Stray Paper, Burning in My Hands

"Knock It Down, Pave It Over..."

2009-06-22T03:43:02Z

When We Drink to Forget
Words: 2539

It was that feeling you got when you took a nap in the middle of the day and for a moment upon waking, you have no idea where you are. Your bed, your pillow, even your own skin seems anonymous. It would be anywhere, anytime. Jovie had been gone for seven weeks and back for eight and she was starting to realize that she didn’t have a home any more.

***

“The conquistadores came here. They spilled blood all over this area, looking for the fountain of youth,” the man tells her. His shoes were so shiny and God! She could see her own face in them! He laughs and doesn’t seem to care that she’s not paying attention. “I suppose that’s what they found, in a way.”

***

They called it the city without regrets and that sounded pretty good to Carleen. Her boyfriend-Denny-was a good man. Much better than what she might have expected to find in a place like Doyle that’s major claim to fame was a softball team that had been state champions in 1963. He had a job at his parent’s tax business and aspirations to, if not wealth, than at least lower middle class. Carleen, who’s father worked at the paper factory like his father and his grandfather before him, found an awful lot to like in a little upward mobility.

She knew she loved him a fourth of July barbeque. She had a half-eaten hot-dog on a plate balanced on her thighs and a warm beer in her hand. Looking at her scrambling, scrabbling cousins attempting to fire off a series of bottle-rockets in the mid-day sunshine she felt an urge, so strong and sudden it choked to breath out of her, to be away from all of it. It seemed she couldn’t run fast enough or far enough and Denny she thought, her brain spitting his name again and again like a cat with a nettlesome hairball. And that, Carleen supposed, had to be love, or close to it.

And Denny loved Jesus, so Carleen learned to love him too. He was a loving sort, most of the time, she discovered. But, like anyone else, he had his sticking points and he didn’t much like it when men and women got up to dirty business before they’d made it official. Denny, of course, just kissed her on the cement stair outside her door after their date nights. She could smell the cologne he wore too much of. He’d bought it because the girl at Rite-Aid said that women liked it especially.

Carleen had lost her virginity at fourteen on a broken green sofa in TR Whalon’s basement. She remembered it mostly as a serious of nervous flutters in her stomach and a burst of pain that lasted approximately three minutes. Afterwards, they watched a rerun of the Duke’s of Hazard on TR’s snowy television. She had a feeling, though, that it still counted as far as Denny and Jesus were concerned.

The next day, the place between her legs was sore and fragile, as though she broken something very brittle, like a china teacup, and the pieces and edges were just rattling around in the cradle of her hips. All in all, it wasn’t a memory she minded parting with.

Ahead of her in line there was a party girl with a plastic skirt and a black eye tapping her foot impatiently and ahead of her was blonde girl in full military dress. “Excuse me,” said the woman behind her, who was soaking wet and wearing all grey, “the line is moving.”

You saw all kinds in a place like this.

***

“You know,” he said, with a conspiratorial sort of look, like he was Father fucking Christmas, “there’s a river on the other side as well.”

She knew that.

***

That fucking song was following her everywhere. Was it possible to be stalked by something that wasn’t a person? Was that the word for it? She never knew what to call things.

And the worst part was, she couldn’t ever remember the fucking words! It was like they were buzzing all around her, in the air like a smell, but she couldn’t quite grasp on to them. She thought about when she was little and she and her sister Jen used to exhaust themselves running all over the damp grass, chasing down fireflies. The problem was, you never knew where they were going to be until they were already there.

That made her think and so she gave Jen a call. They were driving fast and she was hanging out the sunroof (she liked the feeling of her hair whipping at her) so she had to shout. She couldn’t remember what she said, exactly, but it was something about fireflies. Jen would probably tell her when she called back, but she didn’t call back and she didn’t call back and then she lost her cell phone. In a bathroom, she thinks.

She lost a shoe, too, but she found two boys, so she thinks it’s a fair trade. Their names are…are…? Well, she knew before. Her memory is bad, gots holes like Swiss cheese. The one, the blonde-haired one, is always teasing her and touching her hair and she knows what that means well enough, learned it when she was eleven years old and she can’t forget that…

In the bathroom of the hotel room she didn’t pay for and on the stiff made-up bed and downstairs in the pool, break the window, sneak in, mind the glass…He pulls her hair, pulls her head down, and it hurts but they’re not going remember any of this, he tells her.

She doesn’t believe him because her memories are like fireflies. Cannot name them, cannot put shape to them, but they are there. Just waiting to flare up in the dark. The trick-

That’s what she called to tell her!

The trick is not to chase them down, but to learn how to be still. But she is still learning and her foot taps out a rhythm that has no words.

But it used to, didn’t it?

***

He spreads his hands out as if to say “hey, not my doing.” He smiles at her like an oil slick. “We have to offer a choice. Corporate mandate.”

She snorts and folds her trembling arms, “not much of a choice.”

He gives her a long appraising look and he silent for such a long time that she starts to think he isn’t going to answer her at all when he finally says, “you would be surprised.”

***

Ms. Deirdre had several routines. In the schoolroom, it went: Arithmetic, Geography, English, Luncheon, History and Spelling each day, every day, without pause or exception. No one had ever known her to be sick or absent. She had no family that anyone knew of, no hobbies or secret loves. Save, perhaps, a certain dusty passion for order and continuity.

Her pupils liked her well enough (she was a significant improvement over the unstable and petty previous schoolmistress) though none of them could claim to love her. Men tipped their hats to her in town, but they did not come calling at her door when there was a picnic or a dance to be attended. Women greeted her politely, but did not feel right gossiping with her, or inviting her to work-circles. She was twenty-three but she seemed much, much older.

She lived in the apartment above a doctor’s office that had three rooms. It had once been a complete house but the doctor had partitioned it off in order to take on a boarder. Ms. Deirdre was respectable and timely with her rent and she suited the doctor, who was in his thirties and was himself unmarried (though not due lack of offers from the town’s eligible maidens). Every Wednesday the doctor knocked on Ms. Deirdre’s door and politely invited her to join him for the small dinner that he had prepared. Ms. Deirdre always demurred in the fewest words possible and the doctor went back to his own small kitchen and methodically put back the additional plate, cup, fork, spoon and knife that he set out every week. And alone in her room, Ms. Deirdre lay down on her bed and breathed deeply.

Wednesdays were a ritual. Ms. Deirdre spent half of her week preparing for them and the other half recovering. They were, in this way, manageable. But sometimes, when the doctor was running late or early, their morning schedules would converge unfortunately and Ms. Deirdre would open her door only to find herself staring into the doctor’s dark, startled eyes. He always looked at her as though as he were seeing not just her, but anyone at all for the very first time. As though she were Eve, naked in the garden. This look of his, it rendered Ms. Deirdre speechless and aroused such a terrible bitter aching in her breast. It was more than once that she looked down at her own shirt-front, fully expecting to see some new red wound there.

He married, of course, a few years later. She was a gay, chattering thing who’s voice could constantly be heard all through the apartments above the doctor’s office. And no one could understand or explain it when, four months later, Ms. Deirdre walked out into the pond at the edge of town until the waters closed over her head and drowned her quite efficiently.

The doctor’s young wife did not say so, of course, but she was rather glad to have the extra space freed up.

***

“There are some people who think they can handle it, I suppose. Or they figure knowing too much is better than not knowing anything at all,” he explained in a careless sort of way, as though he couldn’t understand the mentality himself.

“Which way do you think is better?” she said flatly and she could tell just by looking at his face that he was going to worm right out of the question.

“Well,” he said slowly, “it’s hardly a matter of better.”

***

“Well, what do you want?” Jovie’s mother demanded one morning over scrambled eggs and grape-jelly toast. She was always talking like that, starting right off like you were already in the middle of any argument. “You want to be back in that hellhole?”

Jovie realized belatedly that she wasn’t actually hungry. Where the fuck had all these eggs come from? Ah, right. Mom. “I don’t want to be anywhere,” she mumbled, sounding like a sullen teenager. Her mother slapped both of her hands down on the table and threw back her head at the ridiculousness of it all.

“Well, isn’t that just cute?” she demanded, “what is that supposed to mean? How am I supposed to take that, Jovie?”

Jovie shrugged and sank down into her sweater. She could feel herself getting smaller, getting softer. She looked in mirrors all the time now. She was losing muscle definition and her hair was getting long. Her mother had told her she better keep growing it out or people would think she was a dyke.

Her mother stared at her for a long time as though she was expecting something. She didn’t get it, apparently, because she got up and slammed her plate down in the sink with a clatter of crockery. “I don’t know what to do with you, Jovie,” she said. “It was supposed to straighten you out but…” she trailed off, choked with hopeless anger.

Once, when Jovie was six years old, she asked her mother why she didn’t have a daddy like her friend Tabitha, where she came from if it wasn’t from a daddy. “I ordered you out a catalogue,” her mother told her easily, and that was the sum total of her commentary on the matter. Over the years, Jovie had often thought that they might all have been better off if she had come from Sears or JC Penneys. Then her mom could have sent her back and gotten the sort of girl she really wanted and maybe there might have been someone, somewhere, who could fix the things that were wrong with Jovie.

“Mom,” Jovie said quietly, her voice was hoarse from lack of use, “I’ll…I’ll try, okay?”

Her mother leaned against the cupboards and pressed her hand to her forehead, “Jesus, Jovie, I’ve seen twenty-five years of your trying.”

***

“Sometimes I think people get…stuck,” he said. “Like a record.”

“Like a record,” she repeated flatly.

“Yeah, they can’t figure out how to…hop the groove and get going again. They got some mistake that they keep making, over and over and over again.”

***

The woman in gray wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. Her hair just drip drip dripped down her back.

“It’s bad things, isn’t it?” said the black-eye girl in the plastic skirt kindly, “you want to forget bad things, don’t you?”

“I just want…” she said, her lips barely moving, “I just want to fade away.”

Carleen said a prayer for her and it didn’t seem surprising at all when God seemed to take no notice at all. She had a feeling that a place like this…well, God didn’t look too hard at it, was the thing. The girl in the uniform just looked at them all with this hard sneering look on her face, like they all made her sick.

“Oh Christ,” she said, “why can’t you people get your shit together? Life’s hard, it doesn’t get any easier if you piss and moan about it all the time.”

The girl in the plastic skirt turned to look at her. Her eye, the blacked one, had a series of ugly burst blood vessels in it, turning it a crackled, spider-web red. “Why are you here?” she asked, apparently sincerely.

The girl opened her mouth and closed it again and found she had nothing to say at all.

***

“My mother said people either learned how to take life as it was or spent all their time unhappy, looking for something that didn’t exist,” she told him dully.

“Was she smart, your mother?” the man asked in that murmuring, cautious tone that people got when they were trying to pull all your secrets out of you.

“No,” Jovie snapped immediately. “But she was my mother and you learn things from your mother, even if you don’t mean to. Or want to.” She looked down at her own face in his shining shoes. “That’s what it’s supposed to be about, right? Learning? Learning life?”

“Supposed to be,” the man admitted easily.

“But some people are dumb, can’t figure it out,” Jovie added softly, almost to herself.

“Not dumb,” he said kindly, smiling at her. “Dumb’s not the word for it. Fragile, maybe.”

Jovie looked up into his face for what felt like the first time. He wasn’t really handsome, all things considered. “So what do they do? When the needle gets stuck?”

The man folded his hands in front of him and his smile was a tender one. “There’s more than one kind of river here, you know,” he told her.

Seemed to Jovie that she’d always known that.

"This Place is Merely a Subplot..."

2009-06-22T03:24:00Z

Unloading some older stuff...

The Last Day of the Armistice
Words: 2787

The war was coming in the windows and Sophie stood in front of the largest one, a cup of ersatz coffee already cold in her hands. Today the sirens made a wooly whump, whump, whump sound. Like some misunderstood monster in a fairy tale.

“Get away from there,” said Derek from the little kitchen table, “it’s not safe.” Sophie thought about asking him what place was safe, so she could go stand there. But she didn’t, because that would have been spiteful and Sophie was trying very hard not to be that way any more. It wasn’t easy; the world was a spiteful place and she had never been much of a liar.

“The sirens sound closer,” Sophie sat down at the table. Derek smiled gently at her. Derek was always smiling, but he was a much better liar than she was. “Do you think they’re getting closer?”

“The wind’s from the north,” Derek answered, scooping scrambled eggs onto two little blue plates. Sophie took one and stared at the sicky yellow pile. They’d come powdered, from a box with a chicken on the side.

“Jilly comes today.” Derek watched the aimless way Sophie forked at her eggs, breaking them into smaller and smaller clots. “Maybe she’ll bring chocolate?”

Sophie didn’t think she would and even if she did, it would be a hard, dark brick as thick as her hand and tasting like wax paper. Derek seemed to take her silence for agreement and he applied himself to mixing up a small pitcher of milk, using water from the sink and a tall box of white powder. Sophie had watched him do this a thousand thousand times before but for some reason, today the sight of the little globs of undissolved powder crushed stickily against the ceramic sides of the pitcher sent her lurching towards the bathroom.

“I’m just fine,” she shouted through the door when Derek knocked. She’d gotten some on herself so she peeled her shirt off and dumped it into the bathtub, turning the water on full blast. Her blouse grew dark and spread out, floating like a body.

***

Jilly brought a girl with her. She was ten or eleven and had huge, greeny yellow eyes. She was thin and her hair was straggly and she was sucking on a candy orange wedge. “Her ma died,” was all Jilly said by way of explanation.

“Well, kittens,” Jilly sat down at the table and pulled out her brown book. Derek sat down across from her, jangling his knee up and down in that eager way of his. Sophie sat across from the girl, who was still working on her orange wedge. The sugar was gone now and, slick, it caught the light and shone. “What do you need?” Jilly asked, and smiled.

When she smiled very widely like that, Sophie could see the tooth that was missing from the back of her mouth. Sophie had asked her once how she had lost it and Jilly said, “that was my own dear husband. Hit me with the bottom end of a beer bottle,” she’d pulled back her hair to reveal a dull pink scar, as long as Sophie’s ring finger, running down from her ear. “He’s dead now, of course, in the fighting,” Jilly had continued solemnly. “God rest his soul.”

“Well,” Derek shot a look at Sophie and licked his lips, “we were hoping for chocolate.” Jilly chuckled to herself in a matronly fashion.

“Of course you were.” She made a little ticking mark in her booklet.

“Everything else is pretty standard,” Derek said, Sophie rested a hand on his arm.

“We’re out of hair soap,” she said. Jilly nodded and marked this down as well.

“This is gonna be eight,” she concluded, looking Derek steadily in the eye.

“It was six last time,” Derek tapped his fingers on the table to the same erratic beat as his leg. Jilly shrugged, unconcerned.

“It’s harder to get now. Harder to get to you, too. They’re gonna burn this whole neighborhood down, you know. You oughta leave now.”

“The wind’s from the north,” Derek answered, “no way it’ll catch.” Jilly smiled in a “suit yourself” fashion.

“Price is still eight,” she told him. Derek looked uncertainly at Sophie who nodded once, almost imperceptibly. Jilly grinned like someone’s mother.

“Alright then, we got us a deal.” She made another mark in her book and, beside her, the girl bit her orange slice in half with sharp white teeth. She offered the smaller half to Sophie, who took it. It tasted chemical and dizzy-sweet and like old, grainy orange rind.

***

In an old sock in the top part of her closet, Sophie kept a little roll of paper money and a far more valuable handful of silver dollars. She took them down once a day, counted them out on her bed with the tender care of someone for whom the workings of numbers have never come easily. She locked her door during this time and Derek couldn’t come in unless he knocked and she said it was alright.

She was going to have to find a new hiding place. For a while she had kept it in the cupboard below the sink, but then the pipes burst and she had stood nervously next to Derek while he tried to stem the cold gush of water from the broken metal. Then for a while she had kept it buried in the backyard, but that was when it was still safe to go out sometimes. The night the sirens started, she snuck out in her robe to dig it up and carry it back inside. Maybe she would put it in the top of the toilet tank, or stuck up in the springs of her bed. She touched the round, ridged edge of a coin. It was awfully cold.

“Sophie?” Derek called through the door, “Jilly’s waiting, Soph.” Sophie picked out a coin and a few bills with care and then returned the sock to it’s place in the closet. It would be safe for a few hours, at least.

***

Derek had come to her with a lightning storm. It was late in the summer and the heat was like a sticky hand at her throat and she spent all her time in the window, with her bare legs and her bare arms hanging out over the fire escape. There were still a few children in the streets then. They ran and shouted and picked things out of the heaping gutters, the dirty sidewalks. Old picture frames, earrings without mates, a lipstick tube, some old sheet music.

In the dark, lightning filled up the sky, illuminated the wet ground and boom-cracked in her bones. When Derek knocked on her door, she thought for a minute that it was just the storm. He was carrying a brown army pack in one hand and he had a cut over his eye. He had cuts on his knuckles, too. She sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched him clean them out with fizzing peroxide.

Derek was sick, there was something wrong with his heart and it had kept him out of the fighting (Sophie did not ask where he had gotten the army pack). He had been traveling with his sister, but they’d gotten separated (Sophie did not ask how he’d gotten cut up.) He hadn’t eaten in four days. Sophie made him pancakes with the last of the white flour.

That was months…years ago? Things got fuzzy in Sophie’s head. She couldn’t remember much before Derek, before the war. She had a little packet of letters underneath her bed, tied up with a girl’s blue hair ribbon. She would forget about them sometimes, and then she’d find them again and sit down on her bedroom floor. She would read through all of them and be reminded. They said she’d had a boy once, who loved her and was coming back for her. Sometimes she imagined him with yellow hair.

But people went a little crazy, sometimes. People disguised their handwriting, wrote whole letters, long letters, all just pretending. People did that, sometimes.

***

Every night at five-thirty, Derek went around to every window, pulling the blackout curtains tight against the window frames. Sophie sat in the old pink chair in the living room and watched as the light vanished slowly, in pieces and in bits. When everything was black, she listened carefully to the sound of Derek’s footsteps, the sound of his breathing.

Derek had a gun, Sophie had seen it in his army pack. It was short and unbeautiful and cool blue-black. Sophie had thought about asking Jilly for one of her own, but Jilly loved to run her mouth and Jilly always treated Derek like he was in charge and Sophie like she was a simple child. The next best thing that Sophie could find was a long slender boning knife from the kitchen. She kept it in the drawer of her bedside table and sometimes in the night, she woke abruptly and reached wildly into the drawer feeling for the slick cold of the metal, its sharp, inert edge.

“Sophie?” Derek asked, and he was halfway between the kitchen and the living room. “Turn on the lamps, will you?” Sophie got to her feet and she was much, much quieter than him. She moved towards her bedroom like a ghost. Inside the radio, she had decided, she would remove the radio’s back panel and slip the sock into the spaces between the gears and the wires. They never got anything but static anyway.

In the hall before her bedroom, she passed by Derek, with no more space between them than a cat’s whisker. She could hear little intake of his breath and the frustrated exhalation. “Sophie!” he said again, more urgently, “answer me!” Sophie flattened herself against he wall and slid past him as silent and featureless as a shadow.

In her bedroom, she could still hear him moving around. He walked through each room methodically, touching every piece of furniture, feeling every corner. She could hear the soft collision of his hands against the wall. Sophie felt for the sock in the top of her closet and, when her fingers finally grasped it, pulled it down and hugged it to her. Unfortunately, down with it came an empty purple hatbox which fell to the floor with a hollow cardboard thunk.

“Sophie?” shouted Derek from the living room, “are you in there?”

Panic made Sophie careless and she turned too widely, catching her hip on the hard angle of her bedside table. She could not suppress her cry of surprise and pain, nor the sound of her nightdress tearing.

“Sophie!” Derek ran into the bedroom, colliding slightly with the half-opened door. He felt along the edge of the bed until he got to the place where Sophie was half-crouched, touching gingerly the sore place on her thigh. He touched her hair, her tearful face. “You’re hurt,” he said, “oh, Soph…” He sounded impossibly sad. Sophie reached out a single hand, pressed it to the place upon his chest where she knew his heart to be. She thought, for a moment, that she might be able to feel it; the piece missing or part damaged, an irregular tick, a lagging tock. But his heart beat strong and steady and peerless underneath her skin. With her other hand, she deposited the sock in the center of the open hatbox. It didn’t make even one sound.

***

In the morning, Sophie assessed the damage. She had a round bruise on the side of her thigh with a small, dark spot of blood in the center, like a fish’s eye. Her nightgown had a square rent in it. In the kitchen, the sunlight from the open windows, Sophie draped it across her lap and set to work on it with needle and purple thread. Across the table, Derek watched her patiently.

Jilly had stopped by earlier in the morning, she’d left the chocolate-a paper-wrapped square-on the counter. The both of them had left it there, untouched. Sophie had used the hair soap, though, and the whole kitchen was filled up with the oily lavender smell of it.

Sophie was a very poor seamstress. She pushed the torn edges together and passed the needle through them creating big, clumsy stitches. They looked like jagged purple teeth in a fluttering white mouth.

“Jesus, Sophie!” Derek darted across the table, grabbed her hand with his own. “Look at what you’re doing!” He squeezed her hand until it hurt. Sophie looked down at her fingers. Somewhere, three or four stitches back, she had passed the needle and thread through the skin on the side of her ring finger. She could see the thread, dark like veins, resting beneath her flesh. There was only one thing for it. Sophie took both ends of the remaining thread and pulled until it ripped up, out of her finger. Blood oozed slow from her torn skin, fell in drips on her white nightgown.

Derek clucked his tongue like an old woman and gripped her fingers eave more tightly, until the blood slowed, stopped. “Why do you do these things?”

“I don’t know,” she snapped, pulling her hand away violently. Blood burbled upwards, red and insistent. “I’m not a little girl and you’re not my father and this is not your house!” she was shouting now and she wrapped her bleeding finger in a loose pinch of skirt.

“Who’s house is this, then?” Derek stood up, stood over her. Sophie though about the gun in his pack. “Do you even know who those people are?” He gestured towards the framed photographs on the mantle and the little tables. Unsmiling faces in black and white, some in color.

She had known them once, Sophie was certain. This one had to be her grandmother, that one her green-eyed sister. The one on the end table was her little brother, she was certain of it. She’d known his name before.

“How did you get here, Sophie? Are these your things?” Derek pressed, smiling nastily. Sophie rose up, nightgown falling in an aimless crumple on the floor.

“This is not your house,” she yelled again, bleeding hand clutched fast in her skirt. She pushed him hard and he offered no resistance, falling back and allowing her to shove him towards the door.

“Sophie, you oughta have your head examined,” Derek said wonderingly, in the doorway.

“You oughta get the fuck out of my house,” Sophie replied, giving him one final push and shutting the door behind him. She listened, resting heavy against the door, for the dull, persistent thuds of his footsteps retreating.

When he sounded about halfway down the stairs, she raced over to the open window, clambered out on to the metal fire-escape. She leaned far over the edge, but couldn’t spot Derek anywhere she looked. “You won’t find anything out there,” she called to the empty streets, “it’s all burned!” Her hand on the railing was clean and free from blood. There was just a little white depression now, where the damage had been.

***

Derek had not come back by five thirty, so Sophie had not closed the blackout curtains. She woke in the middle of the night to the swink, swink, swink of fabric sliding easily along a metal curtain rod.

Sophie was sitting up in bed, waiting patiently with a quilt around her shoulders, when Derek knocked gently on her open door. He was drunk and he slumped uneasily against the doorframe.

“Soph,” he said miserably, “I wouldn’t ever hurt you. You know that I wouldn’t ever hurt you…”

That afternoon, she had hunted down his army pack, lifted the gun out of it slow and careful, like it was a sleeping snake. She had dropped the bullets one by one down the bathtub drain and listened to their strange music as they fell. They sounded like bells descending.

“I love you, Sophie,” Derek said, sounding anguished and honest. But he had always been the better liar. Sophie reached down, almost absently. She could feel the hard seam where her night gown had been awkwardly repaired, the stiff places where her blood had fallen. She ran her damaged fingers over the bumps and angles and it seemed that she could read it like Braille, but none of it made any sense.

“Sophie?” Derek asked, uncertain. Even across the room, he smelled musty and burning, like cheap alcohol. Sophie lifted up one arm and beckoned for him. Derek stepped forward, wavering almost imperceptibly. And the darkness? And the silence? It swallowed up the both of them.

"A Skinny Belgian Idiot Was Arraigned on Charges Today..."

2009-06-22T02:53:44Z

Let it never be said that I don’t use my own personal miseries to apply the scientific method to a series of old wives tales eventually determining which one is most effective for the benefit of you, my friends and accountancies.

….so I got this wicked sunburn. Made worse, no doubt, by the fact that I am:

A) whiter than the inside of a Mallo-Cup and….
B) pathologically afraid of skin cancer, to the point where I vampirically shun the sunlight, wearing big, floppy Old Southern Lady hats and wearing 900 SPF sunscreen

…two traits resulting in:

C) I haven’t had a serious sunburn in, like, five years.

Naturally, because I’m a big wuss, I scoured the web to see what the wisdom of crowds had to say about this fun new constant burning sensation I was experiencing. I found out that people with sunburns are really desperate. Like, really desperate. If it can be refrigerated and is kinda viscous, someone, somewhere, has put on their face. I chose to test the following:

Aloe gel
Sunscreen
Alcohol
Vinegar

First, the aloe, which was immediately effective. However, it was sticky and, the brand I have (Banana Boat) is an electric green. By the time I was done applying it, I looked like I had manually exsanguinated the Incredible Hulk. The real problem, though, was that I had to re-apply the stuff approximately every forty minutes or so if I wanted to continue pain-free.

The sunscreen lasted longer, but was less soothing. But it was neither green nor sticky, so, ya’know.

The idea behind the alcohol is that it evaporates so quickly that whisks the heat right out of your skin. Whisk! It is very effective and it does work immediately (I was worried it would burn more, for some reason, but I didn’t have a problem with that). It only worked for about five minutes, though, and did nothing to permanently alleviate the problem.

I think the vinegar theory works on a similar principle and it is much, much, much more effective. It immediately relieves burning and I applied more than three hours ago and we’re still going strong. The redness has even faded somewhat. I hesitate to make any kind of sweeping judgments here, but: vinegar, vinegar, it’s vinegar, vinegar is the best, you should use vinegar.

The only real downside is that I kinda smell like a salad right now but I hear some dudes are into that.

(I don’t hear that. That was a lie.)

Note: I had to add both “exsanguinated” and “ vampirically” to Microsoft Word’s dictionary for this entry. What the hell, Microsoft Word? How will socially maladjusted fourteen year old girls write their Twilight fan fiction? HOW? (I also had to add Mallo-Cup, but that was less relevant to the joke).

"Spent Her Life in a Gold-Plated Body Cast..."

2009-04-21T05:21:44Z

Does it count as jumping on the bandwagon if everyone stopped doing this three months ago?

Sigh, it’s hard being an inveterate procrastinator and a narcissist.

1. I cry involuntarily when I yawn. And I don’t mean, like, some minor eye-watering. My face gets red, I produce tears, lot’s of ‘em and then they fall and, usually, get whatever I’m working on wet. When it’s really bad, my throat gets tight and my nose runs (I know, I know, I’m almost unbearably sexy.) From the first grade to junior year of high school, not a year went by when some teacher didn’t stop mid-lecture all “Uh, are you okay?”

It was a hard question to respond tactfully to. “Oh yeah, I’m fine, this lecture’s just really fucking boring,” seemed like a bad way to go.

2. Continuing in the vein of weird physical anomalies: I have a really high tolerance for cold. I’d keep the window open all through winter if I didn’t think my roommates would kill me in my sleep and make it look like an accident. This is probably genetic, as my grandmother’s apartment has occasionally been mistaken for an outlying edge of the artic circle.

3. I didn’t realize how small Alma really was until I moved here. To say nothing of Riverdale. Most people don’t actually think it’s a place. “You mean, like, where Archie and Jughead live?” Yeeeeah, if they had a series of setbacks and/or wanted to start up a meth lab. Of course, Archie is taking 50+ years to graduate from high school, so, you know.

My personal favorite response to “I’m from Alma,” was from Katie: “Oh yeah! I drove through there once!” Alma MI: in between two places you actually want to be.

And until I met Brittany, I didn’t know how suburban suburbanites are. Or maybe I didn’t know how rural I am. Apparently, if you’ve been woken up by the lowing of cows on more than one occasion, you’re pretty backwoods.

4. Okay, this is a story that I tell everyone (but, uh, not when I first meet them. Only after they’ve committed to a friendship and cannot extricate themselves gracefully). And no one ever lets me forget it because, let’s face it, it’s incredible.

I once threw up on a baby.

A word of advice to any would-be baby wranglers in the audience: uh, don’t eat a bowl of spaghetti-os right before changing a baby who’s suffering from stomach flu.

The greatest part, of course, was the brief moment of perfect silence when the baby and I looked at each other, a dawning horror on both of our faces. Then she began that siren wail thing that children do and I panicked and called my mother:

“Mom! Mom! I threw up on the baby!”

My mother paused, no doubt thinking “that’s my genetic material, right there.”

“Well,” heavy sigh, “wash her.”

Clearly, I’m going to be the best mom ever someday.

5. I love the Discovery Channel, even though it’s got the most exploitive programming this side of Fox (boom-cha! Rapier wit, folks.) But I especially super-mega-love A Haunting. Everything about it seems designed to make me happy inside. Where to start? Where to start? The horrible acting? The portentous narration? The totally un-self-conscious talking head segments? (“And that’s when I saw the demon. Coming in off the patio.”) Or the stable of “psychic investigators” like Lorraine Warren (who grows more skeletal and terrifying with every appearance and is frequently the only actually frightening thing on the show) or my personal favorite, Dusty. A paranormal investigator who takes herself very seriously and, inexplicably, wears a cowboy hat. I imagine these two traits are interrelated.

An example of why all this is so awesome: on an episode I recently caught, this family detailed all these elaborate apparitions they saw and these crazy sounds they heard and how they all had trouble sleeping and all the usual ghost shit. And then, towards the end of the episode, they venture into the scaaaary basement and discover that one of their gas pipes is leaking. That’s right. A gas pipe. Leaking. As in, spewing gas into their home over a long period of them, like, say, the period of time during which they were all having auditory and visual hallucinations.

The first sentence out of anyone’s mouth? “I knew that the ghosts had broken that pipe.”

HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE IT?

6. I regularly read the Craigslist Missed Connections because they provide for me a unique mixture of the heartwarming and the sleazy. The fundamental concept of Missed Connections, of course, lends itself to a certain creeptitude, but occasionally it’s nice to be reminded that, in a world that appears to be increasingly isolating, people do notice other humans and think about them, at least a little bit. Of course the real fun comes from the uneasy mixture of these two ideas when you get stuff like “I saw you at the 7-11 and thought you had the kindest eyes. We should get to together so you can give me a hand job.”

7. The House Carpenter is my favorite folk song and I kind of informally collect versions of it. My favorites are the ones that keep the line “I’ll take you where the grass grows green on the banks of the deep blue sea.” It just speaks so concisely and yet so completely about longing.

8. I have never broken a bone. I’ve never even sprained or dislocated anything. This is probably due to the fact that I was a pale, soft child that preferred to pretend to be a pioneer in my backyard rather than play any sort of sports, organized or otherwise. I’ve never even had a black eye. I think the closest I’ve ever come was when I was thirteen and Melody hit me in the face with a golf club (this is her embarrassing story that I never allow her to forget).

A few things to note (so that you might better imagine the scene):

We were playing mini-golf. At KoKoMos

I am six feet tall, Melody at the time was, I would say, around 5’6 ish (correct me if I’m wrong). And I was standing on a ledge, behind her.

We were less than four feet from the hole.

This was Three Stooge-ian levels of serendipitous timing, positioning and ineptitude, folks.

Nothing was broken though and my brains weren’t scrambled (they were a little fuzzy, though, because I remember very clearly that I was incredibly concerned with making sure we got the clubs back to the rental desk.

Melody: Uh, maybe we should see to the, uh, head wound, there?
Me: But we’ll get LATE FEES!)

9. I think those older, rounded CATA buses (and the new bio-fuel ones as well) look like huge, wheeled gerbils. No, I can’t explain why I think this.

10. My earliest memory is of watching my dad dress a series of geese in the mudroom on the back of the house we were living in at the time. The whole room, walls and ceiling, were painted this dull powder blue and it was heavy and slick and I remember how cold and smooth it was on my bare feet and I can remember the smell of blood and how it looked purple on the floor. I think I was around three or four and it’s still one of my most vivid memories.

11. I think if I didn’t chew gum so much, I would smoke. Even though I hate the smell of smoke (except for cherry pipe smoke, which is oddly comforting) and it makes me all cruddy. And, you know, it would kill me and stuff. But I have kind of an oral fixation and I always need to be doing something with my hands. The constant unwrapping and crushing and folding and chewing of the gum really helps me out and I can’t think of anything, other than smoking, that would simultaneously allow me to indulge all of those quirks.

12. I’m reading The Prince right now, and I’m finding it really funny. Like, really funny. And I feel like that’s probably not the correct reaction. I mean, I’m not supposed to be thinking that it’d be really fun to grab a drink with Niccolò Machiavelli and talk about how much people suck, right? Yeah, probs.

13. I have a ridiculous tongue. It’s really long and really wide and it kind of looks like one of those eels with the bullet-shaped heads. Until I was probably fourteen or fifteen I did not realize that this was unusual. As recently as three years ago, I didn’t know there were people who couldn’t touch their nose with their tongues. Seriously, I could be in a very lame circus sideshow.

14. People ask me for directions all the goddamn time. I think this is because I’m a weird mixture of really, really shy and genuinely misanthropic (if I don’t talk to you, it’s either because I’m scared or because I think you’re awful. One of those things). I think this makes me look kind of scary, but purposeful. The irony, of course, is that I’m really not all that mean (I am a little bit mean) but I am lost, like, forty percent of the time.

15. I’m scared of heights. It’s a full-on phobia, too. I freeze up, can’t breathe right, get swimmy-head. It’s bad news. I have no problems with velocity or dizzying movements, but just seeing someone else up high is enough to fully freak my shit out.

I was at a birthday party once (it was actually Katie Sanchez’s, maybe?) and one of the other girls climbed up inside an empty grain silo. The higher she climbed, the more I panicked until she was perched on the top and I was all, “maybe you should come down because FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, YOU ARE GOING TO FALL AND DIE HOLY SHIT!” She gave me this excellent withering look, all “Dude, unclench, I can hear your panties twisting from here.”

I’ve never been on a plane before, for related reasons and this summer will be my first ever flight. And while I know, intellectually, that a plane is nothing like climbing up a ladder or a cliff, I’m still a little freaked. My father is not helping.

“Yeah, and with the turbulence, it’s like you’re going to fall out of the sky at any moment!” Thanks, Pops.

16. Edna St. Vincent Millay is my favorite poet. Here’s why:

No matter what I say,
All that I really love
Is the rain that flattens on the bay,
And the eel-grass in the cove;
The jingle-shells that lie and bleach
At the tide-line, and the trace
Of higher tides along the beach:
Nothing in this place.

17. My ideal vacation would be a tour of the major battlefields of the Civil War. I went to Gettysburg a few years ago and I ate that shit up with a spoon. I had kind a weird love/hate relationship with the commercial kitsch that’s sprung up around the site. Because on one hand…eccch, you know? But on the other hand, I actually ate at a place called General Pickett’s Buffet. Seriously. “We may not make it out alive men, but we will take that soup station!”

This, of course, is just one of the many ways in which ways I am a total fucking dork.

18. I draw boxes on everything. Small, three-dimensional boxes, mostly, but I occasionally branch out and do other shapes. I would say at least 60 percent of all assignments I’ve ever turned in have had at least one on them somewhere. It’s practically involuntary, although a Forensics judge did once bust me for doing it during other performances. This is seemed, to me, to be spectacularly missing the point. But I’m certainly not still bitter, years later, about this stupid and arbitrary bit of pissery. As you can no doubt tell.

19. Lilacs are my favorite flower (they count as a flower, right? Nicky, Meghan, help me out here.) Early in my summer of Mackinac I was walking home from the pub one night with my pinchy, ill-advised shoes in one hand. The grass of other people’s lawns was slick and cold and the lilacs were towards the end of their bloom. They were heavy and wet, almost rotting and soon they would curl up and fade. But for the moment, they were at their most intense and as I walked down the street, I would wander in and out of these patches of lilac smell and it was like miniature worlds opening up and closing again. It was one of those rare moments of perfect happiness.

20. My shameful secret musical love? Nineties country music. Well, from the late eighties to the late nineties, really. The advent of Toby Keith is a good cut-off point. Or at least when he got really successful and his entire catalogue became about how he was a staunchly ignorant hick with anger-management issues and this, somehow, made him the bedrock of America.

In my defense, it was the music of my childhood. And I’m not going to say that it didn’t include it’s fair share of vapid obnoxiousness, but at least back in the day, the artists were actual grown-ups instead of a never-ending stream of interchangeable blonde seventeen year olds. In fact, now that I think about it, the 90s country scene was pretty big on the female singer-songwriters. They weren’t particularly glossy or glam, they tended toward “message” songs (which, while often maudlin or cheesy, at least demonstrated a willingness and desire to participate in the general discourse). And the thread of female empowerment in their work felt a lot less banal and lip-servicey than what’s going on now. Compare, for example, the strikingly funny, honest, sexy, emotionally resonant depiction of women’s lives and wants and frustrations in Mary Chapin Carpenter’s work to…anything Carrie Underwood has ever produced.

I’m not even going to attempt to make excuses about the hair, though. I have no idea what was happening there.

21. I get incredibly uncomfortable watching interviews or anything where people interact in any sort of unscripted way (improv has a similar effect on me, unless it‘s very professional and skillful). Unless I know that they are going to be witty and charming and not awkward at all. Even the by-proxy awkwardness of normal people having a normal conversation on television is enough to make me cringe and hide under the sofa. I always skip the interview portions of The Daily Show for this reason.

22. The one and only time I successfully attempted a hand-stand, I immediately fell over and landed on my back, knocking the wind out of myself. I thought I was going to die and, when I didn’t, decided that it was probably some sort of time and my future would not lie in tumbling. Or gamboling. Or clowning of any sort, really.

23. If they actually made tiny little windshield wipers that clipped on to one’s glasses, I would buy them and wear them on a regular basis. And then I would buy two more pairs in case one broke. I would do all of this unironically. It’d be handy, dammit!

24. I love period-pieces. I’m particularly fond of anything from the last half of the nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth, but really, I’m totally undiscerning. I’ll even watch those Hallmark Channel movies where some pioneer chick finds Jesus and then kisses some bland guy with a really big face.

25. As a child, I had a totally unsubstantiated (but no less intense for that) fear that there were dinosaurs living in the toilet and flushing would cause them to rise up, Godzilla-like, and kill me. So, I would always flush and then do a wild dash out the door to avoid my inevitable grisly, prehistoric death. Eventually I realized how incredibly irrational this was and stopped hurtling out of the bathroom and careening off walls like some sort of really stupid pigeon caught inside a greenhouse.

