, and not MEL-A-NIE, and there would be no monster lurking, or maybe the entire graveyard—oh, that was her brain making a slip—entire JUNKyard wasn’t alive.

Except it was.

It was alive, and it did take an offering every so often, and it preferred the pretty girls, like most monsters prefer the pretty girls, and history backs this up. It was watching her, and waiting for when she brought just enough of its parts home. She had the radio knob, and the gear shift, and two bolts and a small mirror from the back of a visor in her purse, and she had taken a cassette from the broken dash of a tape deck that had been left in an old Eldorado. And when she left with the decoration off an antenna, one of those Burger King bobbles from the 80s, that was enough.

She was in her bathroom, listening to her music, her hair down because she didn’t mind when the ends got wet in the tub, petals floating on top, eyes shut, a lit joint on the ashtray on the closed toilet seat, and she heard the voice, the rumble, her name, her name in that way she’d heard the first time, so she hadn’t been imagining things, no, she hadn’t made this up.

Then he was there, made of all of her nightmares, turning her bathtub water black, dissolving her like an oil slick after the rain. Returning to the junkyard with the parts she’d purloined, parts she’d believed would keep her safe.

When she didn’t show up at work on Monday, the men knew. They didn’t say anything right away. They didn’t want to. Everyone had liked Mel just fine. Budd would probably miss her the most, though.

Del bent down to pet Budd, and talk to him in that baby-talk way some big men use when they speak to dogs. “Oh, sweet little pup. Oh, baby doll. No more Melanie to give you treats from her purse. No more Mel to pet you. CAL done took Mel away.”