by Ellen Datlow
But her grip was slippery. And Haddie was too heavy. And when Ellie tried to yank her up, the woman fell, plunging into the water below. She struggled there for a minute or more, thrashing in the waves, trying to stay afloat. And then—but it couldn’t be—something rose from the water. Something with long black kelpy hair. Something that wrapped an arm around her throat and pulled her down into the froth with a gargling scream.
The hag.
Ellie staggered to her feet and called out for her daughter and saw that, along the cliffside, impervious to the driving sleet, stood the other islanders. Dozens of them. All wearing gull masks. They made no effort to stop her when she ushered her daughter away.
* * *
Ellie drove at perilous speed to the harbor, nearly skidding off the road more than once. Her right hand gripped Lyra all this time as if something might crash through the window and rip her away.
She thought about rolling directly onto the ferry, but didn’t know how long it would take to unmoor from the docks, let alone how to negotiate its navigation system. She had grown up in a family that loved waterskiing and fishing, so she abandoned the car at the wharf and raced Lyra onto a lobster boat that surged and thudded in the storm. She untied its ropes—peeling back a fingernail in her hurry—and cranked the engine to life. There was a scrape when the bow nudged against the stern of another boat. She cranked the wheel and eased the throttle, spinning them around to chug into open water.
Then the boat lurched and the motor whined. The anchor. She had neglected the anchor. The island didn’t want to let go of her yet.
She chased her way to the back of the boat, searching for the anchor crank, and then scudded to a stop. Because he stood at the end of the dock. Thatcher. Watching her in the sleet-blurred darkness. The boat was only ten yards offshore and he leapt into the sea and surged his way toward her, his big arms scissoring the water.
She said, “No, no, no,” and unlocked the anchor reel and began winding it in as fast as she could manage. She dared a glance overboard just as a big hand rose out of the water and snatched hold of an algae-slimed fender. Up from the chop rose the bearded face. Thatcher spit water from his mouth and tried to haul himself up to the gunwale.
And then, in a rush, her daughter appeared beside her. Holding a filet knife. She slashed once, twice, three times at the anchor line— and it snapped free. The boat chugged suddenly forward. At that Ellie charged and kicked Thatcher full in the mouth, knocking him back into the waves that rose into points like teeth.
The ship motored blindly out to sea and Ellie blinked through the sleet at her daughter, already worried about the scars she would carry inside her and how the memory of this place would stain her, as the girl gripped the knife and stared blankly out into the windswept night and said, “We can go now. We fed her. And now, for a little while anyway, she’s done being hungry.”
Take Me, I Am Free
Joyce Carol Oates
THE mistake must have been, the child woke too soon from her afternoon nap.
Really she knew better, for she’d been scolded previously for waking too early, and interfering with her mother’s schedule. And now, coming downstairs unexpectedly, in her fuzzy pink slipper socks, she hears her mother on the phone: “No, it is not postpartum bullshit. It isn’t physical at all. It isn’t mental. It isn’t genetic, and it isn’t me. It’s her.”
The voice on the other end of the line must have expressed surprise, doubt, or incredulity, provoking the mother to speak vehemently: “It’s her. She’s defective. She’s perverse. She hides it—whatever she is.” Another pause. “You can’t see it. Her father can’t see it. But I see it.”
And, as the child stands frozen on the stairs, in her fuzzy slipper socks, groping her thumb against her mouth to suck (though disgusting thumb-sucking is certainly forbidden in this household): “Of course my mother-in-law, the doting grandmother, refuses to ‘see’ it. The woman has a vested interest in denial.”
Now, the mother notices the child on the stairs. A flush comes into her face, her green cat eyes glare with fury that the child has (once again) wakened too soon from her nap and come downstairs too soon, intruding upon the mother’s private time. “I’ve told him, it’s her or me. Preferably her.”