However, the first time I encountered one of those automatic flushing toilets (I was fourteen. Hick, remember?) I experienced a moment of sheer, unadulterated panic when I stood up and heard what I could only describe as a pterodactyl shriek coming from the depths of the toilet. I managed not to scream, but it was close one.

"If My Woman Was a Fire..."

2009-03-19T02:27:50Z

So I got an audio book version of To Say Nothing of The Dog because…I don’t really know, actually. Seemed like a good idea at the time. And it’s very interesting and pretty enjoyable.

But the dude reading it? Does not know how to do an Irish accent. Like, at all. Even a little bit. He just kind of pronounces everything very carefully as it’s written and the words thunk gently into place. It’s a good thing that Jane’s part in the books is so brief because you can actually hear him struggling and then being like “fuck it, she’ll just sound British and slightly developmentally delayed.”

Speaking Irish accents and lack thereof: I was a little conflicted about his Jeeves-ian take on Baine. On one hand, I kind of liked it because I’ve always had an unconfirmed belief that Baine was putting on an English accent for the book. We know he’s Irish and as his first job was apparently with Lord Dunsany, that’s presumably nationality as well as ethnicity. But the people in the books who have accents (Jane, Irish, Count de Vecchio, fake Italian) are noted by Ned and their dialogue is rendered at least partially phonetically; Baine’s speech has no such distinctions. Add to that Baine’s future (past?) playing British aristocrats on the silver screen and logic concludes that for some reason, either because he himself saw a necessity or because Mrs. Mering made him (which would be hilarious and totally in character), he’s faking an accent. So the stilted, no-one-really-talks-that-way tones that Steven Crossley chose kind of work because he doesn’t, in fact, talk that way.

But I had some problems with it because I don’t think Baine ever really succeeds in sounding that impassive. In contrast to Finch’s uber-servant, Baine is characterized by his emotional outbursts and he’s constantly being vulnerable and inappropriate with the people who write his checks (and a bewildered Ned). His total inability to compartmentalize and to stay out of his employers’ (particularly Tossie’s) business is what makes him an imperfect butler. And, you know, awesome and kind of adorable.

In the end, I’d call it a draw, which is more than I can say for Tossie’s voice. And I know it’s hard to do characters of an opposite gender without sounding ridiculous (like how in the Jim Dale Harry Potters Hermione always sounds like she’s out of breath and that = female). But Tossie speaks so slowly! Which is really unforgivable for Tossie. She’s one of nature’s babblers. She’s not really thinking about what she’s saying and so her speech is full of superfluous detail, corrections and justifications and rapid-fire changes of opinion. And she doesn’t care what other people think or say so she has a tendency to rattle on obliviously. So the weird dirge-like tone in the audio book is weird and completely inappropriate and kind of ruins the fun of a lot of her ridiculousness. Her “Henry the Eighth had eight wives, you know. Baine says he only had six but if that were so, then why is called Henry the Eighth?” Doesn’t work without that dizzy, chirrupy meandering. And I love that joke so hard.

He has similar problems with Verity, too. She has standard “woman” voice, but winds up sounding kind of whiny rather than the cool, ironic badass of the book. Seriously, this is a chick who responds to a (sort of oblique) declaration of love-at-first-sight with a flat suggestion that Ned sleep it off. She’s sharp as a tack and she’s always got herself together which makes it all the more hilarious when she gets time-lagged and starts loopily waxing romantic about the unfairness of Ned’s boater. Here she just sounds sort of…whispery and concerned. Which is not cool.

His Mrs. Mering is very good, though as is his hilariously over-gruff Mr. Mering and I really like his take on Terrence. He manages to make his quote-laden dialogue sound like organic speech which is no mean feat as I think Terrence on gets, like, eight non-quote words in the whole damn book.

His Finch is really weird and I don’t know how I feel about it. I certainly don’t like it, but I don’t know if that’s just because I have such a strong image of the character in my head (and he doesn’t sound like he’s going to knock over a 7-11 there) and am uncomfortable with a different interpretation or if it’s simply wrong. It’s a weird choice, to be sure. It’s kind of a…I don’t know, rough? sound. And for such a straight-laced, efficient and anachronistically genteel character it becomes really jarring. Which may, in fact, be the point. And, of course I recognize that with so many characters who all need to sound roughly the same one has to start making a few sweeping gestures to differentiate. His Scottish Mr. Dunworthy is awesome, though, he’s pretty much exactly as I imagined him.

And I really liked how he was able to differentiate between the more confident, smoother narrator voice and Ned’s actual speaking voice while still maintaining an obvious kinship between the two. And (other than the aforementioned problems with Tossie) he has a very good sense of timing and it really makes a lot of the jokes. Especially those relying on Ned’s time-lag induced bewilderment.

So yeah, cool stuff and it kind of makes me wish someone would make an adaptation of To Say Nothing of The Dog even though it would be more likely than most to get detrimentally abridged. C’mon, tell me you don’t want to see a botched séance involving a bulldog in a nightdress covered in luminous paint? You can’t, because everyone wants to see that.

"Get the Fuck Out of My Dreams!"

2009-03-06T23:09:29Z

So my job description is somewhere between Scruffy the Janitor from Futurama and one or more Hardy Boys. I’m an English major working in plant research greenhouse/laboratory, so there’s a lot of dish washing and floor sweeping and other tasks appropriate for someone who has trouble disguising between tomatoes and unusually pink peaches. But I also work weekends, mostly by myself, and it’s quiet and empty and full of thudding machines and there’s dark corners and long winding hallways and mutant plants. It’s all very A Shadow Over Innsmouth and I have no trouble freaking myself the fuck out.

My roommate Meghan, who works there too (she got me the job) is profoundly unhelpful in this regard.

Meghan: You know that work is, like, haunted, right?

Me: Haunted by who?

Meghan: Dead professors, evidently. From the seventies or something. Apparently they show up primarily on the weekends when no one’s around.

Me: In order to more conveniently drag people down to some unspecified hell dimension?!?

Meghan: Sounds like a reasonable theory.

Me: Oh, dude, I just realized something: people don’t talk to me on weekends, they just sort of walk around, doing their things. I have no idea when they come or go, what if they’re dead, Meghan! What if?

My other roommate Brittany, injecting a totally unappreciated bit of common sense: Well, if they were ghosts, wouldn’t they still be all kitted out in 70s gear?

Meghan and I stare

Me: You are familiar with professors, right?

Meghan: I think when they give you tenure, you’re not allowed to buy clothes anymore.

So, this conversation in mind, I went to work the following Saturday and proceeded to get freaked the fuck out when I suddenly encountered a middle-aged Asian woman minding her own business. And then I did it again. And then a third time. When we were both in a relatively confined space and I knew she was there. She must have thought I had some sort of Memento-esque short-term memory loss and that every time I turned around I was, goldfish-like, seeing her anew. And jumping.

Then I read World War Z and spent most of my days fleshing out my zombie contingency plans (this is not a new pastime by any means, I must note). Much of my job entails checking plant growth chambers to make sure that their temperature readings aren’t going all spazzy. It’s a pretty easy task that takes about fifteen minutes and has to be done three times and day and it a affords a lot of time for idle thoughts. Like, what if there were somehow a hungry zombie imprisoned inside one of the chambers and it was only a fundamental misunderstanding of the handle principle that kept him in there? My increasing panic…um…increased when I passed by the chamber that’s been designated for the study of decomposing plants and thus has a pungent rotting organic matter smell, even though thick metal. And then I walked briskly back upstairs. One good thing about zombies being my irrational fear/supernatural nemesis is that I’m fairly confident that I can outrun them. Werewolves? I’d just announce “well, I’m fucked” and take a seat, hoping that they choked to death on one of my metatarsals.

And then last week I swept out an older, disused laboratory and about halfway through the process, I paused and regarded the scenery. There was the sink, crusted with calcium deposits and streaks of rust, the rubble-ly floor, the many mysterious stains, the big metal things with dials, their purpose was totally opaque. In short, I was clearly in a mad scientist’s laboratory. Or-oh! Oh! Oh! And abbbbbandoned sanitarium with a dark history! Seriously, all it needed was a victim strapped to a table, I mused as I pushed a aside a big trashcan with a “Hazardous Nuclear Waste” tag on it.

Best. Job. Ever.

In totally unrelated news, I am attempting to make my way through the Gormenghast novels. Because if I see a brick with a castle on it, I’m really powerless to stop myself. I’m not very far, but I’m skimming ahead like I do because I’m awful and I’m liking it a lot. I was sold by the eleventh page when Peake described Rottcodd thusly: “His skull was dark and small like a corroded musket bullet.”

And because I like a little audio/visual presentation to go with my literature, I watched the miniseries version of the first two books, produced by the BBC in 2000. That was yesterday and I still haven’t really decided how I felt about it. On one hand, I thoroughly enjoyed it; on the other hand, I don’t think I did so in the intended fashion, at least not all the time. The mini-series has a lot of good things going for it and it also has a lot of ridiculously awful things going for. And these are good too because they are that special, transcendent kind of awful that you are inevitably forced to regard as a kind of work of art in its own right. It is, in short, the Worst Best Thing Ever.

First of all, casting is an issue (Christopher Lee is in it! With a speech impediment and hilariously long, luxurious hair!). Jonathan Rhys Meyers is playing the psychopathic protagonist/antagonist Steerpike and it’s pretty hilarious for a couple of reasons. Most notably, because it means that somewhere out there, some casting director read “creepy, hunch-backed, near-albino with a weird bulbous forehead” and thought: Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Of course, some casting director also heard “Henry the Eighth in the midst of his reign, half-mad, ulcerous and hideously corpulent” and thought the same! So maybe casting directors don’t actually know what Jonathan Rhys Meyers looks like?

To be fair, the dude does have that Beautiful People Alien Face thing going on. You know, like when someone is so pretty that their face looked like it was carefully designed to adhere to the golden mean or something? It creates a kind of eerie, divisive attractiveness that some people really get and some people find really freaky. Like, I assume that people who think Cillian Murphy is hot don’t, in fact, think he looks like he just got back from a long night of injecting heroin into his eyeballs and sucking the spinal fluid out of his many innocent victims. But that’s all I can see.

And, you know, he does a competent job with it. He plays up a lot of Steerpike’s oily, Uriah Heep-ian qualities to uncomfortable effect, though. Sometimes this works and sometimes it’s like…ehhh, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, stop capering so hard, you’re making my teeth hurt. Also, the miniseries kind of hilariously lampshades the inappropriateness of his casting by using (and oftentimes creating) any opportunity to get him shirtless, culminating a lolarious scene where he strips several layers of shirt off in order to…mend Fuchsia’s possibly broken leg? Because I don’t think the power of your meticulously hairless chest is gonna work there, dude. The scene is in the books, but it makes more sense in context and is an odd mixture of bewildered sweetness (on Fuchsia’s end) and total creeptitude (um…guess).

Also, they do that thing that I informally refer to as “It’s Not That Bad. Seriously.” It’s a phenomena that occurs when someone hires an attractive actor to play a role that requires him to be hideously maimed. Buuuut they can’t actually bring themselves to seriously fuck up his pretty face, so they make the damage incredibly minimal and localized and then just have everyone react all out of proportion, like the dude has some sort of crazy tentacled Chulthu face. This is also known as The Gerard Butler Principle. It was especially awkward here as Fuchsia is a grown woman in her mid-thirties, she asked to see it and It’s Not That Bad, Seriously. But she still totally acts like he’s got exposed brain matter or something.

Speaking of Fuchsia; I assume the mini-series was going for “childlike” and “capricious” but they landed somewhere around “possibly functionally retarded.” I like book!Fuchsia quite a lot, she is spoiled and fundamentally immature, given to fickleness and destructive choices, but she’s also the character who acts most often out of love. In a way, it’s her fatal flaw. All of this stymied, frustrated love inside of her seeking an outlet is what inevitably allows Steerpike to make inroads to her heart with predictably disastrous consequences. I think the mini did a good job with the wild-bird-ness of her, her erratic, quicksilver moods, but forgot to temper that with any real sense that she could actually, say oh, tie her shoes. She twirls off a cliff. OFF A CLIFF, SHE TWIRLS. No one does that! Especially a cliff that is essentially in her back yard and that she should, logically, be very familiar with! Seriously!

And I really like that Fuchsia in the books seemed to have an immediate, instinctive understanding of Steerpike as someone to be wary of and that it was only long years and loneliness that allowed her put aside her lizard-brain misgivings about him. Miniseries!Fuchsia seems have a lot more genuine affection for Steerpike and certainly a lot more sexual attraction. I suppose because this is more dynamic and filmable than “and then he wears her ass down for seventeen years.”

But while I don’t fully support the Fuchsia changes, I can’t deny that they lead to some magnificent, tears-welling-up, stomach-aching laughs. Specifically: “I don’t want to see any more furniture! Or monkeys!” is how I’m ending all of my dates from now on. A note to the men in the audience (who are presumably here because they finished reading everything else on the internet or because it showed up on their Facebook feed): the gift of a trained monkey? Never got anyone laid. Nope, not even if you make it wear a little coat.

But at least Fuchsia, if almost supernaturally dumb, is interesting. Titus himself is like a black hole interest. Even his “I’d really like to get out of this castle so I can go fuck my fake sister” plot can’t inject life into him and his artfully styled hair. Although I have say that I nearly peed myself during the scene when young!Titus encounters young!Wild Thing and she cocks her head like a bird for, I shit you not, like fifteen seconds. Thinking that fifteen seconds is not a very long amount of time? Try cocking your own head at a serious of odd angles for fifteen seconds. While staring fixedly at some stranger.

Yeah. How’s the restraining order working out for you? And somehow, despite this, Titus manages to come off as more of a creeper than the feral naked girl who eats live birds.

And that stuff that’s good is very good: the earl’s madness is an appropriate mixture of tragedy, comedy and what the fuck they seriously let these people rule country?…ery. The twins are creepilicious and venal and inspire a toxic mixture of pity and contempt. The Countess is spot. On. And even though she might be the worst parent in existence, I was totally on her side while she was smacking Titus down for putting on his bitchface all time. Fuchsia’s stilted but intensely loving relationships, both with Titus and (briefly) their father, are appropriately sad and pitiable. Stephen Fry, as always, is great.

(A note: Microsoft Word automatically turns “bitchface” into “bitchfest.” Seems logical.)

The special effects are, of course, nose-bleedingly bad. Gormenghast looks like it’s made of cotton candy instead of the broken dreams and crumbling masonry it’s constructed of in the books. I get that they were going for “Chinese-influenced” but that’s really no excuse for the over-abundance of pink and purple. And the green screening is really unforgivable. It was very Magical World of the Leprechauns.

And, at the end of the day, what higher praise can I offer for a bad/good miniseries?

"With the Records Quietly Spinning..."

2009-03-01T07:15:16Z

So, uh, are you guys watching Dollhouse? Because you totally should be.

Okay, so before I get too deeply into why I feel that way, I have explain something: I’m not, specifically, a Joss Whedon fan. I’ve seen a couple of Buffy episodes over the years and a quite a few episodes of Angel ( it comes on at five in the morning on TNT, after Cold Case. Please don’t use the knowledge that I watch Cold Case to cast aspersions on my ability to discern quality TV. I like montages, dammit!) For some reason or another, neither show ever really caught my attention and compelled me to seek out more. I did watch Firefly, but while I liked it a lot, I also found it hugely flawed in a lot of ways. There were big structural problems with a lot of the episodes, internal consistency sacrificed to serve the larger emotional arc of the characters. I don’t think the world was as fully thought out as it should have been and the show aspired to an edginess and a moral ambiguity that it often failed to achieve (except in the fairly excellent Serenity). Plus there was whatever the fuck was going on with Inara. Rarely have I encountered a character that was just so…fail, in conception, in execution, in context with the rest of the richly drawn and interesting characters. Whatever statements Whedon was attempting to make about the nature of female power, prostitution, choice and utopia, it was hopelessly entangled in dopiness, cheesy soft-core porniness and suffocating cliché. Even Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which I have a great deal of affection for, is marred, I think, but a certain laziness and over-reliance on the “And then one DIES” method of wrapping up a love story.

So when I tell you that Dollhouse is worth your time, it is not fangirling or accumulated loyalty. I think Joss is a talented writer with serious and consistent flaws. Like most writers. And I have done my best to evaluate Dollhouse on its own terms. Spoilers ahead, obvs.

And seriously, dudes, it’s really interesting. The show is tackling some really huge stuff, not always in the most graceful fashion, but each episode leaves me thinking about the implications of the ideas presented. And that’s a lot more than I can say for a lot of media.

Take last night’s episode, for example. In my (admittedly localized) research, I found that people were pretty widely divided on its merits with many people determining that it was anvil-ly and dull and a step backward for the show. I agree that Echo’s exploitation was contrasted with Rayna’s at the hands of the entertainment industry was really, really, brick-to-the-face obvious and that it hurt the episode. However, I still think that the metaphor is important and is really about exploring what I think are two of the tent pole ideologies of show: 1. How does exploitation work? How do we fit into the system, both as actors and victims? And 2. What constitutes the self when society so narrowly prescribes behavior?

Rayna’s story actually works best, I think, when understood as a counterpoint not so much to Echo, but rather to Alpha. Rayna is a defective; she is the end result of attempting to micromanage a soul. She is an unsatisfactory person, erratic, mentally ill, self-destructive and myopically narcissistic. Rayna has torn herself apart attempting to reconcile the conflicting parts of her imposed persona with a fragments of her own suppressed self and, as with Alpha, the end result is tragedy and violence with zero regard for innocents caught in the line of fire.

And while it definitely could have been handled with more deftness, I think it’s important to examine the Disney Girl phenomenon (more carefully and articulately detailed here ) more in popular culture. A lot of criticism is heaped on the Lindseys and Brittanys of the world, but it is less common for anyone to actively critique the cultural meat-grinder that produces these human car accidents. The Madonna/Whore complex in action, the schizophrenic nature of the “perfect” woman and the schadenfreude involved in such creatures’ downfall are all questions that fit very naturally into the show’s purview.

I also appreciated Rayna’s total unpleasantness, though I know it bugged a lot of people. It allows us to not simply rail at the machine, but to evaluate Rayna (and ourselves) as willing cogs within it. Rayna could educate herself on the inner workings of her empire, she could take a hiatus or do some strategic firing. She could take control of her life in any number of positive ways. Of course, nothing in her life has prepared her do any of that, but as Echo demonstrates, people (the strong ones, anyway) break out of their programming all the time. In the end, Rayna makes a series of decisions about to what extent she wants to participate in her own oppression and how she wants to escape and this gives her undeniable agency. Even though many of her decisions are dangerous and short-sighted, they are her own. Rayna is tragic, but not a victim. Or at least not just a victim.

As an aside, I kind of liked the line about how getting what you want isn’t really good for you, even though it’s from the “well, duh,” school of philosophy, because I think it kind of works as a mission statement for the show. Echo is designed to give clients what they want, but some sort of flaw in the mission and her own ability to think outside the parameters of her programming combine to ensure that, more often than not, she gives them what they need instead. And sometimes people need to be walloped with a folding chair. Heh.

The show as a whole is very aware of itself in this fashion. It’s very invested in manipulating the very structure of “entertainment” and critiquing the viewer/voyeur dynamic. Echo’s circumstances are perpetually forcing the viewer to arrest themselves and consider where their loyalty and emotional investments are. When we root for the Dollhouse to sweep in rescue Echo, we are actually rooting for them to return her to slavery and sexual abuse and it’s an uncomfortable realization to make. Every character we might like or identify with is complicit to some degree to what is, unavoidably, an abomination. It’s sort of a meta take on how and why we watch shows and the ways entertainment usually kind of builds in these “get out of jail free” cards that exempt us from the consequences of our baser instincts (like in Alias where we won’t really supposed to think about how a brilliant and highly skilled male CIA agent probably wouldn’t ever be forced to model lingerie for a mobster because Syd kicked his ass in the end, so it was okay.) Dollhouse refuses to let us off any hooks and it becomes, in this way, the most interactive show on television in the sense that I truly believe that Dollhouse could not tell its story without the visceral and intellectual reactions of the audience. How you feel after the episode is at least as important as what actually happened during it.

It’s an ambitious show, clearly, and already it’s fallen short of the mark on many occasions (the first episode was oddly paced, filled with awkward dialogue and reliant on a coincidence so unlikely as to be virtually impossible, even within the realm of a show about brain-wiping). Eliza Dushku is very limited. She’s clearly trying (which is part of the problem) and in some episodes it’s more of a liability than others. Fortunately, the nature of the show requires a strong ensemble around Echo (who is, after all, learning to be a character) and the supporting actors/actresses are ranging from very good to excellent. The show needs to tone down the Lesson of the Week shit, though, and allow the audience to come to a conclusion more organically. (Seriously, Rayna’s going to deliver a monologue about wanting to be free while actually standing in an actual cage? Really? That’s what we’re gonna go with?) Because they are interesting conclusions and we don’t need our hands held.

People aren’t loving the episodic nature of the show, but I’m okay with it because it think they’re generally doing a good job of advancing the mytharc while fleshing out the ideological underpinnings of the show. But I do agree that the “and the mission goes WRONG!” structure has got to be revised, because it’s making the Dollhouse look increasingly incompetent. I actually thought last night’s ep was a step in the right direction in that regard, though. It was more of a “mission goes right but in an unexpected way.” It allows us to better understand why Echo hasn’t been iced long ago: her otherness, her complexity of thought, the qualities that make her a risk also make her an exceptionally good Active. And now we have the added dramatic tension of wondering if (and when) that precarious balance between asset and liability will tip.

Finally, I’d like to say just a little bit about the misogyny debate. “Just a little bit,” because I don’t really understand how anyone can look at Dollhouse with a reasonably objective eye and determine it to be sexist (the advertising is a different story, but it can't really be helped) On the other hand, I don’t think it’s specifically (or perhaps rather only) a feminist show, either. I think it’s reductive to say that the show is simply about prostitution or objectification of women. Those are obviously important themes that emerge, but as a result, I think of the show’s true focus on selfhood, cultural consumption and exploitation on a human level. A lot of the points it makes will, I imagine, have a feminist bent to them simply because the show is proceeding from the premise that women (specifically Echo) are human and that their experiences can be used to comment on the larger human condition as accurately as a man’s can. Echo is then logically treated as a character, and that means suffering. Tribulation is not the same as victimization and I think the difference is the purpose it serves. We are watching Echo literally create a self; each week she struggles to carve out more and more of an identity and each piece of the new person that emerges is earned in blood and fear and love and loyalty and courage. We are not watching her fruitless, eroticized torture, we are watching her endure, withstand and transform. And no matter how orchestrated, how artificial these situations are, Echo inevitably has only herself to rely on; a self that she must build with her own hands. This is not a female journey or a male journey but rather an accelerated, extreme version of the way each one of us got here, the accumulated cultural “programming,” suffering, striving, joy and heartbreak that made us whole and real.

It bothers me a little bit that so much scorn is being heaped upon Dollhouse for its alleged sexism. It seems to me that people are demanding that the show not simply be good or even interesting, but that it become some kind of definitive statement about women in the media and modern feminism. Speaking as a viewer, as a feminist and, perhaps most importantly, as a writer: a story cannot grow correctly when it takes its marching orders from any single ideology. Characters become mouthpieces instead of people and situations do not arise organically from interplay between those characters, but instead become preachy showpieces. I would always prefer to see stories about women rather than Stories About Women.

And it’s particularly galling when Dollhouse is dismissed so summarily for those largely insubstantial reasons when a show like </i>Heroes, which has literally sacrificed virtually every interesting or potentially interesting female character to further the plodding, circuitous plot of Sylar- a character who hasn’t been relevant or interesting for two seasons- seems to get a free pass. But Heroes is comic-booky and ridiculous, so that’s par for the course. Joss Whedon is a self-identified feminist and has helped raise millions for Equality Now and he has what? A moral responsibility to toe the party line? To be inoffensive, even if it comes at the expense of good and truthful storytelling.

And I do know that a lot of people are aware of the issue with Heroes’ approach to women and do find fault with it, but I rarely see it attacked with the same vehemence. People aren’t walking away from Heroes because the premise angers and upsets them; despite the fact that one of the implicit premises is that women are cannon fodder and wank material and that is it. Women’s lives (and, frequently, their deaths) on Heroes are only important for the impact they have on the real characters (i.e. the dudes).

Whatever Dollhouse’s flaws might be (and there are many), Echo is not a satellite or a catalyst or a pieces-part in someone else’s story. In fact, it is increasingly becoming clear that it’s the other way around. These men and women who exploit her, who buy her, become stepping stones to her self-actualization.

Um…okay, so that was not a “little bit” by any stretch of the imagination. Sorry. Anyway, in conclusion:

I really think this show has the potential to be something unique and even maybe great. I also think, though, that it’s gonna get its ass canceled. My prediction: people are going to retroactively appreciate Dollhouse months or years after its demise. Wouldn’t you like to get in on the ground floor now instead of waiting for me to make you watch the DVDs next year?

"I Should Have Kept it Hidden, At Least in The Beginning..."

2008-09-20T00:18:53Z

Things That Happened to Miranda
Words: 2,160

The Technician

Miranda was seventeen. She had a filling made of soft gold in the second molar on the right side of her mouth. When she opened her mouth very widely- to laugh, or to scream, or to sing-you could have seen it. It would have glinted in a dull-foil way against the pink of her tongue and the red of her mouth.

Miranda had dark hair. Her eyes were probably brown. Possibly grey.
She had broken her left ring finger once, long before she was seventeen. It had healed incorrectly and would have looked just slightly off-kilter. Miranda was six and a half weeks pregnant.

She was wearing a barrette in her hair. Perhaps there were once two, but there is only one that I have ever seen. It is a glossy tortishell, cracked very finely down the middle now. We do our best to keep it safe, to protect it from the slow dissolution that time brings. She was wearing a white blouse, which is yellow and stiff with dirt, and a flannel skirt, which is torn. She lost one of her tall black boots. To wild animals, perhaps. Or to other things that linger in the forest at night.

Over all of this she wore a long cape with a hood. If she curled up, she could have draped it over her body like a blanket. It’s heavy-made of the kind of awkward, home-spun wool that one sees so rarely now. And it is the deep, rusty crimson of fallen leaves. Its color has faded some, of course. It now looks merely brownish, like stagnant water or an old and nameless stain of blood.

Perhaps it is this cloak that keeps Miranda such a secret from us, for all we know about her hands and her hair and her tortishell barrettes. Miranda is a name we gave her, after all.

Perhaps she wrapped that cloak around her and lifted the hood over her face and simply vanished underneath it, passing through the village and out into the darkness like a ghost. And perhaps no one saw her, not the gold in her mouth, nor her awkward finger, not even her eyes which were brown or maybe grey.

I think though (we all think) that someone must have noticed the singular red of her.

We speculate often, on the nature of Miranda, and the close-tight lips of those who lived in the village next to the woods then. We ask our questions carelessly, at random.They stand out vivid against the staid background of our casual conversation. They bring us no answers.

Once, perhaps every two years, or every three, one of us will get an itch at the back of their spine. A worm in the head, as my grandmother used to call it. And we’ll steal down to the place where she rests in the dark. And we look in on her, touch her with gloved hands. The pitiful contours of her, the hard edges and the stiff bristles of hair. And we ask her, in whisper-tones “Who, Miranda?” But she has nothing to say to us, and after a while, we nod, our heads heavy with this knowledge. And then we put her back in the place where she belongs, with a number above her that makes us sad (though Miranda is just a name we gave to her).

We strip off our gloves, and regard our hands. The edges that delineate hard, interior bones, smaller, more delicate and more numerous than we can really understand. We sigh to no one, and leave her to rest.

She takes up very little space, there in the dark.

The Aunt

Oh, and we did warn you, didn’t we child?

I remember when you were no bigger than a flea, had that yellow sundress that your mama went without to give you. I remember how you dirtied the seat and tore out all the stitches in the hem. Oh, you must have got a whipping over that.

I myself pulled you off the loose, sagging wire of the fence, you kicking and screaming and bleeding all the way down. “But I want! I want!” you said. I raised four little ones of my own. I know all about “I wants.”

The sun was shining everywhere except the woods. The branches twisted together like intertwined fingers and the dark openings into the deep forest looked like huge mouths. There were wolves in the woods; they slink down into the town sometimes, when times is lean and we find their wreckage in the mornings. I told you this with a swat for good measure and you cried out, but your little face was still set and earnest.

“You don’t want to end up like the girl with the cape, do you?” I asked and you turned your little face up towards me and said:

“Who?”

I forget, sometimes, that you’re just a wee one. It seems that everyone’s known of the girl with the cape for so long. Oh, I never saw her, nor did my own mother. My grammie claims to have touched her very cloak, but the old woman did like a story and a drink.

“She was a little girl just like you, who was just going through the woods to visit her own true love. And she wore a cape red like cherries so he would know her. But she got herself turned around-it’s easy to do in the dark-and the wolves got to her. And all her true love ever found of her was her long brown hair and her long red cape.”

I told the story just the way my mama used to tell me. I remember how it used to make me curl up tight under the bedclothes and imagine every high gust of wind was the sound something huge and wild and snarling coming right for me. But you, you were always fearless and you stared up at me with hard, bright eyes. “Tell me about the cape lady,” you said, and pulled urgently on my hand.

No more to tell, far as I knew. But here you were, gobbling up any little scrap of story I had for you. I dug around deep in the back of my head, brought out an old and musty memory of watching my mama as she hung up endless chains of wet laundry that belonged to other folks, asking for a story, “just a little one!”

“The cape girl came from a village by the ocean,” I said, taking your hand and turning you back towards the town, where you mama was probably knocking down doors looking for you. “And she fell in the love with a boy who lived in the dry desert, but she had no way to get to him, you see. ‘Cause her mama and her poppy thought she should marry a boy ‘round her own home. It would take her many days to walk there, but she was a foolhardy girl and she didn‘t bring anyone along to protect her.”

“There is a desert on the other side of the woods?” you asked, tears drying heedlessly on your face.

“So they say.” You gave me that look you got about you sometimes. I don’t suppose I altogether liked it. It made you look old in a way that little girls should now. Almost obscene. “That’s why you listen to your parents, that’s why you don’t run off. You never know what might be waiting for you.” I told you this, but you know how you are. If a body told you that the sky was blue, you just had to go over to the window and look for yourself.

The Married Lady

The deep hollow at the center of the tree looks not unlike a cat’s pupil. Except ragged on all its edges. It’s not very big and it’s half-filled up with rainwater and leaves that are going to sweet, musty rot.

I think it’s killing the tree. Half the branches are dead and spongy, hanging on to the trunk out of habit. Yellow leaves spread in a halo all around the base of the tree. Wet, black roots poke up in between and break the circle.

I brought this idea to my mother once, and she said that if the hole was killing the tree, it’d been doing it since long before she was born.

I used to come here as a girl. It was the best hiding spot I’d ever found, no one ever even thought to look there. I would crawl inside, pile the leaves up around me and drape my cloak over my head and everything went very still and very dark. The little hissing of my breath was all that I could hear.

I stopping coming here when I was around eleven, though, after my mother found me in the tree. She dragged me out so quickly that I bloodied both my knees on the ground. She was crying. I’d never seen her cry before, not even when my brother Peter was born blue and still with his little hands curled in tight fists.

“What are you doing?” she asked me, still crying even as she striped my backside. “What kind of bad fortune are you looking to bring down on your head?”

She said the very same thing the summer I turned sixteen and started taking up with Michael. “What kind of man is that, little girl?” she would ask and then answer her own questions. “That man will always love you twice as much and half as well.” Sixteen years old, that sounded awfully romantic.

My mother didn’t tell me the story of the cape girl until I was thirteen. She said her own mother used it as a bogey-tale, saying the wolves would come to eat her if she wasn’t a good girl. “The absolute truth,” she said, stroking my hair while I shivered on my bed, feeling like my guts were re-arranging themselves, “is that she was a foolish girl who fell in with some bad man. They say she was with child.” My mother with six children living and two dead, could not bring herself to say “pregnant” without blushing. “But she didn’t have no one to look out for her, to raise her right.”

(They say she-the cape girl-haunts this forest, this tree, but I don’t think that’s so. I think she was long gone before she even saw the shadow of the branches.)

Sometimes I’m glad my mother’s been dead these last four years. Sometimes I’m glad because she’ll never see the sad new shapes my life has taken on. Sometimes I’m glad because I can’t bear to think of all the things she would say (though I hear them all the time in my head).

I don’t know why I’ve come here. Probably because it’s still the best hiding spot I’ve ever known. I could curl up inside (I am still small, even after two children pushed their way through me). I could lay in the dark silence, hearing, tasting nothing but my own slow breath.

But Michael will always find me, whether it takes a day or a week or a month. He would sniff me out like the wolves that howled in my mother’s nightmares.

The wind moves through the desiccated branches of the trees, sending yellow leaves down to rest on my shoulders like many comforting hands. I fancy I can hear the urgent patter of Michael’s feet somewhere behind me. But my deep breathing is much louder.

The thing about wolves, you understand, is that they are cowards by nature, preferring to hunt in packs and pick the weakest and the most fragile prey. And sometimes, if you turn and face a wolf with no fear in your heart, he will run away, whining and pissing himself.

Especially if you have a rifle.

The Cape Girl

The girl smiles and something winks like a burnished star in the corner of her mouth. Her hair falls over her face, a fragile brown cob-webbing.

“I’ll be on my way, then,” she says to her companion, who makes a motion as if to argue. She lays her hand on his arm and laughs. She is very warm, her skin burns against his even through many layers of good, home-made clothing. “I can look after myself,” she says and this time he says nothing.

She lifts the hood of her cloak up over her ragged hair. This makes her look smaller somehow, her sharp face looks childlike and strange. Like a fairy or a goblin or something that was never a child at all.

She moves into the night, tracing an uneven track in the dry, late-fall snow. The man watches her go.

"I'm Burying The Bones..."

2008-06-29T08:53:58Z

Well, this story has been kicking my ass up and down the block for a few months now and it still doesn't feel done.

Sleepless
Words: 4,641

Well, I married me a wife
She gave me trouble all my life
She ran me out in the cold rain and snow
Rain and snow, rain and snow
She ran me out in the cold rain and snow
- “Rain and Snow,” Traditional

I did not sleep last night. Instead I tossed the covers from me and then snatched them back, I curled and I sprawled. I opened the spare little window and I closed it again. The sky outside was a muffling, enfolding velvet black. There was none of the misty peach-colored softness that I had come to know in the city. The moon was so bright, it battered at my eyelids. Soon, I suppose, I will look just like my dear and troubled husband with his hollowed, darkened eyes and the muscles that shiver and jolt underneath his skin.

I heard his music last night, floating low and liquid up the stairs like thick, sluggish oil. It was beautiful-an original composition, unless I have forgotten my schooling-but not soothing. My husband is a genius but his work rarely offers solace to the disordered soul, I must say.

We were quite the owl-eyed pair at breakfast this morning. I have not slept properly for these last four nights. For my husband, it has been much, much longer. I discovered this on our wedding night. Which, I am given to understand, was rather unorthodox. I am, of course, no blushing schoolgirl, and I was surprised when he did not touch me. We lay like children with out faces pressed close together until, eventually, I fell asleep. He did not. When I woke in the lost and early hours of the morning, I found him sitting motionless on the edge of the bed we share (but rarely inhabit now). “Darling?” I said, and reached out my hand to touch his arm. He jerked away from me as if I had fired a shot.

“I’ve had an idea,” he said, and turned his shivery, pale smile on me. He left me then, in the dark, bewildered. He has spent the days since then holed up in the library, where he keeps his piano. It’s starting to sound very accomplished, but my ears are hardly what one may call refined. My mother attempted to teach me the piano several times when I was younger. She herself was a rank amateur, of course, but she loved music with her whole heart and never quite got over the dream of having a daughter who was a celebrated concert pianist. I didn’t had the fingers for it, though, so, as I always say, I did the next best thing and married a bonafide eccentric musical genius.

We ate fruit at the breakfast table, picking at it like birds while the sunlight bathed us in an eye-searing white. There seems to be no filter here, between the heavens and the earth. It has a way of making one feel rather skinless. I do not ask him about his composition, he does not ask me about my tours around the house. Our breakfast passes in bright silence, but all is well. Neither of us were ever the very talkative sort.

I spend my days here doing what my mother would have called “women’s work.” I walk from room to room, along hallways and down stairs with a little notepad in my hands, a kind of inventory. My husband has lived here alone for a very long time and he has not bothered much with the house, outside of his library of course. What decoration there is must have been devised by his mother, a woman I have only seen in pictures. Which, if my general impression of her taste is correct, is probably all for the best.

She apparently had a strange love of the tastelessly macabre (one of the many affectations of the prior decades that I do not miss at all). The house is thick with hair wreathes, twined with musty ribbons with pictures of the dead propped up inside. After finding them in room after room, I began to wonder if it was even possible for someone to have this many departed relatives. One room, another parlor I presume (I had never before been in a house that required more than one parlor) was all done in silken black wall papering with a gloomy purple sofa and on the table there was a handful of dead flowers in an odd, off-white vase. It was several minutes before I realized that the vase was made of bone. The room puzzles me, somewhat, as there is a clear discoloration on one of the walls. One square area is much darker than the wall surrounding it, presumably something hung there once, perhaps a cabinet or a small painting. It is strange to me, that a decoration should have been removed when everything else seems so untouched. Perhaps it was a relative who fell out of favor? Or a picture so profoundly dreadful that even my oblivious husband stirred himself to get rid of it?

I do not bother my husband with these idle thoughts in which he could not possibly have any interest. Besides, I have always loved a diverting mystery. I have spent my last two days searching for the lost cabinet or picture, but, despite her fascination with the dreadful and the departed, my late mother in law was scrupulously organized. Not a single gaudy bauble out of place. I have grown very certain that it has something to do with the keyless room.

On the third day of our marriage, my dear husband gave me a heavy ring of keys, one for practically every door in the house. Some were huge skeleton keys, for the outbuildings and storage sheds on the grounds, others were as small and delicate as a breath (these, I found out, belonged to the red music box in what had been my mother-in-law’s room). I spent several pleasurable days working out the function of each of these keys and exploring the rooms that they opened to me.

But there was one door, an unassuming door on the second floor made of ordinary wood and an ordinary brass know. It looked just like its fellows on either side of the hall (those doors took long, narrow keys with fleur de lis on the end). But there was not a single key on my ring that would fit into the lock.

“Husband,” I said, as he pushed his fruit about his plate with a pale, passionless expression, “there is a key missing from my ring.”

“Mhm?” he said, for my husband’s mind is often rested exclusively upon higher things.

“On the second floor, the fourth door on the right, I cannot open it.”

My husband did not look at me. He had arranged the slices of his strawberries on his plate in an endless red spirals. “It must have been lost long ago. I doubt there’s much of interest in there.” I nodded and I sipped my black coffee. The next day I went back up to the keyless room.

I have never been, you must understand, a patient person. My mother used to despair of me ever finding a husband, for I could not sit still long enough to learn French or water coloring, or even to get fitted for a dress. And my husband’s home, while large and elegant and filled with a good deal of interesting things, did have a certain lack of stimuli, after a while. My mother had been thrilled, upon first encountering the large ballroom in the east wing of the house, she had excitedly imagined the parties and balls I might host, to learn the names of my neighbors and their general dispositions. But there were no other homes, no neighbors, for miles and miles. Just dark forest and the braying of my husband’s disused hunting dogs.

