Joe Alan Artz

Midnight Chipmunks

Ellie knocked on the door of the weather-beaten house. Her nostrils caught wafts of the odor mentioned in the neighbors’ complaint: an ammoniac reek that from experience meant she about to enter a house full of untended cats.  She heard the soft scuffing of feet inside, slowly approaching. Locks clicked, the knob turned. Ellie waited, half expecting the door to open just a crack with two aged eyes peering out, suspicious, perhaps fearful.

The door swung wide. An elderly woman, neatly dressed in sweatpants and a housecoat, greeted Ellie with a cheerful smile. The stench swelled forth, enveloping the social worker in an overpowering miasma. Ellie did not react. She’d known worse. In the 1990s, during her childhood, she’d survived genocide in her native Kosovo. She’d seen Serbian soldiers murder human beings for no reason other than their Albanian ethnicity, their corpses left to rot in mass graves.

“Alvina Kraft?” asked Ellie, glancing at the clipboard cradled in her arm.

“That’s me,” said the woman. She was bony, wrinkled, leaning on a cane, but beneath her cloudy corneas, the irises of her eyes gleamed. Her jawline was strong: the shape of her mandibles visible beneath a taut parchment of skin. Her smile exposed incisors, uppers and lowers, filed to sharp points.

Ellie introduced herself, pointing to the Health and Human Services photo ID pinned to her business suit. “I’m here to find out how you’re doing with your housekeeping and other things,” she said. “Would you mind showing me around your house?”

“Sure, come in,” said Alvina, opening the door even wider. “The neighbors complained, didn’t they? I expected they would. Hot as it’s been, the smell’s gotten pretty strong.”

Ellie stepped over the threshold into a living room that was clean and uncluttered. Not a single cat in sight. Ellie took notes as her eyes swept the room.  Carpet: threadbare but unstained. Potted plants on a window shelf: leafy and green. Easy chair: corduroy upholstery worn nearly smooth, with a blanket and pillow, perhaps used as a bed. End table: dust-free, with a reading lamp, magazines and books. Sofa: upholstery intact, unclawed by cats. Rocking chair: antique? Restorable?

Ellie checked boxes on her form, indicating that conditions in the living room seemed normal, with an exception. In the blank for “Unusual objects?” she wrote “spoons under rocking chair.” The space beneath the Bentwood chair, rocker to rocker, seat to floor, was packed with white plastic spoons.

“A very tidy room,” she said, keeping her thoughts of the spoons unsaid. The goals of this first visit were to make sure Alvina was not immediate danger and to win her trust. Afterwards, back at the agency, Ellie and others would decide Alvina Kraft’s fate.

“Aren’t you going to ask about the spoons?”

“Very creative, a nice accent to the décor.”

“The Midnight Chipmunks bring them in,” said Alvina, “from the dumpsters behind the fast food places on Grand Avenue, a block over.” She gestured in the correct direction.

For “Sense of direction?” Ellie checked “Y.”

“They pull the spoons through that hole they’ve gnawed in the baseboard, over yon. Drag them across the carpet using their sharp little teeth.” Alvina pressed a fingertip to one of her own pointed incisors. “They come single file, silent, in the middle of the night. That’s why I call them Midnight Chipmunks.”

Ellie stared at the chair. “Let’s move on, shall we?”

The kitchen and bath were as immaculate as could be expected of a ninety-four year old woman living alone. The kitchen sink and dish drainer empty, the countertop wiped-down and reflecting sunlight from the window above the sink. Formica-topped table with a single placemat at one end. A Mr. Coffee with half a pot and the warming light off. Alvina offered Ellie a cup. “Maybe later,” said Ellie, “when we sit and talk.” 

The bathroom toilet, tub and sink were as good as spotless. A nonslip mat in the tub, a bathmat on the floor; towels and a washcloth draped neatly over chrome-plated rods; a bar of soap – Dove – in an antique, milk-glass soap dish; a water-spotted tumbler with a worn-out toothbrush beside it. Ellie opened the medicine cabinet above the sink, saw a shelf lined with bottles of pills; in front of them, a seven-day pillbox. The compartments for Sunday and Monday were empty, this being Tuesday, and Tuesday’s compartment was open, revealing what Ellie assumed must be pills that Alvina would take later in the day.

“Those pills cost me a bundle every month,” said Alvina, “but the mister left me a good pension.”

Ellie looked up from her form. As pleasantly as possible, she said, “Now, Alvina, about the smell.”

“Thought you’d never ask,” said the woman. “Comes from the bedrooms.”

The excited gleam in Alvina’s eyes, the eager tone in her voice, caused the social worker’s neck hairs to bristle.

The hallway Alvina led Ellie down was dark; the further down it they walked, the darker it got and the stronger the reek. “Light bulb’s out,” said Elvina, “I don’t come down her much.”

Ellie’s dislike of closed, dark spaces welled inside her. In Kosovo, just a child in the protection of equally terrified adults, she’d hidden for weeks in lightless crawlspaces, attics, and basements as the war raged. She’d survived to cross the ocean a refugee. Now thirty-two, she was a naturalized U.S. citizen who spoke unaccented English and lived a comfortable, distinctly non-Balkan lifestyle. For a decade, the worst she’d suffered from the trauma of childhood was an occasional surge of claustrophobia. She’d just about fought down the current bout when Alvina opened the first bedroom door.