Carrying the phone in one hand, the furious mother seizes the child by the wrist and tugs her down the remainder of the stairs—“You! Are you eavesdropping, too?”—giving her a small shake of rebuke while continuing to speak into the phone in an incensed voice: “I didn’t sign up for this. I didn’t understand what was involved—‘motherhood.’ Before I knew what was happening she got inside me and kept growing and growing and now she’s everywhere—all the time. Always I’m obliged to think of her—sucking all the oxygen out of my lungs.”
Guiltily, the child tries to apologize. She is a small inconsequential girl, just four years old; tears leave her face smudged, like a blurred watercolor. She should know better by now—indeed, she does know better. Waking at the wrong time. Coming downstairs at the wrong time. Bad!
In a flurry of activity, focused as a tornado, the mother gathers the child together with the week’s trash to set out on the sidewalk in front of the buffed-brick rowhouse on Stuyvesant Street. In the neighborhood there has been a longstanding custom of setting out superannuated household items—old clothes, chairs with torn cushions, battered strollers, children’s toys, occasionally even a toilet seat, or an entire toilet—beside a hand-printed sign reading TAKE ME, I AM FREE. Mocking this phony-charitable custom, the mother sets the weeping child down amid a gathering of unwanted useless things, of which some have been on the sidewalk for weeks.
“Just sit here. Don’t squirm. I’ll be watching from the front window.” Trying not to sob, feeling her lower face twist in a spasm of grief, the child sits on the chilled pavement through the remainder of the day as strangers pass by, pausing to stare at her, even to (rudely) examine her, or to ignore her altogether, as if she were invisible. Some laugh nervously—“Well—hell! You’re a real girl.” A rusted tricycle, a soiled lampshade, a red plastic ashtray with a plastic hula girl on its rim, a box of old clothes, shoes, books are met with more enthusiasm than the shivering child who remains obediently where her mother positioned her even after a cold rain begins to fall.
If only she hadn’t wakened too early from her nap!—the child recalls with shame. That was the mistake, from which her punishment has followed.
Each time a pedestrian approaches her the guilty child peers up with an expression of yearning and dread—yearning, that someone will take pity on her, and bring her home with them; dread, that someone will take pity on her, and bring her home with them. Though she should know better, she can’t help but think that, in another few minutes, her mother will relent and lean out the front door of their house to call her in a lightly chiding voice—“You! Don’t be silly! Come in out of the rain right this minute.”
Eventually it is sunset, and it is dusk. There are fewer pedestrians now. The child has virtually given up hope when she sees a tall figure approaching—“Good God! What are you doing here?”
It is the child’s father, returning from work as he does each weekday at this hour. He is astonished to discover his beautiful little daughter curled up asleep on the filthy damp pavement beside the crude hand-printed sign TAKE ME, I AM FREE.
“Darling, I’ve got you now. Don’t cry—you’re safe.”
But the child begins to cry, clutching at the father’s arms as he lifts her and carries her into the house which is warmly lit and smells of such delicious food, the child’s mouth waters.
“Well! Nobody wanted her again, eh?”
In the dining room the mother has begun setting the table for dinner. She does no more than glance at the indignant father and the fretting child in his arms—their appearance hasn’t surprised her at all.
The father says to the mother: “You aren’t funny. You know very well that we wanted this child—we want her.”
“Wh
at do you mean—‘we.’ You—not me.”
“Well then, yes—I want her.”
“But did you want her? You couldn’t have known who she would be, could you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, come on—don’t be ridiculous. Do we ‘want’ what we are given, or are we merely resigned to it? In the matter of children it’s a lottery— losers, winners—‘blind fate.’ You can’t say that we deserve her simply because we had her, as you can’t say we had her because we deserve her. She has no say in the matter, either—but she doesn’t realize, yet. As one day she will.”
“You have no reason to come to such conclusions. In a civilized country like ours—each child is precious.”
“‘Civilized!’”
The mother laughs derisively. Her laughter is sharp and cruel as a cascade of falling glass.
The father says, stung: “I said—you aren’t funny. Just stop.”
“You stop. You’re the Platonist in this household.”
