Stray Paper, Burning in My Hands

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 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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 v