Horns

Ig wished he’d brought a hat. He cupped a hand to his forehead, as if to shade his eyes from a bright light, hoping to conceal his horns. If anyone noticed them, however, they gave no sign of it.

At the far end of the room was a window in the wall and a woman sitting at a computer on the other side. The receptionist had been staring at the mother of the crying child, but when Ig appeared before her, she looked up and her lips twitched, formed a smile.

“What can I do you for?” she asked. She was already reaching toward a clipboard with some forms on it.

“I want a doctor to look at something,” Ig said, and lifted his hand slightly to reveal the horns.

She narrowed her eyes at them and pursed her lips in a sympathetic moue. “Well, that doesn’t look right,” she said, and swiveled to her computer.

Whatever reaction Ig expected-and he hardly knew what he expected-it wasn’t this. She had reacted to the horns as if he’d shown her a broken finger or a rash-but she had reacted to them. Had seemed to see them. Only if she’d really seen them, he could not imagine her simply puckering her lips and looking away.

“I just have to ask you a few questions. Name?”

“Ignatius Perrish.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Do you see a doctor locally?”

“I haven’t seen a doctor in years.”

She lifted her head and peered at him thoughtfully, frowning again, and he thought he was about to be scolded for not having regular checkups. The little girl shrieked even more loudly than before. Ig looked back in time to see her bash her mother in the knee with a red plastic fire truck, one of the toys stacked in the corner for kids to play with while waiting. Her mother yanked it out of her hands. The girl dropped onto her back again and began to kick at the air-like an overturned cockroach-wailing with renewed fury.

“I want to tell her to shut that miserable brat up,” the receptionist remarked, in a su

“Do you have a pen?” Ig asked, mouth dry. He held up the clipboard. “I’ll go fill these out.”

The receptionist’s shoulders slumped, and her smile went out.

“Sure,” she said to Ig, and shoved a pen at him.

He turned his back to her and looked down at the forms clipped to the board, but his eyes wouldn’t focus.

She had seen the horns but hadn’t thought them unusual. And then she’d said that thing about the girl who was crying and her helpless mother: I want to tell her to shut that miserable brat up. She had wanted to know if he thought it would be okay. So had Gle

He looked for a place to sit. There were exactly two empty chairs, one on either side of the mother. As Ig approached, the girl reached deep into her lungs and dredged up a shrill scream that shook the windows and caused some in the waiting area to flinch. Advancing forward into that sound was like moving into a knee-buckling gale.

As Ig sat, the girl’s mother slumped in her chair, swatting herself in the leg with a rolled-up magazine-which was not, Ig felt, what she really wanted to hit with it. The little girl seemed to have exhausted herself with this final cry and now lay on her back with tears ru

“Sorry about the ridiculous noise,” she said, and touched Ig’s hand in a gesture of apology.

And when she did, when her skin brushed his, Ig knew that her name was Allie Letterworth and that for the last four months she’d been sleeping with her golf instructor, meeting him at a motel down the road from the links. Last week they had fallen asleep after an episode of strenuous fucking, and Allie’s cell phone had been off, and so she had missed the increasingly frantic calls from her daughter’s summer day camp, wondering where she was and when she would be by to pick up her little girl. When she finally arrived, two hours late, her daughter was in hysterics, red-faced, snot boiling from her nose, her bloodshot eyes wild, and Allie had to get her a sixty-dollar Webkinz and a banana split to calm her down and buy her silence; it was the only way to keep Allie’s husband from finding out. If she had known what a drag a kid was going to be, she never would’ve had one.

Ig pulled his hand away from her.

The girl began to grunt and stamp her feet on the floor. Allie Letterworth sighed and leaned toward Ig and said, “For what it’s worth, I’d love to kick her right in her spoiled ass, but I’m worried about what all these people would say if I hit her. Do you think-”

“No,” Ig said.

He couldn’t know the things he knew about her but knew them anyway, the way he knew his cell-phone number or his address. He knew, too, with utter certainty, that Allie Letterworth would not talk about kicking her daughter’s spoiled ass with a total stranger. She had said it like someone talking to herself.

“No,” repeated Allie Letterworth, opening her magazine and then letting it fall shut. “I guess I can’t do that. I wonder if I ought to get up and go. Just leave her here and drive away. I could stay with Michael, hide from the world, drink gin, and fuck all the time. My husband would get me on abandonment, but, like, who cares? Would you want partial custody of that?”

“Is Michael your golf instructor?” Ig asked.

She nodded dreamily and smiled at him and said, “The fu

Ig jumped to his feet and walked quickly to the receptionist’s window. He hastily scribbled answers to a few questions and then offered her the clipboard.

Behind him the little girl screamed, “No! No, I won’t sit up!”

“I feel like I have to say something to that girl’s mother,” said the receptionist, looking past Ig at the woman and her daughter, paying no attention to the clipboard. “I know it’s not her fault her daughter is a screechy puke, but I really want to say just one thing.”

Ig looked at the little girl and at Allie Letterworth. Allie was bent over her again, poking her with the rolled-up magazine, hissing at her. Ig returned his gaze to the receptionist.

“Sure,” he said, experimentally.

She opened her mouth, then hesitated, gazing anxiously into Ig’s face. “Only thing is, I wouldn’t want to start an ugly scene.”

The tips of his horns pulsed with a sudden unpleasant heat. Some part of him was surprised-already, and he hadn’t even had the horns for an hour-that she hadn’t immediately given in when he offered his permission.

“What do you mean, start one?” he asked, tugging restlessly at the little goatee he was cultivating. Curious now to see if he could make her do it. “It’s amazing how people let their kids act these days, isn’t it? When you think about it, you can hardly blame the child if the parent can’t teach them how to act.”

The receptionist smiled: a tough, grateful smile. At the sight of it, he felt another sensation shoot through the horns, an icy thrill.

She stood and glanced past him, to the woman and the little girl.

“Ma’am?” she called. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

“Yes?” said Allie Letterworth, looking up hopefully, probably expecting that her daughter was about to be called to her appointment.