I paced a streak in the hallway before the keyless room. I stared through the eye of keyhole, but could see nothing of darkness. I attempted to jimmy the lock with a hairpin, but I had no luck. I thought of simply bashing the door in and saying it had been an accident. But I could not conceive of what sort of accident would result in my smashing through an otherwise strong and serviceable door.

“Darling?” I said, on one of the rare nights when my husband shares my bed and we lay together, still and sterile.

“Yes?” he said, for he does not sleep and only stares at the ceiling.

“Do you think perhaps we should get a new lock for the room on the second floor?” I did not need to clarify which room I meant, he knew perfectly well.

My husband, who had never denied me a thing I desired said only, “no.”

And I left the matter there, in the dark and the silence.

Since then, I have tried to put the keyless room out of my mind. I have catalogued my husband’s treasures, I have ordered new wall hangings and new furnishings, picked out paint schemes and marble. I have eaten sumptuous meals and read all the fashionable novels that I never had time for before. I have listened to my husband’s strange, floating music. And I have not slept one night in the last week.

My mother is due to visit upon the coming weekend, and this is something that I could never reveal to her. Two nights ago, there was something outside my window. I could hear it, as I lay awake. It was very faint at first, the lightest of tappings, like a child’s fingernails. But it grew more insistent until it drew me from my vague reverie. Something, I am certain of it, was pounding on my window’s pane. I could see the glass shudder and bow underneath the abuse.

I laid very still on my bed, frozen with indecision. My husband was down in the library, too far to hear me should I call out. In theory, there were servants in the house, but I have never seen any of them, save for the dour butler and the expressionless cook and I had no idea where I might find any of them. I looked about the room for anything that might be made into a serviceable weapon. There was not even so much as a fireplace poker. All this time, the pounding at the window was growing more vicious and more violent, I felt certain that whoever was on the other side would soon break through the glass.

I stood up silently and grabbed the cold lamp that rested on the beside table. It was not ideal, of course, but it had a heavy iron base and that would have to do. But as soon as I stood, the pounding, the tapping, all of it ceased. I waited a few moments and heard nothing but my own breath. I moved over towards the window, thinking perhaps that the fiend had seen me rise and was waiting. Outside, there was nothing but that darkness that lays so heavily on the eyes. There was, however, a handprint on the window, outlined in the white mist made by a body’s heat. It was tall and slender, not much bigger than my own hand.

I stood before the window for a very long time, until the moist heat of the handprint had faded and the place where it had been was indistinguishable from the rest of window pane. When I returned to my bed, I heaped blanket after blanket upon myself and still I was cold.

***

My mother came on Saturday and drank tea on the white veranda. I stared out at the green hills that rolled ceaselessly into one another until they crashed up against the horizon. This place had seemed so open the first time I stepped on to the grounds.

“You look wretched, darling,” my mother said, pressing the lemon down again and again into her cup.

“I am sleeping poorly,” I told her. And it was so, the dark hollows underneath my eyes, the tremor in my hands. Even the shocking, ghostly whiteness of my skin. All of it could be cured, I felt sure, if I could only close my eyes and rest…but always there was that knocking, that terrible rapping. Worse, somehow, was when it would cease for a few moments and then the tapping would begin, soft, insistent. Like fingernails. It had not let up, not one night since that first night.

My mother chuckled to herself, “well, you are just lately wed, it is to be expected.”

“My husband does not touch me,” I spit, with a violence that surprised me. My mother was taken aback as well, and she set her tea down with a clatter, splashing some of the hot liquid on to her fingers. We both jumped up and reached for the little tea towels and we said nothing more to one another as we dabbed at her injured hand and the stained white of the table cloth.

When we sat back down, we did not speak of my outburst and instead my mother regaled me with tales of the elegant dinners she had recently attended. As her carriage rolled through the tall front gate, I waved goodbye and for a moment, I had the strongest urge to run the thing down, to climb inside and never come back.

But I did not do any of those things. I waved.

***

I think someone is watching me.

Oh, but I have not slept and such a thing does play with one’s mind. I have a terrible headache at all hours of the day now. I lay in my bed and do not sleep, I can stomach no food. My husband, I do not see. He has been working on the same piece of music for more than eight days now, I hear it at all hours. I have bribed the servants and they say he does not leave his library any more, asks only that his tray be left outside the door.

I have abandoned my attempts at decoration. Except for my own bedroom, which I have had fitted with heavy window drapings, dark navy blue. At night I stick bits of cotton deep into my ears, I sleep with pillows over my face, and still I hear it, plain as day. As though it were next to my very face. Every night I think that the glass must be sure to crack this time.

I even-I even-you shall think me foolish-I have tried sleeping in nearly every room in this manor. Each night, the knocker follows me. Even down in the servant’s quarters, even at the very top of home, three floors off the ground. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I were to go over to the window, throw back my dark curtains, undo the latch and spread the panes of the window open to the night.

But really, if I am to be perfectly truthful, I think it does not matter whether the window is opened or closed, because the thing that is out there is in here as well. I think I hear it moving, walking from room to room ahead of me. Its footsteps are very light, they sound like cloth softly skimming rough wood.

***

Six weeks ago, when I could still close my eyes in the night and did not flinch away from whispers and footsteps, I went to see my husband.

The city where I lived before sometimes seems unreal now, like something I heard of once in a story and never really existed at all. But I remember the parties, I remember the heavy, wet feeling of silk sitting on my thighs and I remember retreating to the dark corners and dead end hallways where faceless men whispered in my ears. And I remembered how to put on my make up, ghosting powder along my cheeks until they shone pale in the gloom and painting my lips a cheerful crimson. I even did my hair up with heavy irons that I heated myself in the bedroom’s fireplace. It must have looked incongruous, my painted and pursed face, hovering above my white nightdress.

I lingered outside of the closed library door and I heard him murmuring to himself. I couldn’t make out any words, just the mutter of his voice and the low plunking of piano keys. I knocked on the door and I could hear everything inside his room go still and silent. “Husband?” I call, and my voice was so soft and so velvet. He came to the door with his hollow, black eyes (I think my husband must have been handsome, once).

He looked at me like a man drunk, or else drugged. I opened my mouth and could not speak. He took the long skirt of my nightdress in his hands, twisted it all around his fists until I was pulled inexorably towards him. He looked at the white fabric like he had never seen such a thing before, as though I didn’t wear the exact garment or a copy of it every night in our sterile bed.

My husband lifted my long white skirt, bundled it up into my unresisting hands. My skin-my exposed legs and my pale stomach-were cold. But they had been cold before (been so cold since the day I walked into this house). My husband knelt down before me like a supplicant knight and rested his head in the flat cradle of my hips, directly above the rise of my sex. It should have been embarrassing, and for a moment it was and I could not think what to do with my arms, save hold them stiffly out from me. But then it was as if some strange fairy magic had descended upon the two of us. I was transfixed, shot through and stuck fast to the floor by the feeling of my husband’s sweat-soaked hair on the secret skin of my abdomen (seen by no one other than myself since I was eight years old). I rested my hands atop his head, he drew his own arms up to encircle my waist. Gooseflesh erupted on my legs.

My husband took my maiden head (so carefully guarded these long years!) leaning awkwardly against the sleek grand piano. Stricken keys played a discordant, repetitive tune underneath us. He wept into my neck the entire time. When he had finished he collapsed against me like sickly child and I could think of nothing to do but to smooth his hair with my fingers and shush him gently, the way own mother used to do for me so long ago. “Donielle,” he called me. This is not my name.

I laid alone in our bed that night, and regarded the little scattering of blood on the white of my dress. It was less than I expected and it was already drying brown. Surely, I thought, he would come to me now.

***

I have a met a servant who will exchange words with me. He is skittish like a jackrabbit and has a jackrabbit’s wide brown eyes. He speaks with an accent I do not recognize and when we talk together, he tilts his head and whispers as though someone were listening (I think someone is listening).

He says my husband is be-deviled. I ask him what that means and he tells me that when a man does a bad thing, even a very rich man who will never have cause to fear the law, even that sort of man, must be punished. He tells me that husband speaks to voices that aren’t there (and I have heard him, I have heard him at work in his library railing at himself. It seems he gets louder every day now).

“Like a ghost?” I ask.

“Not like a ghost,” the manservant says. He pauses and he looks down the corridor, though we are alone (I fear we are never alone). “She eats him alive.”

***

My husband was married three times before. I am twenty-seven years old, he is much older. His first wife fell into a fast-raging river and drowned before anyone could attend to her. His second wife suffered a sickness that had her coughing up blood and bits of her insides as she died. His third wife tumbled down the long staircase that leads to the ballroom where there has not been a ball in thirty years. It is not good luck to be anyone’s fourth wife, this I know.

But I am twenty-seven years old. And, as my mother always said, we are not actually rich, simply well-dressed.

***

The day I realized that my monthlies were not arriving as they should was the day the blood began appearing. It was just a drop at first. A single drop-so red it was nearly black-sitting on the pale wood of the fourth floor hallway. I studied it for several moments and the more I looked upon it, the more afraid I felt. It was perfectly round, as though someone had simply stood there and…dripped…

I did not ask any of the servants to clean it. I did not think they could.

That evening, the tapping at my window ceased. It was inside, the thing was inside…

***

The blood drips on the floor grow in number each passing day. There was a long smear today, as though an errant foot had caught a bit of gore and slid uneasily upon it.

***

I tore my way into the keyless room today. My rabbit-eyed servant located a small axe for me and it did good work, smashing through the wood around the lock.

There is a girl in that room. Her name was Donielle, she was pretty, with yellow hair, like my husband’s. There are photographs, so many, of her. Donielle at the shore, Donielle sitting stiffly like a doll, Donielle riding a horse, Donielle at her piano. Several of her at the piano. They are hung on the walls and piled three deep on every surface. One is no-doubt the very one missing from the parlor downstairs.

Once, there must have been much of Donielle in this house. There are books, little leather-bound ones filled with her essays in English and French and Latin. There are piles of sheet music, the hand that scribbled on them the same one that wrote out those long, perfect French sentences. I imagined my husband’s long-dead mother, wandering through the halls and caverns of her home, removing the girl from walls and tables and beds. Until it was as though she had never been at all.

The whole place is full of dead flowers that smell like nothing but dust now. The paper notice of her death has a prayer and somber angel on it. God welcomed her into heaven, it said, almost twenty three years ago. She was nineteen years old, my husband’s only sister.

I stared for a very long time at one picture in particular, another of her at the piano. Her face was bent towards the keys, her shoulders set with concentration. Her mouth was slightly open, as if caught in a frenzy of creation. She did not appear to notice the photographer at all.

And then I walked downstairs and with every step I took, I could hear my husband screaming louder.

***

I gasped, I could not help myself. It was a weak, whimpering sound and my husband did not even turn to acknowledge it. He sat like some austere water bird, hunched over the piano’s keys. His hair was soaked through with sweat. How was it that I had never noticed how feverish he had always been? His hands banged haphazardly against the piano, like an insolent child. She stood tall and white next to him and drew her long fingers across the back of his neck. His skin where she touched it was colorless as bone, as though her very flesh had leeched the color from his.

Her hair was no longer blonde, but matted with black grave dirt. She wore a long white dress, like a bride might wear. It was heavy with blood in her middle, I could see the movement of her legs against the soaked fabric. It rain down her legs, collected on her bare feet, made a dark puddle all around her. Surely there was not so much blood in a human body.

Donielle heard me, she turned her face to me and it was as pale as my own must be. The hollows underneath her eyes a true black, not like a bruise but like a wound that has gone to rot. Her eyes were filmy blue, blind and useless as marbles. But still Donielle saw me and she smiled. And then she leaned down to whisper in her brother’s ear, still smiling. Like a gentle mother. Her fingernails were long and thick with dirt and they went tap tap tap on the piano’s shining lid.

All this time I could not move and as I watched my husband’s back stiffen, I felt my bladder let go and warm wetness streamed down the insides of my legs. I matched then, the terrible thing that had my husband’s ear.

My husband turned to face me and he was crying a child’s ceaseless tears. They made his waxen flesh shine. “Oh no,” he moaned, standing up from the piano bench. “Oh no, you can’t…you can’t…it was my fault.” He lurched towards me across the floor, his limbs were sluggish and unwieldy, as though he was fighting his way to me through deep water. “I sent her to the man, that fucking hack, that fucking killer! I put the…the…thing inside her,” he sounded as though the words were being wrenched out of him. Each one bled.

And still I did not move, could not move. As on that night when he took my virginity, I found myself hypnotized by my husband. He looked at me with tortured eyes, with haunted eyes, with eaten-up eyes. “You can’t,” he said, and suddenly the tremor had gone from his voice. He stood up straighter, like a soldier, like a gentleman. The way he had looked that first day I had met him, smiling and pastel-colored and admiring the fine view from his windows. He looked at me sternly, like a child that had disobeyed him. “Donielle, it is a sin. You’ve got to get that thing out of you.”

“Perhaps it is our punishment,” the smiling creature at the piano whispered, her lips barely moving.

“No,” he said, and his eyes seemed to look through me entirely. “It’s our secret. It‘s got to be our secret, Doni…” He stepped towards me; and that is when I began to run.

I could hear her, she was playing the piano and singing to herself. I could hear him, he was running fast and efficient. His footfalls made an even, staccato music of their own. The song she played was beautiful and terrible. It was almost finished now, sure to be much lauded but not loved because you cannot love a thing that disrupts your soul in such a way. I remember what my mother had told me the day I got married when I tarried before my mirror and could not understand what I saw reflected there. “Think what it will be like,” she said, “to live in a house full of music!”

I climbed the stairs, my skirts flurrying out around me. My husband chases me, but I am faster and I am cleverer. There is a room up here, you see. With a girl and a sharp axe inside it.

"I Lay Down on The Cold Ground..."

2008-06-22T11:13:29Z

I made a willow crown this morning.

It’s trickier than you might think. It requires patience and a certain stubborn desire to get things just right. Willow crowns taught me something about myself when I was still young. That I am willing to try so hard for the most inconsequential things, that I will do it over and over again until it works the way it should. But only if it doesn’t really matter.

The key is to start with two long branches-thick but not stiff-of the same length. And every subsequent branch much be braided into the one that came before it, or it will all unravel. If you like, you can put things in the gaps where the branches bend and twist away from one another. Flowers, mostly, or other kinds of leaves.

There are these roses that grow wild behind an outbuilding on our property. At least, I think they are wild. I can think of no reason why anyone would have deliberately planted them there. Either way, if they weren’t always wild, we’ve made them that way with our negligent ways and tall razor grass. They are a dark Barbie pink, rippled and crenellated like a person’s pursed-tight mouth. They have little thorns all on their stems, like light, prickly fur.

I picked one of the roses (the best one, that still had its shape and had mostly escaped the ravages of bugs) but I didn’t put it in my willow crown. Instead, I destroyed it, picked apart the individual petals and watched the odd shapes they made against the fresh-mown grass.

I sat underneath the willow tree and the moon was still in front of me, fading and no longer full. The sun was rising behind me and if I were to turn around, the spangle of yellow light on wet grass would leave me blinking. I could see the red stop sign at the end of the road, the gold wheels of baled-up hay. My feet were cold and sticky with wet grass and suddenly all I could think was “I’m going to go far away from this place.”

I put the willow crown on my head and I waited for the sun to rise.

"How The Hills of Our County Made a Seam to Hem Me In..."

2008-06-16T22:17:36Z

Halcyon Days
Words: 3370

This was all before Winnie died, you understand. About six or seven weeks before, unless I miss my guess. I remember it was still fall and the days were just getting so you’d have to put on a jacket before you went out. Winnie died in the winter. There was so much snow on the ground, John lost the third toe on his left foot running out in it for a doctor. Which, as it turned out, did no good after all.

Winnie dying seemed to change just about everything for us. Whether we admitted to it or not we all started measuring time in just two units: Before Winnie and After Winnie. I think, really, it just showed us the things that were already there. Made it so we were living in the world instead of playing pretend. We’d lost people before that, of course. John, who froze his toe off in the deep winter snow, had seen his whole family-Mom, Dad, two little sisters-killed. Throats cut like hogs at slaughtering time. And there wasn’t a one of us didn’t have a story just as bad or worse. But, up until Winnie, none of us in the inner circle had ever been seriously wounded. We were living what you might call a charmed life, or so it seemed. Winnie, lying in that gray bed with her own blood and spit and bile soaking the pillow underneath her, promised us that were not invincible.

That is not to say we didn’t have our fair share of close scrapes. We’d sit around the table nights and bare our scars in the lamplight, telling the stories of how we’d gotten them for the new kids. I myself had a pretty good knot of shrapnel in my left shoulder from a pipe bomb that’s timer I’d misjudged. Friendly fire, but it hurt like a motherfucker all the same. That night, we were actually patching up Clarence Allison, who’d taken what had turned out to be a somewhat lucky shot to the back of the knee. The bullet had tore through all the tender tissues and muscles in there that Maria might know the name for, but just looked like meat to me. And he went down like a ton of bricks. But the part that made it great, the part that made it miraculous was, as he was lying there, the goddamned spike who shot him runs up (chasing after Joshua, most like) and trips over Clarence and falls right on his fucking face. It was like something out of a movie. Clarence shot him with his own pistol and we got off scot free, laughing all the way.

We were still laughing, fit to bust a gut. Even Clarence was laughing, burying his face in a donated pillow while Maria rooted around in the remnants of his knee. He told me later he didn’t even feel it, just felt hot and numb, like when you’ve been sleeping on your arm all night and you wake up to find it all boneless and airy. Course, Maria had doped him to the gills, so I don’t suppose I suggest that you try the same and see what happened. “I think what I liked best,” Joshua pointed out, “was the elegant windmill he did with his arms on the way down. Very dignified.” This got a big laugh, and we all took turns re-enacting the fall, our movements growing gradually more exaggerated.

“Jesus Christ,” Maria muttered while John was pratfalling on the tile floor, “this whole thing would be a lot easier if you’d been standing up straight and he’d hit your thigh instead.”

“Oh gee,” Clarence’s voice was muffled from the pillow. “Next time I’ll be sure to get shot in a more convenient place. How about my ass? No complicated tendons in there. Do you have a preference as to which cheek?”

“Well, actually, your fat mouth would be favorite, if I get a vote,” Maria answered sweetly.

“Ah, the soothing sounds of lovebirds chirruping to one another,” Joshua said, batting his eyelashes like a flirtatious girl.

“I haven’t gotten to this part in the book yet,” Maria said, ignoring Joshua and wiping her forehead with a gloved hand. She left a streak of orange-y blood behind her.

“Now, you see, I don’t need to hear that shit,” Clarence complained.

“Well, then next time you wait more than four days after we get the medical textbooks in before you go and get your ass shot,” Maria pointed out. “You’re lucky I’ve read past the damn table of contents.”

“That’s me,” Clarence agreed, “lucky.”

All this time, the fifteen of us had crowded into the stockroom that, with the addition of a gurney and a bedpan, doubled as an infirmary, and Winnie was just standing back in the door. She had that look on her face that she got, with those big, staring eyes and her sad mouth, red and crinkled as a flower with deep frown lines on either side. The boys were always trying to get Winnie to have a good laugh, they’d tease her or tease each other, make faces and stupid jokes and she’d just look at them as if to say “that’s just fine.” But never even so much as a chuckle. Us girls were a bit subtler, we might offer to do her hair up nice, give her a magazine or a candy bar that we’d gotten in a relief shipment. And though her big, sad eyes always seemed grateful, she never so much as cracked a smile at us.

Joshua had had a good long think before taking Winnie on. She was awful young, for one thing. Only just sixteen years old. And she was, it was plain to see, all messed up in the head. We heard the story from our contact who’d helped get her and a small group of others under the age of eighteen out from one of the juvenile facilities. When Winnie was just eleven years old, she’d been taken from her family by a high ranking official who liked little girls far more than a grown man should. After a few years, when she started getting a woman’s body about her, he’d turned her over to the Council on Moral Matters, who’d charged her with crimes against nature and sent her to the Containment and Re-Education Facility. She’d come to us were her hair shorn and electricity burns on her skin in the tender, brittle place where the skull gets thin just up from your eyes. We never meant to keep her, just play safe house for a few nights until our man could find a more permanent settlement. But Winnie, as we found out, was kind of a genius when it came to shooting a firearm.

I’ll never forget the night we discovered that about her. She woke us all up with six rhythmic shots in close succession. We all burst out of our beds and ran to the lot behind the house, where she was standing in her borrowed nightgown, Joshua’s own pistol his dad gave to him stretched out in front of her (we still don‘t know exactly how she got hold of it). She had set out glass soda bottles on the wooden fence that carved our property out from the endless fields beyond it. There were ten of them in all, she had shattered six and, as we watched, she demolished the other four. And all this time, her eyes-I saw them myself-were closed tight.

“How the fuck did you do that?” Joshua said, while I reached out and took the pistol from her hands, which were nerveless and unresisting.

“He taught me how to shoot,” she said, and we all knew who she was talking about. “He liked to teach me tricks. It made him laugh. Like those bears at the circus that wear people clothes.” Seemed like it would have been better, somehow, if she had sounded bitter or angry. But she didn’t sound like anything at all. She was just relaying the facts.

“I meant the part about the closed eyes,” Joshua corrected gently. Winnie shrugged, looking briefly like a teenage girl for once.

“I’ve got a good memory,” she said.

At the end of the day, Joshua figured that the ghosts in Winnie’s eyes were the kind of thing we could fix, with patience and good cheer, and that we always needed a steady and accurate hand. She’d been with us for almost two years the night we cleaned up Clarence’s knee, and Joshua was still wondering if he’d made the right decision. As for me, Winnie’d saved my life more than once, and I wasn’t the only one either. It didn’t matter a whit to me whether or not she liked a joke.

That night, Lari was playing with the radio as usual. Joshua’d first got the thing from a shady black market contact who we just called Henderson, he thought we might be able to communicate with other freedom cells, maybe even get some foreign news broadcasts. Unfortunately, the thing was an unqualified piece of shit, it didn’t get anything but the most local of channels when it worked at all, which was almost never. Lari, though, fancied herself a whiz with machinery (and she did get that old jeep of mine up and running, so there may have been some truth to her notion) and she was always fucking around with the thing, usually getting nothing more than an earful of static for her trouble.

That night, though, she must have really had the magic touch. She got this station, it was local, but it must have been underground, because instead of the usual parade of false reports on the nature and outcome of various skirmishes and requests for prayers for the spikes, fighting a brave battle against the vile guerrillas, they were playing dancing music. It was nothing spectacular, all tinny like it was coming from a long metal tube, but we hadn‘t heard anything with a beat in half a year. It was that song that was so popular that year over the mountains, you probably remember it. Well, the original wasn’t in English, obviously, so instead of just playing the thing, as is, some joker tried to translate it with what was probably one of those little phrasebooks you get when you take a trip. “Great, we’re so fucked up that even the music has to be smuggled in,” Joshua used to say, but I could tell he liked it, it always made him smile in spite of himself.

In this song, there was some term of endearment in the chorus, something like sweetie or baby or the like. But the translator had chosen not to sub in one of those words and instead inserted the more literal “little duck.are my little duck, you are my little duck, today and tomorrow, you are my little duck,” went the chorus. We were, all of us, laughing like loons at this, when John starts singing along and swaying across the floor. We watched as he danced his way across the room to where Winnie was pressed hesitantly against the doorway. He stretched out his hand like a fine gentleman and she took it just like a lady and they spun around together, him jerking her back and forth zanily, a puppet with a drunk master. And then he sang to her, in a voice that was shockingly deep and very serious, “You are my little duck, you are my little duck, today and tomorrow, you are my little duck.”

And that was the first time any of us ever heard Winnie laugh. It was just a little sound, at first, you almost couldn’t tell it was there. It sounded like tiny bells. And then it grew louder and louder, it was high and joyful, I think she even snorted a couple of times. And none of us could help but laugh along with her. We sat there in that makeshift infirmary and laughed until hot tears ran down our faces.

We were never really all together like that ever again. There was a good month and a half between that night and the day Winnie died, but it was a busy month and a half. Joshua and I were planning the bombing of the new high-rise down town that was ostensibly a “bank,” but we had it on good authority it was actually a training facility packed with spikes and councilmen. Maria was busy with our inside contact, trying to hustle a group of sickly folks, wounded, over the border and also with Clarence, who’s knee never did heal the way it should. Maria had to take it three days after Winnie died. The rest of us just got all caught up in the thousand things that filled up the day, the little crises and victories and tragedies. I think if we had known how things were going to get we would have made more time, chosen nights in the kitchen shooting the shit and wasting candles over getting extra sleep. But then, that’s pretty much true of just about anyone, right? I mean, who wouldn’t change the things that were, if they could?

Winnie died because of the bank job, which went so bad wrong in a way that nothing had gone wrong for us before. Half the explosives didn’t go, but it was the three that went fifteen minutes too soon that really hurt us. I left Lari screaming in a stairwell with a load of masonry and glass piled on top of her. I couldn’t dig her out and her face was burned so bad, didn’t even look like any kind of face at all. A kinder and braver person might have shot her and spared her the pain. But I couldn’t stop thinking of her in the kitchen at midnight smearing peanut butter on crackers and punctuating her story with the knife in her hands. And I did some screaming of my own to drown out hers.

Jamie Lurch, Magnolia Dale, Preston James came out of there with bullets in them, wounds they wouldn’t recover from. Lari Morrison and Jan Diaz didn’t come out at all. I had some burns, Joshua broke his arm in a couple of places. Maria and John were unscathed, pristine. And we thought Winnie was, too. We thought that up until she started burping up red blood. She didn’t think it mattered, see. She didn’t think she needed to tell us about the spike she’d run into coming down the stairs, about the featureless black canister he’d had on his vest and how he’d sprayed it right in her face (covering his own face with his other hand. It must have been brand new, they hadn‘t even started issuing them masks yet. I like to think he got a little of it himself, not enough to kill him, maybe. Just enough to tear up the inside of his head). She thought it was hairspray, she told us. It had tasted sticky and chemical and fruity in her mouth.

The spray was brand new to all of us (since then we’ve gotten to know it well) we’d never seen a thing like it. In retrospect, we should have figured that they’d be monkeying around with better, more efficient weapons. The spray, why you can cover a whole city block in it and take out every man, woman and child inside without firing a single shot. I’ve seen it done. The spray attacks the body on a variety of fronts (even now, so many years later, we don’t know exactly how the shit worked on a chemical level. The spikes must have had some sort of terrible wizardry). First it breaks down the nervous system, the sufferer babbles wildly and jerks as his or her brain fires off random, desperate bolts of energy, dying violently. And then it ruptures the capillaries inside the body, filling up the organs-most notably the lungs-with blood. Winnie was drowning, right there in that bed in the storage closet, with not enough faculties to spell her own name or even take herself to the bathroom. It took six days. It might have dragged out longer, but Maria was both braver and kinder that I was.

“It’s the last of the morphine until the next shipment,” she said, “I suppose we’ll all just have to bite bullets for now.” Joshua was holding her hand, and Maria reached down to smooth out her hair and I watched from the doorway, frozen, as Winnie died, babbling words that weren‘t real words with a spreading yellow stain on the front of her nightgown. She was eighteen years old.

I don’t think any of us would admit it, but Winnie dying seemed to be the thing that turned the tables for us. Maybe we just lost something with her, heart, or something like that. There used to be a kind of fierce joy in it, almost like a children’s game. After Winnie, we just did it because we had to, because there was no other sort of life left to us.

I think that, before Winnie died, we thought we would win someday.

Clarence didn’t survive the operation to sever his leg. We were still out of morphine and Maria had to give him chloroform. Either she misjudged the dosage or his heart gave out on him, there’s no way for us to know. Maria sat there with the dead body all night and we could hear her all through the house, not even crying, just moaning. Like she was already a ghost.

John had insisted on going for a real doctor that night Winnie died. “We need somebody who hasn’t just read about it in a fucking book!” he’d shouted as he went. He never really forgave Joshua for not letting him go sooner, nor Maria for not saving Winnie. But, as it turned out, Joshua was right to forbid him, because that nervous, white-haired doctor shook his head over Winnie, took his leave and went right to the spikes to report us. They tossed the house a week later and took three of us, John included, off to the Containment and Re-Education facilities. We never heard what rightly happened to him. Once a body goes into the facilities, you generally don’t.

Oh, there were other houses, and other young men and women, but me and Joshua are just about all that’s left of the old guard now (Maria ate her gun about eleven years ago, two years after Clarence died). We would hear them at night, collecting down in kitchens and front porches, laughing and bullshitting, drinking bathtub whiskey and complaining about how bad it is. But we don’t ever join them, just leave them be.

We’re positively ancient by guerrilla standards and we don’t work like we used to. No more bombs for us, no daring shootouts. We work mainly with the inside man from the old days, who looks just like he did back that, right down to his neatly combed hair and geometrically exact bow tie. We shuttle folks out of the facilities, find places to hide them, take them over the mountains when we can. It’s a good life, even a peaceful one, in it’s way. And I can’t complain, because it’s the one I chose.

But I do think sometimes (more and more the older I get) about those days before Winnie. They were good days, happy ones, we were all filled up with righteousness and rightness. But I understand (more every day it seems) why they’re gone now. After all, the young always think they can change the world. But young folks can’t do anything but get old, and the world always spins just the same as it did before. It gets stuck in my head, sometimes, that song with the chorus about the little ducks and I dream about them, dancing across this little room that I share with Joshua. They look so impossibly young and so impossibly beautiful. In my dreams, Winnie laughs.

It sounds like she will never stop.

"I Bet You're Making Shells Back Home for a Steady Man to Wear..."

2008-06-03T18:49:43Z

Goodness gracious! I actually finished another part of this!

Ghost Town
Part Two

The Ruby Flats hotel was located at far end of what constituted main street. It was a tall, sprawling building with a white balcony stretched all along the front. Doctor Sherman hadn’t lied about the decoration; soaked strips of paper streamers were drooping wetly against the wood of the balcony and the whole of the ground was fairly covered with bits and pieces of pink roses. “Must have been expensive,” I muttered, nudging a pile of petals aside with my toe.

“All this sound and fury, signifying what?” Doctor Sherman murmured obliquely, as he occasionally did. As usual, I didn’t even bother to ask what he was talking about.

“So what are we looking at here?” I asked instead.

“There are thirty-two rooms in the hotel, two dining rooms, one grand ballroom and a very large kitchen. Apparently the bridal suite was to be room 24 on the second floor.”

I scanned the windows as he spoke, searching for movement or color, but it seemed that someone had securely closed all the curtains. “Is there anyone inside besides the fiancé?” Doctor Sherman shook his head and fingered his little green snuff box thoughtfully. He was, I knew, trying to quit again.

“Well then,” I said industriously, tipping the water off my hat, “let’s get to it.”

As we crept in the large front doors, Doctor Sherman gave me a annotated history of the hotel; its owners and it’s function. It had been constructed just this year and it seemed that I could still smell the clean, greeny smell of fresh wood shavings, overlaid with other, newer scents. Lemon cleaning polish, gray dust and flowers, heavy sweet, half-rotted. There was a long ashes of roses-colored carpet on the floor, it was dingy and distasteful despite obviously being brand new. It matched the grim wrought iron light fixtures and the brooding deep crimson wall papering. I decided that whoever had designed the Ruby Flats hotel had probably been the sort of person who wrote a lot of very long, very sad poetry of very poor quality.

Shadowy doorways opened off the main hallway and we checked them in a perfunctory sort of way. Doctor Sherman and I had both been doing this a long time and there was a kind of deep-down feeling you got when you were close. A sort of catch in your throat and a low quaking in your stomach. Plus, there was the smell, and after all this time, we had keen noses for it.

At the master staircase (dark cherry wood, highly polished and brooding, of course) the doctor and I separated. He continued on the ballroom, winking cheerfully as he went and I climbed the stairs. Already heading, I knew, for room 24. There were only two floors in the Ruby Flats hotel and, just my luck, all the lights were out on the second floor. Thankfully, I’ve never had a problem seeing things in the dark.

I was at room 12, heading towards the end of the long hall when I heard the first movement. It was a soft, sighing, shifting sound, practically the wind. It was coming from one of the rooms ahead of me, either 11 across the hall or 13 next door. Silently, I uncorked the little bottle of holy water that I wore on my belt. The shuffling noise did not come again, but I knew that I had not imagined it.

Room 11 was small and barren, there was a single bed made up only with starched white sheets. Identical white curtains hung motionless from the window and on the bed-side table there was a tall glass vase with a single pink rose in it. It was the only ornamentation in the room and the bloom was heavy and soft with decay. The closet door was open perhaps an inch and a half and the shadows through the crack were strange and incorrect.

I sighed and re-corked my holy water; the room was far too neat for a body to be lurking there. They were destructive creatures. “You can come out,” I said, resignedly. Now, I’d have to escort this person out of the hotel and send them on their merry way, then come all the way back and Doctor Sherman would probably have it all sewn up by the time I got back. We came to this stupid backwater for one goddamn reason and now I was going to miss it all because the village idiot wanted to play hide and seek-That’s when the closet door opened and the slender barrel of a rifle emerged.

“I do not have time for this!” I said, hopping mad now. I was being ill-advisedly loud, but this sort of thing was always happening to me. I wasn’t all magic circles and feats of derring do, our job, and it seemed like I was always getting stuck with the clean-up, the schlepping boxes to and fro and now someone was going to take potshots at me?

“Who are you?” asked a low, suspicious voice and the closet door opened far enough to reveal two eyes that were obviously appraising me from the top of my hair to the dirt on the bottom of my boots.

“Some people sent for us. Because of Bitty, we take care of things like her. My boss, he’s a doctor and he’s licensed for it.” The rifle barrel wavered for a moment and then relaxed and slowly the door opened to reveal a half-crouched woman with two long plaits like a girl, though she had a considered, mature face. She stood up and I could see that she was tall and broad shouldered and wearing a faded dress of blue-checked gingham. The hem was a little high and she had a pair of man’s brown trousers underneath. She was, perhaps, thirty, and tremendously beautiful.

“Dahlia DeBuke,” I said, with certainty. She did not seem surprised that I should know her name but regarded me with a general sort of curiosity. “What are you doing here?” I asked, when it became clear that she wasn’t going to volunteer any information.

“This thing is at least part my fault. I didn’t know they’d called you,” she gripped and re-gripped her rifle, as though I was going to leap across the room and rip it out of her hands.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said slowly, thinking that she was not likely to meekly turn around and head home just because I asked her to. “The way I see it, this is the fault of the one what raised her.”

“She wouldn’t be dead if-” she brought herself up short and shook her head. “I have a responsibility,” she continued, more reservedly. Then, nervously, she shifted and revealed to me what the shadows and her stance had hidden before. Dahlia was pregnant, six, perhaps seven months along, if I was any judge.

“Oh no,” I said immediately, pointing to the gingham swell of her middle. “I was going to try to be polite about this, but you have to go home and be safe. Right now.” Dahlia DeBuke gave me a hard look.

“I have a gun,” she said, “I’m a good shot. I can be of help.” I shook my head and opened my mouth to speak. She made a persuading gesture with one hand. But the both of us were stopped abruptly by the sound of the opening door.

“Hello?” Doctor Sherman said, smiling at Dahlia in a charming, bemused sort of way. He turned to me and raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“Dahlia DeBuke,” I explained, “she, um, she came here to find the fiancée.”

“I came here to give what help I could,” she corrected stiffly. Doctor Sherman didn’t say anything for a long minute, but simply took her in. Her rifle and her face, her man’s pants and her pregnant belly.

“What kind of bullets do you have in there?” he asked finally. It was an unexpected question, but Dahlia answered promptly enough. She gave him the size and caliber of the bullets, even told him the brand name, but the doctor just shook his head. “I mean, are they spelled in any kind of way? Are there any enchantments cooked in the metal?”

Dahlia had clearly never heard such a thing was possible, “no,” she said, “they’re just ordinary bullets. My husband bought them at the mercantile when we moved here two years ago. For wild animals and things.” This was the most I’d heard her say all at one time and she sounded anxious and off-put. Doctor Sherman did that to people.

“I don’t suppose they’re made of silver?” the doctor smiled. Dahlia smiled as well, thinking he was making a joke to put her at her ease. But I knew that he was completely serious. He turned to me and shrugged.

“Can always use an extra pair of hands, even if she doesn’t even have any silver bullets,” he said, sounding annoyingly reasonable. I wanted to argue, but knew that it was no use. Doctor Sherman didn’t make suggestions, he made decisions. He smiled at the both of us and gestured silently down the hallway. I’d almost forgotten about Bitty and the kidnapped Randall in all this excitement.

“Stay close to her,” Sherman advised Dahlia as we moved through the doorway, “you wouldn’t want any harm to befall your little one.” And he smiled in a way that made me understand why he was a feared man in so many of the places we traveled to. Dahlia didn’t say anything, but I saw the way her hands strayed to her stomach, unconscious and protective.

***

As I had suspected, something was moving in room 24. Something uncoordinated and half-wild; it banged off walls and knocked loudly into furniture. Dahlia and I waited, silent and breathing shallowly, pressed flush to the crimson wall. Occasionally, I could hear faint, thick sobs.

“What now?” Dahlia mouthed to me.

“We wait for the doctor to get up here and begin,” I checked my pocket watch impatiently, I’d summoned him but he was poking around in the mostly disused attic and he could be damnably slow when he had a mind to be. Dahlia, meanwhile, was giving me a withering look.

“We just wait?” she asked incredulously. She had been, no doubt, picturing us rushing the dead girl, guns blazing, spells flying.

“Trust me, it’s easier this way.” Dahlia said no more and we shifted against the wall awkwardly. “So,” I said slowly, “you’re married?” I like a good story just as much as anyone else, after all, and I’d only gotten bare outlines of this one.

“I was,” she said stiffly. “He’s dead now.”

I nodded sagely, “how’d it happen?”

Dahlia gave me a fierce look and, truly, it was no business of mine but tact had never been much use to me in life. I just shrugged.

“Mine caved in,” she said, not looking at me. I figured that must be a familiar refrain around here. I imagined a deep, twisting knot of dark tunnels underneath our feet, filled up with dead boys.

I craned my neck to look towards the attic, no sign of the doc. “Why’d you stay?”

“We own land here,” she said. I wondered how long ago it was that her husband had passed. Short enough, it seemed, that she was still a “we” but not so long that she couldn’t take up with another fellow.

“No offense,” I said, absent-mindedly polishing the grip on of my pistols with my thumb, “but it seems to me land around here ain’t work the price of…well, living on land around here.”

Dahlia gave me a fierce look. “I don’t think you understand. We own it. It’s paid-for. You don’t just up and leave the things that are yours.”

She was right, I didn’t understand, but then, I’ve always been a bit of a nomad. My mama had me in the back of a wagon heading towards territory so new it didn’t even have a name, and I haven’t stopped moving since. But there were those, I knew, who attached a whole lot of importance to the ground underneath their feet, for whatever reason.

