Full Frontal Fiction by Jack Murnighan

Anderson-Malloy had told me at orientation that sometimes state people come out to check on group homes in the middle of the night to make sure the staff isn’t getting paid for sleeping on the job. I kept seeing headlights scatter across the walls all night.
    Plus there was my whole ex-boyfriend thing brewing too. I was being stalked, so to speak. He didn’t know it, but his ass would soon be in jail. Anyway, to keep myself busy, I started snooping through the filing cabinets over by where the scales are, near the door to the basement, in the little makeshift office there.
    I got out Tom A.’s and Tom B.’s files. I read Tom B.’s first. It said right at the start that Tom B. suffered from moderate mental retardation and also possible schizophrenia. He could talk but had trouble with his speech. He had lived his whole life in an institution in Columbus called the Orient, but was sent here when it closed down, as was Tom A. In fact, at that place, according to Tom B.’s file, both Toms had a reputation for being “obsessed with each other’s presence” so much that they often had to be split up and put into separate parts of the institution. Usually, though, according to typewritten reports in the file, they found their way back to each other. Tom A. could not talk, and was more retarded than Tom B., so his file was pretty skimpy, except I read one part about when he was four years old, his stepdad burnt him with cigars.
    By that next morning, which was a Saturday, I knew the whole damn story by heart. Since no one had to go to the sheltered workshop, Kate Anderson-Malloy had written me a note in the log that said they all could sleep in till eight. I made a big breakfast, to let them know I was an okay chick. I mean, the works. Now that I’m a full-time shift supervisor, lead direct care in fact, I just put out the boxes of cereal and gallons of milk and they go at it. But that first morning, I made waffles and heated up the syrup in the microwave, had some sausage patties that I also nuked. Full glasses of juice and paper napkins, picnic-type dinette table set, like the Waltons were about to come down and eat. It was ready around 7:45 that morning and no one was up, so I got antsy and went down the hall again, like the warden who makes breakfast.
    When I woke up Tom A., he looked at me like the way—I’m sorry, this sounds pretty awful—like the way my cat does. Lonesome inside, without the capability to explain, and yet also relieved that he was off the hook from having to tell me anything. In fact he smiled at me, and I said, “Why, aren’t you chipper!”
    I almost added, as a joke, “Looks like you got some last night.”
    But I didn’t.
    He sat up. His belly hung down quite a bit. He had a boyish face though. I noticed on his back all those cigar scars. He walked over to me and put his hand out, like a gentleman in a silent movie.
    I shook it. He let out this huge scream that about killed my ears.
    â€œThanks,” I said.
    I went and got Sally, this little woman with Down’s Syndrome who may have had Alzheimer’s too. She was in her canopy bed in her pink bedroom—that’s the way her sister painted it for her. She had on a pink flannel nightgown and looked like a melted doll in a play-house.
    I got Damon, a black guy with a big head that had water inside it. He had a pump installed in his skull that kept the water from drowning out his brain. I knew all this stuff from Kate Anderson-Malloy and from the files. I knew Damon used to live with his prostitute mother and she used to sell him out to freaks. He was very quiet and could only say, “Mona Lisa.”
    Got Larry up. He talked too much. Soon as he was up, he started gabbing.
    â€œHello. You’re new here. Your name is what? May I ask what?”
    His eyes were open great big. He was sitting on a rocking chair in his room with posters of big-breasted women hung on