Bleux Stockings Vol. 1: Nicole Moody
We are delighted to reprint Nicole Moody's piece from our January show.
Belinda Doolittle
In a small county, down a country road, nestled between two churches, stood a cozy cottage where lived a young woman, an orphan named Belinda Doolittle. The following is her 5-7 minute story.
“It’s okay Boo,” Belinda said. “I promise this isn’t going to hurt. It’ll hurt me more than it hurts you. But it won’t be long before you will be back home where you belong.”
Carefully holding her knife, Belinda made a shallow incision along the belly of her beloved beagle, Boo Radley. Boo passed the evening before, old age thank goodness. He went peacefully, alone, in his favorite corner of the cozy cottage Belinda kept warm and snug.
The touch of fur on her fingers. A shorthaired black cat circled the table, her tail furiously beating against the beagles chin while she delicately licked her paws.
“Oh, you want to watch, do you Dorothy? Hmm, I see. You never seemed to care for him, and now all of the sudden you’re interested? Well, I can’t say I’m shocked by your curiosity,” Belinda laughed, as she placed a hand over Dorothy’s small black head, tenderly rubbing her temples with middle finger and thumb.
Dorothy Parker, one of three cats who ruled them all, lifted her chin, closed her eyes for a second then with a sneer, arched her back, turned on a heel and whoosh, an abrupt leap from the table before she retreated down the dark hallway.
9 p.m.: Belinda had prepared for the night. Salt to preserve the skin, a needle and thread, a casting mold. Four heavy-duty trash bags to hold the insides. There was a time when she took the effort to bury these effects in the backyard, but after some soul searching she believed this part of the process unnecessary. After all, Boo is not dead. Boo is resurrected.
Some background on Belinda: she became an orphan on September 11, 2001. She was 19 when Mama and Papa Doolittle, to celebrate their 50th birthdays and 32nd wedding anniversary respectively, took the first commercial flight of their lives, deciding on New York City as their first exotic destination. Ever the early birds, they had picked the wrong time to sightsee the World Trade Center.
The week before, however, feeling the midcentury ache in their bones, hearing the tick tock of their mortality clock, and seeing to their hardworking, penny-pinching, baby boomer ways, the Doolittle’s made a will, leaving Belinda the cozy cottage between two churches and approximately $650,000.
Back to Belinda: misanthropic since birth, she preferred the company of animals and kept as many as her parents would allow. Then, post 911, like some morbid Disney princess, she took to taxidermy in an effort to keep and control, the product of assured separation anxiety mixed with a growing suspicion about her own magical powers. And what do you know? After operation preservation completion of her first subject, a French bulldog named Moliere, an eerie thing happened. As soon as she put him on his feet, he could talk. To her... And to the other animals… And the other animals could talk to him… And to her.
Belinda looked at the clock. Midnight. Time to take out the trash. She put on her only pair of hard shoes, and peaked out the door. She looked right, then left. There was a church on either side. A First Baptist on one, a Second Baptist on the other.
With similar arches and leaps as Dorothy, Belinda pounced for the driveway. At the end of the gravel path, she swiftly placed pieces of Boo into the large green bin. There were voices to the left of her… In her periphery she saw them. People!
She jumped and rolled behind a tree, before slowly creeping on her hands and knees to the property’s hedges, a row of which shielded the cozy cottage from the country road. Propping her head back, so that only her eyes could be seen from above the bushes, she witnessed them. This happened often enough. Flashlight wielding youths from one Baptist church come in the night to change the letters on the other Baptist church’s sign, typically an immature attack on the other, occasionally humorous, but rarely salacious enough for her taste.
Imbeciles, she thought. This is why. This is why I cannot be around them. Church members had long since stopped coming to the Doolittle’s door in an effort to evangelize, specifically after an 8 year-old Belinda twice pushed her way through to inform flabbergasted proselytizers that she would consider believing in their God the day there was only one Baptist church next door.
Some more background on Belinda: The shock of her parents’ death resulted in a form of arrested development. Already leery of people, she dropped out of community college and became the youngest recluse ever known to the small county. Her hermitic decision was fully supported by the Internet, which she partnered with to support all of her needs.
1 a.m.: Bedtime. Belinda checked on Boo, then went from room to room, saying goodnight to every member of her family.
“Goodnight Oscar, you Wilde man,” she spoke tenderly to an English setter by the fireplace. “Sleep tight, Viola and Sebastian,” Siamese twins who looked up from their spot on the guest bed and gave a gracious simultaneous nod. They were refusing to talk these days, after what they considered a particularly unfavorable bathing incident.
“Buenos noches, Senior Hemingway,” to a bullmastiff, who responded with a slobbery kiss. And on she went, speaking to various nooks and tabletops, to a coterie of living creatures and nonliving-living again creatures, giving each one named after a literary doppelganger a proper farewell before slumber. A white rabbit called Carroll, a brown rabbit named Milne, Huckleberry the red hamster, Tea Cake a beautiful ball python, and so on… Each echoed back to her, in their voices Big and Small.
In her room, on the dresser by the bed, a framed picture of her parents had been placed next to a blue macaw’s cage.
Her mother used to say “There’s a special place in hell for people who hurt children.”
The Internet told Belinda that there were 21 people who had hurt children within a 2-mile radius of her cozy cottage. She imagined tearing into the flesh of each belly. Belinda did not live in fear; she lived in resolution, and ever the modern recluse, perhaps she had binge watched a little too much Dexter and Luther on Netflix.
“Time for bed,” Maya Angelou sung out.
Belinda closed her eyes, although she didn’t want to sleep. It won’t be long now, she thought. Boo will be back with us, and all will be right in the world.
9 a.m.: The sun pours through faded curtains as a transfixed menagerie surrounds Belinda, who died peacefully in the night, a brain aneurysm. The touch of fur on her fingers, light reflecting off of a knife in paws…
“It’s okay, Belinda,” they said. “We promise this isn’t going to hurt. It’ll hurt us more than it hurts you. But it won’t be long before you will be back home where you belong.”