I was about to ask Dahlia how it was that she got to be tangled up with the Kristoph boy when there was an especially loud slam against the door of number 24 and then, something we hadn’t heard before, a man’s sharp cry, fading into an urgent moan. “Well, shit,” I said, unscrewing the cap off my holy water, “it seems it would be criminal to wait any longer for the doctor.”

“Stay behind me,” I told Dahlia, who nodded grimly, like a soldier. “Don’t get involved if you don’t have to, try not to let her pass out the doorway, if you can.” Dahlia swallowed visibly and I watched as she carefully took the safety off her rifle. “Don’t get involved,” I said again, because there was a hard and shiny look about her eyes that I did not like. She nodded.

The door was a good one, solid and well made. It took nearly six kicks for me to collapse it in. Usually, I preferred not to announce my presence in such a manner, but it couldn’t be helped. The sounds ceased abruptly after the first kick, a worrying development to be sure.

I left Dahlia in the doorway and stepped into the room, which appeared to be empty. The exploded door did not look out of place amongst the general destruction of the room, the furniture had been ripped into it’s component parts, there were long, haphazard gashes in the walls, even the carpet looked as though it had been pulled up in spots. The rose on the bedside and the vase were both nowhere to be found, but the pink petals littered the floor, like a child’s abandoned game of “love me not.”

I stepped inside the room and I could hear breathing. It sounded ragged and terrified. The fiancé, then. Bodies weren’t known for their over-loud breathing, or their breathing of any kind, really. The closet door was cracked, from inside a single, wildly rolling eye stared at me. It was blue and shot through with blood. I aimed my pistol and that’s when the thing had been Bitty (which had been laying flat underneath the bed, clever beast) overturned the bed and tackled me from behind.

I heard Dahlia yell. I couldn’t see much of anything with my face pressed hard into the carpet. The thing on my back stank fiercely, a thick, wet swamp stink. It was heavy and wild, it tore at my long coat, searching for open skin. It grunted and wheezed from its ruined throat. Slick dark hair hung down from it’s skull, tickled my cheek.

There was a shot and the thing made a screeching noise, its weight shifting on my back, I took the opening and flipped my body around, trapping the thing underneath me. She was still wearing her funeral make-up, her lips too red and her face too white. Her hair was falling down from its high braids and switches. The dress she died for was beautiful, even grown ragged and dirty as it had, little pearls all down it that caught the light like stars.

She’d lost an eye at some point. There was a long, bloodless gash stretching from the corner of the socket to her ear that suggested that perhaps it was the survival instinct of her erstwhile fiancé had done it.

Underneath me she howled and twitched and writhed but couldn’t really shift herself. Unfortunately, the same was true of me. It was taking both of my hands and both my knees to keep her pinned and that left no extremities to draw a gun or a bottle. An overturned chair in my eye line reminded me of something Doctor Sherman had told me long ago. I grinned. “Dahlia,” I said steadily, remembering how it had been the first time I’d seen a body. I’d pissed my own pants and couldn’t move an inch. But I had been a girl not yet thirteen and Dahlia was a woman grown, a woman who‘d had the presence of mind to take that shot earlier. “Are you listening to me?”

“Yes,” she answered, it was barely more than a whisper.

“You see that chair leg there? With the broken end?”

“I do,” said Dahlia, shifting her weight in the doorway.

“Alright,” I said and reared my head back as Bitty went for my face, snapping her jaws like a wild dog on a chain. “You’re gonna grab that chair leg and you’re gonna come stand next to me.”

Dahlia did this, holding the shotgun awkwardly in the crook of her elbow. I could see the horrified fascination on her face as she stared at the remnants of Bitty who gave a wild howl of frustration as she passed. Sweat was collecting on my palms and the thing’s cold flesh was sliding uneasily against my own.

“Okay,” I said, when Dahlia took her place next to me, “I’m gonna count to three and then I’m going to get up and, as soon as I’m clear, you’re gonna ram that chair leg into its stomach as hard as you can.”

“I understand,” Dahlia said, and her voice sounded much stronger.

“One,” I said, Bitty’s forearms sliding around inside the ring of my fingers. “Two,” and I pressed my knees down fiercely into her thighs. “Three,” I said, and threw myself upwards violently. I staggered backwards and collapsed against the underside of the bed. It was the sort with springs and my hair got tangled in some of the metal coils, I pulled my head free in a painful hurry.

But Dahlia was good and quick about her work. She rammed the wood through Bitty’s middle with all her strength. Frustrated, the thing screeched and clawed at the wood, tried to wriggle out from underneath it. Dahlia held it fast, but gave me a desperate look. I ran over and tamped the thing down with my foot, drove it deep into a lucky crack between floorboards.

“Good job, Dahlia,” I grinned, wiping sweaty hair from my face. On the floor, the thing that had been Bitty gave a rattlesnake hiss.

“It ain’t dead,” Dahlia pointed out, not unreasonably.

“No,” I said, putting the safeties back on my pistols. “But that’s rosewood, it binds things of that nature, it won’t get up ‘less we let it up. Looks rather pretty, too, in a room of this coloring.”

“So we just leave her there forever?” Dahlia’s forehead wrinkled skeptically.

I laughed, “Just until my lay about boss gets up here. It doesn’t do, just shooting a thing like that, it’ll keep coming any way it can. You gotta send it back,” I elaborated.

“You don’t know how to do that?” Dahlia asked, staring down at the thing’s snarling face like one compelled.

“I’m an apprentice,” I answered. Truthfully, I was pretty sure that, if push did come to shove, I would be able to lay a body to rest, but Doc Sherman was always telling me that I wasn’t ready and he generally had good reasons for saying things of that nature.

“Well,” said the man in question, appearing in the doorway looking dusty but cheerful, “couldn’t wait for me before starting the fun?”

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked, but with no real fire. In truth, I was feeling rather proud of myself, taking down a violent body (mostly) by myself.

“You’d be amazed what people keep in their attics,” was all he said by way of explanation. He walked over to the body and knelt down beside her, she twitched and hissed, rolling her single eye. A slow swell of dark blood had welled up around the place where the chair leg was embedded in her. Doc Sherman looked at it and laughed. “A little inelegant,” he said, “but well done all the same.”

“Couldn’t wait all day for you,” I said, shrugging my shoulders, but inside I was grinning. Praise from the doc was sparse and hard-earned.

“Where’s the boy?” Doc Sherman asked and Dahlia and I looked at one another in alarm. I ran over the closet and threw it open. Randall Kristoph, Bitty’s one-time intended and possible unauthorized necromancer, was lying in the bottom, sweat-soaked and passed out cold.

***

The Doc had some smelling salts for occasions such as this. Randall woke up gasping and raised his hands up to protect himself. “Relax, young man,” Doc Sherman said sternly, “you’re safe and sound now.” Randall’s gaze rolled inexorably over towards Bitty, who was still pinned to the floor not three feet away.

“Who are-” he began and then caught sight of Dahlia, who was looking supremely awkward and was staring down at her rifle’s stock as if it had asked her a difficult question. “Dahlia?”

“We’re folks who take care of this manner of thing,” the doc said smoothly, when it became clear that Dahlia wasn’t going to say anything. Randall was fixed right on her, though. You couldn’t have pried his eyes away with prayer and crow bar. “Son,” Doc Sherman said, getting in the boy’s line of sight, “did you try to raise that girl?”

That snapped Randall back like a gun shot. “No! Why in all hell would I do that?” The doctor and I exchanged thoughtful glances at this.

“Who was it you suppose raised her?”

Randall shook his head wearily. It must have been a rather trying day for him. “I don’t know,” he said. “Her parents, perhaps? They doted on her.” On the floor next to him, Bitty had relaxed slightly, her legs twitching occasionally. “They’re probably still paying for that dress she’s wearing,” he commented dispassionately.

I looked at Bitty’s dress, with it’s second skin of shining pearls. And that is when it hit me like a pile of bricks or a steam locomotive. “Godammit,” I said, half-standing up, “I am gonna strangle that girl my own self,” I turned towards the door, having no thought but to follow my epiphany.

“Where are you going?” Dahlia blurted out, the first words she’d said since we’d revived Randolph. Her voice brought me back to earth some. We still had work to do here, after all.

“I should have seen. She was so slick, probably thought she could raise her and put her back down in an afternoon,” I turned to the doctor and Randall who were watching me with varying degrees of confusion. “The sister,” I sighed. “Bitty’s sister. She raised the woman to steal the damned dress off her bones.”

"Our Tender Bellies All Wound Around in Baling Wire..."

2008-05-29T01:42:51Z

Another dream story, but I don't think I got exactly what I wanted here.

In the End
Words: 1465

It was the last day of our world and I could not find Galliol any place that I looked. He was not in the apartment we shared with it’s view of the dark, sickly river. I lingered there, though, for a moment. I took the ring that had been Galliol’s mother’s from the unadorned jewelry box on the dresser. He had never given it to me officially, said he was waiting for just the right time. The opal winked like a single cataract’d eye on my finger.

He was not downstairs in the grimy little deli where the owner had shot himself and was lying still next to the open cooler of liquor. The bottles were sweating unpleasantly. I tucked a smallish bottle of tequila inside my coat, figuring that no one would miss it now and I could certainly put it to use. I tried not to look at the owner as I passed by, but I saw him from the corners of my eyes. His features looked perfectly normal, but the top of his head was…missing. Just gone.

He was not in any of the alleyways between the cramped buildings. I thought I heard a child-I could not tell if it was a boy or a girl-crying down one, but it was dark and I couldn’t see anything. Baria, who lived down the street and was always in the deli mornings complaining about lackluster bagels, ran by me. She had a little girl underneath her arm, maybe three or four. The little girl wasn’t moving, but Baria didn’t seem to notice.

I found Galliol in the street with his camera. He crouched on one knee, the tiny, intricate workings of his camera clicking and sputtering as he took picture after picture. I stood behind him for a moment, taking in the scene. The streets were empty, but for us, the tall buildings blank and sightless. If I spoke, it would have echoed. As it was, the little juttering clicks of the camera seemed to come at us from all sides.

Galliol did not speak, did not seem to notice my presence. I leaned down and looped my arm through his. “Come on,” I said, “we have to go now.”

The ships had landed crookedly. They piled awkwardly around one another, throwing up big piles of earth where their metal feet had dug into the dirt. Carved long wounds into our land. Thick lines of people swarmed around the ships’ dark mouths. In their arms they clutched unwieldy packages, haphazard piles of clothes. The faceless soldiers walked placidly up and down the queues, long, dark weapons easy in their belts. Galliol simply stared. He clutched his camera to him like a child.

“Hey,” I said, twisting him around until he faced me. His brown eyes were distant and unfocused. It was a bit awkward, as he was so much taller than me, but I pressed my hands to the back of his neck (his flesh gave underneath mine like it had no nerves or muscles at all) and I pulled his face down to rest against mine. “Hey,” I said, and his mouth was unresponsive beneath mine. “Hey,” I said again, and realized that I was crying.

Galliol and I got separated in the line. He just kept moving forward, one foot in front of another with a terrifying focus. I strayed behind, dawdled in line. We had time, I took it.

“Where’s Galliol?” asked Josa, who sounded out of breath. I shook my head and pointed towards the far end of the line, where Galliol stood with his camera in both his hands, staring into the dark lens. Josa narrowed his eyes, he looked so like Galliol from that angle, though for brothers they had never had any great resemblance. “Is he alright?” he asked.

I shrugged and tried to laugh, it came out small and strangled. “Who’s alright?” I said. Josa took my arm in a familiar way that I disliked, I edged away from him. Up and down the lines the soldiers did not look at us. In the distance, the light was getting bigger, it made strange shadows on all of our faces. “Do you think-” I began and heard indistinct shouting from the metal mouth of one of the ships.

Galliol was struggling with one of the soldiers. Neither of them said anything, and the only noise was the push and pull of their bodies. Galliol clutched the camera to him, the solider attempted to wrestle it away. “Galliol!” I said, and he did not look at me, but the soldier tilted his head like a cat. Galliol ran and the soldier did not follow him. The light in the sky was huge and bright, and there was nowhere to go.

I moved to follow him and Josa pulled me back urgently. “Where are you going?” he hissed into my ear. I didn’t say anything, just shook myself out of his grip and moved after Galliol. He had vanished already, somewhere between the high gray buildings. I ran from the long line, some of the others turned to look at me and the soldiers didn’t move.

“Where are you going?” Josa asked again, his breath ragged and urgent right behind me.

“After him,” I said, and ran.

I met Galliol on the bank of a river, I was eating an egg salad sandwich and reading a little book of poetry. I cannot remember the name of the author, it seems all of sudden like I should, like it’s important. He took a picture of me. In it, I look thoughtful and weary, there is a long strand of hair stuck to the corner of my mouth. We keep that picture on top of our crappy television set, along with one of me and Galliol at the carnival, laughing at the top of a Ferris wheel.

“We don’t have time for this,” Josa complained, keeping pace with me. I stared down long alleyways, my head swinging back and forth like a dog with a scent.

“Then go back,” I told him shortly.

“Orla,” and it sounded like he was crying, “don’t do this, come back with me. Galliol’s gone, everything’s gone.”

Once, when Galliol and I had been dating for about a year, Josa came up behind me while I smoked over the kitchen sink. He grabbed my hips and danced us slowly across the tile floor. He smelled like cologne, not anything like Galliol, who just smelled like white soap and boy. I just stopped, planted my feet and smoked like it was the last cigarette I was ever going to see. He dropped his hands and his head until it was almost touching my shoulder. “I’m so goddamned drunk,” is what he said.

He grabbed my hands, pulled me back abruptly. I did not look at his face, but I could tell he was crying in earnest now. “Come back with me,” he was saying, over and over again until it was wasn’t words, just strange slurring sounds. I pulled my hands out of his one at a time. The skin was red and wet where he had touched me.

“Go back now, Josa,” is what I said.

I found Galliol on the second floor of a warehouse. I think he was trying to get to roof. He had slipped, gone over a railing, maybe on the third or the fourth floor. He was sitting up, resting his elbows on the window sill as I climbed up to him.

He turned and he smiled at me and I think I could feel my heart breaking. I sat down beside him, his legs stretching out uselessly beside me. He was bleeding from an open cut just above his eyebrow. I licked my thumb and wiped the red away.

He looked at me, looked at my face and my wild hair, my torn shirt, my dirty tennis shoes. He looked at my hand, where his mother’s opal stared up at us. “I should have given you this a while ago,” he said, touching my ring finger.

“Yeah,” I said. Dust choked my throat.

Outside the window, the light was getting big and yellow. I thought I could hear the sound of the ships firing their great engines. But that may have just been my imagination. Galliol turned to me and raised his camera to his eye. He looked like some bleak machine, he appeared to have no face at all. I stared steadily into the dark lens. The camera gave an orderly, brittle snap and he lowered it, revealing his dark and lovely eyes.

“Beautiful,” he said.

And then we turned and watched out the window as the light got bigger and bigger, burning everything it touched. Inside and out.

"I Fought to Keep You..."

2008-03-31T02:18:12Z

So I pretty much just dreamed this. Yep. It was a rather productive bit of sleeping.

The Wild Clark Sisters
Words: 823

The wild Clark sisters stole my father’s best car in the endless, sticky summer of 1965. It was a Mustang fastback, practically brand new and gorgeous like cars were in those days. It looked like some huge, hungry beast, running up and down the streets looking for prey. That car had a soul, you never see that now. Everything’s all smooth and round and not hungry at all.

It had been sitting on the lot for quite awhile by then. Dad would always find some excuse not to sell, the customer was never good enough, could never take care of it right. Truth was, he loved the thing too much. Probably more than he loved us boys. We weren’t to touch it, except to keep it washed and shined. It was a canary yellow color and it gleamed in the sun, you could see folks head crane as they strained to look at it, going by. Dad used to take it out at night, secretly, and drive it up and down the dark streets, pretending, no doubt, that he was a different sort of man.

And then the wild Clark sisters walked right up to his door and took it right out from under him.

Ellie Clark was the oldest and she looked, I thought, just like Tippi Hedren in The Birds, blonde and white as a snowstorm with those razor eyes. I’ll always remember the way she looked stalking across the lot in the sun, wearing that white tennis-dress (as if any Clark had ever set foot on a tennis court). Ellie came right up to me, bold as brass, and said, “We’d like to see that one,” like she hadn’t gone to school with me since we were both five years old. Behind her, Marian smiled apologetically. She wasn’t as pretty as her sister, but not so sharp either.

“Alright,” I said, and I showed them the Mustang. Ellie smiled like a new mother and ran her hands down along its sides. Dinie, the youngest, didn’t dither around. She simply climbed into the open back (we kept the top down in the summer-Dad said it made it look inviting) and sat in the back seat, like she’d been born there, like she’d never leave. Ellie, without so much as a by-your-leave, opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat. She put both hands on the wheel and grinned and I could see that she looked right sitting in the seat in a way my father-sweating and balding and running to fat-never would. Ellie and that car had the same heart, and it was a fierce and terrible thing.

Ellie turned her face up to me. She was wearing a shade of lipstick that I knew her mama would never have approved of. “We’d like to take this for a test drive,” she said and I knew right then that if I handed her the keys she would drive away and they would never come back again. The car was all gassed up, in case Dad wanted to take it out again later, they could go quite a ways if no one flagged the law too soon.

But I didn’t order them out of the car and I didn’t go get my Dad, even though I realized it meant an ass-whooping of the most unholy variety. “Where you going?” I said instead and Ellie shrugged.

“Away,” said Dinie, who had a shockingly raspy voice and steady dark eyes. Ellie nodded, agreeing with this assessment. She paused then, looking uncertain for the first time, and tapped her long fingers on the steering wheel.

“Aren’t we supposed to have an employee along, on these test drives?” she said neutrally, as if merely pointing out a simple fact. I looked at Dinie in the backseat and she looked right back at me, and her little heart-shaped face was about the best thing I’d ever seen and I didn’t think there was anything around here that could top it.

“That is so,” I said, clambering in next to Dinie. She didn’t slid over for me, and she was electric-warm, like a light bulb. I tossed the keys to Ellie, who caught them in the air and grinned like the cat that’s eaten the canary. The engine turned over with that rumbling-god noise my dad loved so well. Dinie’s hand snaked over on the smooth seats and clasped mine.

I used my free-hand to wave to my brother Alex as he sprayed down the used cars on the far side of the lot. He didn’t wave back and just watched with us go, looking gob smacked. We turned out on to the highway and Ellie didn’t have no trouble with that accelerator. Pretty soon the wind was beating at them, tossing their hair until it looked like bright, thin halos all around their faces. But no one talked about putting the cover up.

Not at all.

"The Color of Her Eyes Were The Color of Insanity..."

2008-03-22T23:37:03Z

So I just sliced the fuck out of my ankles. I look like some sort of anatomically confused emo kid. A tip for the ladies? Don't shave your legs to Devil's Dance Floor. It leads to increasingly erratic razor-strokes and, eventually, copious amounts of blood.

"If This Was a Cold War, We Could Keep Each Other Warm..."

2008-02-01T19:55:38Z

So, I haven't blogged in a few weeks Naturally this return to form would be about an important topic that I think is on all of our minds: awesome candy heart sayings.

The best one I've gotten thus far (and perhaps ever) was actually two stuck together, so it may be stretching the definition a little bit, but I still think it counts. Anyway, one heart said "You Rock!" and it's little conjoined twin said: "No Way!"

I chortled softly to myself.

Seriously, it's like the one heart is all wasted and the other heart is the sober friend brought along to make sure Drunky McCandyheart doesn't call his ex-girlfriend and ask her to marry him and move to Canada to raise alpacas because "those guys on the commercials look so...fucking...like, happy. I want to be fucking happy...with the fucking giraffes." And Sober Heart is sitting at the bar bitterly drinking a virgin margarita all "Sorry, okay, yeah, I'll take his cell phone away."

Also?

Dear Boy Leisurely Strolling Down the Narrow Hallway Directly in Front of Me That Time When I Was Late For Class:

I hope you really enjoyed that long, meandering cell-phone conversation that required you to weave obnoxiously all over the hallway. I, personally, am just surprised that you managed to get reception that far up your ass.

Also? You are wearing a fedora. It's...a Tuesday afternoon. Is there a masquerade party somewhere I don't know about? Did you just leap out of the convenient time machine you hopped into when you saw that the cherrytops were hot on your tail and you had to stash the moonshine somewhere?

Perhaps you aren't even aware you're wearing a fedora? They are, I know, stealthy creatures, and masters of the hunt. If this is true, then I feel it is recumbent upon me to do my duty as a citizen and tell you: STOP IT!

Fedoras are a slippery slope leading down into a hellish pit of unnecessary canes and pin-striped suits. Eventually, you’ll become that guy who says “swell” unironically and thinks women find it charming and cosmopolitan when he calls them “dolls.” Soon you’ll be talking seriously about wearing that red satin-lined cape you got at Hot Topic on days other than those ending in “-ween.” And at that point, it’s really rather like a horse with a broken leg, isn’t it?

So, actually, our meeting was rather fortuitous. For you.

Sincerely,

A Fedora? The Fuck?

In weather news, I’m not what you might call “psyched” about the bajilleron inches of snow we’re getting (or the oozing, crackling brown slush it turns into upon reaching the earth). Case in point: I was crossing the street quickly today to oblige a waiting car, and due to slushiness and shoes with poor traction, I was forced to do a little goblin-esque hopping dance across the road. I skipped awkwardly, my arms automatically popped out on either side and kind of bobbed up and down in a terrifying chicken-y manner. You know how in some versions of Rumplestiltskin they describe him leaping around in the forest, grotesquely cackling to himself?

Oh yeah, I was full on capering.

I blame winter.

"But You Are In The Ground With The Voles and The Weevils..."

2008-01-15T03:47:27Z

To the individuals who in the mid-sized car who passed me at approximate 9:50 tonight:

You are mistaken. I am not, in fact, a “ho.” I can understand the confusion, however, as I was walking down a sidewalk. A typical activity for those ho-ishly inclined. Also, I was wearing the official uniform of the “ho”: a winter coat, scarf and hat. You know, clothing.

But sir, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, I am here to inform you that I am not a ho, and while I have little knowledge of the “strategies” of prostitution, I would think that, were I a ho, I would be turning tricks somewhere indoors. Indisputably sexy though the sidewalk in front of the chemistry building may be, it would be a rather chilly experience, I should think.

As per your request: No, I will not “show you that booty.” I would argue, though, that the booty in question is quite substantive and if you cannot ascertain it’s general location, you are either blind or in a space station several billion miles above the earth’s surface.

Honestly, now.

I don’t know how exactly you developed the idea that it’s okay to yell shit at women on the sidewalk (I bet you could write several papers about this question) but allow me to be the first to inform you that it is not. At all.

When you do so, you are demeaning in the fullest sense of the word (de·mean, verb (used with object) to lower in dignity, honor or standing; debase). You are telling me, from the window of your car, that it doesn’t matter what my name is, what I think, what I do, the music I like or the things I’ve accomplished. Walking down the sidewalk, I am just one of the great crush of femininity, not even worthy of the basic respect all humans deserve. Just another ho.

At the same time, you are instilling fear in me. It’s okay for me to walk on the sidewalk, I pay my tuition just like the 40,000 other students here. But I still feel an odd twinge of worry in my stomach. Like I don’t really have that basic community ownership of the sidewalk, like I don’t even really have a basic ownership of myself. You call me a ho and you tell me that you aren’t afraid to do so, because you have power and I have none. I walk the sidewalk only by your continued benevolence.

And I know that, barring some accident of fate, you’ll never read this, but I didn’t write this for you. I write this because I’m nineteen years old, I’ve got a lot of life left to live, and I’m already tired of this bullshit. It increasingly seems to me that that nervous sick feeling in your stomach alone at night and the shouts of men you don’t know, ordinary boys you might pass on the way to class, transformed into sometime sharp-edged and frightening in the dark, all that appears to come part and parcel with being a woman in the world. It makes me angry, but most of all, it makes me sad. And I have to pretend that, if you ever read this, you might consider it and, maybe, do something different next time. I have to think that, or I think I’d just punch a hole in the wall. Or scream. Or cry.

But I will do none of those things because I don’t own this wall and my roommates are trying to do homework and I’m not really the weeping kind anyway. Instead, I wrote this letter to you, full of all the things I thought you should know. What you do with those things is, as it is for everyone, entirely up to you.

Very Sincerely,

Nicole (who has a name. Just like you.)

"The Water Looks Bluer Through Her Pretty Eyes..."

2008-01-14T00:52:10Z

I don't always think this place is beautiful, you know.

It's not like home, certainly. They don't have stars here, and the sky is always this industrial ashes-of-roses color. It looks like an old wound. It has a certain concrete charm, the yellow eyes of open windows blinking distantly, but it's not always beautiful.

Tonight, though, I was walking in the not-dark (I miss darkness so much sometimes, in the summer, I used to creep quietly out of the house at night and lay on the grass and everything was just vaguely delineated shapes, brown and black and blue. The darkness here is chemical and yellow) and I looked up and the sky seemed to me warm, the rosy color of a blush and it was snowing and it landed on my eyes and my hair and my hands and my mouth. In the triangular light cast by the streetlights, snow spiraled down with the kind of lazy carelessness that a certain kind of snow has. The flakes were big and white and flickering delicate like impossible moths.

It made me happy in a lonely kind of way. The happiness of distant lights and silence and cold and poor man's dark. It was the kind of world you want to walk forever in it. But when I came back the same way, and the sky was the very same color and the snow moved towards the earth in the same erratic patterns, I felt only cold. And a little sad.

I wrote half of this entry in my head on the way there and half on the way back and I'm still not sure what it's about. Maybe simply that you can't walk the same ground twice? Or something about the cold and the quality of dark and the way it makes your heart feel.

Because if I'm really honest, those nights in the grass of home, with the moon and million stars, I felt the same thing I felt underneath the lamp post, the same thing I felt once at the edge of a blue-black water with my feet in the sand: a terrible kind of gnawing longing for something unknown. Something I don't even have a name for.

It's the same sky, after all. The only thing changing is the human world underneath.

"Best Kisser That I Ever Knew..."

2007-12-01T16:41:06Z

So I won NaNoWriMo. I know! I was shocked too!

And thus, the last bit:

Chapter Fifteen: A Wake

The Women. May 9, 1962.

The phone calls were endless.

Nanie stood for what seemed like days between the kitchen and the living room with the olive drab telephone receiver pinned between her shoulder and her ear. Janice had overhear enough to understand without Nanie telling her, though she did anyway.

“Your Nanny Collington died,” she said, reaching down with slow, weary hands to rub the swollen edges of her feet. Janice did not know what to say to this. Nanny Collington was an impossibly ancient woman who she had met on six occasions. Her mother did not seem sad, only in need of some sleep.

“I’m sorry, Ma,” she said, eventually.

“The funeral is Tuesday,” Nanie told her, one hand still resting carelessly on the still and silent phone. “You’ll want to wear your black dress.”

***

Dina Meredith was fairly certain that the box of photographs she was searching for was hiding in the uppermost shelf in the closet. She could reach, she knew, if she were to climb the stepstool and fish around back there. But Dina’s knees hurt her deep in their joints, and her back stiffened up on her occasionally. It made prayer an exercise in enduring pain, but she sometimes thought that that had always been true.

They were pictures of her mother that she had not looked in a very long time. Black and white and stiff, the way they all looked in pictures then. She wore long dresses and carefully done up hair of the kind that you never saw on women these days. It took a half hour at night, Dina could remember standing behind her shoulder and watching her remove pins, swatches of fake hair, little pink flowers. It had been her generation, Dina thought, who were wearied and worn with work and hardship, that stopped that sort of thing. They had ragged hair, brittle, dusty, falling-down hair. They were slovenly creatures with hollow eyes.

Dina’s long-dead husband used to tell her that she had a horse’s tail for hair and Dina could not help but agree. Stick-straight and black as coal, it was brittle and sharp in her hands. She was so glad when her daughter was born with her father’s loose, light hair. It looked like dark marmalade, if one were to hold it up to the sunlight.

Dina’s own daughter had always been fashionable, or as fashionable as she could be with hair cut by her mother leaning over the kitchen sink and clothes made from cut down dresses of her mother’s. She was pretty, freckled, laughing and young, though. That made up for a lot. Alas, it was the nature of youth to waste and fade. Her daughter’s colorless face and the sharp bones in her hands could have told her this if the aching of her own knees did not.

Dina Meredith had rarely spoken with her mother throughout most of her adult life. She had heard that children who came after youth’s first bloom were often more petted, coddled creatures, but such had never been the case with her mother who had seemed largely indifferent to Dina and her brother. Dina had not missed her in her absence. She did not think she would miss her now, but one never knew.

Eventually, Dina rose up from the sofa with a plastic crackle and moved the stepstool over to the open door of the closet. She climbed it with painstaking slowness.

***

She had tried laying flat on her bed, contorting her elbows painfully. She had tried leaning against the edge of her closet door and pushing all the breath out of her. She had tried pulling the dress slightly upwards and then buttoning it there in the free air above her head, but it would not slip down over her again. She was contemplating her back in the mirror, the sad, incomplete look of the flopping fabric and undone buttons when Andy Jr. knocked at the door.

“I can’t fit my dress,” she told him morosely. Andy Jr had surmised this from the general scene, but he didn’t point that out.

“Do you have another one?” he asked instead.

“Not one that’s black!” Janice snapped with a kind of frustrated misery. She was not angry at Andy Jr, of course, but simply just angry in general and it flowed from her easily with no regard for who or what may be in its path. Andy Jr, who understood these things about his sister, simply went to her and gestured for her to turn around.

“Press your stomach in,” he said and Janice rolled her eyes, but did so obediently. Underneath her hands, her skin felt distended and awkward, she pushed hard, almost fiercely. Behind her, Andy drew the edges of the fabric together tightly, they strained against her skin and flattened her breasts uncomfortably, but eventually she felt a slight settling as he did up the buttons.

Janice took a shallow breath and stared at herself in the mirror. She looked pale and puffy. Sickly. The dress looked like it had been made for a child. Lace cut into the top of her dress. “I hate this,” she said, or perhaps she only thought it.

“It’s just for a few hours and then you can wear what you like,” Albert waved his slim dark tie at her, “ I hate wearing these things, too.” But this was not what Janice had meant and her brother knew that. She had not told them exactly, had not said the words, but they would have to have been blind as well as stupid not to see.

“Do you ever want to run away from home, Andy?” Janice asked, lowering her voice to a murmur, even though they were alone in her room.

Andy Jr. did not know exactly what to say to this, so he said only, “make sure you don’t fart in that thing, there’d be a ripple up your back if you do.”

Janice laughed in spite of herself, it sounded like a flock of birds, frightened by a gunshot. She pretended that she had been joking about running away, not really saying anything at all, and he pretended the same thing. “You ass!” she said, and punched him in the arm.

***

Nanie made the coffee and they sipped slowly out of china that had belonged to Dina’s mother. It was blue with vine-y roses on it. It was not the good china, but it was the set she loved best. Nanie stirred and stirred her coffee and did not drink it.

“She had a little money and she took care of most everything herself,” Nanie said, looking past her mother into the sunshine of the open window. Dina made a vague noise of agreement. When Nanie was a girl, she had been a runner. She was light and speedy, faster than all the boys. In any race they ran, they would eventually fall behind her, catching their breath in the dirt while they watched her red head and brown legs zoom away. She moved slow like thick honey now and there was something painful in the anesthetized movements of her hands and her feet and sleepy eyes.

“I called Albert Paulson and he said he could meet with us this afternoon,” she continued. Perhaps sensing that her mother was not paying attention to her she pressed, “Ma?”

Dina looked at her sharply, “do you remember when you were small and you used to run?” she asked. Nanie looked startled by the question.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“When you were a girl,” Dina moved the coffee out of the way and leaned towards her daughter. “You used to run like anything. Do you remember it?”

Nanie shrugged her shoulders. She remembered it, of course. The first sunny day of spring with the mud still thick on the ground and she wore no shoes and she never got stuck. She could smell the dirt and the grass and the hard fluttering in her chest. There was no one who could catch once she got going. Once she got going, she could have run to the moon. But that was a very long time ago. “I suppose so. Children’s games and the like,” she said.

Dina knit her brows together, her features growing sharp and angry. “You weren’t like anything,” she said. Nanie could not help remember any number of scoldings and swats on the butt she had received during childhood when her mother’s face went like that.

Nanie stared at her, “are you feeling okay, Ma?” she said slowly. She did everything so slowly now.

“You’re not an old woman,” Dina told her, wanting to slap her sharply across the face as she had when she was small and crying or whining or dragging her feet. Nanie still looked puzzled and faintly annoyed.

“We’re talking about the funeral,” she said.

“Gemma’s dead,” Dina answered shortly, “nothing much to talk about. Talk about people left alive.”

“Are you going to make me do this alone?” Nanie asked, her voice growing high and frustrated. She didn’t understand why her mother felt that, even after all this time, she still had to punish her. She did not understand and she did not know what to do that would please Dina.

“No,” Dina relented seeing the frustrated anguish in the younger woman‘s face and taking her daughter’s limp hand. It felt like it belonged to a wax figure. She smiled sadly. “It’s just, sometimes, I wish you had a bit more running left in you.” Nanie gave her mother a long, blank look and just as Dina had despaired of her ever understanding she said, brisk and brittle and old:

“There’s nowhere to run to, Ma.”

***

Janice wasn’t sure that she’d ever actually seen Mr. Paulson not wearing a black suit. It was only by the revolving door of his ties that she understood it to be different occasions. Today it was a somber, solid blue. He stood in the very back of the room with his hands folded and his eyes glazed, but he smiled at her as she came in with her coat buttoned securely around her. And even though it was warm in the funeral home, she did not take it off once.

Albert appeared at the top of the stairs and Janice waved briefly at him. He returned her wave and rolled his eyes. She nodded and he descended the stairs while Nanie grabbed her daughter’s arm and steered her towards what was called the viewing room. When Janice was little, she had played there with Albert, running and hiding among the fake plants and the huge boxes on stilts that she did not realize at the time were most assuredly full of dead people. The box at the center of the room now was white and there was a circle of dark roses resting on it. It was a closed casket, but Nanie made the children go up and stand beside it awkwardly, ostensibly to say their last goodbyes.

Then Janice’s mother ushered them into the third row, arranging the children in a persnickety fashion as she did when they went to church on Sundays. Ahead of them, Janice could see the iron gray head of her grandmother and a man she didn’t recognize. He wore a gray suit and didn’t contribute anything to the low, guilty chatter that filled the room. A woman their grandmother’s age, but with her short, spiky hair dyed a lurid red, sat next to him.

“Hi, Grandma,” Janice said, leaning forward to whisper in her grandmother’s ear.

“Hi, baby,” the old woman said, turning slightly and smiling at her. She raised her gloved and manipulated them in a slow, liquid sort of way, apparently for the benefit of the man beside who nodded and smiled as well. “This is your great-uncle Christopher,” she told Janice, off-handedly. Janice had not been previously been aware that her grandmother had a brother. They did not look terribly alike, except in the way that all old people look alive, but they moved a little bit the same way. Cautious.

Mr. Paulson had cleared his throat and had ushered the preacher in when the tall, black-eyed woman crept in. She moved unobtrusively down the aisle way and took a seat next to Janice. She gave her sidelong glances out of the corner of her eyes, trying not to stare rudely. The woman was tall and lean and had black hair as well as black eyes. She seemed old but did not look so very old. Janice could not guess her age. She carried a small black purse and stared straight ahead at the casket.

The preacher, a mumbled, gray-haired elderly man, took up his position at the podium and opened his ancient bible with a brittle, yellow crack. “The Word tells us this about death…” he began.

***

“Her name is Grace. She’s my sister,” Dina told Janice shortly, when she enquired after the dark-haired woman in the yellow kitchen of the hall they had rented.

“She doesn’t look old enough to be your sister,” Janice marveled, perhaps a hair rudely. Dina only snorted in response and carried a tray of deviled eggs out to the waiting family.

The relatives faded away with awkward hugs, inevitably, they broke with Janice and gave her a shrewd look that made her skin curl up against itself. Soon, only the women were left, moving between the tables with their long black dresses swishing against the nyloned legs. Some gathered up bowls and plates and dishes and all the other detritus of grief. Others gave the tables themselves a brief wipe down. Finally, they retreated to the kitchen, where they sat around the table with coffee steaming in their hands and cigarette smoke curling from their fingers.

Sitting in the empty hall and picking at a small run underneath the knee of her pantyhose, Janice could hear their low mutter clearly. They sounded like Christmas and the 4th of July and every funeral and every christening she had ever been to. “…about your girl,” said the slow, cold of the dark haired woman who was her great-aunt. Janice thought she could hear her mother’s pause and her gentle intake of breath.

“We’re having the wedding later this month, it doesn’t leave much time for planning,” she said finally. Janice was a little surprised Grace had even asked. Of course, no gossip was off-limits, but it was generally considered taboo to inquire after dirt with the pertinent individuals right in the room. She found herself hating her great-aunt a little.

There was a slow murmur of vague agreement from the women and Grace’s voice cut through it like a razor. “Is that what she wants?” she asked.

“Of course,” Nanie said, her voice muting and softening.

“Hmm,” said Grace in reply. And that was all the more she said about the matter.

***

Gemma Collington had spent most of her life preparing to die. If it was not her crippling headaches, it would have been the stiffness in her bones or the wasting liver disease. The spring cold that finally carried her off was greeted with open arms and the cleaning woman who found her, found her laid out in “for-good” dress on her bed with her hair carefully done and her boots on and buttoned all the way. Her possessions were confined to neatly labeled boxes, her will scrupulously exact. She had even taken care to make sure that the dishes were washed and the rugs beaten.

Janice, then, was uncertain exactly what there was for her to do as her mother and grandmother busily parceled out the bits and bobs that made up the dead woman’s life. After what seemed like hours of milling around aimlessly, she eventually escaped out into the garden and began smoking as though she were angry at the cigarette.

“This garden looks just the same as it did when I was a girl,” Grace said, sliding up behind her like a shadow. Janice jumped a little, she couldn’t help it. She carelessly kicked at the dirt, though, to hide the motion. “Mama never planted anything different. She didn’t like change.” Janice nodded at this information, but said nothing.

“Can I see your engagement ring?” she asked, apparently lightly. Fiercely, Janice blew a stream of smoke out of the side of her mouth.

“I don’t have one,” she gritted.

“Oh,” said Grace insincerely.

“I think there are boxes I should be helping with,” Janice said, casting her cigarette irritably into the grass and crushing it with her heel. She turned to head back inside, but Grace caught her elbow in a grip that was ostensibly friendly, but Janice had a feeling if she tried to pull away, it would tighten unbearably.

“I shouldn’t think so, in your condition,” she said.

“If you wanna call me a slut, just do it already,” Janice snapped. She wouldn’t have been the first, probably not the last. Grace’s eyes widened briefly in what appeared to be genuine surprise.

“No,” she said, her voice growing surprisingly gentle, “I had no such intention.” Janice pulled her arm out of Grace’s hand irritably. “I simply wanted to ask you if there was something else you’d like to do?”

