Toby Buttons was just a little character me and my best friend Steve made up because we wanted to feel better than all the people who were better than us. He wasn’t so much a nickname or caricature of a single person as he was a catch-all way to make a mockery of all the traits that indicated future success and secretly made us jealous. Every time a classmate reminded a teacher about the homework or got praised for doing exceptionally well on a test or assignment we would mouth the catch-phrase to each other: “Here comes Toby Buttons!” One of us would pantomime doing an effete little twirl and we would laugh under our breath until the teacher noticed.
In fourth grade we thought that being the first boys to try a cigarette and then start chewing tobacco somehow made us cool. By the time we got to High School and had also been the first to try beer, then weed and finally the harder stuff we knew it made us losers. By the time we couldn’t even handle coming to school sober we knew we weren’t “trying” anything, it was all we were. If we couldn’t get loaded before wandering into third period we would meet at the moldy old couch in the woods behind the school and scheme on how we were going to make it happen. Once we were a little looser one of us would do “Toby Buttons” - smiling a mischievous little smile and prancing around the woods until we were both rolling with laughter.
Once we had dropped out and taken jobs at the same shitty little factory our fathers worked at there was nobody left to make fun of. All the kids we used to mock had become actual grownups, they’d either gotten good jobs or gotten into good colleges leaving us and our sad little town behind them. Steve was my best friend but I never actually got to know him, at least not really. The truth is that I never really got to know anyone, not even myself. I had spent my whole life running and hadn’t moved a single inch.
Both of our wives left us in the same week. They hadn’t even been talking to each other, once they became too good for us and too good for our town it meant they were too good for each other too. They had discovered internet dating just in time to leverage the last of their good looks and escape the suffocating cloud of failure that stuck to us like a bad smell. Steve told me he had come home to a note after work on Tuesday. Friday morning there wasn’t even a note. We’d been sleeping in separate beds since the miscarriage three years ago. I knew she was gone before I even noticed she had taken all her clothes and most of our valuables with her.
For the first time in years Steve and me decided to hang out after work. My old man had drunk himself into an early grave while Steve’s seemed to be hanging on out of bitterness alone and had started making his life a living hell. We went to my place. Neither of us knew how to talk about our feelings but we knew how to drink. We were about tied on working through our twelve packs and had each drained our pints of the same cheap whiskey we’d been drinking since High School when Steve got up to piss.
I heard him call out in the same jokey falsetto: “HERE COMES TOBY BUTTONS!” I actually cracked a smile for the first time I could remember when the sound of his stream suddenly stopped. Then I heard the sound of shattering glass and a sickening thud that was far too loud to be an accident. Still my first thought was that Steve’s drunk ass had probably fallen over as I ran upstairs to the open bathroom door.
The mirror was shattered and covered in blood but even more concerning was the wall behind it. That one had a circular imprint of much darker blood punctuated by little globs of gore that were starting to succumb to gravity and slowly slide toward the floor leaving little trails in their wakes. A thicker trail led down to where Steve was slumped against the wall, the way his head and the wall intersected I could see the back of his skull had been smashed completely flat.
The truly terrifying thing was standing above him. A short little man stood their smiling, his eyes, nose and ears all ended in impossible points. A little green Peter Pan hat sat on his head with a single brightly colored feather. His green shirt was far too tight against his chest and right down the middle were three oversized black shiny buttons. His legs were mostly bare except for a tiny green pair of shorts and his feet were covered in pointy little elf shoes also each decorated with one oversized button.
As I stared in mute horror he crossed one arm in front of his chest and lifted the other into the air above his head. Bending one knee he pointed his toe toward the floor and raised himself onto the point of his other foot. Staring me dead in the eye he smiled even wider, gave me a wink and began to twirl