The room was in ruins, its floor and furnishings buried under bent and broken ceiling tiles that had collapsed beneath the weight of masses of rodent excrement that lay in urine-soaked heaps and mounds on the tiles. Unbidden, Ellie’s mind flashed suppressed memories of bombed out buildings, of the brick and rubble ruins of whole towns; of mosques and medieval libraries deliberately burned; of the stumps of minarets felled by explosives.  

“These,” said Alvina, “are the ruins of the Palace of the Midnight Chipmunks.” The bizarre sentence jerked Ellie back into the present.

“The Midnight Chipmunks have a palace?”

“The first one they built.” said Alvina. Further down the hall, she opened a second door. Looking in, Ellie saw the scene of collapse and ruin repeated. She recoiled, stepping backward across the narrow hall, pressing her spine and shoulders to the wall.

“When the kingdom outgrew the first palace,” said Alvina, “the King expanded into the ceiling above the master bedroom. I’d lay in bed listening to the chipmunks scutter around up there. Then the ceiling fell and I had to start sleeping in the living room.”

“The Midnight Chipmunks have a king?”

“You look pale,” said Alvina, closing the doors. “Let’s go out to the living room. I’ll fetch us coffee. Strong coffee clears the head.”

Ellie followed Alvina into the living room. The old woman gestured her visitor to the end of the sofa nearest the easy chair. Ellie sank into the cushions, taking slow, deep breaths. She heard Alvina in the kitchen, rattling china; heard, very faintly, the splash of coffee into cups. She could not take her eyes off the spoons beneath the rocking chair.

The rocker sat close by the easy chair, its foam seat cushion compressed from use, the seat and backrest covered by a torn, knitted throw the color of old meat. The spoons underneath were laid in horizontal, interlocking strata, as orderly and intentional as a beaver dam. A ramp-like wedge of spoons extended from the front of the structure. The trail worn in the carpet ended at the bottom of the ramp. At the top was a tunnel-like opening.

Alvina returned with two fragile cups of stone cold decaf. Ellie took a few sips then squared the clipboard on her lap. Alvina lowered her bony frame into the easy chair, took a long drink, smacked her lips.

“The Midnight Chipmunks,” said Ellie. “What do they look like?”

“The workers are the normal kind. Genus Tamias, species striatus. The King and his nobles, though, they’re mutants, a species unknown to science. They’re enormous – twelve, fourteen inches long – and intelligent. Their brains are huge.” With curved palms raised to her forehead, Alvina illustrated bulging frontal lobes.

“And these mutants rule over the normal chipmunks?” Ellie flipped the form over and began scrawling notes in a large, empty space headed “Please note other disturbing factors.”

“The King and his warriors  arrived like conquistadors, rounded up every T. striatus in the neighborhood and marched them to my house, through a crack in the foundation, up into the ceiling. They bred fast, like chipmunks do, and there would have been famine if some explorers hadn’t discovered the fast food joints on Grand. The King sent workers to mine the dumpsters and they carried the edible scraps to the palace in their cheeks. Single file, looked like little Silk Road caravans. Everything else – paper, foam, plastic – they piled off to one side. On a royal visit, the King became obsessed with the plastic tableware in those piles, especially the white plastic spoons. Soon, the workers were hauling spoons back to my place, stacking them up  under the mister’s old chair.”

“They’re building a monument to their King,” said Ellie. “Under your late husbands chair.” Ellie’s pencil hung motionless in limp fingers.

“Not a monument. A mausoleum. And they finished not a day too soon. A couple weeks ago, the King died. They drug him across the carpet, up the ramp, into the tunnel, and chucked him down a burial shaft they’d left in the middle.”

“Chucked him down.”

“Chipmunks aren’t much for sentiment,” said Alvina.

Ellie checked “Y” for “Signs of emotional detachment.”

“They dropped in a few spoons after him, then topped off the shaft with sacrifices.”

“Sacrifices?” The pencil fell with a clatter on the clipboard. Ellie felt her composure slipping.

“They bit the brains out of all his concubines, a few virgins, his most trusted warriors, and all his miners and masons. Makes sense there’ll be plastic spoons in heaven, right? No embalming, of course. The smell’s getting noticeable.”

Ellie sniffed, detected a slight odor coming from within the structure of spoons, an undercurrent to the reek that permeated the house, but identifiable: the putrescence of rotting flesh. Ellie recalled crackling gunfire as the Serbs moved through her city, leaving corpses in horrific piles, rotting. She, in hiding, had breathed their slow decay for days. Among the corpses were those of her father and brothers.

“They thought of sacrificing me, I think,” said Alvina. “I am, after all, or was, his queen and his throne was, is, in the ceiling, up there, right above my chair. But I kiboshed that. I claimed succession. I’m heir to the throne.”

Ellie looked up at the ceiling, saw the discoloration and sag of the tiles overhead, heard the scrabbling of tiny feet. Alvina opened her mouth in a demented grin. Behind the filed front teeth, stored between gums and cheeks, Ellie glimpsed chunks of food. Alvina laughed, a high, staccato “chip, chip, chip.”

Ellie fled, calming her panic during a long drive across town. At a sit-down restaurant far from the Kingdom of the Midnight Chipmunks and the fast food joints on Grand Avenue, she ordered Slivovitz, the only liquor in America that approached the mind-numbing strength of raki, a plum brandy remembered from her homeland. Then, she ordered soup and drank it from the bowl, the soup spoon hidden beneath her napkin, the clipboard atop the napkin, face down to hide the form.