Janice looked at her blankly, “like go to a movie or…?”

“Like not get married,” Grace corrected flatly.

Janice laughed, it was ugly, dog-bark sort of laugh. Grace started at the sound of it. “There is no ‘else’.” Janice told her wearily.

“There’s always an else for individuals of conviction and power,” Grace told her seriously. Janice blanched. She couldn’t think of a single person less powerful than herself. “That little boy in the black suit told me a secret about you,” Grace leaned in to whisper conspiratorially, “he told me about the stories you see in playing cards.”

Janice shook her head. “It’s a stupid game.”

“You are not wrong.”

Janice knew that this was true, but she would not admit it, instead staring down at the dirt and folding her arms across her breasts. “So?”

“It is a stupid game, the cards” Grace answered softly, “but there are other things, other ways. It’s just a matter of learning the ways and the forms.”

Janice smiled, though nothing was really terribly funny. “But…why? It’s just…I’m mean, what would it change?”

Grace shrugged her shoulders. “That’s your own lookout.” She fished around in her pockets for a minute, eventually drawing out a scrap of yellow paper. She had written an address there with careful, upright printing. It was in California. She handed it to Janice, who took it with numbed fingers. Grace smiled then, it looked awkward on her face, as though it had been lifted into place with wires and pulleys, and then she turned to go. Janice stared and stared at the neat scrawl and then said “Grace?” as she stepped up to the door.

Grace turned and raised her eyebrows at her. Janice tapped the paper against her fingers nervously. It felt fluttery and cool and her the thing in her stomach lurched uncomfortably. Like destiny. “Do you live near the ocean?” she asked.

“Practically in the surf,” Grace told her.

APN: So I had a hard time with this chapter. I generally do with Janice chapters. So, if you were bored reading it, rest assured that I was most certainly bored writing it.

Chapter Sixteen: The Marvelous Martinelli

Christopher Collington. Summer, 1928

No one really expected Florence to die before Gemma. No one really expected Florence to die. Looking into her mean, vibrant eyes, it was easy to forget the white fall of her hair and the blue veins that rippled across her hands like grotesque roadmaps. But Florence was not immortal and she was not immune to the trials of the everyday world.

When Christopher was nineteen years, Florence fell down the stairs. Not all of them, just the last five or six, but it was enough to fracture her right hip and she languished in bed for two weeks before finally succumbing. Gemma wrote to her wayward children and asked them back and, but for Grace, they came dutifully, with hands full of casseroles and pot roasts.

Dina, who was married and already had children in tow, came with her preacher husband who had red hair and a certain unsettling zeal in his eyes. He had not seen her in nearly four years. She looked much older somehow, larger in her hips and her bust and her face was harder. But when she smiled at Christopher, he could see that she was happy, very happy in a way that Dina did not know how fake.

The first thing she did upon arrival was clasp Christopher in the wide, warm circle of her arms, burrowing her face into her shoulder as though she might attach herself to him and never let go at all. Her brain, usually so ordered and complete, was glowing with vague thoughts that chased one another around busily and did not rest long enough to be coherent. “I’ve missed you,” she signed. A lesser woman might have cried.

That night, they slept in their old rooms, Dina and her husband with her children coiled on top of them like warms kittens in the little bed. The wind moved against the window in a familiar way and the smell was the same: musty and cigarette-y and with something sharp like wintergreen. Christopher breathed it in deeply, feeling not exactly happy, but certainly content.

“Don’t you ever get tired of the beach?” Dina asked, shedding her shoes and dumping them carelessly in the sand, all while wearing a huge grin that Christopher could not help but return.

“Never,” he said. They sat down at the water’s edge and stretched out their feet into the warm gush of the surf, crashing against their legs and them pulling at them with a faint, aching kind of want. It had been years since they’d gathered like this.

“Are you well?” Dina asked her brother, her brow crinkling sincerely.

“Yes,” he smiled, “I’m very well. I got a teaching position,” he told her, drawing aimless designs in the wet sand.

“At the special school?”

He nodded. Dina beamed.

“I always knew you were clever.”

“What of you?” he bumped his shoulder against her, “are you happy?”

“God has been good to me,” she said. She pulled a small pile of the sodden sand to her and began shaping into a rough castle sort of shape. “I’m pregnant again,” she said, neutrally, with no great excitement or despair that Christopher could discern. “I haven’t told him yet. It’s another boy.” She looked up from her sand castle and contemplated the yellow sun spreading out and sinking into the green of the water. “They’re good boys,” she said, as though Christopher had argued the point. She looked down again at her sand-dusted hands, “but they are not exceptional.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Christopher pointed out. “What good did it ever do us? Or Grace for that matter?”

“It is good,” Dina said quickly, “I wouldn’t want…well, it would be trouble. It’s better this way. God has given them other things.” She shrugged her shoulders like a girl. “I don’t know why I lament it, but I do sometimes.”

Christopher said nothing to this, but only leaned down to help her shore up a slackening side of what was rapidly becoming a sand palace.

***

It was not, Florence told herself, a needlessly vindictive act. In the last days of her life, she liked to tell herself that she did not do anything for the quiet, nasty thrill of inciting misery. Some days she was more successful than others. Certainly, there was much in her life that was morally questionable, but this was a secret that had to be told. And she’d kept it for a long time, taken it too her death bed and almost her grave. Surely, this one she could be excused for.

Florence called Christopher and Dina into her bedroom and they marveled how small her face seemed in the swelling tangle of her white hair. Her hands on her chest shook faintly whenever she reached up to point or gesture. She smiled at them, children still. Dina reached down and took her hand. She looked so much like Grace had at that age. Sometimes, when she was younger, Florence used to get the two confused and would call Dina Grace by accident.

“I want to tell you a secret,” she said, gesturing for them to lean closer to her.

Grace was a special girl, her most beloved niece. But she had to learn that there were consequences in the world. You couldn’t just do what you wanted, all willy-nilly. The world always found a way to punish that kind of lawless behavior. The twins leaned down to listen to her, their faces grave, wondering, identical.

***

Dina did not smoke often. She thought it was an ugly habit. But leaning in the kitchen doorway, she shared a cigarette with her shell-shocked brother and watched the little ducks totter towards the pond at the bottom of the lawn.

“Did you know about this?” he asked her, staring out at their mother’s yellow tulips as if they, too, had been hiding secrets and telling big lies all along.

“Not exactly,” Dina said carefully. “I had thoughts.”

“Thoughts?”

Dina shrugged apologetically. “We all looked so alike. And Papa was so sick for the last part of his life. And you know Mother never looked at us the way she looked at Grace.”
“You didn’t say anything to me,” said Christopher, sounding faintly annoyed. Dina turned to look at him, her eyes apologetic.

“They were just thoughts. If I was wrong, I’d look silly and if I was right…” she trailed off and shrugged. “I don’t know. What would happen then?”

Christopher did not answer this question. “You put your hair behind your ears they way she did, before she cut it,” he said instead in a slow, wondering sort of voice, as though the hidden parts of the world were unfolding in front of him. Dina took the cigarette from his fingers and took a long drag. She had thought she had no secrets from her brother, but it suddenly seemed that she had been keeping this one from him her whole life.

“This doesn’t change anything,” she told him warningly. “She was no kind of mother to us then and she isn’t now, either.”

Christopher turned to look at her and his eyes were all lit up and she knew that he wasn‘t absorbing a single thing she had said. “Who do you suppose our father is?” he asked. The end of the cigarette was burning down dangerously near the flesh of her fingers, but she only watched it until she could feel the red, radiant hurt, throwing it to the earth only at the very last second.

“Does it matter?” she asked him.

“Why don’t you have questions about this?” he demanded, looking suddenly young and small.

“We always knew she didn’t want anything to do with us or this place,” Dina said reasonably.

“I can’t…” Christopher started and trailed off aimlessly. Dina could see the dark threads of anger and frustration that bound up his tongue. Eventually, he produced another cigarette from some distant pocket and Dina stayed there on the kitchen stoop and helped him smoke it.

***

“Your father was a boy named Christopher Martinelli,” Grace said, watching the robins hop around aimless in the sparse, brown grass out the window. Going to see her, Christopher had expected her be more evasive, even deny that she was their mother, but she admitted the truth with only a passing comment about how Florence had become nasty in her old age.

“You gave me his name,” Christopher signed, not drinking the tea she had offered him. It smelled dark and lemon-y. He preferred coffee, but Grace never drank it since she had to drink that awful ersatz stuff in the war.

“I thought you should have something of his.” Grace took a seat opposite him, folding her hands graciously and balancing her clever, cold face on top of them. He had thought, perhaps, to question her severely, ask her how she could do such a thing but her cool acceptance of his anger made it seem small and futile. Outside the window behind her, one of the robins took flight, vanishing into the dark criss-cross of the tree branches.

“Why?” he asked finally.

Grace knew only marginal sign language, but she appeared to understand his meaning fully. “I did not want children,” she said, with no apology in her voice or the angled set of her body. She looked like some kind of terrible but inert weapon.

“That’s all? That’s it?” Christopher signed, incredulous.

“I was very young. Younger than you are now,” Grace elaborated shortly, “I had work to do in the world.”

“You couldn’t have taken us with you?”

Grace said nothing to this, but he knew that she had understood him clearly. Her look was very eloquent, it said two babies? And a deaf one at that? without her ever having to open her mouth. She brought her cup of tea to her lips and drank deeply from it while Christopher stared down into the murky depths of his own mug. She didn’t want, he realized, anything like forgiveness from him.

***

Christopher Martinelli had lived in a narrow white house in a neighborhood on the west side of town. His grandmother was said to be a witch-women who dealt in potions and spell work and Christopher had a flat, cynical feeling that that was most likely what had attracted Grace to him the most. But the Martinellis had not lived there in years and Christopher had been gone even longer than that. No one could tell him exactly where the man had gone, but that general consensus was “probably straight to the dogs.”

Christopher Sr, it seemed was a wild and dissolute boy who lacked the power to terrify that had kept the gossips off of Grace all those years. He had been a mediocre student, an absolute failure at sport, with no discernable goals or ambition beyond managing to do as little as possible. “He’s probably a senator now,” one old man said to Christopher, laughing heartily at his own joke.

He wasn’t. Christopher Martinelli was currently making his way across the Dakotas in a brightly painted wagon with “The Marvelous Martinelli: Wonders and Works of Astounding Magic” written on the side. Christopher caught up with the wagon in a town that seemed to be principally composed of dirt and he circled it thoughtfully, taking in the amateurish art, the vivid colors. There was a portrait of a man in a top hat and tails, who he took to be the Marvelous Martinelli himself and on the other side, a drawing of a girl emerging up from red flames with “The Amazing Phoenix: She Has Died One Thousand Times and Risen One Thousand and One!” written underneath her in large letters.

Christopher thought briefly about knocking on the wagon (he could see shadow-shapes moving inside) but decided to purchase a ticket instead. The show was held inside a large red tent that smelled faintly of donkey. Christopher took a seat towards the bottom and carefully observed the blank section of dirt that was meant to indicate a stage.

There were no special tricks of light to announce Martinelli’s arrival and he was visibly shouting to be heard in the upper parts of the wooden seats. Christopher was at first surprised at the turnout, but then supposed that there must not be much to do in such a town on a Saturday night.

Martinelli was probably in his middle-thirties, his hair was dark and it was slicked back dramatically from his forehead but Christopher noticed the way that strands would work themselves free and hang upon his skin in a way that was somehow unspeakably tragic. He wore a badly tailored suit that bore little resemblance to the elegant construction on the wagon’s side and his smile was wide and white. Not quite inviting though, predatory, feral instead.

He pulled paper flowers out of cones filled with water and made brightly colored balls vanish. White doves fluttered towards the ceiling, colorful handkerchiefs were swallowed up by his dark sleeves. He smiled and smiled and smiled.

It was all very nice but decidedly mediocre and the audience slumped in their seats, clapping apathetically after each marvel. But, from the ragged curtain at the back of the tent emerged someone Christopher could only assume was the Amazing Phoenix herself. She was young and very lovely. She had long red hair, it hung to her hips in twists and coils and braids. It was not a color of hair that people had, but it do not look affected on her. It looked, for lack of a better word, magical. She smiled and waved as she moved across the stage and the audience seemed to sway towards her like a flower towards the sun.

Martinelli obviously knew of her power and he moved his hands in the air around her, drawing an invisible outline of her body. She grinned and tossed her red hair and jutted out her hips, nearly bare but for the curling gold lace of her costume. Next, Martinelli gestured for a tall, upright box with an ordinary padlock on the front. The box was on wheels and he turned it around several times, rapping on the thing with his knuckles, presumably to demonstrate that there were not any secret doors inside it.

He opened the door of the box politely for the girl and gestured for her step inside, which she did, turning her head to look over her shoulder at the audience with animated, impish mock-fear. Martinelli closed the door behind her and locked it, asking a man from the audience to test the strength of the lock. He dutifully did so, pulling on the metal and laughing as it stayed put.

Martinelli waved him back to his seat with an imperious hand and drew from some invisible pocket a single long sparkler of the kind that children played with, drawing their names in the dark of the night. He cupped his hand around the thing and when he moved his skin away, it was hissing and spitting with white fire. Winking gravely at the audience, he bent down and pressed the flame of the thing into the dark place underneath the bottom of the box.

The audience watched then, as the box slowly began to glow with yellow fire, starting from the bottom of the box and then moving upwards. Christopher could almost see the hungry mixture of fear and thrill that shot through them. The flames climbed higher and suddenly, the people around Christopher began to look shifty and unsettled, the started to get to their feet and sat back down and looked to one another for clarity. Some pointed towards the box with righteous panic in their eyes. Slowly, Christopher realized that the girl must be screaming. He thought it a particularly macabre touch.

The box went up quickly, charring and blackening and burning itself out before the audience’s very eyes. Wafting the smoke away from him, Martinelli cautiously cracked what was left of the door open and revealed the nothingness inside. But, with a look of horrified wonder on his face, he reached down and plucked from the ashes a single crimson feather, of the sort that had covered the girl’s costume.

The audience, unsettled and uncertain murmured amongst themselves, Christopher could feel it thrumming through the wood of the benches. And then, like Aphrodite from the waves, like Athena springing forth from her father’ forehead, the Amazing Phoenix emerged from the ceiling of the tent, descending on a rope like an old time pirate. She curled gracefully to the floor and melodramatically waved the black smoke away from her face, all the time flashing her vivid smile to the audience. She bowed low and then snapped upwards, her long hair flickering like some kind of impossibly red ocean. The audience sat back against the benches, their sigh of appreciation was like a cool, distant wind.

***

“I can’t tell you how it’s done,” said the Amazing Phoenix, or at least, that’s what he assumed. Christopher’s lip reading skills were rather rusty. He shook his head and smiled at her. It was amazing, her costume wasn’t even singed. She grabbed the fat coil of her hair and twisted it up behind her in a business-like fashion. “What do what do you want, then?”

Christopher pointed towards the dark opening of the wagon where he had seen Martinelli vanish moments before. The Amazing Phoenix regarded him thoughtfully. “Do you speak?” she asked, he shook his head. “But you hear?” Christopher shook his head again and, in a moment of boldness he had not previously thought possible for him, touched his index finger very lightly to her lips. The girl was visibly startled, but she did not draw back. He removed his finger and grinned shortly. “You read lips?” she asked, raising her eyebrows, Christopher nodded, “And you want to see the Marvelous Martinelli?” He nodded again, smiling. She shrugged and red lace crinkled against her shoulders. Up close, she was even younger than she’d first appeared, her freckles covered up with thick white makeup. She had dark eyes, sloe and lovely. She gestured for him to follow her and made her way up the steps into the wagon. He could not help but notice the way the feathers of her costume brushed back and forth against her skin as she moved, like the motion of a swan’s neck.

Inside, it was a dark warren of open boxes filled with mundane things like dishes right along with magical interlocking silver rings. It was close and uncomfortably humid and it had the same musty donkey smell as the tent. Martinelli was sitting on a low bench in the back in his shirt sleeves. He had poured himself a glass of spirits and looked to be in for the evening. The Amazing Phoenix did not seem to notice or care about this, however, and she drew Christopher inexorably forward, eventually presenting him to Martinelli like a proud cat with its still-twitching kill.

“This boy has come to see you,” she said. “He doesn’t speak or hear but he understands. He wanted to see you,” she repeated, as if she still couldn’t quite believe it. Martinelli regarded Christopher thoughtfully and took a long drink of the nameless substance in his glass. “Start packing up the stuff in the tent,” he told the girl shortly. A frown creased her face and seemed that she was not keen on the idea, but she complied willingly enough, brushing past Christopher to move to the door. Her costume may not have been damaged, but the Amazing Phoenix smelled unavoidably like ashes and smoke.

Alone, Martinelli said nothing for a long minute and Christopher suddenly found his mind a blank. “Well?” the magician signed after a while, with his long, fluid hands. Christopher must have look surprised because he added, “my mother was deaf and dumb,” in a weary fashion. There were those who thought conditions like Christopher’s were congenital, perhaps he had gotten more just than his father’s name, Christopher thought aimlessly.

“I’m Grace Collington’s son,” he signed finally. Martinelli sat back and took another drink, but he did not appear to be terribly shocked by this information.

“I figured,” he said, “you’ve got the look of her.”

“My sister looks even more like her,” Christopher signed back with sudden, fierce anger. Like his conversation with Grace, this encounter was not following the script he had written in his head. This seemed to surprise Martinelli, if only marginally.

“Twins? She got big, but I didn’t realize…well, I was just a boy, what did I know about such things?”

“You knew about us?”

Martinelli nodded, “well, not both of you obviously. I knew she had a baby. Do you need money, because she’s probably the one to ask after about that.”

“I don’t need money!” Christopher’s hands cut angrily through the air. It should have been perfectly obvious, looking at the state of Christopher’s dress and his bearing that he didn’t want anything Martinelli might have squirreled away in his raggedy caravan.

“What do you need?” Martinelli signed back reasonably. This was a question that Christopher was not entirely prepared to answer. He had imagined that he would come here, find his father and then barrage him with the huge, horrible truth and then…then he did not know. He had assumed a plan of action would suggest itself in the moment. Sensing his anger and his confusion, Martinelli sat forward, looking the boy in the eye. “Did you want me to make an honest woman out of her? Because I don’t think there’s a man on God’s green earth could make Grace into anything she don’t want to be.”

“You left us,” he signed simply in return.

“Your grandmamma could take care of you far better than I could. I was sixteen years old and, Grace, she didn’t want nothing to do with me. And I certainly did want to be fussing around with babies.”

Christopher said nothing, stood motionless with his hands at his sides.

“It’s just the way of the world, boy,” Martinelli said in a voice he must have thought was gentle and engaging. Christopher turned and walked out of the wagon without exchanging one more word.

At the base of the wagon, the Amazing Phoenix, who clearly had no intention of cleaning up the tent, was waiting for him. She had changed and was wearing a pale yellow dress. Her shoulders were brown and bare. It should have looked all wrong on her, but instead she smiled and looked like a fire burning merrily in the dank cold of winter. Christopher thought suddenly that she was the kind of girl that he could, perhaps, tell his troubles to. But, he knew that she would not understand him if he tried.

Until she drew her hands from behind her back, holding a sheaf of paper and two charcoal pencils.

***

The Amazing Phoenix was really named Sascha and was a gymnast, by rights. She had been swinging from bars and tumbling in carefully controlled falls since before she could put together sentences. Her parents were dead. The Marvelous Martinelli found her when they were both working at a particularly miserable little circus that went from town to town.

“The man who ran it was a right bastard,” she said, her eyes glowing with remembered spite. “He beat the animals and the performers, too, the ones that would let him.” She grinned. “I wouldn’t let him.” Along with a few disenchanted others, Martinelli and Sascha had decided to open their own traveling circus but the Marvelous one himself was apparently “a bum to work for. He drinks up all the money and leaves you with pennies.” The others had dropped off one by one, leaving only Sascha behind.

“Why did you stay?” Christopher wondered on a scrap of paper. Sascha shrugged.

“He was a friend to me once, and I don’t forget friends. And no one would take care of him if I left.

“He’s a grown man,” Christopher pointed out.

“Not really,” Sascha said, “you don’t know him. He’s…I guess immature. Like he never grew all the way up.”

“He’s my father,” Christopher told her. She nodded knowingly.

“You look a lot alike,” she explained.

“Everyone says I look like my mother.”

Sascha read this and shrugged. “Maybe so. But you look like him too. Especially around the nose and the eyes.” She paused and looked carefully at Christopher, as if committing those eyes and that nose to memory. “Are you angry with him?” she asked.

Now it was Christopher’s turn to shrug, “I don’t know. Yes, I suppose,” he wrote finally. He did not know how to tell her the faint, gnawing feeling in his chest he’d had ever since discovering that he was in the world as the result of the loveless doings of two people who didn’t want each other and certainly didn’t want him.

“Well,” Sascha said considering, “did you get a good raising? The clothes and the food you needed and no one hit you or was mean to you?”

After considerable mental wrangling, Christopher decided that his childhood could indeed qualify as “good,” at least in the most general terms. And even with his mother’s distance and her headaches and Aunt Florence’s sharp tongue, he knew he would not trade it for a lifetime spent trailing Grace, no matter how exciting that might have been. Still, it hurt him faintly that he had not even been asked along.

“Yes,” he wrote. “I don’t think I would have wanted to live with them. My sister might have wanted that.” Dina was fervent, half-crazy and half-magic. She might have fit into the odd, sharp-edged little family they would have made. “Maybe she could have gone if I had not been born with her.” A defective baby. It would have been a tragedy even in a happy family.

Sascha grinning and it was like the softer flickering of candlelight. “I’m glad you were born,” she said.

***

Grace Collington and Christopher Martinelli. A Long Time Ago.

He thought that kissing her would be like kissing a razor. She could be cold and metal-bitter in his mouth. And she’d cut his insides apart. But he wanted to kiss her anyway. Very, very much.

At first, she didn’t look at him. She came every day to the door to bother his grandmother with her implacable obsidian stare. She pushed and prodded the old woman and when no would let her in, she sat on the front stoop and stared unblinking into the green hedge. But Christopher usually let her, if only for the chance to talk to her briefly and touch the taper of her back as he guided into the house.

But then slowly-so slowly he could not help wondering if he was only imagining it-she began to notice him. She grew tense under his helping hand, looked away when he looked at her and ceased offering even the cursory pleasantries that she had before.

One day, as she stalked down the stair after another volley at his grandmother had failed, she stopped, seeing him the hallway and drew up close to him. She studied his face for a moment and then asked him “do you want me?”

“Yes,” Christopher said, for this was the truth. Grace nodded as though this was merely confirming a theory she had.

“Alright,” she said quietly.

The visitor’s bedroom was the only room in the house that had a lock. Christopher was careful to lock it behind them and to close the drapes as well. Grace rubbed her hand over the nubby crenellations of the bedspread. She kissed like a science experiment, like there was some important information written in the hollows of his mouth. They were both virgins and he began to apologize for hurting her and she gave him a scathing look until he went speechless.

Undone, her hair was longer than he’d though. Very fine and very dark, he twisted it in his hands with a kind of wonderment. It smelled faintly like flowers he did not know the name of. Looking at his hands twined in her hair and his marveling face, Grace smiled with a brief tenderness and kissed him softly, like a woman.

“This is a sin,” Christopher whispered in her ear doubtfully.

“It is the kind that God forgives,” she whispered back, and moved her nimble fingers to undo the laces at the back of her.

“You’re a witch girl. Did you put a spell on me?” he asked, wrapping his arms awkwardly around her to help.

Grace rolled her eyes heartily, “I don’t know those kinds of spells. But I do know ones to make you shut up.” She discarded her corset and her white chemise billowed out over the both of them.

“Is it okay if I don’t love you?” Christopher asked, pulling the hem of the chemise up and over her upraised arms. She smiled at him as the fabric cleared her face, leaving her hair fuzzy and mussed. “Yes,” she said.

“I might love you a little,” Christopher said doubtfully, burying his mouth in the skin of her neck.

“That’s alright as well,” she answered, and wrapped her cold arms around him.

***

Christopher Collington and Sascha Petrova. In the Gloaming.

The light was failing. Christopher could hardly see Sascha’s bright face even though she was very close. He wrote quickly, taking advantage of the last of the lingering sunshine. “How do you get out of the flaming box?” he asked.

Sascha smiled a wicked smile and lifted her arms above her head, mimicking the picture of the side of the wagon. She looked gold, yellow, red, in the dying light. She looked like an Amazing Phoenix, rising from dark ashes.

“I don’t,” she said.

APN: I like Christopher and, overall, I think I like this chapter, but I think if I ever did another draft of this, I would put this chapter somewhere else. It was a late addition to the outline and I don't think it flows quite like it should.

Coda: The View From The Window

Janice Reed and Albert Paulson Jr. The Future.

“Ha,” said Albert, grinning from one ear to the other. “I always knew you were a magic girl!”

Janice rolled her eyes and handed her ticket to the bus driver, who took it without comment. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“So, is she going to teach you how to make your broomstick fly and what to do during your dark revels?” Albert teased, following her to the back of the bus, where there were two seats open. She sat down next to the window and he squeezed in beside her.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Janice said judiciously.

“You know, wandering into a witches house without any kind of defense has historically not worked out so well. Look at Hansel and Gretel,” Albert shoved their meager suitcases violently into the overhead bin.

“Hansel and Gretel were dumb enough to mark their trail with bird food. They deserved to get eaten,” Janice told him sourly. He sat down beside her and jostled her arm cheerfully.

“Why so sad? This is an adventure.”

Janice had nothing to say to this.

“There are people who’d kill for the opportunity to go learn something like this, and you’re getting it for free.”

“You haven’t met her,” Janice said, as the bus lurched into motion. “I don’t think she gives anything away for free.” Janice could not help but remember the predatory slink of the woman’s body and her dark, fathomless eyes. “My grandma didn’t like her much, and that’s her own sister.”

Albert waved this aside airily, “how well do you like your sister?” Janice laughed once, weakly. The bus maneuvered away from the stops and out on to the street, familiar trees and houses flashed by in a slow whirl of color.

“Are you afraid?” Albert asked her serious. Janice swallowed heavily and nodded. Albert leaned over and rested his head on the rise of her belly. “I don’t hear anything,” he said, wonderingly.

“Believe me, it’s in there,” Janice laughed bitterly. “It moves sometimes. At night.”

“You talk about it like it’s something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Albert laughed.

“Well, what else would you call it?” Janice asked reasonably.

“You should think up some names for it,” Albert suggested. Janice gave him a supremely skeptical look. “If it’s a boy, you could always name it after me.” Janice pulled a face.

“You hate being a Jr, and I know my brother does too. If I name this thing, it’s gonna have it’s own name. ”

Albert nodded, agreeing with this and they lapsed into the kind of silence that would be uncomfortable among strangers, but is merely restive among friends. “The ocean, huh?” Albert said finally, there was the faintest nervous tremor in his voice.

“Practically in the surf. I’ve heard it’s beautiful,” Janice told him. Albert reached around in his jacket pocket and eventually emerged with his ragged and careworn pack of cards.

“You wanna do the cards for me?” he asked, bending his knees to create a makeshift table. Janice started to take the cards and then paused, her fingers hovering over the painted face of the Queen of Diamonds.

“No,” she said finally, decisively. She smiled at Albert, who looked confused. “This is an adventure,” she said. “We’re going to figure it out ourselves.” After a moment, Albert smiled in return and stuffed the cards awkwardly back in his pockets. He could practice tricks with them later, if he’d like to. The two grew silent again and eventually, Janice leaned over to rest her head against Albert while he stretched his arm around the seat behind her. Like it was drawing them, they both pressed their free hand to her belly, to the nameless pod person inside of her.

Janice watched out the window until she fell asleep and the bus rolled on and on, past the roads they knew, and even further.

APN: And thus it ends...

"It's So Cold...In Your Arms..."

2007-11-28T21:27:10Z

Chapter Twelve: The Secret Language

Grace Collington. May 19, 1919.

Grace Collington came home from the war with her hair bobbed and her arms full of packages wrapped in brown paper. She came in a taxi, which was positively unheard for Dina and Christopher’s still, tree-lined neighborhood. They watched her from the little arbor of grapes, which was only decorative, and hid behind the leaves and vines when she walked past. Grace did not say anything, but she gave the arbor a casual glance, as if she might have seen the children after all.

Dina and Christopher had distant, soft-edged memories of Grace at the edge of their father’s grave, hustling them out of the parlor with urgent, ungentle hands, the stiff crinkle of her black dress when she hugged them goodbye. The children were not afraid of Grace, exactly, but they thought of her the same way they thought of the large knives that their neighbor used to section apart the wildly colored birds he killed: something sharp and interesting, though dangerous.

With her alluring brown packages in hand, Grace rapped sharply at the door which swung open immediately for her. Mother had been waiting, though she had pretended she had not in the same way she had pretended that she read Grace’s infrequent correspondence once and only once when anyone with eyes could see the places where her fingers had folded and re-folded, touched and caressed and worn thin.

Dina did not even have to gesture to Christopher, as one, they moved to the wide parlor window and peered inside. Grace, tall and spare like the dark stem of a flower, looked too big for the close little parlor somehow. Mother hesitated next to her, her lined face glowing, her hands fluttering eagerly around her but never touching, as though some invisible force held them back. Auntie Florence sat stiff and grim on the sofa, she did not smile.

At the window, Dina poked Christopher hard in the ribs and gestured towards the little pile of packages when had been hastily deposited in the worn wing chair. He grinned hugely at her and nudged her back, just as hard. And then Auntie Florence, who was not unaware of the view afforded the open parlor window, cast them a bland, sweeping glance. They ducked down reflexively. She may not have seen them at all, but they did not think.

Dina took Christopher’s hand and drew aimlessly on its palm. “Do you suppose it’s toys from France?” she wondered.

“I don’t know,” he answered, “I hope it’s a soldier’s gun.”

Dina laughed, “Silly, she won’t give you real gun.”

Christopher was stubborn, “she might,” he insisted. “Grace is not like Mother.”

Dina had to concede that this was correct.

***

The children had hoped, but not expected, that they might get their presents when they were called in to greet their far-traveling sister. But as they stood fidgeting in the parlor while Grace peered steadily down at them as though appraising gemstones of low-quality, it soon became clear that there were no brown packages in sight.

“How are you doing in your schooling?” she said gently enough. Dina was weary of such questions, and she’d like nothing more than to shrug aimlessly and go back out to play in what was left of the light, but she knew that would be absolutely unacceptable.

“I like reading,” she said, “and mathematics.” These were answers she had carefully rehearsed and, to judge by the expression on Grace’s face, it showed.

“I asked you how you were doing,” Grace correctly, still gentle, “not what you liked.”

Startled, Dina looked to her mother, who looked nerveless and white and then to Auntie Florence, who’s face was blank as stone. “I…” she trailed off and swallowed hard, “I get middling marks. Miss Clarke says I don’t work as hard as I should.”

“And how does Christopher do?” Grace addressed the question to Dina, but looked directly at Christopher, who looked back, refusing to show his fear.

“Christopher doesn’t go to school,” Dina said uncertainly, “he can’t. There’s a special school, but it’s far away and Mother says it’s too expensive and maybe someday but not now.”

Grace took in this information carefully and tilted her head to one side thoughtfully. “But you teach him yourself, don’t you?” she asked, “you tell him the things you learned in a way he’ll understand?”

Dina went red. She did do such things, of course, but she was fairly certain she wasn’t supposed to. She herself was only a mediocre student and Miss Clarke always said it was better off for that boy to stay happy and not burdened with a lot of knowledge he couldn’t understand. But Dina knew her brother was smart, smarter by far than Miss Clarke, who was not even swift enough to figure out that it was Jonathon Michelson who was tossing firecrackers in the outdoor privy, even though it was clear to anyone with eyes. “I do,” she said, knowing that lying to Grace was hardly worth the trouble involved, “sometimes.”

Grace nodded, “and how is he doing?”

“He likes reading even more than I do, he’s read everything in the library and he liked when we did astronomy, but I forgot a lot of things and could only tell him parts.”

Grace nodded, as if this, finally, was an acceptable answer and then turned to their Mother, raising her eyebrows. Mother smiled uncertainly, and jumped up from the sofa, ushering Dina and Christopher towards the staircase.

“What are you doing?” they heard Grace ask as they climbed up the stairs as slowly as possible.

***

Dinner was strange and strained. Dina and especially Christopher had been hoping that Grace might feel free to share some stories of the war, with flying bullets and brave, bleeding men. But she was mostly silent, eating slowly but steadily as though the meal was a disagreeable task she had set for herself. Their mother glanced nervously around at the ring of faces and Auntie Florence ate with her usual gusto, as if nothing at all were different.

Dessert was chocolate cake, which was not fancy, but did require a lot of expensive chocolate and the children had been looking forward to it since they had smelled the familiar, distinctive smell of it cooking. “What did you see in the war?” Auntie Florence asked, as their mother cut the cake with her shaking hands.

Grace looked at her flatly and it was clear that she did not appreciate such a question. “I saw awful things in the war,” she said shortly. “It’s hardly dinner conversation.”

“Was it all awful?” Florence pressed with the kind of mean grin that she got sometimes. Florence was a good Auntie and she gave the children candy when their mother wouldn’t, but there times when Dina thought that maybe she was just as sharp as Grace, in her own way.

“Not all,” Grace said, through gritted teeth, “I helped many people.”

“And that’s why you went, isn’t it? To help people?”

Grace neatly bisected her cake and set herself to scraping the thick icing off the top. Dina, who had her own slice halfway stripped, stared at her plate, hands moving almost automatically. “Yes,” she said thoughtfully, “I think that’s all a person can do in this world. You can’t hope to be the best or the most, but you can help others.”

Florence nodded and made an “mmm-hmn” sort of noise, deep in her throat. “Did you save many of them?”

“Some,” Grace conceded. “Some were very bad off. Sometimes, there was nothing to be done to them.”

Florence nodded sagely, “I’m sure you did everything you could.”

“Eat your dessert, Aunt Florence,” Grace said mildly, lifting a forkful of bare chocolate cake to her mouth. Dina expected Auntie Florence to argue, but she only smiled in her thin, slicing way, and obediently took to her own cake.

“Do you like Grace?” Dina asked her aunt as she tucked her in that night (Mother’s bad hips made it nearly impossible for her to negotiate the tall staircase.) Florence appeared surprised by the question.

“Yes,” she said, “very much.”

“You sounded mad at her tonight, at dinner,” Dina pointed out.

“Can you like someone and still be mad at them?” Florence questioned in return. Dina, who fought often with her beloved brother, nodded. “I don’t like the things that Grace does, but I like her very much. I used to tuck her in bed at night, just like I do for you and your brother.”

“What does Grace do that you don’t like?” Dina asked, unwilling to be distracted from the point. Florence considered this carefully.

“Grace’s head is backwards,” she said slowly, “she treats people in a way she shouldn’t. She’s…mean.”

“But you’re mean, sometimes,” Dina couldn’t resist pointing out, “you make Mother cry.” Florence nodded. She did not lie to the children.

“It’s not the same,” she told Dina, tucking her dark hair behind her ears, “I don’t know how to explain it to you, but Grace isn’t mean like I am.”

Dina did not know what this meant, but she knew her aunt well enough not to push her. She laid back on her pillow while Florence moved stiffly to the door, blowing out the lamps as she went. Dina thought for certain that her head would be far too full to sleep, but she closed her eyes and considered the dark behind them and before she knew it, she was gone.

***

“I don’t think she brought anything for us at all,” Christopher said, sitting petulantly in the wet sand at the beach’s edge. Behind him, Dina examined a sand dollar. It looked just like every other sand dollar she had ever seen.

“You’re just cross because you didn’t get a real soldier’s gun.” Dina pointed out. “I’m tired of the beach,” she continued, “can’t we go somewhere else for once?”

Christopher concentrated on a rather amorphous sandcastle he was carving out at the water’s edge. “It’s my turn to pick and I’m cold.”

Dina stretched out beside him, pushing her legs into the white froth of the surf. “There are warm places that aren’t the beach,” she grumbled quietly. Truthfully, she was counting her blessings. When Grace first went off to war, he’d had had a regular obsession with battlefields and Dina had soon grown tired of blood splatters and the keening of the dying.

“Grace is queer,” Dina said to Christopher’s blank profile.

“They’re all queer,” Christopher answered dismissively. “Growing up alone here made her strange. It makes us strange too.”

“We’re nice-strange,” Dina insisted.

Christopher laughed at her. He never laughed when they were awake and Dina loved to listen to the sound of it. “There’s no such thing. Good or bad, they look at you the same way.”

“I think Grace scares them,” Dina continued. Christopher said nothing. “Does Grace scare you?”

“No,” he said, with all the considerable bravado of a ten year old boy.

“She scares me a little. Sometimes. But in a good way, like when you go to the edge of a high place and you look down and you’re a little afraid, because you know that you could fall but mostly you feel safe because your feet are on solid ground and you know that there’s something protecting you.” Christopher said nothing to this, but only drew his finger along the wet sand, writing his name and hers in the flourishing, curly style that Dina had painstakingly taught him.

“Do you want her leave?” Dina asked.

“No,” said Christopher, after a thoughtful moment.

“Me neither.”

***

“I think your hair looks sweet,” Dina said, from the doorway. Grace didn’t turn to look at her, but regarded her calmly from the mirror. “Do you think my hair would look nice if I cut it that way?” Dina fingered the severe edges of her haircut. In truth, they shared the same dark, painfully straight hair (Christopher had it as well) and Dina herself bore a striking resemblance to her older sister, except her eyes were blue and her nose was not so sharp and long. With a matching bob, Dina would most certainly look like a miniature Grace.

“I did not wish to cut my hair,” Grace told her, “I did it to avoid lice and because it was a bother, falling down all the time.” Dina, who knew the troubles involved attempting to shape their fine, slick hair into anything resembling an updo, nodded with understanding. “Your hair is lovely, you should keep it just as it is.” Grace smiled at Dina for the first time that Dina could recall.

Slowly, her steps small and hesitant, Dina moved into the room. Grace did not stop her, so she continued and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Are you going to stay here now?” Dina asked her as she pinned her dark hair carefully behind her ears. A lick of hair coiled upwards around her ear and with her pale skin she looked, Dina thought, like the bad fairy in a storybook.

“For a time,” she said.

Dina leaned forward eagerly, Grace unscrewed the tops of mysterious pots and containers and examined their contents. “Where do you go when you leave?” Dina asked her. Grace shrugged her bare shoulders.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

Dina crossed her legs neatly and, seeing this in the mirror, Grace clucked her teeth and Dina obediently straightened her legs back out. “Why don’t you stay, then, until you get a husband?”

Grace laughed, it sounded like the slow peal of a bell. “I think I would be waiting a very long time for that.”

“So?” Dina insisted, “Auntie Florence came here to wait and then stayed, you could do the same thing.”

“Your Aunt Florence…” Grace began severely and then seemed to deflate, losing the thread of her thoughts. She shook her head and ran her fingers around the inside rim of a pink jar.

“Do you miss us when you go away?” Dina asked, fingering the heavy embroidery on the bedspread. Grace in the mirror looked briefly startled.