Though the mother speaks in a bright brittle accusatory voice, she is really not unhappy. She is not in what the child knows to be a bad mood. The glassy-green cat eyes gleam with less malice than before.
For it seems that while the child has been outdoors in the rain, the mother inside the warm-lit cozy house has prepared a special meal. Moist pink flesh upon a platter sprinkled with fresh parsley, which the child identifies as grilled salmon; wild rice with shiitake mushrooms, Brussels sprouts sautéed in olive oil—a feast. The mother has brushed her lustrous dark hair, brightened her sullen mouth with red lipstick, changed from the shapeless slacks she wears around the house into a soft heather-colored wool skirt that falls to her ankles; around her slender neck is a necklace of carved wooden beads carved to resemble tiny hairless heads.
How many places are set at the dining room table?—the child blinks back tears, desperate to see.
A Trip to Paris
Richard Kadrey
Houston, Texas 1963
ROXANNE Hill cut her finger on a broken teacup while finishing the dishes. She went into the bathroom and doused the injury with iodine, grimacing as it burned, but not making a sound. The pain was her penance for being clumsy enough to shatter one of her late mother’s cups. When she was done, she returned to the kitchen, but left the rest of the dishes to soak rather than ruining the bandage she’d carefully wrapped around the wound. She would finish the cutlery and plates tomorrow; at the same time she would scour the wall clean where a small patch of mold was beginning to grow on the wall behind the faucet.
The house was quiet. It was always quiet now. However, some days seemed heavier with silence than others, and this was one of them. Glancing at the calendar on the cupboard door reminded her why. It had been exactly a year since her family had died. How could she possibly have forgotten a date like that, she wondered. But she forgave herself because there had been so much to think about since her husband and children left her. The police, for instance.
She worried about them every day, though the fear had diminished greatly over the last few months. If the authorities didn’t know that she’d poisoned them by now, they weren’t likely to ever know. It was thrilling to think. She was free. Roxanne said the word once.
“Free.”
And in filling the silence it felt as if she’d broken a dark spell that had surrounded her for the previous three hundred and sixty-five days. She took a long breath and turned on the burner under the kettle. There was time for a cup of tea before she had to be at church.
* * *
After Wednesday evening services, she went down into the church basement with four other women and began sorting boxes of donations for the parish’s clothing drive. While the four other women babbled, Roxanne noticed that their voices were more hushed than usual. It was clear that while she’d forgotten the significance of the day earlier, the other women had not. Jeanette Morgan tried to draw her into the conversation by asking Roxanne’s opinion about an elegant evening dress she’d found in one of the boxes. There was no reason for the question, of course. Roxanne knew very little about fashion, much less about evening wear. It was an obvious attempt by Jeanette to draw her out. So, to break the tension mounting in the room, she said, “It’s beautiful. I wish I’d had something like that for my wedding.”
As she’d guessed, mentioning her marriage quieted the other women and they worked most of the rest of the evening in relative silence. Around eight p.m., Delilah Montgomery drew Roxanne aside and confided in her that she and the other women were worried.
She said, “You’ve been strong, honey, for a whole year. But we know it’s been hard on you too.”
“What do you mean?” said Roxanne, not liking the comment one bit.
“It’s your skin, darling. It’s so pale. And your eyes. We can tell you don’t sleep.”
In fact, Roxanne slept soundly every night. Still, she played along with the other women’s worry, hoping they’d leave her alone. They’d become intolerable to her over the past year. Such tiny people with such tiny lives, wanting nothing more than a clean house and mowed lawn to complete them. But she held her tongue and gave Delilah a smile that could be taken for grateful.
“I suppose it has been hard,” Roxanne said, hoping that would end the discussion. But it didn’t.
As if on cue, Jeanette approached her with a large aluminum pot she took from the refrigerator where they kept juice and snacks for Sunday school.
“We didn’t want you to have to cook tonight,” she said. “So we got together and made you a beef stew. Enough to last for a few days. And you don’t even have to return the pot. It’s yours. Our gift to you.”