“Yes,” she said. Grace had none of Florence’s compunctions about lying to children. “You’re my family.”

“Is your brother mute as well?” Grace asked in return, applying something seashell pink to the soft place in her neck, underneath her chin.

Dina considered this. No one had ever thought to ask her such a thing before. Most people assumed that Christopher’s silence was a part of his deafness and that he was addled in the head as well. “I don’t think so,” she said, “I think he just doesn’t like to speak very often. His voice sounds strange when he talks to other people and he can see it in their face.”

“His voice doesn’t sound strange to you?” Grace squeezed something fragrant from a glass bottle on to her pursed fingers and then pressed them to her earlobes and the V of her collarbones.

“He doesn’t sound like anything to me,” Dina said uncertainly. She had never been asked before to explain they way she spoke with Christopher, she simply did and no one else had ever seemed very interested in it. Grace looked at her searchingly in the mirror.

“Has Florence ever tried to teach you?”

Dina did not know exactly what Grace meant by this. Auntie Florence was certainly not the one to go to if one was looking for teaching. There was something painful in the way she struggled over the words in books and drew her ciphers all round, deliberate and slow. “No,” she said slowly, shaking her head.

Grace nodded, as if this confirmed an idea she had long held. “That may be for the best,” she said. Grace turned for the first time and smiled at Dina over her shoulder. “Do you know that I named you?” she said, “when you were just a little baby?”

Dina had not known that.

“Do you like your name?” Grace continued curiously.

“Yes,” Dina said, “there are two Mollys at school and four Sarahs, but there are no Dinas at all. Except for me.”

“I thought special girls should have special names.”

“What about Christopher?” asked Dina, who thought that surely if anyone deserved a special name, it was her brother.

“He was named for a friend I once had,” Grace answered airily. Dina desperately wanted to ask about that other, long-ago Christopher, but she restrained herself and only sat very still, watching Grace apply soft white powder to her face.

“Did he die?” Dina asked finally, unable to hold it in any longer.

Grace shook her head, “not so I’ve heard,” she said.

***

The children did not actually receive their gifts until the very last day that Grace was there. She called them up to her room with a pale smile on her face, she was wearing something fashionable and pale green. Her resemblance to a spiky growing thing was even more pronounced than usual. Two small brown packages had been neatly arranged on the bed and she stood by the window, gesturing them forward with a nod of her head.

Dina tore at the hard corners of the paper eagerly, while Christopher decorously unfolded the complex lines and folds. The package was clearly far too small to be a real gun, but both of the children were visibly disappointed to see that there was only just a pair of identical candles in each. Grace did not seem disturbed by their lack of excitement, she simply sat down on the edge of the bed and watched as they turned the candles over in their hands experimentally.

There was a small, square razor underneath the pale tallow of the candle; Christopher fingered it thoughtfully. “It’s not a toy present,” Grace told them, “it’s a useful present.”

“How?” Dina asked, picking at the white wick. Grace took the candle from her hand and set it upright on the bedspread.

“Mama is getting older,” she said, drawing her fingernails gently down the soft sides of the candle. “Aunt Florence as well, they won’t always be here to take care of you. You’re nearly grown now, but you might need my help someday. You light this candle and I’ll come to you.”

Dina knit her brows, “but how?” she asked again.

“Blood calls to blood,” Grace told her, “most of the work’s done for you already. As for the rest, I’ll show you what you need to do.” Grace paused and looked, for the first time, slightly uncertain. “I could show you many things, if you would like,” she continued, softly.

Dina looked unavoidably to her brother, a cross expression flittered briefly across Grace’s face. Christopher took Dina’s hand in his own. “Do you want to take me with you?” Dina asked.

“I thought I might,” Grace nodded.

Dina squeezed and squeezed Christopher’s hand until it became painful, but he held fast and did not grimace. “What about my brother?” she said.

“I have some money,” Grace told them neutrally, “enough to send him to a special school, a very good one. He would have many books to read and there are things called telescopes there that can see the night sky up close.”

Christopher rarely asked Dina to ask or tell others things for him. He did not wish to make his sister his translator and, besides, he rarely had anything too important to say to anyone. But now, he asked “why can’t I go with you?”

Obediently, Dina related his question and the sides of Grace’s mouth creased down. “I think you are a smart boy,” Grace said, addressing herself to Christopher, who did not react, even though Dina had hastily signed her words into his palms. “You understand the nature of the world, it’s only your sickness that separates you. Your sister is not the same as you.” Dina tapped this into his skin and his hand curled up underneath her.

“She is trying to toss you aside,” Dina insisted angrily to her brother, Christopher shook his head slowly.

“No. She thinks that I’m strange because I can’t hear but you are strange…strange like Mama and Aunt Florence and…and Grace.”

“It’s all the same kind of strange!” Dina could feel the blood growing hot and fervent in her cheeks.

“I know,” Christopher assured her, bending his face until their eyes met, “there’s no one in the world more like you than me.”

All this time that they were talking among themselves, Grace simply watched them and said nothing. Eventually, Dina turned back to her and shook her head. “I won’t leave my brother,” she said.

“You may change your mind,” Grace cautioned her.

“Maybe,” Dina admitted, “but not today.” Dina pushed the candles along the slick of the bedspread towards Grace, who pushed them right back.

“It’s still a thing worth knowing,” she said, curling Dina’s fingers around the circle of the candles.

***

Christopher and Dina watched from the top of the stairs as Grace walked briskly down the front walk towards a waiting taxi. On the landing behind them, Florence watched as well with something unreadable in her face.

“You should have gone with her, girl,” she said finally. Stubborn Dina did not turn around. “There’s nothing in this house for a growing girl.” Dina could not help the agonizing slowness of her aunt’s gait as she made her way to the stair where the children waited. “You are just like her, you know.” Florence said, bending down to whisper unnecessarily in her ear.

“I’m not like her at all,” Dina said fiercely, a scowl knitting her face darkly. “I’m not mean and strange and frightening and I wouldn’t leave my family behind and go away forever.”

Florence laughed at the girl and touched her fine, dark hair. “Just you wait, little one.”

APN: Okay. It's offical: I am no longer even pretending to have period-appropriate dialouge. And I'm pretty sure the timeline is totally fucked. But I no longer care!

Chapter Thirteen: A Low-Down Wicked Heart

Andrew Reed. March 3, 1957.

Andrew had started to think of the bench as his own and was faintly irritated when he found it occupied. On such days, he often stood at the end of the bench and shifted his weight from one foot to another until the sitting person began to watch him awkwardly out of the corner of his or her eye and then began to scoot unobtrusively down the length of the bench and then, finally got up entirely and walked off vaguely as though they suddenly wanted to stand. Albert would then settle himself on the bench as he usually did and then carefully unpack the lunch that Nanie had made for him, unfolding a white handkerchief on his lap.

Across the street there was a small park with just one swing set and one of those metal dishes that you sat in while someone else spinned you around. When Andrew first arrived at the bench in the morning, the park was generally empty, but as the day wore on, especially around three o’clock, children filtered in slowly. They did not seem to be bothered by the limited accommodations and shouted and ran, weaving brightly between dull metal and green grass.

Andrew liked children, he always had. Children were easy. They required so little of, they wore their hearts on the outside, transparent and hollow like they were made of glass. It had made him popular as a boy and to this day made him seem genial and innocent. Andrew didn’t think he’d ever been really innocent, though.

Andrew’s mother, a woman he had re-invented as a golden-haired angel of the house, used to tell him that he had a wicked heart and it was going to lead him straight to hell. Her own heart burned inside her like a restless coal, lines of red criss-crossed her body painfully, swelling and exploding when she wept or fought or punished him. Andrew knew it for a fact, he could see it.

Andrew’s mother raised him all alone in the back of a black Ford across the roads that scissored the vast landscape. He grew up with the blue, endless sky filling up his eyes and leaned his name writing in the dirt on the car’s slick sides. His mother was not religious, not really, but the fiery torment of hell had a special hold on her imagination. For his part, Andrew couldn’t imagine a hell any bigger or any worse than the inside of that black Ford, rolling ceaseless down featureless highways. He left her when he was thirteen and half and never saw her again. She might be dead by now. He hoped she was.

Nanie had grown up among many children and she did not entirely like the idea of having a large family of her own, but Andrew insisted. He was hoping for a boy and he got three girls before he finally hit it lucky. Not that his girls weren’t beautiful, but there was something in a man that longed for a son.

His sandwich was tomato and cheese and no meat. There hadn’t been any meat for a while. Andrew knew her tricks, bean soup for the last three nights, oatmeal instead of cereal for the kids. She hadn’t said anything yet, but simply looked at him in that waiting way of hers. He had not intended to lie, he rarely did. He had thought after that first day that he would find a job eventually. He had even picked through the want ads in an industrious sort of way. But more and more, he fell to sitting on his bench and contemplating the ebb and flow of humanity all around him.

The men in the offices on the hill behind often walked along the shady avenue directly across from the bus stop bench. He observed carefully the cut and color of their suits. He could be a dandy, sometimes, and he liked log his impressions for future reference. Sometimes, women would join them and they would nestle one arm around the S curve of their backs, charcoal, black, striped hats, pressed flushed to colorful backs. These women were not wives. They did not have wife hair or wife shoes or wife smiles. Something eager and hunting stretched out languorously in the lines of their legs and the set of their pretty jaws. Andrew read them like a book as they paused on the sidewalk, half-turned, reaching out for some glib lover trailing them. The thing that made them attractive; the thing that made them unsuitable. They were tragedies, really. But so were most creatures.

Andrew always thought that when he had children, he would be good to them. It was harder, though, than he thought it would be. Seeing the dark, ugly little things in them, moving like worms in the bloodstreams. He found himself wanting to punish them for things they hadn’t done yet, just for what they were.

His son, who wore his name but failed to inhabit it, was weak and pliable. There was more grit, more steel, more of Andrew in all of the girls. Last year, they’d gotten him a beagle puppy and kept it in a little coop in the backyard. But it was a frail and ailing thing and simply sat in the shade of it’s house, watching with liquid eyes and not moving. “That thing is sick,” Andrew had said, in his son’s doorway. Andy Jr. was hanging off the end of his bed with the bright pages of a comic book stretched out in front of him. He jerked once at the sound of his father’s voice and Andrew could see the hard spike of bright fear jutting through him. The boy was lit up like a Christmas tree with his fear.

The shotgun was nearly bigger than him (he was nine, but small for his age), he held it awkwardly in both his arms. Like it was a baby. The boy vibrated with uncertainty, Andrew rested his hands on his shoulders and he could feel the electric sting of it through both their skins. “You do your job now,” he said, feeling the pointed, fluting bones that made up the boy’s shoulders. He swallowed heavily and awkwardly shifted the weapon in his hands. Spitting, hissing like a snake, it seemed to go off by itself, twisting violently out of his grasp to do some strange mischief of its own.

Andy Jr. was no crack shot, that was for damn certain. The dog howled in that mournful, questing beagle way and scraped at the dirt with just it’s front paws. There was a sharp intake of breath from the boy and, at the same time, he dropped the rifle in the dirt. “Hey!” Andrew said, squeezing his shoulder sternly, “that’s dangerous.” The boy stumbled back against him, as if seeking comfort, but Andrew was motionless, as still and smooth as a rock’s face. He bent down to whisper in his son’s ear “you finish your work,” he said.

Andy Jr stepped forward, away from him, his eyes growing huger and huger as if to wrap more fully around the scene in front of him. He braced the gun awkwardly against his shoulder, Andrew knew he would have bruises tomorrow. His second shot was even worse than his first and it sent up a little brown geyser of dirt. The dog howled. The boy began to cry. His last shot was haphazard, through tightly closed eyes. He tucked his chin into his collar and turned his face away. Blood intermingled with the pale dust until it was a slow, dark brown ooze.

Nanie watched from the kitchen window, disapproving. Her cigarette smoke (a rare indulgence) drifted out over the white flowers planted in the window box and drew gray shapes in the air. But she did not say anything as he boys returned inside, as Andrew led his son to the wood and glass cabinet where the gun properly belonged, as he lifted the boy up to the sink and turned the water on. She stared, though, at his broad palms, moving in the water, pinning smaller fingers in between them. Dirt colored the water and drifted heavily down in the dark mouth of the drain.

“Boys need things like that,” Andrew told her later, “they need them to become men.” Andrew had seen his own father shoot a man once, when he was fourteen years old. He had not looked much like a man, though. His hands were curled and cold-blackened and they picked restlessly at invisible bugs on his person.

“He was messed in the head,” Andrew’s father told him dispassionately, his face sharp geometry in the dying sunlight. “He hurt that Fredricks girl over town way.” Andrew observed the dead man with interest. There was not much blood and the wound was invisible inside the voluminous layers of his clothing. But there was some queer, singular quality to his stillness that would have told Andrew that he was not sleeping, even if he had not watched him father pick him off from forty yards away like an ailing cow.

Seeing this macabre tableau, Andrew’s father offered him a rare bit of comfort, draping his long arm around the slope of his shoulders. They walked all the way back through the rushing grasses in that fashion, only breaking apart when the hot, red smell of the chili Mother was making reached their nostrils.

One Monday, during the long uncertain period after Andrew had eaten all of his lunch and before the fateful ticking of six o’clock, a girl sat down on the end of the bench. She had blonde hair and green eyes and she wore a suit that was very nearly, but not exactly fashionable. She had a white hat and white gloves to match. “I see you here every day,” she said, folding her hands in her laps like sleeping doves. She did give him her name, which was fine by Andrew, who preferred to withhold his as well. “What do you do?” she asked him.

Andrew smiled. He was, he knew, a handsome man. And even if he hadn’t been, there were ways of appearing to be more than one was. “What did you see me doing?” he volleyed back. The woman did not blush or avert her eyes.

“Nothing very much,” she said steadily.

“There you have it.”

The blonde woman sat back, some uneasy electricity in her hands made it hard to hold them still, the touched, folded over one another. She raised one finger to touch her neck, in the place where it met up with the hollow of her ear. She had a man in a suit and hat, maybe one who walked past the bench every day. And Andrew knew that he was only a curiosity with a charming smile. She was a nice girl-or at least she thought herself so-when he fucked her on a motel bed with broken springs, he would be careful to close the blinds first.

Andrew’s very first kiss had been when he was fifteen years old, with a maid in the pantry of the kitchen while his mother arranged pink cookies on a silver tray four feet away. Her name was Gloria and she’d been hired to help out over the holiday season. His mother had a mania for entertaining. Bored and educated beyond her own good, she was sharp as the edge of a diamond and her husband quite sensibly recognized that she required tasks to occupy her hands and her mind. Statesman and senators and men with movie-reel smiles filled up the dining room tables. The ladies on their arms glimmered with a jewel’s hollow sheen. Andrew preferred to stay in his room.

Gloria pressed her hand to his mouth and hissed “shh” in her little mouse voice. Her skin was damp and urgent and it tasted like lye soap and the turkey she had been basting earlier. She let him undo the small, jet buttons on the back of her uniform that looked just like little beetles were creeping up on her, but would let him go no further. The cookies were for shit, too.

The blonde woman, of course, did not ask him who his first kiss had been, or whether he was married or single, or had ten children or none at all or lived around here or was secretly a prince from another land. She didn’t care, with her weary green eyes and her carefully “done” blonde hair. He would have told her if she’d asked of course: he was, he was, he was.

He didn’t believe in keeping secrets.

APN: This and the next chapter add up to about one chapter of ordinary size. I don't know if I'm just getting towards the end and am burning out, or if these characters simply don't require as much space. Hmm...

Chapter Fourteen: The Study of Atoms

Danny Meredith. The End, 1944.

He died slow.

Well, as far as war wounds went. That was the worst part about it: you could be walking along, keeping to your own, and suddenly knocked off your feet or have no feet at all anymore. It was clearly useless to try to take him to a hospital, even if there was one in any kind of reasonable distance, and he was grateful for that. He would not have wanted to expire in a crisp white bed where everything smelled like sick and rot and death. That was the worst part.

So he simply lay back and lay very still, propped up against what had been a building not too long ago, but was now just a wall. Or a part of one. Rich had bandaged his throat with what he had in the med kit, but he could feel it seeping through. There was an awful lot of blood in a person’s throat.

He couldn’t talk, was the only thing. And he would have liked to. He would have liked to talk to Rich, but he’d always liked talking to Rich. From the first time they’d met, he’d known that here was a man who spoke his language.

He felt like he should probably rest his mind on his family, away across the ocean, and the things he’d left undone. But he couldn’t help but think that the sky was so immense and grey and crumpled here and there with the edges of darker clouds. It looked like rain, maybe later this afternoon.

Rich lifted up the edge of the white bandage very slightly. Danny could hear the slight, sucking sound it made against his skin. Rich did not say anything, but only creased his brows and Danny understand. He wanted to tell him that it was alright, or anything else that was nice and untrue and smooth out the lines on his face. But he mouth worked fruitlessly, pink spit collected on his lips like terrible seafoam.

Looking small, Rich slumped up against the wall beside him and turned his face towards the sky as well. Danny’s hands still worked and he took Rich’s squeezing and squeezing until it must have been painful, but Rich did not seem to mind and he did not look away from the sky.

Danny thought maybe, if he could have spoken, he might have told Rich that he loved him. But most probably not. It was not the sort of thing they said to one another. Theirs was a relationship of edges. Clear delineations and the space in between where they struggled to breathe, to see, to live.

For the first three months of their acquaintance, they ate and slept and marched and shot and kept watch together, but they did not touch. Not even in the easy, congratulatory way of other men. Other men, for whom there was no danger in a hand that lingered on a back, or the accidental collision of limbs. Drawing close to him, it was as if Danny could feel the press of the air between them, as if it was a solid thing. If he brushed him with a coat or the edge of his hand, his skin burned where he had been. The first time they kissed it was terrifying. He thought that people at the center of a bomb’s blast must feel a similar kind of way.

They never spoke about it, the buzz and the hurt and the bomb that lived between the two of them. They talked instead about their homes and Danny told him about his brothers and his sister and the tree at the edge of the property where he used to sit with his books and wonder at the bigness of the world. And then Rich would smile in that hazy way he had, as if listening to something just out of normal earshot.

It wasn’t the sort of thing they said, but Danny might have told him he loved him anyway.

It hardly mattered now, though. He pressed his fingers to his throat, the bandage was saturated, his fingers came away a bright, terrifying red. Staring at them, he had a moment of blind, wild panic. He wanted to run, to tear at his throat, find the bullet living there and pull it out with his fingers. But, like a wave, that feeling soon ebbed, and he leaned back against the wall again, felt the coarse face of the bricks and the slick cool of the mortar in between them.

Rich had gotten shot in a field. It was in his shoulder, right above his heart. His face had gone white and still and he hadn’t said anything and Danny, kneeling at his side, couldn’t say anything either. He just leaned down and listened to the galloping, frenetic beat of his head. When he drew back, there was blood on his ear and his face and his hands. He must have tried to staunch the wound, but he didn’t remember any such thing. Just Rich’s heart, pounding at his chest like the sound of horses hooves.

It’d taken him three weeks to recover in the hospital. Danny did not visit him, though the other men did, tucking their helmets under their arms and running sweaty fingers through sweaty hair. They laughed with him and teased him and gave him nicknames and they left him with a smile on his face. But it was not the one that Danny knew. Danny came sometimes at night, when he was sleeping, and sat in a chair at the edge of his bed and tried to speak, but couldn’t. Sometimes, he wondered if Rich wasn’t faking sleep. Either way, the quiet lay too heavily on the both of them.

“I don’t want you to die,” Danny told him, when he came back with a small, almost unobtrusive white pad on his shoulder. It sounded ridiculous as soon as he said it, but it was the truth. He wanted to take Rich somewhere far away. An island, maybe, where it was all sandy brown and butter yellow. Or a tall tower or the deepest part of the ocean. He wanted to keep him somewhere secret and safe and know for a certainty that the arrows of the world would bounce off his skin like it was made of steel. He wanted Rich to live forever.

It seemed like it was always winter there, always white, always cold. He slept on the ground and thought of his mother, who knew the trick of things like that. She was magic and he was her son, he looked like her, more than any of the other children. Even Nanie, who had their father’s red hair and kind, hazy features and his tender disposition as well. He thought about deer and blood and the his breath freezing wet and cold in the air in front of him.

Rich slept with his head tucked into his shoulder like a cat. He looked fragile when he slept. Bullets would go through him as through tissue paper or butter. Danny didn’t think that a deer was enough. Papa, after all, carried with him a lingering weakness left over from his sickness. A defect in the heart, the doctors said. A deer wasn’t nearly enough.

“My ma is magic,” he told Rich one night. He traced the angry edge of the pink scar tissue that had sprung up on Rich’s shoulder. It looked a little bit like a C, if you tilted your head.

“Yeah?” Rich had answered, lighting a match against the heel of his boot. Danny could never figure out how he accomplished the trick, and he refused to reveal his secrets. Danny nodded.

“Yeah. She knew spells to make you happy, to make you sad, to make you have a baby or to lose one you didn’t want. She knew how to save your life.”

To this, Rich said nothing. He did not like to discuss his wound, or the field, or the warm, creeping feeling of blood pooling underneath him. “No use to me,” he said glibly, blowing a gray stream of smoke into the air above them. “I’m planning on living forever anyway.”

Danny cut his hair while he slept. The blood was harder. He rested his hand flat over Rich’s eyes, the way Ma used to when they were small and too rambunctious to go to bed. “Sleep, sleep,” he said, and to his mild surprise, Rich did. Witchery, it seemed, should require more of him. Danny cut his finger, squeezed the skin together carefully until a single black bead, like might go on a lady’s dress, rested in the center of the tuft of hair.

Danny kept the hair and the blood wrapped in a handkerchief for two weeks. He was afraid it would work and afraid that it wouldn’t and he reached into his pocket from time to time to feel the prickly edges of it, the good white cotton of the handkerchief. It was the boy with the bullet in him that pushed him to action.

Older than them by a year, but he seemed younger because he had these big eyes with long lashes, like a girl’s. A bullet hit him in the side, right underneath his lungs, but it didn’t kill him, only lingered there, turning his body against itself. It started to swell and grow hot to the touch and then it went pale yellow-y green and begin to stink something awful. It took his mind before he went, and he died calling out, by turns, for a woman named Charlotte, and cursing someone who he knew only as a “dirty cocksucker.”

Danny could hear his wild screams while he swallowed the talisman, as his mother might have called it. It didn’t taste like anything in particular. He didn’t feel anything different. The next day, a bullet took him down and red gushed over his front in a laughably impossible font. He stared at it, amazed, for a moment. It couldn’t have been his. There wasn’t that much of anything in him.

“I don’t want you to die,” Rich said. He sounded like he might be crying. Danny didn’t turn to look, didn’t want to see it if he was. Danny considered instead what Rich might look as an old man. He thought he’d be distinguished, with his Roman nose and broad, striking cheekbones. He was beautiful, Rich was.

Towards the very end, where thoughts trailed one another around the inside of Danny’s head with no apparent rhyme or reason and it seemed that he could taste something black on his tongue; Rich slumped over, like he was the dead man and laid his head in Danny’s lap. His arms were slow and sluggish, but he would have liked to reach up and touch his hair again, his face, the scar on his shoulder. He moved his mouth and said nothing at all. His lower lip cracked and began to bleed. He had a sudden urge to laugh: could there possibly be any blood left in him?

“I love you,” Rich whispered, his voice flattening and muting against the crinkle of Danny’s uniform. It seemed, somehow, that a piece of the world had collapsed. Like the lonesome, terrible peace that comes just after the explosion.

Danny Meredith died slow, and he was grateful for the time.

APN: Pretty much everything about this chapter turned out to be very different from my original plan. Mainly because I never intended make Danny anything like a main character. But now he is, and I rather liked him, while he was around. One of the few people in the story who isn't bound up in helplessness or selfishness. Or total craz-i-tude.

"Take This Meanness Out of Me..."

2007-11-27T09:07:34Z

So here's the deal: I'm cheap.

And broke.

(also: lazy).

With the upcoming gift-orientated Holiday, I have struggled to reconcile these traits with my desire to continue to supply high quality Christmas presents for my friends and acquaintances (read: fuzzy pink tiaras and candy). If only there was something that I could offer to my friends that was relatively easy and as close to free as possible...by Jove I think I might have it!

I shall write stories for my friends!

And that's where you guys come in, if you'd like a story, please just comment or e-mail or message or whatever to tell me and feel free to tell me what you'd like to read. I shall do your bidding, whether you're seeking a chronicle of the super awesome adventure of a troupe of space-going ninja cucumbers or the simple, tragic love story of a man and his upright, side-by-side refrigerator.

The stories will short (between 500 and 1,000 words, unless inspiration carries me away). They will be yours alone, I will not reproduce them anywhere and they will be printed on festive holiday paper and I'll write little messages on them and possibly attempt to render bits of holly and Christmas trees in the margins(for my LJ friends who I've never met, I'll e-mail your stories with stern instructions to print them on themed paper).And then we shall eat candy canes and drink egg nog, and oh, how we shall laugh...

It'll be so cute you'll puke up a lung, I swear.

So, please comment, I'd like to do a whole bunch of these because it will make me feel like less of a louse for regularly missing birthdays, anniversaries and other significant days all year round.

“Nog” is not in Microsoft Word’s Dictionary. Possibly because it’s one of the those words that you only have to say, like, three times before it starts sounding less like an actual thing and more like the name of a wise, elderly cave man. Noooooooooog.

"A Little Tepid Pool/Drying Inward from the Edge..."

2007-11-26T06:04:25Z

Chapter Nine: A Smell Like Moonlight

Nanie Reed. October, 1946.

“He’s rich,” said Kathy, who didn’t mince words and had started smoking during the summer they had spent apart. She left a perfect red circle all around the white end of the cigarette. Nanie regarded her smilingly, and then turned slightly to the left to observe the man she was referring to.

He was dancing very close with a dark-haired woman; they were turned such that she could see the look of rapt affection on the woman’s face and her open, pink mouth. Full of laughing teeth. But she could see nothing of the man save the back of his head and the slick of his hair.

“Rich?” she quirked an eyebrow at Kathy, who nodded and blew out a mouthful of smoke in a long stream. Kathy looked to the left and then to the right and tilted her head down conspiratorially.

“Citrus,” she hissed, in a low, cat-rasp whisper. Nanie smiled and looked again at the back of the man’s head. He shifted and stretched one arm out, his partner fell into it with all the grace of a heap of laundry.

“Citrus,” Nanie said, pondering.

“He did something with planes during the war,” Kathy rested her elbow in the hollow of her hip and stared out of the scattering of dancers with a proprietary ease. “No doubt he has many a tale of exciting derring do.” Nanie laughed out loud and Kathy grinned in a very small way. On the dance floor, the man leaned down and whispered something in the woman’s ear. She laughed again, and Nanie and Kathy could hear the loud trilling of it. Touching her hip once, briefly, the man left her and moved across towards the open door. As he passed by Nanie and Kathy, he smiled. Nanie thought later that she would not have been able to recall any specific features of his, should she be asked, only an overwhelming notion of genial good looks. “Evening, ladies,” he said, pressing one finger briefly to the side of his head.

***

“She was telling tales about me.”

In the doorway, Nanie could smell distant water. It was fall and turning to cold at night. Already, the stars had acquired a distant, frosty sheen. In a small, wordless way, she lamented the passing of the summer heat. She did not turn around.

“Well, what did she have to say about me?” insisted the handsome man, grinning. She could hear him grinning and she could hear the tender hitch of his breath in his chest. He shuffled forward slightly and rested his hand on the door’s wooden frame. Nanie did not say anything right away, but simply stretched out her hand into the dark, as if to sink her skin deep into it, like rainfall.

“Nothing very much,” Nanie answered eventually, smiling. She turned around to face him. Even up close, his face seemed to blur and fade leaving only an impression of white teeth and shining eyes behind. “Just the things you did in the war.”

“I flew in the war,” he said softly, Nanie nodded.

“My brothers who fought, they don’t like to speak of it.” As usual, Nanie did not mention her brother Danny, who spoke of nothing at all now. When Kathy had come home from that long summer away with her slim new face and her sun-brightened hair, she had tried to wrap her arms around her like old times, like children. And Nanie had shrugged her off, struggling out from under the circle of her arms with a sudden desperation that was new and frightening.

The man slackened slightly against the door until his arm bowed weakly. “I was shot down, once” he said, with no discernable expression. He offered this small bit of information to her with a kind of casual bewilderment, like it was a chocolate candy and he couldn‘t imagine why anyone should want it. “Over France.”

Nanie, who had had quite enough of the war long ago, regarded him thoughtfully for a few moments. “My name is Nanie,” she said, “and I’d like to dance.”

“I’m Andrew,” the man answered, his smile crinkling up the edges of his face becomingly, “and I’d like to dance with you.”

And they did.

***

The lake caught the starlight and reflected it back up towards the sky. “Kathy says your people have something to do with citrus.”

Andrew nodded, picking apart a waxy, crimson leaf. He peeled away the red portion and left the middle, black and skeletal. “My father grows oranges,” he said. “It’s much warmer where I come from, of course.”

Nanie looked at him and the starlight lit her face, “tell me about it?”

Andrew twirled the remains of the leaf between two fingers, it made a soft twipping sound in the darkness. Nanie was smiling at him in a way he couldn’t help but love. “Well, the nights last longer there. They draw out and turn gold, like butterscotch toffee. There’s rows and rows of trees in my family’s orchard and if you go out there at night and sit down among them, you can smell them, like flowers and something yellow and stinging.” He dropped the remainder of the leaf to the ground and left it behind him. “It was my favorite place in the world to be alone.”

Nanie shook her head in wonderment. She could imagine such a place, of course, just as she could imagine Sleeping Beauty’s castle or St. George’s dragon. “Why did you ever leave?” she asked, in wonderment.

Andrew looked into her pointed, rapt face. “Why, to meet you, of course,” he said, and smiled his white smile. Nanie smiled back, like the slow bloom of a flower. He pulled her close to him, he could feel the edges of her through her dress and the heat that came off of her like a candle’s flame. “I always thought…” he whispered into her ear, “that, at night, in the orange grove, the smell it had…it must be a smell like moonlight. It was the best smell I could imagine. But now I think maybe that best smell, that moonlight smell, is you.” Her hair brushed his face and he could see her skin growing redder and redder against him.

Nanie Meredith had her first kiss at the edge of a millpond. Behind her, a maple tree dying in shades of purple and red bloomed briefly green and then back to red again. A huge, consuming, exploding red. Wind moved across the water, leaves fell to the earth.

,center>***</center>

“I’m sorry,” he said, after the first time, when they were curled in the center of his bed in the cheap little apartment he rented on a bad side of town. “I didn’t know it would hurt you like that.” This was a lie.

Nanie shook her head against him. The hair on the back of her neck was wet with sweat and it was cooling rapidly in swirls of winter wind that eddied in from the open window. He was warm-blooded creature, he said. “It didn’t hurt so bad,” she assured him, “it was mostly surprise, my mother never told me…” she shut her mouth against his skin and smiled, shame-faced. It seemed she was always stopping herself from acting like a girl these days.

Andrew picked up her hand, tapped each one of fingers, as though he was counting them or attempting to assure himself of their existence. He was always doing things like that, tracing the edges of parts of her as if to delineate the boundaries between them. Nanie watched him with fascination. “You make me happy,” he said finally, looking into her flushed face. This was not a lie.

Nanie wondered if now was perhaps the right time to say “I love you,” to him. She had thought about it many times, but it had never seemed quite appropriate. He had never said the words himself. Uncertain, Nanie said nothing at all and rested her forehead against his skin, feeling the rush of his warm blood in his chest.

Andrew did not know why he said it. It was the truth, certainly. Or at least a kind of truth. If there was anything that Andrew had learned so far in his life, it was the enumerable variation of truth. “I think I died in France,” was what he said, and he could not think why, except that he liked the shape of her hands and the honest, aching way she looked at him.

Nanie, who had died herself once, in a cherry orchard, did not question this, but simply nodded. “I just laid there,” Andrew told her, the words tumbling aimlessly out of his mouth. It almost seemed that he was watching himself from above, with a kind of horrified fascination. “My plane was on fire, but I got out and I just…laid down in the grass. It was the tall, tall yellow grass and I couldn’t do anything but stare up at the sky. The bluest sky I’ve ever seen.”

“My brother died,” Nanie whispered. It was the first time she’d said such a thing aloud in years. “He was shot. In the throat. No chance for last words that way.” Andrew looked at her appraisingly. He knew, from the set of her mouth and the staring of her eyes and something else, some nameless thing that she exuded like perfume what she wanted him to say.

“You miss him?” he asked. For a moment, Nanie said nothing. She went very still, only shivering very slightly like a deer in a hunter’s sights. And then, fiercely, redly, she began to cry. He wrapped his arms around her, the wind cooled her skin, but he was warm blooded and he kept it from her.

***

There was no money. It was not a lie, exactly, the things he said about the oranges and the warm place he came from. She would not call it a lie. The things he said, they seemed to transform the world, if just for a little while. And while they sometimes weren’t, in the very strictest sense of the word, true…she would not call them lies. But that did not change the hard, immutable truth that there was no money.

And Andrew tried, he genuinely did. But he was unsuited to the jobs that their small town had to offer. Too clever and too unwilling to shut his mouth and toe the line. “It got me in trouble during the war,” he admitting, coming home after being fired yet again, “and it’s getting me in trouble now.”

Nanie understood this and she nodded and crossed the meat off the grocery list and awkwardly attempted to fix the ripped seam in her second-best dress. Nanie understood survival and when she needed help, she called on her mother.

Dina Meredith did not like her son-in-law, she distrusted his white smile and his handsome face. She saw something slippery and secret inside his heart and she had tried to tell her daughter this. But Nanie was a headstrong girl who had been very sad for a very long time. When she came over and sat at the table and did not cry, Dina sat across from her, hands clasped and told her how she was a grown woman now and it was a long, difficult row to hoe.

Kathy got pregnant a year and a half after she married a quiet, unassuming man who did something mysterious that afforded them a house in the new suburb and a new car. She showed her bulge to Nanie, who touched it with a kind of nervous fascination. It was just barely beginning to pull at the buttons on her jacket.

“I think what we need is some distance,” Andrew said to her at night, with the wind blowing high and cold over them. Beside him, Nanie said nothing.

***

Little Marla, who was still unsteady on her feet and had golden hair for some reason that Nanie could not fathom, tugged on the hem of her mother’s skirt until Nanie bent down to look into her face.

“Daddy says,” she announced in her off-kilter, little girl proclamation voice, “that he’s going to go away on a train. He came here on a train, he says.”

Nanie wobbled slightly, unsteady on her haunches and stared into her daughter’s eyes. Which were much like his. “That’s not going to happen,” she said. “Daddy’s telling stories.”

Marla regarded her skeptically. “It didn’t sound like a story,” she argued.

“Daddy’s never do,” Nanie told her, straightening her slick, yellow braid.

***

Nanie did not know the woman’s name, or the color of her hair or whether she was pretty or plain. But she did think she would be pretty. The things she knew of the woman were the outside-edge things. Her smell, her pink lipstick, the sharp spike of her handwriting. Not the woman, simply the outline of her.

Andrew, looking at her in the lamp’s dim light, knew from her face the things she wanted him to say. “I don’t love her,” he said. This was the truth. Nanie looked at him, her eyes looked broken. He felt an immediately, vague stab of hurt. He did not like the lax look of her hands folded helplessly in her lap. “It was stupid, a stupid mistake. I don’t know why I did it.” This was a lie. Andrew knew why he did things like this, why he fucked women in bar bathrooms and failed to show up to work after the second day: because he could. Because it felt good. It felt like laying down in the tall grass and staring up at the blue sky.

Andrew knelt down before her and bent his head. He looked like he was praying. This was his intention. He took her troubling hands into his own. He could feel the want pulsing in her skin. She wanted so badly to forgive him, wanted so badly for this to be as nothing. Vapor. Something they could brush aside as they got on with their happy lives. “I love you more than anything in the world,” he said. This was the truth.

Nanie sobbed once, brokenly, and he knew that he had cracked her. She only looked solid. She was glass and fissures zig-zagged across the surface of her. “This will never happen again,” he told her.

That was a lie.

***

A part of him thought he couldn’t blame her if she was. After all, he did what he wanted. It was only fair, said a part of him. But the larger part of him was burning. He was sick to his stomach, he couldn’t sleep at night and he prowled the edges of his yard, drawing invisible property lines in the green grass.

He did not ask her, not at first, but simply observed her. He watched the sheen of her hair, the way her face glowed even when she wasn’t smiling. He watched the flutter of her hands on their children’s backs and necks and hair. Something had put her heart at ease, he could see the beat of it as her skin was translucent entirely.

She smiled at him, and her smiled begged nakedly for his praise. Or his forgiveness.

“You goddamn whore,” he whispered to her at night. She cried without making any sounds.

***

She wanted to often, but had never actually asked him what he really did in the war. She was not even totally certain he’d even been in the war, let alone falling from the sky like some terrible comet. Oh, she could have pressed him, asked just where in France was he shot down? How did he get out, after all? When did he learn to fly a plane?

But Nanie knew very well that this was not the point. He had been a traveling guitar player, a trapper in the far north, a sailor on the ocean and, of course, heir to a citrus empire. Details and accuracy did not matter in the world of his stories and indeed, had she come to him with his discrepancies, she knew the way that he would look at her. As though she was speaking some other language entirely.

And even though she knew there was nothing like truth it in, she could not help but get caught in his tales. Trussed up like a Christmas goose in the waving yellow of the grass, the high whistle of a train, the sharp-sweet wet smell of oranges on the night air.

She laid her head down on his chest as night and listened to the place deep in the middle of him where his words started and she loved them. Even though it wasn’t real truth-just his truth-she loved his words and they thought they were the best and most beautiful part of him.

This was something Andrew knew instinctively about her. He stroked her hair and told her about the time he lived in the high, far mountains all through a long and terrible winter. She was very still, she was listening, she was contented.

,center>***</center>

“Do you love me?” he asked her once, and only once. After a fight they had not finished, but interrupted with love-making instead.

“Yes,” Nanie said. This was the truth, he could see it shining through her like sunlight through faded curtains.

“Do I make you happy?” he asked.

“Yes.” She said. This was a lie. This was a lie for the first time in their life together. And he did not see it in her face because for a man who lived in lies, he had a strange and tremendous faith in the honestly of others.

“You’re the best thing I’ve ever found,” he told her, rolling over to face the wall. Behind him, Nanie contemplated his back, his dark hair, the outline of his profile against the pillow. She thought, if someone were to ask her later, she could not describe him at all. Just, perhaps, a general impression of good looks and a smiling mouth.

“Happy,” she said, and it was like a sigh in a heady wind.

APN: Hmm...Andrew turned out way different than I had originally planned. He bears little resembalence to the man who inspired him, but I have certainly known men of his type. Less bastard-y, though.

Chapter 10: Chapter Nine: Grave Dirt

Grace Collington. 1897-1914

Mama was having a bad day. She was lying down on the couch in the sitting room with a white towel over her eyes. Grace had watched her uncertainly from the doorway, but she waved her away and said she was fine and simply had to lie down for a while. Mama slept a good deal, much more than Grace did, though she sometimes tried to lay down beside her but soon got bored and got up to play outside in the trees and the dirt. Mama didn’t like that, but she rarely prevented her play.

So when the doorbell rang, Grace decided to be a good girl and get the door so her mama wouldn’t have to get up. The woman on the doorstep was very tall, or at least she seemed that way. Later, Grace would decide that she looked like a statue, like a mermaid with her brown luggage a pool around her feet. She was wearing a green dress and her hair was done up very carefully underneath her hat. There was nothing improper about the way she looked, but there was something…uncertain about her. She did not scare Grace, but Grace thought that some people might be scared of her.

She had blonde hair just like Grace’s mama and she did not bend down to speak to her as adults often did. “Hello,” she said, and clasped her hands. “I’m looking for Gemma Collington. Does she live here?”

Grace knew that was her mama’s name, so she nodded. The woman smiled. Her smile was sharp. Not her teeth, which were normal teeth, but the edges of the smile itself. It looked as if it had been drawn on her face with the edge of a ruler. “You must be her little one,” the woman said, not in the sugar way that people often said such things, but in a measuring, adding up, sort of way. “You look just like her.”

Grace knew this to be untrue. She looked like her father, everyone said so. She had his dark eyes and his dark hair, even though his hair had gone white now. There was a picture of him on the mantle in the sitting room in his uniform and his hair was still black and his face was still sharp and handsome and everyone who saw it said she was his girl, just as certainly as the sun rose in the east. “No I don’t,” she said to the strange woman, who simply smiled again.

“Can you show me in?” she asked. Grace nodded, slow and sullen. She did not think she entirely liked the woman with the luggage, but she led her into sitting room speedily enough. She left her luggage behind on the doorstep and did not seem terribly concerned about it’s fate.

“Gracie? Go play.” Said Mama when she heard rustling in the hall. Mama was the only person who ever called Grace ‘Gracie.’ She did not look much like a Gracie.

“There’s a woman, Mama,” Grace answered and Gemma sat up, peeling the white cloth off her eyes as she went.

Mama ordered out of the room, but Grace rarely did what she was told, and she lingered in the stairwell, where should could see right into the open sitting room. Her mama sat on one couch and the woman sat on another, right across from her. Her mother looked hesitant, small and uncomfortable. The woman simply smiled, as though she didn’t even see the other woman’s obvious dismay.

“It’s real nice, Gemma,” was the first thing the woman said, apparently meaning the sitting room, or the house entirely. Gemma nodded stiffly, as though her neck was broken. “Married for money?” the woman asked. She sounded polite, but Grace recognized the stiff, brittle way Gemma pulled herself up.

“Why are you here?” she asked, the other woman shrugged.

“Witting won,” she said, “it took him a while, though.”

Gemma folded her arms and narrowed her eyes the way she did when Grace came in with her dress all ripped and stained. “I’m surprised you didn’t fix him.”

The woman gave a slow blink. “Too late, his damage had been done. They raided the house and scattered the girls. They’d have put me in jail or put a bullet in me if I’d stayed still long enough.” At this, Grace crept closer. She’d heard of people getting shot at in war, like Daddy, but never a woman. Especially not a woman with a nice dress and a nice hat like that.

“But why are you here?” Gemma insisted.

The other woman leaned forward slightly and dragged her gloved hand across the coffee table appraisingly. “Did you marry for money?” she asked.

Grace watched as her mother’s eyes widened angrily and then closed slowly. She expected her to shout or order the woman out, but her voice, when she spoke, was very quiet. “You’re not staying here, Florence.”

The woman-who was Florence-simply sat back and said nothing.

“I don’t want you near my little girl.”

Florence laughed once, it sounded like a dog barking. “You’ve got a funny little girl,” she said. Gemma seemed irritated by her remark.

“She’s a good girl. I don’t want her around you and that’s the end of it.”

Florence clearly did not think it was the end of anything. “I’ve got no interest in corrupting your girl,” she grinned here as if she thought this notion secretly hilarious. “I just need a place to rest my feet until I figure out what to do next.”

Gemma sat back against the hard back of the couch and fingered the cold cloth in her hands. “Just…” she began slowly, “just for a short while. And then you’ll go.”

Florence moved her luggage into a room in the upstairs, right across from the room where Grace’s father was struggling through his convalescence. She did not join them for dinner and, that night, Grace pretended to go up to see her father, but really, she was eager to get a look at the strange women. But her door was shut and, even with her ear pressed to it, Grace couldn’t hear anything going on inside at all.

***

“Your mother will tan your hide if she catches you in here,” said Florence, sitting on the edge of her bed, smoking a cigarette without a long holder. Her father had sometimes smoked cigars in the evenings, before he took ill, but Grace had never seen a woman smoke before. Grace sat down at her feet and shrugged her shoulders, unconcerned. “But you do what you like, don’t you?” Florence asked her.

“Yes,” Grace answered, unhesitating. “Mostly. Sometimes, I’m a good girl.”

Florence kicked at the dust ruffle all around the edge of the bed. She wore just a white chemise with a corset over it. Her legs were very pale. Grace’s own legs were brown with dirt and mottled with bruising. Souvenirs, she thought, of her adventures. She did not think she would want to be all white and oblivion, like Florence. “You think that makes you a good girl, doing what your mother asks of you?”

“Yes,” said Grace.

“But you don’t really want to do those things, do you?”

Grace considered this. “Not always,” she admitted.

“What would you like to do instead?” Florence asked reasonably. The question bewildered Grace. She sat still for a moment and traced the pattern of blooming roses on the hard carpet her mother had picked out specifically for this room. She looked up at Florence, who’s face seemed suddenly very, very old.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Well,” Florence looked around, searching for a place to extinguish her cigarette. Finding none, she licked the tips of her thumb and index fingers and crushed the red tip between them. “When you sort it all out, come find me.”

***

Grace’s father died when she was twenty three years old. She stood at the edge of the grave with her mother on one side of her and her Aunt Florence on the other. They did not touch her, or one another. Both of their heads of golden hair seemed more gray now and neither of them were crying. Grace didn’t really feel like crying either, but she thought she should. She pinched a bit of her skin in the dark of her pocket until her eyes got wet and ran. In the green grass between the headstones, Dina and Christopher ran and played and laughed their high, shrill children’s laughter.

That night in the kitchen, her mother and Florence unwrapped kindly gifts of food and reheated them in the practically new oven. They moved like efficient dancers, handing off dishes clean and dirty and platefuls of food with a kind of liquid ease. Their backs featureless and identical and their twin blonde heads, it was one of those rare times when Grace could imagine that they were sisters.

“He was good to me,” her mother said, sitting at the table in the kitchen, with her black veil crumpled in her lap. “Many aren’t. Many were much worse off than I.”

Florence could be mean, Grace had seen it often enough, but she could also be kind. She was kind now, taking her sister’s hand and squeezing it lightly. “You did right,” Florence said, and though Grace did not understand exactly what she meant by that, Gemma seemed to take comfort from it. She smiled at their clasped hands and shook her head, as if to shake sadness off like a thousand tiny water droplets.

***

“Have you been with a lot of men?” Grace asked her aunt, when she was fourteen and a half years old. Florence, who was pulling the weeds out from among the yellow flowers that grew around the edge of the house, did not hesitate.

“Yes,” she said.

Grace leaned on one leg and then the other. She should be in her room right now, practicing her French. “What was it like?”

Florence shrugged, “depended on the man.” The wide brim of her hat hid her expression entirely. Florence was often terse about her life before, but she always answered Grace’s many questions honestly.

“What if a man didn’t fancy you?” Grace asked, crouching down beside her.

Florence laughed her nasty, dog-bark laugh, “men always fancied me. Even when they were afraid of me.” Florence gave her a sly, sidelong look. “Is there some gentleman you’d like to pay you some attention?” she asked.

Grace smiled enigmatically, “I’d just like to have that, I’d like to be the way you were.”

“What? Wanted? Or feared?”

“Both,” Grace said definitively.

***

When Grace was nearly sixteen, she came home from school with her hair falling down on her shoulders and her dress torn. Her hands were scraped red and peppered with dark grit. She walked on tip-toes up to Florence’s room and, when she opened the door, asked her, “can you teach me how to hurt someone?” in a flinty whisper.

Florence knew, of course, how Gemma would like her answer this query. But she also knew how little Gemma truly understood her daughter. “How much would you like to hurt them?” she asked.

Grace appeared to have prepared for such a question. “I don’t want to kill her,” she said thoughtfully. “I just want to make her suffer. I want to show her what she is.”

“There are ways to do that,” Florence admitted, “but are you sure you want to know?”

Grace gave her a flat look and Florence laughed discordantly, “of course you do,” she said. Florence put her hand on her niece’s shoulder and ushered her into her room, saying “I learned these things from an old woman who learned them from her grandmother. We’re lucky to know these things, you have to use it right.”

Grace nodded eagerly, she looked at Florence’s face the way she looked at her instructors while they were explaining a particularly difficult lesson. “Oh, I will,” she said, “I’ll punish her for what she did and she’ll be better for it.”

Florence chuckled, remembering herself at that age. “That’s all well and good, little girl, but I don’t know how well that will work for you. Hurting people is easy, changing them is near impossible.”

Grace gave her aunt a long, considering look. She seemed older, somehow, even with her disheveled hair and bleeding face. “Not for me,” she said.

***

When Grace was twenty six years old and home for a rare visit, she observed her sister Dina as she played, signing merrily to her brother with rapid, easy hands. They ran and played and fell, still children and still alone somehow, in a world that consisted of just one another.

“Your mother is getting old,” said Florence, who was old herself. Her hands rattled and shook and were thick with raised veins.

“Mother has always been old,” Grace answered. And truthfully, Gemma had a worn-though, fragile quality, but she had always been such and like a wafer-thin teacup on the top of a shelf, she had remained.

“She’ll die soon.” Florence continued, apparently unmoved by this argument. “And so will I.” Through the open window, they could hear the laughs and grunts as Dina, clinging to a tree branch, struggled to pull her brother up beside her. After a moment, she succeeded. “What will become of them?”

Grace knew she was not being rhetorical; she never was. “They’ll survive.” Florence did not say anything. “I will make them strong and prudent,” Grace continued, “it will teach them about the nature of the world.”

“Yes,” Florence said slowly, “and that is a thing we must all learn.”

***

The blankets weighed heavily, oppressively on her body. Crushed down on her still tender, aching middle. Her hair felt slick and heavy with dried sweat. Her mother was crying downstairs, Grace could hear her. Florence sat beside her, simply watching in her quiet way. Grace was seventeen.

“Is there someone you would like me to punish?” Florence asked her, under her breath, so Gemma would not hear. Grace shook her head.

“No,” she said, “this was all my foolish doing.”

Florence reached out and took her niece’s hand, “are you hurting?” she asked.

“Yes,” Grace whispered. She did not cry. She had not cried since she was very young.

“Would you like me to do for you?” Florence asked, thinking of the little girl at the door with her sleek black hair and her fathomless eyes. She thought about the dolls that colonized her room and white lace bedspread that someone else had clearly picked out for her bed. Grace squeezed her hand sharply and shut her eyes.

“Yes,” she said.

Florence kissed her niece’s forehead and then lay her hands on the middle of her. “Watch carefully,” Florence said, not ungently, “you may want to know how to do this one day.”

APN: Someday I might write something small about what exactly transpired between Florence and Mr. Witting and the account books

Chapter Eleven: God’s Work

Dina Meredith. 1938

Their first winter there, a girl died. She was seven years old. She took ill as the trees were changing and by the time the first snow was falling and melting against the brown dirt, her lungs had filled up and she drowned in her own warm bed wrapped in the quilt her mother had made her.

Dina’s husband presided over the final journey of her little body. They buried her in a yellow dress that her mother had been working on when she died. It was not quite finished, and they had to tuck it up to disguise the unraveling hem. Dina sat with the woman in her kitchen after the funeral, one arm around her quaking back and the other hand keeping her place in her Bible.

Dina brought a large glass pan of scalloped potatoes when the woman lost her little boy and by the time her husband took sick, she had stopped coming to church entirely and Dina found herself spread wide and thin. It was hardest on the children who were so small, and didn’t have the strength to fight it off. But there wasn’t a house in the town that hadn’t been touched in some way or another.

Dina and her husband moved from house to house with hands full of food and scripture on their tongue. Her husband smiled and spoke in his soft voice and at night, he came to Dina and put his head in her lap and wept while she stroked his hair and whispered half-remembered lullabies.

In January, when the snow was whipping down towards the world, Dina and her husband were standing in the close, yellow kitchen of a house where three children and a woman were dying slowly. Dina wet cold cloths in a bucket of half-frozen water. Her hands had grown red and painful with her work. She could hear how ragged her husband’s breathing had grown.

“I don’t…” he trailed off, running his shaking hands over his neck, “I don’t know…I don’t know.” Through the open kitchen door, they could hear the soft, miserable human sounds of children, miserable, afraid. “I don’t know what he wants from me. I don’t hear anything.”

Dina pressed the wet cloths into her husbands hands, “you take these in to them,” she said.

***

The snow continued into February. School for the children did not. Cooped in the house, Dina’s children grew listless and irritable. They squabbled amongst one another and colonized the windows, watching the slow, wordless fall of snow while Dina and her husband passed by one another like ghosts.

She stroked his hair at night as he rested on her chest. “How can I tell them that this is what God wants?” he whispered, wrapping the bed linens around his clenched fists. “I don’t think this is what God wants.”

Dina knew he did not want her words. She wouldn’t have known what to say, if he had. Instead she kissed her fingertips, one after another and pressed them to his cheek. It was a secret sign they had, just for the two of them. He smiled up at her in a thin, fragile way. She noticed suddenly the threads of white in his red hair.

The next day, the Watkins little boy died. He was their only one and little Genie Watkins, who was young yet, lost her mind. The boy, who was called Wayne, was still lying on the couple’s sofa next to the fire with his lips gone blue and his eyes still open. Dina walked past him and did not look close, she went to Genie, who was throwing up violently in the backyard with her bare feet buried deep in the snow. She was wearing a man’s winter coat over her nightdress and her face was a smear of tears and snot and yellow bile.

She didn’t speak to Dina, but hiccupped miserably, giving soft, strangled moans of a kind of misery that Dina understood in the deep places of her heart. She took from her coat pockets a white handkerchief and a thin brown vine, twisted around and around and tied in a circle.

“Darling,” she said, taking Genie’s hand and unfolding it until it laid flat in hers, “you take this and you twist up your pain in it until it’s gone small and hard. And then you bury it deep in the ground.” She folded the woman’s fingers around the hard points of the vine and Genie nodded miserably. Dina did not offer her condolences or aphorisms, but simply pulled the smaller woman to her and held her shaking frame. She could feel the sharp bones of her and the cold quiver of her spin. She was so tremendously young.

Dina could see the tragic, slumping set of her husband’s shoulders. “I’m tired,” he said to her. She took his gloved hands.

“Come home then,” she said, “and sleep.”

***

Dina’s husband took unavoidably sick in the middle of the night while sleet was falling in thick, freezing sheets. She wrapped him in layers and layers of bedclothes and still he shook with a sheen of sweat on his face. For the first hour, she sat by his bedside with her Bible open on her knees. For the second hour, she walked across the kitchen floor, counting the tiles as she crossed them again and again. For the third hour, she sang to him, songs her mother had taught her and tunes they had danced to when they were young. It all seemed so tremendously distant now. It had been winter for so long.

“Mama?” said her boy Danny at the door, with his sleepy eyes and his hair sticking up oddly.

“Yes, baby?” she said, pausing to fuss with his pajamas, which had been buttoned incorrectly. He squirmed underneath her fingers.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I’m going out to help your father,” Dina answered.

“Papa is sick?”

Dina had never lied to her children. “Yes,” she told him.

“Can I come?”

Dina’s first instinct was to say no. It was not children’s work and Danny was just twelve years old. “I’ll put my coat on?” he pressed and Dina reached out to smooth his hair, a kind of habit. “I want to help Papa. I don’t want him to die.” He submitted to her ministrations, though it was visibly galling. Dina smiled at her son.

“You put your boots and your hat on as well.”

***

“It will run away from us,” Danny said in a low whisper. He had been hunting before, with his Papa and his older brothers. Dina shook her head.

“No, he will stay.”

The object of their conversation, a large deer with five sharp points on his antlers, was standing very still in the deep sink of the snow. He appeared to be looking at the stand of trees where mother and son waited, blowing twin plumes of frozen breath into the air. Danny looked at his mother’s profile, at the sharp angle of her nose and set of her mouth. Usually so kindly but fierce somehow now. He did not know how his mother would pin the creature to the earth, but he did not doubt that she could. Every child, he realized, grew up thinking their mother had a certain inherent magic, the difference, he had recently realized, was that most children were gradually disabused of such notions as time went on. He took his mother’s hand, she was warm even through her mittens. She smiled. The deer did not move.

Danny didn’t like to look at the thing. The frozen panic in it’s dark eyes as they dragged it across the thick snow and the occasional feeble twitching in his limbs, it all made Danny sick at heart. “It feels bad,” he told his mother.

“It is bad,” said Dina. “That feeling you have is a good feeling. It means you’ve got a clean soul. It should be hard to kill things.”

They dragged the twitching creature behind the woodpile. It rested its head on the pillow snow and stared off vaguely into the middle distance. “Stay here,” Dina said and Danny nodded, keeping vigil at the deer’s side while she vanished in the house. He stamped his feet and blew listlessly into his gloved hands. He did not look at the deer. Dina was gone a very long time. When she returned, she had Paper’s shotgun in the crook of her arm and a white handkerchief clutched in her fist.

“Load this, baby,” she said, handing him the gun and a small collection of red shells. Danny peeled off his mittens and his fingers underneath felt clumsy and weak. It took him several tries to slide the shells in all the way. Dina, for her part, knelt down next to the stricken deer and carefully unfolded the handkerchief. There was a small patch of brown hair in the hollow of her hand with a blob of something crimson that might have been dried blood.

“Shh shh shh,” she said, pressing her cupped hand inexorably to the animal’s snout until it had taken the scrap of hair and reluctantly swallowed it. Dina stroked its long white throat with an unreadable expression. Slowly she got to her feet and smiled at her son. “Give it here,” she said, reaching out for the gun. She’d stripped off her gloves and her fingers were very white against the wood of the stock. She paused for a moment, checked that his work had been good and aimed very carefully. Danny could not help but stare at her as she stood there with her hair uncovered in the white fall of snow. She looked so much older than his mother. She looked like someone had carved her out of stone.

The gun shot was very loud, but Danny did not flinch away from it.

Danny stared and stared and stared at the slick, dark spread of blood underneath the deer’s blank head. Dina snaked her arm around his shoulders and drew him close, “you did good work, baby.” Danny’s head sank down until it rested against her shoulder between her collar bone and her chin, they way he had when she used to read him stories at night. She reached up and stroked his elbow, “but you’re not a baby anymore now.”

“Will this fix him?” Danny asked. Dina opened her mouth and closed it again, as if thinking better of whatever she had to say.

“Yes,” she said finally and did not elaborate.

“Why didn’t you do it for the other ones?” Danny thought of Jonah Crewe’s little sister who died and Alex Darling who was in the grade above Danny and Virginia May, who taught school for the little kids. Dina stiffened slightly.

“It’s not for us,” she said, “we don’t get to decide.”

“But you did for Papa.”

“It wasn’t God’s work, what we did,” Dina told him sternly, as if he could have imagined such a thing.

“No, ma’am,” he answered softly. “But…Mama? Would this have saved them? Anyone?”

Dina nodded her head, “yes, if you have the skill of it. It is a skill, it can be hard to learn. There’s some admiration to be had of it. But you can’t forget what it really is.” She took her son’s hands between her own and rubbed them vigorous. “You’ll catch cold,” she said, pulling him back towards the yellow light of home.

***

In the pale, fragmented light of early morning, they drug the creature out to the little fringe of trees that wreathed the house and left him among the saplings and fallen logs. “It’d be no good to eat,” Dina told her son unnecessarily.

During the night, Danny’s father’s fever broke and he slept like a dead thing. Dina was by his bedside when he finally awoke, looking bleary and fretful. She did not say anything to him and his voice was weak and splintered. She simply smiled and leaned her head down to rest upon his chest like a girl. He stroked her hair and stared up at the ceiling, bewildered and content. His hand was shaking as he raised it to his lips and kissed each finger before brushing it gently against the curve of her cheek.

Danny wandered by their open door as the sun was sinking and saw, for the first time that he knew of, that his mother was crying.

APN: See? It CAME INTO PLAY LATER! This what you losers who don't read the author's note miss: fascinating insights into the future of the novel.

"Fingernails, thorn trees, my fickle heart too..."

2007-11-18T05:12:48Z

Chapter Eight: Red Dress Woman

Gemma DeWitt. January 1st, 1890

Florence moved in a way that Gemma had tried, unsuccessfully, to duplicate. It was halfway between a slouch and a snarl, she twisted from place to place, sliding like a snake or maybe like low fog. Gemma didn’t know. Gemma knew her own gait to be awkward and disjointed, it seemed sometimes that she was all hinges and wires and careful machinery. She would have liked to have been cold smoke, like Florence, but alas, some things were simply not to be. That was something she learned later, though. In the first days of 1890, Gemma was just fourteen and nearly everything seemed possible, given time and patient dreaming.

“Mama didn’t want me to come,” she said, when she first appeared on the doorstep of the big brick house where she had been told she might find her sister. Florence, who stood in the rose-pink foyer with her arms carefully crossed over her chest, smiled slowly.

“No, I expect she didn’t. Well, come in out of the cold,” she took Gemma’s arm and pulled her in, brushing fat white flakes of snow off her hat and her shoulders. Gemma had last seen Florence six years ago. She had still been in braids and Florence was already tall and slim with an elegant air and something hollow in her eyes. She’d been to the city and she’d met a woman there and she was going back to live there for good and she was just saying goodbye. Mostly, though, she’d wound up shouting at their mother and father and pressing her fists into her ears when they shouted back. She kissed Gemma goodbye, though, and left a lipstick smear on her cheek. “Be a good girl,” she had said, “come see me sometime.”

She looked older now. But she wasn’t, really. She was just wearing her hair all high and matronly and affecting a grim, wearied expression. She wrapped her arm loosely around Gemma’s shoulder and steered her towards a tall dark brown staircase. Through open doors on either side of them, Gemma could see what appeared to be rollicking parties with many smiling women and a scant handful of men. Florence did not comment on this as they passed by.

Upstairs, in what she supposed was Florence’s room, Gemma didn’t know what to do. It seemed wrong, somehow, to put her suitcase, which was mostly faded leather and bits of baling twine, down on any of the surfaces. Everything looked like it would be as cool and smooth as snake skin, if she were to touch it. Florence, for her part, simply pulled a white cigarette out of a small silver case she kept in her breast pocket and went about lighting it industriously. Gemma did not smoke, but she was still faintly disappointed that her sister did not offer her a cigarette of her own.

Florence blew a long stream of smoke out an open window and stared down blankly at the people who passed by aimlessly on the street below. “So,” she said finally, “how did you make your way here? I know it wasn’t with their help.” Gemma shrugged and tossed her head, smiling.

“Got on a train, walked, you know. Nothing special.” It was the farthest away Gemma had ever gone, with or without her parents. Her feet hurt her in a good, accomplished way. Florence’s eyes did not move from the window.

“Do they know you’re here?”

Gemma shook her head. They probably suspected, though. Their mother, standing in the doorway, watching her leave, had said in her low, toneless voice. “You’ll wind up a
whore, just like her.” Florence turned very slightly from her window and wandered over a narrow, cream-colored chair. She folded herself into it’s seat, her elbows and her knees all sharp, catlike points. She clutched her cigarette close to her skin, as if protecting it from some mysterious wind.

“How are things?” she said with a kind of forced lightness and Gemma understood that she was not asking her how she was doing.

“Not so good,” she answered. “It was a poor harvest. Daddy’s struggling.” This was an understatement. Gemma remembered counting the long hours of the night by the increasing tightness in her empty stomach. Florence nodded at this news and her face with unreadable as new snow.

Gemma might have elaborated on the hard times they had all weathered since Florence had gone, the silences that grew longer and longer and the smacks that suddenly sounded so much louder. But just then, a man appeared in the doorway, not big but tall and distinctive. He did not look at Gemma and she felt small under the incomplete sweep of his gaze.

He clearly had something to say to Florence, but she spoke first, with a white smile lighting her face. “This is my baby sister,” she said, “isn’t she a beauty?” The man gave Gemma a spare, cursory glance and raised and lowered his eyebrows in an impatient sort of way. Florence smiled again, a different sort of smile altogether and stood up. “Wait here,” she said, squeezing Gemma’s elbow as she passed. Together, they vanished into the hall.

Gemma did not try to listen to their conversation, but they did not close the door and she was very close to the hallway. She could even see the brown sweep of Florence’s sleeve and the shiny black of the man’s shoes out of the corner of one eye. Gemma sat very still and listened very intently, without meaning to. Someone was apparently “questioning the books,” and Gemma wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but her sister was in a bright red snit about it. The man told her she needed to deal with it as soon as possible, tonight if she could and Gemma had a fleeting worry that her sister was going to leave here alone in this house of strange and alien women. But Florence balked at the notion and informed the man in a spitting whisper that it was the new year and she’d be damned if she was going to go out in the snow and the cold to appease some number counter who didn’t have the good sense to just get drunk like every other creature on God’s green earth.

Florence re-appeared shortly after that, her face was very white. She looked the way their mother looked after the fighting, when she knelt by the edge of her bed to pray. “You can never let a man boss you,” Florence told her fiercely, seemingly apropos of nothing. “And they’ll try. You start letting them tell you when to jump and how high and they’ll be running you, body and soul, before you know it.” She stamped out her cigarette in something tall and gold colored that Gemma supposed must be just for such a purpose. She had never seen such a thing in the world: something fancy like that all for dirt and trash.

“Hey now, where are you gonna stay?” Florence face brightened so immediately that Gemma was a little off-put. It was like she’d never even been angry at all. Gemma shrugged her shoulders. “I know a good little girl, she’ll be nice to you, and you can stay with her.”

***

Leah was not much older than Gemma, though Gemma might not have known this simply by looking at her. She wore her light brown hair high on her head with small curls (love-curls, Gemma thought they were called) all around the side of her face. She wore a dress that was blue and black and she looked a little like a doll Gemma had once seen in a shop window. Her skin was the color of lamplight in the low room and she had a small dark mole on one side of her mouth. Gemma thought she was very beautiful.

“When’s your birthday,” was the first thing she had said, taking both of Gemma’s hands and leaving her battered suitcase on the floor behind them.

“March,” Gemma said, with much more volume and conviction than she felt.

Leah‘s smile was like an explosion, distant enough to appear small and perfect. “Mine’s in April,” she said, “almost exactly one year apart!”

“Leah?” said Florence, who watched them with gentle, indulgent eyes, from the doorway. Leah’s head snapped around to face Florence and Gemma couldn’t help but think she looked so much like a deer that’s heard some alien and intrusive sound and is about to bolt. But her hands in Gemma’s were very still. “Leah, I need you to go see a gentleman for me, is that agreeable?”

Leah looked uncertainly from Gemma to Florence and back again. Florence, without appeared to move her face or her hands, summoned her out into the hallway. Again, Gemma went tremendously still and listened without meaning to.

“He likes you,” Florence said in her soft and wheedling voice. Florence was the one who’d taught Gemma to read, neither of their parents have the knack, and she remembered that soft, interior cajoling. Like she was the voice of your heart, urging you to do the right thing. Leah made an indistinct sound. “It’s the truth, darling!” Florence said, smilingly, this time.

“He doesn’t like any of the girls, not really. He’s strange.” Leah’s voice seemed to fall down some conversational hill until, by the end of her sentence, she was practically whispering.

“No stranger than the rest of them. You’re no fool, Leah, you know how it can be sometimes, the things they say and the things they do, how different they can be? Don’t you?”

“Yes,” it was barely a word, but only a suggestion of sound. Gemma leaned toward the open door as if suffering under a strong wind. She snapped back abruptly and pretended to intently study the pattern of embroidery on the bed coverlet when Florence stuck her head in.

“Honey?” she said, “Leah has to go out for a bit, but you can get some sleep and she’ll be back by morning to show you about. You’d like to see the city tomorrow, wouldn’t you?”

Gemma nodded. Through the crack in the door and the angle of Florence’s elbow, she could see Leah’s face, wholly detached from the rest of her. Her eyes were big and uncertain. They looked like they were made of glass.

***

Gemma awoke, long before morning, to the sound of ugly, half-muffled sobbing. She shifted on her arm and shook a sleepy hand into wakefulness. In the dim moonlight she could see a dark shape in the next bed, shuffling and shifting underneath the smooth cover of the blankets.

“Leah?” she asked, hoarse and uncertain. A louder sob was her only answer.

The room was cold, Gemma could feel it in the places were her skin was outside the warm swirl of the blankets. But she nevertheless threw the coverlet off herself and stepped out into the chill. Hurrying, she scurried across the floorboards on tiptoe to spare the flesh of her feet. She hopped on one foot and then the other tapping the rise of Leah’s shoulder urgently. Finally, Leah opened the corner of her blankets and Gemma could feel the damp heat coming off of her in waves as she crawled inside.

Leah’s face was very close to her own, Gemma could see sticky residue of her tears, the black collection of eye makeup on her skin that looked like lamplight. She breathed raggedly and the warm air swelled against Gemma’s face. She smelled like peppermint Christmas candy.

“He didn’t want me,” she said, the words hitching and sticking in her throat. Her hair was loose now, Gemma noticed the way it moved across her face and created a thin, silvery webbing where it had been. “He said I was a little girl and I shouldn’t even be out so late at night. He said I needed a thicker coat.” Leah’s hand was warm and slick and it found Gemma’s in the folds of the blankets, far from her eyes.

“That’s good, though, isn’t it? You thought he was strange.” Gemma whispered in return, her fingers curling almost of their own volition around Leah’s.

“Strange…strange like…” Leah left this thought incomplete, rolling her eyes eloquently. Strange like humans, she did not say. “She’ll hurt me for this,” she confessed in a murmuring whisper. Gemma looked at her and thought that the strange man had been right: she needed a bigger coat, more protection from the world. She was small and young and skinless.

“I’ll tell her not to,” Gemma whispered impulsively. She could not think why she might have said such a thing. Florence was older than her, bigger than her. Even if there had been a time when she might have listened to and indulged her younger sister, it was long gone now.

Leah, however, seemed to trust Gemma’s earnest eyes and she relaxed into the coil of blankets and the right angle of Gemma’s folded knees. Slowly, without either girl appearing to move, their linked hands made their way to the top of Leah’s hip, right where it curved down into the valley of her ribcage. Slowly, they slept.

Gemma dreamt of peppermint.

***

The strange man came to the door the next day, which was a Sunday. He came precisely at nine o’clock and he seemed to have no patience for the slumped, vaguely human figures who colonized the divans and settees that littered the sitting room.

Florence, who was an early riser, met him at the door looking like a bright and terrible light shone out of her very skin. He was an intimidating sort of man in his reserved, quiet way, but he quelled very faintly under the white-hot glow of her, smiling in her doorway. “It’s nice of you to call for the holidays, Mr. Witting,” she said. Gemma, in the stairwell with an unopened book on her knees could not help but notice the new sandpaper roughness of her speech. Even before she’d come to the city and gotten so weary and shining, she had not sounded so backwoods as that. She sounded like their mother.

Mr. Witting frowned in a small way, as if he knew, too, was puzzled by the change in her voice. “It’s not really a call. And it’s not the holidays anymore, Miss DeWitt.” Florence stepped back from the doorway, but only marginally and Mr. Witting had to turn sideways to get by her. He did so with a set, stony look about his face and his hands pressed tightly against his stomach.

Leah joined Gemma on the staircase and pressed a nervous hand to her shoulder. Gemma, in turn, took her hand and pulled the girl down beside her. “It’ll be okay,” she whispered. On the edge of the stair step, their skirts touched. Below them, Mr. Witting removed his hat to reveal a surprisingly young face underneath. He was like Florence a little, then, Gemma thought. All confused about how tired they should be.

They sat across from one another on matching long, low couches that had a French name that Gemma could never remember. Florence drew herself up straight and white as a tallow candle, she knit her fingers in her lap. Mr. Witting buried his hands in his pockets. Gemma could see a slender gold watch chain extending from one pocket. If she listened closely, she fancied she could almost hear the clicking of a watch fob being rapidly opened and shut again. She thought if must be very loud, then, down in the room beside him.

“I’ve noticed a discrepancy in some of your accounting ledgers, Miss DeWitt,” he said. Florence cocked her head to one side, as though she didn’t understand his words. Click, click, click went the watch’s invisible face.

“Well, I’m sure it’s possible I’ve made some mistakes in ciphering. It is a trial to me,” Florence did not move a jot. She seemed like a thing carved out of marble. She did not even appear to breathe.

“These are not small errors,” Witting volleyed back, “I have every reason to believe that you are being actively deceitful. I believe that you are hiding large portions of your actual income here.”

“Hiding from who? A corrupt constable?” she smiled and sounded like a snake. She moved for the first time to reach for a cigarette from her little case. She offered one to Witting and he declined with a sharp jerk of his head. He lit hers for her, though, almost out of a kind of muscle memory. “No honor among thieves, isn’t that what they say?”

“You’re admitting to this?” Witting asked flatly. Florence shook her head and blew a wide geyser of blue smoke into the space between them.

“I’m not saying anything. You haven’t given me any proof would convince me or anyone else.”

Witting creased his forehead in consternation and Gemma knew that her sister was right: he had come here with nothing more concrete than his suspicions. “I will find something,” he said eventually. Florence looked at him for a very long time. She looked at him as though she was reading a rare and complicated language on his skin. To his credit, he did not falter under her scrutiny and simply looked straight ahead, as though the cheap watercolor of a rose briar on the far wall was requiring every particle of his being to truly comprehend.

“Maybe someday,” she said finally, softly.

Witting reached around himself, as if to gather up some insubstantial papers and, realizing the futility of this, rose off the sofa instead and pressed his hat back down on his head. “I can see this is going nowhere,” he muttered, making his way back towards the doorway. On the stairs Gemma, she could hear the little tightening of Leah’s breath, the stiffening of her body. Witting paused for a moment in the doorway, framed for just a minute between the brown wood of the door frame and Florence’s white arm against the jam. “And, if you would be so kind, would you not send any more little girls in indecent dress to my home?”

“Upset the wife?” Florence asked nastily. Witting favored her with a black look.

“It’s in poor taste,” even for you, he did not add, though she must have surely read it in his eyes. Florence leaned in very slightly until her sharp nose and her bright, fox-clever eyes were very close to him. “Would you prefer indecently dressed boys?” When he did not answer, she drew back slightly and widened her smile as if to say ‘aren’t we all having such fun now?’ “Or women grown?”

Mr. Witting did not deign to answer her and he left with nothing more between them but the single snap of a watch against itself.

“Leah?” Florence said mildly, after he had gone. Gemma thought she could almost hear Leah’s heart beat faster.

***

“It doesn’t hurt that much,” Leah said, examining the odd, make-shift bracelet in the little hand mirror that set on the dresser in the room. It was green and leafy and had apparently been made by twisting many brown vines together. The vines themselves had thorns so small as to be almost invisible. It was loose around her wrist, but the thorns still drew blood in slight twisting dribbles. “She was really very lovely about,” Leah turned from the glass and looked earnestly at Gemma, who was carefully and uncertainly observing the bracelet as it moved against her skin. “She said it would help me remember to be good.”

Gemma nodded, but she did not like the look of the thing. Leah noticed her stare and her hesitance and hid the ornamented arm behind her back. She smiled widely then and joined her on the bed, bouncing slightly with girlish energy. “I think you’re my best friend,” she said. She looked at her in a sly and sideways sort of fashion, there was a thoughtful, evaluating expression on her face that Gemma had never seen there before. “I’ve never had a best friend before,” she said softly.

“Me either,” Gemma managed, in return.

“But you had your brother and your sister,” Leah pointed out, fingering the sharp, tiny thorns of the bracelet absent-mindedly.

“I had Florence, who went away, and Joshua, who died,” Gemma corrected softly.

“But didn’t you ever go to school and make friends there?”

Gemma hesitated for a moment. “Florence went to school,” she said finally. She did not elaborate on how this had resulted in a wild and willful girl with steel in her eyes who ran for the cities at the first opportunity. “There was the farm to tend,” she added, not really clarifying anything at all. Leah nodded anyway, as though she had understood.

“I was born in a place like this,” Leah related easily, “it was right by a river and I used to go swimming in it in the summer time. I miss it sometimes, it’s so cold here.”

“So you don’t mind it?” Gemma turned to her and lowering her voice to a low, interested whisper. She had wanted to ask this of Leah for a very long time and had thus far refrained because it seemed terribly rude. Leah shrugged as if she’d been asked this question a thousand times or more.

“I don’t know. I guess it’s like anything else, isn’t it?” She picked at the bedspread underneath them, unraveling the embroidery with her fingernails. Gemma, who had always been told that women like Leah were hopelessly damned, sinners of the worst kind, couldn’t help but marvel at her.

“You’re not…” she paused and tried to phrase her question in the most tactful way possible. “You’re not worried about your soul?” Leah rolled her eyes heartily and gave a good laugh.

“My mama always told me that you can’t do work on your soul if your body’s collapsing around you.”

“But this isn’t the only way to eat-” Gemma said in an urgent rush.

Leah’s face went red and stony, “But it’s the way I eat,” she said, in a conversation halting sort of way.

“No, no,” Gemma apologized hurriedly, “I didn’t mean…it’s just…well, you’re awfully smart and pretty and you could…I don’t know, I wasn’t saying…”

Leah smiled in a knowing, indulgent sort of way. It made her look uncomfortably like Florence. “You think that because you’re sweet and you haven’t been here very long,” she said. She touched Gemma’s hair in a fond, almost motherly fashion.

***

Gemma, with red cheeks and snow in her hair, found Leah sitting at her mirror struggling with her macabre bracelet on the third day of 1890. She was not crying, but there was shining wetness in the corners of her eyes. She looked up at Gemma’s arrival and folded her palm over the bracelet, as though she had never been worrying at it.

“Did you see marvelous things?” she asked, smiling. Her eyes were still wet.

“Yes,” Gemma answered, unwinding the scarf that her mother had knitted for her and pulling it off. “We went to a toy shop where they had little soldier dolls that moved with clockwork and then we saw a real play. I’ve never been to one before, there was one at the school two years ago, but Mama wouldn’t let me go.” Gemma knew she should ask Leah about her troubles first, but other words seemed to fall out of her mouth of their own volition. She was filled up with the colors and the brightness of the city and it tumbled out of her headlong. She spoke in a bleeding, breathless mutter, words stepping on and over one another in her eagerness. Leah sat before her, smiling and beatific, like the painting of Jesus’ mother that was inside the first page of her mama’s bible.