Roxanne never dropped her grateful smile. She accepted the pot, saying, “Thank you so much. You’re such good friends.”
That was all it took. The other women swooped down on her, hugging her and kissing her cheeks. Roxanne tolerated it, knowing that soon enough, she’d never have to see any of them again.
After that, the other women shooed her from the basement, insisting she go home and rest. She didn’t need to be told twice. With the cook pot on the passenger seat, she drove home and went straight to the kitchen. When she sniffed the stew, it actually smelled rather good, if a bit spicy. That would be Delilah’s doing, she thought. The woman believed that a few jalapeno flakes in a dish made her a daring chef. Roxanne shook her head at the foolishness of it.
She put the stew on to warm and poured herself a glass of wine. What truly disgusted her about the other women in the church group was the thought that if she hadn’t acted to save herself, she might have ended up just like them.
Idiots. Letting themselves be trapped by laziness and fate.
Roxanne remembered when the doctor had told her she was pregnant the first time. She thought she was going to faint. Dr. Powell had to help her into a chair so she wouldn’t fall on her face. She was sure that Sean, her husband, had tricked her somehow. She wasn’t ready for babies. Wasn’t sure she even wanted them, yet there she was. It wasn’t fair.
I was drowning, and when you’re drowning, you’ll do anything to keep from going under. You can’t blame a drowning victim for simply wanting to live.
When the stew was ready, she heaped a good-size portion into a bowl and ate on the sofa while looking through travel brochures. She’d been collecting them for months, and now that a year had passed it was time to move on. But to where?
An hour later, still as undecided as before, she put the rest of the stew away and the bowl in water to soak. As she did, she remembered the thumb-sized patch of mold on the wall behind the sink. Roxanne got out the bleach from the pantry and scrubbed thoroughly until the wall was immaculate. Afterward, she went upstairs to bed, where she fell into a deep and pleasant sleep.
* * *
Thursday was always grocery day. Roxanne took the car to the Piggly Wiggly with a short shopping list in her pocket.
Living on her own these days, she never spent much time in the grocery store and seldom
filled her cart more than a third full. Today was no different, especially since she was anxious to get home to her brochures. She’d been leaning toward moving to New York, but now she was thinking about Europe. She had plenty of time to decide. The house had to be sold before she could leave and that might take months. The idea of another summer in Houston depressed Roxanne, but she was determined to be patient. She’d been patient about dealing with the family. She just had to do it one more time.
There were few enough items in her cart today that Roxanne headed for the express lane. However, on her way over, Jeanette from church cut her off.
She smiled at Roxanne with surprised delight, and she smiled back sunnily, thinking, Pack mule, at the sight of the other woman’s nearly full cart.
“Are you coming to Delilah’s ladies-only lunch this Sunday?” said Jeanette excitedly. “Her roses are coming into bloom and it should be beautiful.”
Roxanne nodded. “She does love those roses.”
“Then you’ll be there?”
I would rather die than be there, Roxanne thought. “I’ll try to be.”
“Did she ask you about the library book drive?”
Anxious to get out of the store and the inane chatter, Roxanne said, “Of course. I’ll put a box or two together this week. Sean and the kids’ books, mostly.”
“Oh,” said Delilah, going quiet. “Will you be all right doing that?”
She took a breath and said, “It’s healthy, don’t you think? Time to let go and move on.”
Jeanette shook her head. “You’re so strong. I don’t know if I could ever do it.”
I am. I am stronger than you, thought Roxanne.
Bored and wanting to get out of the conversation, she glanced at her cart as if she’d forgotten something. “You know, I have some frozen things I should be getting home.”
“Of course, dear. I’ll see you Sunday.”
“Goodbye.”
When she arrived home, Roxanne put away the groceries, heated up some of the beef stew, and froze the rest. Later, when she went to wash her bowl, the patch of mold was back on the wall. A larger patch this time, as big as the palm of her hand.