“I’m glad you liked it,” Leah said, turning her chair to face Gemma. Her smile turned shy and she tucked her chin into the hollow of her shoulder. “I hoped…if you liked it, you might stay.” Gemma knelt down in front of her and pulled from her pocket a tiny doll, only as long as her middle finger. It had a little green dress on and it had dark hair and dark, glittering eyes.

“Florence let me get something,” Gemma told her, “this reminded me of you.”

Leah took it in her hands and marveled appreciatively at it’s small size and the perfect scale of it’s little face. “You can have, if you like,” Gemma told her.

***

“I think something is wrong with it,” said Leah, crouching on the floor with a hand mirror, attempting to catch some of the dim blue moonlight that filtered in through the window. Gemma turned her wrist over in her hands and could clearly see the place where the sharp thorns were digging into the flesh of her wrist. Her skin was shiny and pink where this had occurred and was swelling against the brown vines.

“Does it hurt?” Gemma whispered.

“Not much,” Leah answered. She was lying.

***

Florence never seemed to be busy. Gemma found her in her office or her bedroom or possibly both, with a pile of papers in front of her. Her hands were still, though, and her eyes strayed aimlessly to the window.

“Something’s wrong with Leah,” said Gemma, who had no breath after the long run up the staircase. “Her bracelet, it’s gone funny, it’s hurting her, I woke up this morning and her arm was all red, almost all the way to her elbow and she says she’d terribly cold, but her face is warm…”her voice gradually trailed off as she saw the patient, unconcerned look on Florence’s face.

“Leah will be fine,” Florence said gently, when Gemma appeared to have finished. “Better than fine. It’s like having a little angel on your shoulder, always telling you right from wrong.”

Gemma blanched, in that moment it seemed that her throat had hopelessly swelled and no words could pass by. “She’s just like Joshua, right before,” she managed finally, small and choking.

“She’s not going to die,” Florence answered shortly and Gemma remembered too late that she did not care to speak of Joshua and especially did not care to speak of the circumstances of his death. Which had occurred during a chill and white winter like this one when she was already long gone. Gemma remembered her face in the doorway, six days too late with her hair all undone on her shoulders. She remembered the way their father had hustled her out into the snow with his hand around her arm as white and implacable as some pale marble.

“Don’t you fucking touch me!” she had shouted, tearing her arm out of his grasp and spinning out wildly in the new snow. “Don’t you ever fucking touch me!” her hands slid, wet and red and miserable, struggling for purchase on the slippery ground. Their father stood above her like some terrible story-book god, one fist raised as if to strike.

“I’ll tear out your tongue and feed your eyes to the coyotes if you ever come near me again,” Florence had seethed, rising up from the earth with her gold hair a crazed halo around her face. She was telling the truth and their father knew it well enough to withdraw his fist and retreat to the yellow warmth of the doorway. Their mother screamed, just once, low, miserable and wordless, as he shut the door. Gemma watched the window and the dark, waiting, lonesome figure, until their mother pulled her away and shut the threadbare curtains. Together, at the edge of Joshua’s empty bed, they prayed all night until Gemma’s hands hurt from clasping and her knees hurt from prolonged contact with the coarse floor.

“We are all damned here,” her mother whispered once, through gritted teeth.

“Why did you hurt her?” Gemma asked her sister, “she tried her best and it wasn’t her fault.” Florence gave her an arch look.

“There’s not a man in this world would turn down free trim. I can assure you, little sister, that she was doing something wrong.”

“That’s not true,” Gemma insisted stubbornly.

“It most certainly is,” Florence got to her feet and walked around the desk until she was facing Gemma. They were practically the same height now. “You’ve got no knowledge of such things, and it’s for the good. But you’ll understand how you’ve got to leave these kinds of decisions to me.”

“It’s low down and mean,” Gemma answered flatly. “What you’ve done to her and all of them. You’re not any better than Daddy to these girls.” For a moment, something terrible flashed in Florence’s eyes and Gemma thought of her in the snow, threatening to call down the coyotes.

But when she spoke, it was in a measured, even tone. “I’m not interested in being good,” she said. “They do for me, I do for them, and sometimes they need help to do right and well. Sometimes they need a hurting, because it’ll make them better. And if you think for a minute that Leah don‘t understand that, then you‘re worse than a fool.” Gemma said nothing in response to this and stared hard at the red-brown corner of Florence’s desk.

“Hey,” Florence tried in a softer, cajoling tone, “look here,” she said, unbuttoning the small blue buttons that held her cuffs together. She turned her wrist over and presented it to Gemma, tracing a line around it with her fingernail. Like some strange water color painting, a red tracery of vines and leaves and sharp thorns rose up to shine against her skin like an old and well-healed scar. “Both wrists,” Florence said, “and one ankle. I needed a lot of help.”

Gemma shook her head, “it’s no good,” she said weakly, feeling many things that seemed to have no words. Florence nodded, accepting this, and kissed her gently on her forehead. She smelled like perfume and talcum powder and something sad underneath. She smelled just like their mother underneath.

***

“How are you doing, baby girl?” asked a solicitous Florence as Leah’s bedside. The girl smiled with white teeth like tiny pearls and raised up her wounded wrist. There was a blazing red pattering of leafy vines, shiny with sickness and clustered with low, yellow pools of pus.

“Healing,” she said. In Gemma’s pocket, where she kept the little white doll that she had taken back from it’s place on Leah’s bedside table, her fingers moved, tracing the hard lines of her little nose, her white face. The rounded protrusions of her sad eyes.

APN: I felt like this was long enough to post all by it's lonesome. I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. Gemma's orientation surprised me completely, it was one of those rare times when I really didn't even have an inkling of a pretty significant aspect of a character until it came up in text. And I'm not really sure that I said what I wanted to say without being all anvilicious. But, ah well, I soldier onwards.

"It's Driving Me Mad..."

2007-11-15T04:44:35Z

Another MySpace survey.

What?

All the cool kids were doing it!

I couldn't resist their lure!

1. Whats the worst thing you've done in the past 2 weeks?
Forgotten the apostrophe when I used contractions.

Oh wait.

That was you survey!

Probably failed to call/message/e-mail my family/friends. Because I do that every week. Because I suck.

2. How often do you lie?
I’m a really bad liar, so all my lies wind up deconstructing themselves the longer I talk. Also, I can’t shut up. It’s a bad combination.

3. Do you consider yourself a good guy or a bad guy?
I don’t consider myself a guy at all. Or did you mean in, like, an old West kind of way? Because I look better in black than white and I’m pretty sure I’d just let Little Nell get her ass run over by that train. Take from that what you will.

4. Are you a pushover?
God, you don’t even have to push. I have all the backbone and wherewithal of cherry Slurpee.

(And now I want a Slurpee. I hope your children die, survey.)

5. When is it okay to cheat?
While playing board games. But not Solitaire. Because then there’s this patina of sadness about that whole thing.

6. When is it a good time to lose your virginty?
Er…four o’ clock? You know, not too late, not too early, you still have time to run errands or get a light meal afterwards.

Honestly, survey? I don’t know, I imagine it depends on the individual(s). But I would probably say: not during a tornado or a shark attack.

7. What time is it in Japan?
I…

Is this a riddle?

8. Do you swear?
Like a drunken longshoreman. With Tourettes.

9. Are you sarcastic?
If I said “yes,” would you just assume that was being sarcastic? Is there no way to answer this in the affirmative? Did I just BLOW YOUR MIND?

Oh my God, this question was written by M.C. Escher.

10. Whats your fav cuss word?
Hmm…probably cockslap. It’s the one I’m most likely to shout at passing motorists, certainly.

11. Are you a slut?
I object to the terminology.

Am I sexually promiscuous?
Not right now, surely.

12. What should you be doing right now?
Feeling accomplished. (Take that, stupid essay! Ha, I just wrote the hell out of you.)

13. School?
Okay, survey, putting a question mark after a noun does not automatically make it a question. It makes it a noun with a question mark after it. It makes me “schoooooool” with an interrogative lilt at the end.

It does not make me provide an answer.

14. Emo girls?
I feel like it must be really difficult to be part of a subculture that requires you to wear six and a half pounds of eyeliner and then cry all the time about this poem you wrote about the time a guy with floppy hair failed to return your love.

15. How do you feel about gay guys?
I…huh? They’re great with toast? I like them in blue? Do you have something a little more specific for me here, survey?

16. How many people have you hit?
A lot. I talk with my hands a lot and, sadly, most of my friends are miniscule so I’m like Elbows McGee all in their face.

17. How many people have you made cry?
I have no way of knowing this, survey. Somewhere, someone I’ve never even met could be weeping softly over my scathing indictment of “White Noise” as we speak.

18. Where is your cellphone?
In the uppermost pocket of my backpack.

19. Are you good at giving head?
Woah, I think I just got whiplash from that conversational shift! I have no clue, survey, I’m gonna go with “probably no,” though. Unless by “giving head” you mean supplying little Styrofoam craniums for decapitated puppets. I’m fucking awesome at that.

20. Are you the type of person people like to party with?
No, I am dour and silent at gatherings. My one and only party trick is to point at various partygoers and, in a deep and unsettling voice, predict the date and time of their death.

Occasionally, I do balloon animals. They aren’t very good.

21. Whats bothering you right now?
My math grade, the fact that more things aren’t bothering me, boys and their relative scarcity, the dubious quality of my November Novel, the fact that I’m really tired and have an early class tomorrow and yet nevertheless continue to type this.

22. If you could be anywhere right now, where would you be?
Swimming. I like to swim at night.

23. When is the last time you talked to your dad?
Hmm…Sunday morning?

24. Do you have any half siblings?
Not unless my family has a soap-opera-ian dark secret I don’t know about. Other than the deranged mutant second cousin the attic, that is.

25. Do you regret anything you did in the past month?
Yes. I’ve spoke without thinking, thought too much and never spoke at all, done things I shouldn’t, not done things I should, been mean, been dumb, been lame. Par for the course, really. We’ll try again next month.

"Where's Your Husband, Nellie Kane? Where's Your Darlin' Gone?"

2007-11-13T18:07:13Z

More novelling (I broke 20,000! Woo! And also: Hoo!)

Words: 6,680

Chapter Five: Chapter Five: Down to Sleep

Nanie Reed. September 2, 1956

It was a ritual that required much preparation and had many careful parts, like the ticking, brittle insides of a watch, or a heart. It required two eggs, nylons without holes (or at least with holes so small as to be practically invisible), two cheap carnations wrapped in graying paper towels from the man on the street who sold them all year round, and it required gloves. The gloves had to be white (purple was flippant, yellow was dingy, black was just asking for trouble) and they had to be pressed until they looked stiff and prim and very slightly uncomfortable. These were things that Nanie had, and she applied them to herself like bricks and mortar.

Her mother, though, still seemed bigger than her. A tiny woman with brown hair going to grey and small, trembling hands, she covered her sofa in protective plastic and she sat waiting on it every Sunday morning. She was always sitting right there, no matter how early or how late Nanie was. But Nanie was rarely late.

Nanie pinned the head of the carnation flower in her mother’s lapel, careful not to pick her skin or draw her blood with the red needle. And then she took her gloved hand and led her down the street towards the modest brick building that housed the local Baptist church. Her mother squeezed her fingers in the same warm, featureless way every time as they drew up upon the door.

They sat in the third pew from the pulpit and stared straight ahead at the preacher and at the sighing, writing Jesus fixed fast to the wall behind him. Nanie folded her hands in her lap, one atop the other. White and crisp as freshly pressed dinner napkins.

When Nanie was a child, God had spoken to her. His voice sounded not unlike her father’s booming tenor and he told her to listen to her elders or eat her vegetables. At night, he whispered that everything was alright and the world was not nearly so dark and strange as it appeared to be.

When Nanie was ten years old and broke her ankle falling out of a tree no one knew about in the field only marginally visible from her house, God echoed in her head and told her to get to her feet, that he would provide for her pain. And he did. There was only a dim, rolling numbness in her awkward foot as she limped miserably across the stark, pointed weeds towards home. At was not until she collapsed upon her back porch that the pain burst in the back of her head. It seemed she could feel it coming off her ankle in waves, like heat. She was sick all over the front of her dress.

When Nanie was sixteen and she knelt by her bed at night, she asked God to please, please, please help her heart. Which was broken and creaking and pitiful. God, quiet as a little white moth, seemed to kneel beside her and whispered “You’ll see him again.”

When Nanie was twenty years old, and she discovered the first of her husband’s many infidelities, she wept and took to her Bible, paging through it for answers or advice. But the words seemed to blur together into some unimaginable language that she could not fathom. “Forgive,” said God, sounding kind and indulgent and a little bit impatient, “you can do nothing but forgive.”

And when he called her a whore and an idiot and a stupid bitch, she heard God’s voice in her head, but unclearly. First soft and then loud, like a radio passing in and out of range. Soon, God began to sound more and more like her husband’s spitting voice.

At night in bed, she listened to the sound of his breathing and stared at the ceiling and did not speak. Could not speak. Inside her head was blank and barren and dark as the inside of a well.

But every Sunday, Nanie still put her white gloves on and walked her mother to church. And she sat in the third pew from the pulpit and folded her hands in her lap and stared at the wild, tragic Jesus, pinned fast to the wall.

The silence was deafening.

APN: (You thought I had done away with these, didn't you? HA HA) Think of this as an intermission, or a short palate cleanser before what comes next.

Chapter Six: Kneeling

Dina Meredith. 1935.

God speaks in him. Oh, it is true and do not allow the liars of the world to tell you differently. God speaks in him and he speaks to me. I am blessed, blessed, blessed. He puts his hand to my forehead. It burns, it burns my weak skin and my sinning flesh. Burns it all away, leaves something hollow and bright and pure in it’s place. And he speaks the word of God to my ears, grateful like dry land for long rain. And then he pulls me down to face him and we slam down upon our knees together, facing fervently, eyes screwed up and hands clasped to tight that they are red and white and red again. I have bruises, later, where my bones have struck the floor. I touch them in reverence, like stigmata, like his hand print on my heart. He begs God for his forgiveness, repents of our shared weaknesses, pleads for continuing guidance. And then he waits and I wait and then God fills up my husband and I can see it in the way of his eyes.

“We’re going to North Dakota, Dina,” he says, with his glowing eyes. And I nod, and go to pack up the children. Time wasn’t made for wasting, not when you’re doing the work of God. We have six children, and they are beautiful. I see His work in their faces and the smell of their hair and the fragile wonder of their little hands. I rouse them from their beds in the night and wrestle their shirts over their heads. I let the smallest one-my only girl-go in her sleeping clothes with only her winter coat over them. “Mama?” she says against my shoulder (she is still sucking her thumb, though we are training her out of it by sprinkling it with red pepper) “are we going again, Mama?”

“We’re going to help a lady who’s in sore trouble,” I tell her, and she buries her face in him shoulder and she sleeps all the long miles until morning.

There is a woman here who is in need of God to drive a dark thing out of her heart. There is nothing here in this town but poverty and sickness of the spirit and these people wear it on their skin like black marks. Like cancer. I touch them and they flinch away from me, God burns golden in me and it hurts the darkness on their flesh.

The woman in North Dakota is tied to a brass bed-stand. The sheets lay in a crumpled pile at the foot of the bed and the mattress is gone as well. Or maybe it was never there at all. There’s a man there, he looks faint and uncertain, his skin’s as pale as frozen milk and he hasn’t washed his hair in days. He’s got a bible in his hands, but the pages stick out all scattershot and the cover’s half torn-off. The room smells low and sick and she writhes on the box-springs with her arms pinned over her head. He reaches out, like to touch her, but she curls up in on herself and bares her teeth. She’s got bruises up and down her and one side of her head is red and soft with hurt and her mouth is white and snarling and her hands pull at the ropes and her wrists bleed black down the skin of her arms.

I can see the thing inside of her just as clearly as a shadow on a wall. It’s big like a dog, but its head is far too long and it’s teeth are far too sharp and it has far too many feet. It is a thing that’s good for running. And biting.

She looks at me when I come in, trailing behind my husband with my hand in his and the dog-thing in her snarls with her woman-mouth. I whisper in my husband’s ear “there is a shadow-thing inside her and it walks on too many legs.” He nods and understands, even though he does not see. We have our gifts, each of us, his is to hear and mine is to see.

My husband moves to her side and rests his hand on her forehead and tells her in his deep, soothing voice that he is here to save her and I look at him from the foot of the bed and I love him with my whole heart. She spits obscenities at him and pulls at her bindings. Wounds reopen, blood oozes slow. The man looks uncertainly to my husband and then retreats under his gaze, leaning against the wall with his hands clasped behind his back. My husband opens his Bible.

There is a girl in the corner who is not any older than my George. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. Her nose is bloody and swollen, blood has collected sticky and cold on the rise of her lips. She is crying and working her hands in her blue dress. She’s just a little thing and she is not pretty. I drift faintly towards her, but I do not look at her and I do not touch her.

My husband lays his hands on the woman in the bed; her body scissors upwards in a high arc, her white teeth snap at his distant skin. He does not flinch and he does not pull his hands away. He speaks to her in a low voice of the savior and what he can do to drive the darkness out of her. She appears to listen attentively, but the thing behind her eyes bares its teeth and something shines, yellow and cold.

I move to my husband and gesture with my chin and he understands what this means and brings his fist down in the center of the woman’s face. When he raises his fist it up, it wears her blood and you could see the depression where it had been against her face. This is a hard thing to see and it is very ugly. But it must be done. You will have to understand this.

The girl in the corner does not understand this, she shrinks in upon herself and half-crawls up the wall, her hand scraping uselessly at the faded rose and vine wallpaper. My husband nods towards me and I go to her, taking her hands in mine. They are curled under like claws and they do not relax in mine for a very long time.

“I’m like her,” she tells me outside, under the white glare of the stars.

“Not like her,” I say, combing her hair with fingers the way I comb my own girl’s hair in morning when it’s tangled and twisted. She sits lifeless underneath me. Periodically, she licks at the cold blood dried on the ridge of her mouth.

“She could do things,” the girl says to me, pink tongue slowly cleaning the red from her face. There is a hard, crenellated outline that resists her ministrations. “With her fingers and her words and things in bowls. She showed me…there’s things that grow, things inside animals…”her words seemed to melt and run into one another, fading and falling and mixing together like paint in different colors. She grips my fingers too hard, her nails cut into my skin and left little half-moon depressions behind. “I can do things like that, too. She says it’s because she’s my mother and that my daughter will be the same way..”

I pull us to the cold earth and we fold out legs in and I take her face in my hands. She is so young. I cannot help but think of my boy George. I cannot help but think of myself at the edge of Mama’s bed, listening to the soft hitch of her voice and the sound of her tears hitting the cold skin of folded hands. “Not the same,” I saw, and push her hair behind her ears. She is a little pretty, when she is not weeping.

“I can fix you,” I tell her, “I can make it so the things won’t come for you. If you’d like.” She swallows her tears in a slow, painful gulping and nods her head.

We are interrupted then, but the white flash of her mother as she runs from the little house that is barely a house. She pauses for a minute, her feet splayed against the black of the dirt. Her hair sticks out wild from her face, stiff with dirt and blood and other mysterious darknesses. Her wild eyes rest easy on us and she makes a kind of sighing, hissing, weeping noise of welcome.

The girl crouches on her back legs as if to rise to her feet and I rest a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve got no place here,” I say to the thing in the woman, who is looking at me with dark, confused eyes. She takes a step towards the girl, her hands empty and half-cupped, reaching out and shaking. I know the things that must be done and I am unafraid.

When I hit her, she stays down.

***

“Mama?” said my girl, laying back in the grass and pointing out the clouds to me. I watch the slow revolutions of her little arms and I smile, such joy she brings to me.

“Yes, baby?” I say, tracing the far-distant edges of one that looks just like a horse.

“When will we go home?” she rolls over until she rests against my side, a warm and sunny weight. I marvel at the structure of her, the bones that make hard points beneath her rounded flesh. The easy, elastic cream of her skin. I do not know what to say to her. I blow a gust of air against her face and she laughs in the high and wild way that only little girls know.

“We take our home with us,” I tell her, finally, “like a turtle with his shell on his back.” She stared a me with her wondering eyes. I take her hand, which is perfect and just like mine. In miniature. “You are my home,” I say, and kiss the freckles on her nose.

***

The wild woman lays in the bed, which has recovered its mattress and its blankets. I think she sleeps, but I do not know. Her body is still and her hair is wet. Someone has been careful and kind and washed the blood and dirt off of her. Her wounds look less fearsome now. It will not take her long to heal.

Her daughter waits in the kitchen, a blue, lonely shadow against the kitchen counter with her chin in her hands. “I got the things,” she says, and points to the counter. There is a long knife there, of the kind you’d use to cut apart a deer, and some brown roots, with dirt still clinging to it and what appeared to be a couple of photographs. On the edge of the counter, there are two mugs with steam curling hot and white into the air above them. “I made tea,” she tells me, “you can drink it now, before it gets cold.”

I’ve never liked the taste of tea. I prefer the grainy, rich bitterness of coffee. Tea has always seemed to me like sickly water. I drank it politely and crushed the rind of lemon in my teeth, relishing the hot, sharp swell of it against the back of my tongue. The girl held her tea in both hands and seemed to forget that it was there. She stared at me, watching avidly each time I lifted the mug to my lips.

“Is that right?” she asked urgently when I was finished. “I didn’t have the same kind of knife you said, but I had this one and I thought it was good enough. I sharpened it up.”

“It’s good,” I smiled. In the other room, the wild woman stirred faintly and made a distant, sleepy kind of sound. The girl’s eyes shifted briefly towards the room and then moved uncertainly back to me. I raised my eyes and nodded my head toward the little collection of objects. She gathered them in both her hands, being extra careful with the sharp edge of the knife.

***

“Will it hurt?” she asks me in an ashamed whisper. I rest my hand on the spine of my Bible and tie my hair tightly up on the top of my head.

“Yes. Changing yourself always does,” I tell her and I notice the uncertain way she plays with the very tip of the knife, balancing it against the dirt. I take her arm and turn it gently outwards until the blue veins show. “Start here,” I tell her. She is an obedient girl.

She looks aghast at the wound and I take her chin in firm hands and tilt it up until she looks at me and only me. Her hands know their work and they move without her direction. “This is a good thing,” I tell her. “There was a time when doctors said we were made up of nothing but waters of different kinds. Humors, they called them. And everything we felt or said or did or were was in those humors. The things that you fear inside you, the things you can do, if they’re in you, they’re in your blood.”

She nods but her face is as white and unwritten as new snow. “Look,” I tell her gently, and tilt her face downwards where some black and slow-moving as tar as creeping out of her veins. It is slow but indomitable, as though something other than just gravity moves it down her skin. She stares at with a horrified fascination, her other hand moves, seemingly under it’s own power, to feel the black stuff between her fingers. It clings to her skin and she wipes it urgently against the scrubby grass.

“What if…” she trails off and looks up at me. She smiles, once, and it flickers like sun between sparse trees. I wonder why I never thought her pretty. “My mama used to tell me that it made us special, that there was no one in the world could do what we could do. What if it’s a…a bad thing? Getting rid of it, I mean?”

I shook my head and smiled at her youth. “Honey,” I said, “there isn’t nothing special about you don’t come straight from God. You think he’d give you something like your mama got?” I think for a minute about telling her of my own mama, who used to sleep late into the afternoon with her headaches that bore her to the ground and swelling, bleak sadness that haunted her like a legion of ghosts. But something stopped up my mouth and it was like trying to talk through a wad of cotton wool. The girl shook her head miserably and adjusted her arm so the black pooled on the ground instead of her dress.

“Where, then, do you think that came from?” I ask her softly. She gnaws on the corner of her lip and I notice for the first time the deep red ring of hurt where she’s bit at herself. Her mouth looks different without blood all around.

“I know it didn’t come from no good,” she whispers. Faintly, her lip begins to bleed.

“Knowing’s important.” I open my Bible to a place in the middle where there’s a verse I’ve memorized. I draw her up on her knees and pull her wounded arm towards me. My knees are still bruised from prayer and sacrifice and I relish this new, dull pain that signifies the effort of my spirit. My husband’s voice begins in my head, reciting familiar, worn-thin words and I take the girl’s knife in my hands. I draw it patiently along her skin with the opposite edge and it’s silver tips knits her skin back together like a miracle. “Everything has another side,” I tell her, smiling. “Let me tell you,” I take her finger and I press it to the savior’s words and, though she cannot read them, I think she can feel the shape of the ink in her skin.

We, each one of us, have our gifts.

APN: Dina and her husband are based very, very, very loosely on some ancestors of mine. The only thing they really have in common is that he was a pastor and they were both very committed to their faith. They probably weren't batshit crazy, though. Or performing exorcisms all willy-nilly (that I know of). They did manage to found a church in a struggle almost-frontier-town during a diptheria epidemic, though. So still pretty badass. And now that I think about it, that might come in to play later...hmmm...

Chapter Seven: In the Wee Small Hours

Albert Paulson Jr. 1947-1962

The girl on the stairs had two blue ribbons in her red hair. He asked her if it hurt, because he could see the red line and the stitches down her chest when she bent over to crawl up the stairs. She said it didn’t, but they always said that, and then she touched the pale stitches wonderingly, like she couldn’t imagine where they’d come from. Sometimes Albert thought they must be awfully stupid.

He watched the girl on the stairs as she climbed up and up and up with her hands grasping on to the carpet to steady herself. He watched her until she got to the upper landing and drew herself up, smiled once with childlike triumph and then was gone.

It was funny, sometimes, the things that were so important to them. The brown-haired woman in the dark blue dress just liked to sit on the edge of his bed at night and touch his hair. Not even stroke it, like his mother did sometimes, but just bury the tips of her fingers in his hair with a kind of blank wonderment on her face. He laid still and he let her, even though it made him feel itchy and too-big inside his skin. But even though it seemed impossible, he always fell asleep and she was always gone before his mom called him down for breakfast.

He didn’t really like the lady with her blank stare, but she wasn’t as bad as some others. Like the man with the tall black hat who stood at the attic door and gestured for him to come up. “I want to show you something,” he told Albert. He had mean eyes and Albert did not think he wanted to know what he had up there at the top of the stairs. And he never found out, because Albert did not go up and the man did not come down.

Or there was the boy who was not quite a boy and had very sharp teeth and he liked to hide under Albert’s bed and bite at his heels when he walked close. At night, he cried and it was dirty sound that kept Albert from sleeping.

But Albert was not afraid, not even of the bad ones. When he was very young, his father had picked him up and balanced him on his hip and carried him down into the basement. Albert had small hands and small ears and he pressed them to his father’s chest, until he could hear the beating of his heart, feel the thrumming in his skin. His father spoke to him in a low, murmuring voice like a river and he showed him the people they took care of. He lifted back white sheets and transparent plastic and showed him trays of scissors and needles and things that looked like fierce hedge clippers. “They can’t hurt you,” he told his son, “there’s nothing scary about being dead.” Albert thought about fingers on his skin and the man at the top of the stairs, and nodded.

When Albert was twelve years old, the police fished a seventeen year old girl named Catharine out of the deep, rapid river two towns over. This might have had no bearing on Albert’s life whatsoever, except that the girl’s people were local and after they shipped her downstate for a full autopsy (autopsy, it sounded so professional and exotic), they sent her Albert’s father. It seemed that half the town came to her funeral, trying not to look like gawkers at the graveside and gossiping over baked beans.

For three months, it seemed that no one could talk of anything else. Mothers kept their children safely inside, brothers insisted on walking their previously galling little sisters everywhere, fathers cleaned and carefully loaded hunting rifles out of season. But Catharine, it was soon discovered, was a “wild child” she “ran with a bad crowd.” The common wisdom claimed that it had only ever been a matter of time. Nothing good was ever going to come of one like that.

Gradually, the girls of the city began to return to the yards and stores and restaurants and the parents retreated to a loving distance. In the fashion of little boys, Albert had nearly forgotten about the whole thing when Catharine started showing up in his bathroom in the mornings. She was wearing a short green dress and her stockings were run all to hell. She had one green pump and one bare foot. She sat on the toilet tank and dried her soaking hair with a towel.

At first, Albert didn’t bother to speak to her. Some of them went away if they thought they were being ignored, others got more persistent. Catharine did neither, she simply waited, dabbing hopelessly at her hair while he brushed his teeth with grim determination.

“Fine. What do you want?” he said one day, spitting wearily into the sink. Catharine looked surprised at the question and she sat back against the toilet tank and pondered it for several moments.

“I could use a smoke,” she announced finally. Albert sighed and went downstairs to find his mother’s purse.

“That’s all?” he asked her, leaning against he bathroom sink while she perched opposite on the bathtub. She stared at the burning cigarette in her fingers as though she had never seen one before.

“They don’t even feel like my lips anymore,” she said.

“Are you…pretty much done here?” Albert pressed. She looked up at him, her wet hair drawing an inky, snaking line down the front of her dress. Her mouth moved and he could see she was chewing on the inside of her cheeks. Her lips were just a little bit blue-looking, like she’d just eaten a popsicle.

“I don’t know,” she answered finally, “I’ve never done this before.”

Albert, who could not say the same, played absent-mindedly with his comb and pursed his lips, thinking. “Do you think you’d feel better if you told me who did this to you?” The girl knit her eyebrows and fingered the collar of her dress, which she had tugged upwards in a mostly vain attempt to hide the crimson weal that went all around her neck.

“No,” she said simply.

“You don’t know?” Albert sighed.

“No.”

“You don’t want to tell me?”

“No.”

Albert glared at her across the expanse of seafoam green tile. “Are you gonna be stupid about this?” She shrugged in an insolent sort of way and for the first time, Albert could see a wild girl in her. “Fine,” Albert sniffed, “but I’m not gonna help you then.”

***

Catharine had taken to sleeping in his bed at night. She laid down opposite him so her feet were by his head and her head was by his feet. She dripped on the blankets and left smears of dirt and green algae on his pillow. Albert’s mother berated him at the washing machine, fingering the dark stains. He admitted to leaving his outdoor shoes on the bed; he’d learned from experience that it was a lot easier that way.

“I don’t really miss them,” she said one night, her lips barely moving. Albert didn’t say anything. He had folded a pillow over his head in an effort to block out her words, but even though she spoke in a bare whisper, it seemed to echo around inside his head. “I think I should, right?” Albert said nothing. “I went to summer camp when I was nine years old. I was gone for a week, it was the first time I’d been away from home that long and I didn’t miss them at all. I bunked with a girl who cried all the time. I couldn’t even understand that.”

Albert sat up slowly and blinked at the girl, who simply pillowed her arm underneath her wet head. “Alright,” he said, “this is over with right now.”

***

Albert had a bus pass. It was so he could go the library on Saturdays without his mother in tow. It was a long-fought and hard-won privilege, and so he was extra careful as he crept out of the house with red galoshes on over his pajamas and Catharine trailing along behind him.

The late night bus driver was a surly, ill-shaven man in his middle years. He did not look askance at Albert but only opened the folding doors and then closed them behind him. Underneath his black bus driver’s chair, there was a little girl in a pink dress. She was wearing pink gloves at well, and she raised her tulip-colored finger to her lips for silence. She laughed with her mouth open and no sound coming out.

The bus was empty. Albert and Catharine sat in the far back and he rested his face cool glass of the window. Beside him, Catharine folded her hands patiently in her lap. She did not ask where they were going. She did not look out the window.

At night, the high cement arc of the bridge looked like the outside edge of a castle in a fairy tale. Someone had chipped vague initials into the concrete and Catharine pressed her fingers into the depression. Shadows obscured the water below them, but they could hear the gurgle and tumble of it. Catharine tilted her face upwards towards the stars and winced as the sound reached her ears.

As a rule, Albert did not like to touch them. Even the ones that weren’t too clammy or too hot or too insubstantial still had a small, quiet oddness about them. It was a lack, he decided later, of that small, latent spark that travels from skin to skin when living flesh collides. But he took Catharine’s hand now (it was cold and slippery inside his fingers).

He pulled her down to the river’s edge and the water roiled at their feet. “They pulled you out of here,” he said, dragging her sharply forward. “You’d been in the water for more than a week. Your skin was separating from itself. Your face didn’t look like a face. My dad tried to fix you, but he couldn’t. You had to have a closed casket.” Catharine made a short, abortive keening sound. She tried to turn away from the riverbank, but Albert grabbed her shoulders hard and twisted her around.

“Someone choked you!” he shouted. There were houses on a distant hill, but he did not think they would hear him. “They held you down and pressed on your throat until you couldn’t scream and then they threw you in that water there.” Catharine’s glistening hand slipped out of his as she sank to the ground. The heel of her remaining shoe sank deeply into the soft mud and she buried her face in her knees. Albert felt suddenly awkward. At least she wasn’t crying. He didn’t think so, anyway. “That’s what happened,” he said defensively. “That’s what the truth is.” Catharine’s hair hid her face and she said nothing.

Albert rocked back and forth uncertainly on his heels. “I don’t know what to say to you,” he offered finally.

“You’re a shitty person, do you know?” she mumbled against her skin that was so slippery and cold.

“Well, then why won’t you leave me alone!” Albert stamped his galoshes-clad foot against the earth. Catharine did not respond, tight and still in a huddle of pale pink and waterlogged green. Irritated, Albert clambered back up the slope of the riverbank, his heels throwing up little geysers of dark mud behind him.

On the top of the concrete bridge, Catharine looked very small. Just a fragile shadow at the edge of the water. Albert paused uncertainly and looked towards the grim yellow oasis of the bus stop and then back down at the dead girl on the bank.

“Alright,” he said, using a scraggly tree to steady himself as he climbed back down. He slipped a little and slid the last few feet and he knew his mother was going to have a fit when she saw the long smears of mud on his pajamas. “I don’t know what I can do,” Albert said, getting back to his feet and trying unsuccessfully to wipe some of the mud off. Catharine shifted and seemed to almost unfold, reaching her arms around her knees and lifting her head thoughtfully.

“I used to love to swim when I was little,” she said, Albert tried not roll his eyes. “My mother taught me, she made us matching swimsuits with yellow ruffles on the bottom.” She turned to look at Albert, her face growing hazy and ill-defined in the moonlight. “I’ll never see her again, will I? Any of them?”

Albert shrugged, but his voice was gentle. “You can, but they probably won’t see you.” Catharine nodded, because she had known this for a long time. Slowly, she got to her feet and kicked her remaining shoe off into the high weeds. She unrolled her panty hose with practiced ease and shed her smart green jacket. She looked very young with her bare arms in the starlight. “Do you want to tell me who did it?” Albert asked.

Catharine headed for the edge of the water, she paused for a minute and looked over her shoulder at him. “I don’t know. I didn’t see,” she smiled, and it wasn’t a really happy sort of smile. “It could have been…most anyone.” The water was licking at her ankles now, Albert could see the pale refractions of her feet underwater. She waved a white hand at him once and grinned again, more pleasantly this time. “Thanks for the smokes and the talk,” she said and then her whole body tensed up like a wonderful spring and she raised her arms over her head and dove into the water in a perfect ballerina arc. She was a good swimmer, she went fast and deep and the black water swallowed up all traces of her.

Albert never saw Catharine again, and the man who made the red mark around her neck and tossed her into the water was never caught. The morning after, Albert got a whipping for sneaking out at night and ruining his pajamas. They weren’t at all salvageable.

***

When Albert was fourteen and a half, his mother started across the road and never made it to the other side. She was crossing against the light and she had a bag of groceries in each arm. Neither she nor the driver of the car ever saw one another. She was thrown several feet from the place in the road where the impact occurred. On the sidewalk, she bled and passed out and died before the ambulance could even be called.

Albert saw his father cry for the first time then. It was an ugly, secret thing in hidden corners of the kitchen or the privacy of his bedroom. Albert remembered how huge and powerful he’d seemed when he was a child, when the beat of his heart was like a world of drums.

Albert himself was surprised at how well he was taking the news. So was everyone else. “What a little man!” they said, “look at the way he’s bearing up!” But sometimes, like when he caught a whiff of her perfume in the coat closet or saw the small pile of laundry she had left folded but not yet taken care of on top of the laundry machine, it seemed that there was some cold and fierce icicle driving it’s way through him from his throat to the bottom of his stomach. Times like that, he would have happily cut himself right down the middle like the bodies on his father’s table, if it would allow him to reach in and pull the hurt out of his chest, like some black cancer.

About three weeks after the funeral, Albert started hearing movement at night in his mother’s sewing room. For four nights he laid in bed very still and squeezed his eyes shut. “Please no,” he muttered between gritted teeth again and again. He did not sleep. On the fifth night, he sighed with weary resignation and pulled himself from bed and down the hall towards the sewing room, where someone was humming off key and rifling indiscriminately through things, by the sound of it.

Sometimes, he noticed, they looked pristine. Starched and pressed in the outfits some loving relatives had carefully selected for them. Bright lipstick and not even a hair out of place. Other times, there was just some small wrongness, a spot of blood, a hole carefully disguised with a fall of hair. And then, occasionally, there were the wrecks. Like something out of a horror flick.

When Albert opened the sewing room door, his mother stood at the edge of bureau, though he did not know how. One leg was bloody and twisted as a vine, an arm on the same side hung uselessly from her shoulder, just a collection of splintered bones held together by faint skin. Blood matted her dark hair to her head and filled one eye up red. She bit her bleeding lips and had missing teeth. Her hands left red streaks on the wood.

“No,” Albert said softly, barely more than a sigh. His mother turned to look at him. She smiled horribly. “I can’t help you,” Albert could feel painful tears beginning behind his eyes.

“Honey, I’m just looking for my good earrings, the crystal ones that your father got me for our anniversary last year?” She gestured towards the open, empty drawers of the bureau. Albert stepped forward, swallowing his tears. He took his mother’s hand, one surprisingly smooth and capable, the other more closely resembling battered meat.

“We buried you in them, Ma,” he said softly. His mother appeared to consider this more a moment, comprehension dawned on her wasted face. But, never one to sulk or make a scene, she drew herself up and nodded shortly.

“Well, that was exactly right of you.”

“Ma?” Albert asked. Tears started in his mother’s eyes, they fell clear and pink down her cheeks. She shook her head and smiled widely. She had bit her tongue at some point during the accident, it hung in two pieces connected with a slender thread of flesh.

“I’m sorry,” she choked out, burying her face in her collar. Albert took her chin in his hands. It felt strange, no colder and no warmer than before, but with missing pieces nonetheless. He tilted her chin until she was facing him, crying in earnest now. He was, he knew, crying as well. He could feel it on his face and when he spoke, he could hear it in his voice.

“It’s okay, Ma.”

“I don’t want…I didn’t want…” she sobbed. He took his fragile mother into his arms and he wondered when she had gotten so small. She wrapped her arms around his. It felt like being held through layers of thick, industrial plastic.

“I’ll help you out, Ma,“ he whispered into her ear. “There’s nothing scary about being dead.”

In the morning, he shut the bureau drawers and wiped the sticky red places clean. It looked new, it looked abandoned. It looked like nothing had ever been there at all.

APN: this is probably the chapter I'm most pleased with (the least pleasing being Florence's, for now). Even though it's basically a witch's brew of every Stephen King short story, The Sixth Sense and Pushing Daisies. I really tried to make it it's own thing, but alas, culture invades.