by Ellen Datlow
Suffice it to say, nobody ever told me that, much like any other sort of dead flesh, shed uterine lining really does need to be refrigerated.
* * *
Nini Jones. If someone had given me a gun, even at age twelve, I truly think I’d’ve shot that bitch right in the face. The strange part is that when I think of her now, I see her as she was—plain, not pretty: rake-skinny and dishwater blond, weird eyes, weird angles. But back then, she was really, really good at convincing me and everybody else that she was perfect, the righteous social arbiter of everything “in” or “out.” Jenny Diamond had money, supposedly from the fleet of cabs bearing her last name; Faz was born glamorous, a lovely brown girl centre-set in a bright white trio of semi-pro assholes. And Peri Boyle, I eventually figured out, simply trailed along behind all three of them, avoiding censure through protective coloration. A low-grade trick, I guess, but I sure couldn’t manage it… Imogen, either. So, good for her.
“The hell’s this?” Nini drawled, the next day, down in the Ravine— and grabbed the jar from Imogen, who’d barely started to twist its cap. The force of the move alone was enough to make it spring the rest of the way open, releasing the worst stink I’d ever smelled, a whole hot summer day’s worth of fermentation. Nini sprang back, dropping it; the jar shattered against the ground, sprayed rocks, dirt and glass shards coated with decaying menstrual blood everywhere, including across her white canvas shoes. “Jesus, fuck!” she screamed, kicking out at Imogen with one stained foot, who kicked back, hitting her in the knee. Nini started to fall and caught onto Faz, who flailed, almost upsetting them both, while I saw Jenny Diamond retch in the background as the wave reached her, coughing: “Oh holy shit, fuck me, is that—? Una, god, you freak.”
I laughed long and loud, hyena-harsh. “Medical waste, bitches,” I growled, “same as your mom throws out every month. You stupid fucking retard children.” To which Faz replied, too loud, at almost the same time, with her one arm wedged under Nini’s now and the other hand tugging at Jenny’s skirt-waist, trying to pull them both away: “Seriously, guys, c’mon—what do you want, like… some disease, courtesy of the St Clair coven? A serious case of Tampax cooties?”
“Cooties don’t exist, you dumb-ass,” I threw back. “Or witches.”
“Yeah? Tell that to her.”
I glanced over my shoulder, in time to catch Imogen in mid-crouch, coming up with two fresh handfuls of creek-bed rocks, wet-slick and twice as heavy. She flung them at the “populars” underhand and barely aimed, as if she was pitching the world’s worst softball game. One glanced off Nini’s shoulder to whack Jenny in the chest, both of them squeal-braying in protest as Faz broke into a run, dragging them with her, straight past Peri Boyle, who’d been hanging back all this time behind a nearby tree; she whirled to yell after them, but I didn’t hear what she said.
That was because the other rock collided with the side of my head, opening a gash in my scalp that ripped open the top of my ear and sent my glasses flying, leaving me face-down in the dirt with blood in my eyes, functionally blind and howling. Already in half-Hulk mode to begin with, I felt myself go off, top of my head exploding into metaphorical flames; I rounded on Imogen with both hands clawed, ready to rip, to tear, to knock her head on the ground until it broke. “I’M GONNA FUCKING KILL YOU!” I vaguely remember roaring, even as Imogen saw my face and cried out like some weird bird, half in guilt, half in ecstasy. Like…
Fresh blood, Una. That’s exactly what we needed. Not that old stuff, that garbage you brought—fresh. Because it doesn’t count if it’s too easy, right?
(Right.)
It has to hurt.
* * *
It was Peri who found my glasses, in the end, and gave them back to me in the nurse’s office, once I’d blundered up out of the Ravine with Imogen still screaming after me—Peri, who was never really my enemy, and became my friend after both of us ended up in the same Alternative High School, a few years on. Her mom was a French teacher who thought she was extraordinarily cultured, I later found out, always rabbiting on about Yeats and Robert Bresson, and married to this asshole writer, penniless but culturally approved; he was award-winning, her reward for putting up with Peri’s dad all these years, a “mere” journalist. The two of them would go after Peri tag-team style, work her like a nine-to-five, trying to convince her that because she was physically rather than mentally inclined, she must be genuinely stupid. And while I do think Peri might indeed have had a learning disability, she had more heart in her finger than her bitch of a mom had in her whole body.
For a while, every time we met as adults, Peri would always end up reminding me how brave I was, how much she’d admired the way I wouldn’t lie down and take it back in school, even if she’d never done anything about it. And every time she’d tell me this, I’d wonder what exactly she was on—until the night I finally made myself peer back through the past’s dirty porthole at it, and remembered a dinner with Peri’s mom and stepfather during which I’d spent three courses smouldering at the way they baited her before finally erupting, yelling at them both at the very top of my voice: “She is not dumb, but you are a pair of assholes who deserve to die alone!”
They don’t know, though, do they? Imogen sometimes asks, from inside my scarred ear. That you’re not brave, never have been, but get you mad enough and you’ll leave anyone behind. People can count on it. You make it so easy for them, Una, after all. You always have.
Fuck you, Im.
Like that, yeah. See what I mean?
Which is when I see her, or think I can, through whatever door her own blood eventually opened, smiling at me sweetly from whatever black-jewelled throne she sits on, pointing a finger at me with its long, gilded, cormorant-claw nail. Then shrugging, and returning to whatever duties she has on the other side of the crack: organizing a library made from cured rolls of human skin, maybe. Writing new spells in gold-dust and quicksilver. Mummifying her enemies alive, or flaying them, or flaying some to mummify others. A twelve-year-old sociopath with a crown serving gods who run on rage and hate and pain, never quite grown old enough to bleed herself, except with a ceremonial knife: powerful, finally, enough so she can probably order rain to fall and mountains to rise, if she wants to; a suitable reward, no doubt, for all her effort. But alone, now and forever, in every way that matters.
The same way we both are.
* * *
So the school nurse called my mom, and the look on her face when she saw me… I don’t have to try to remember that. She made me tell her who all the other kids were, marched to the principal’s office to tell him she was keeping me out of school for a week, and booked us an assessment at the Clarke Institute for Psychiatric Health. After it was done, the doctors told Mom they thought that if I actually believed I was a witch, I might have anything from narcissistic personality disorder to early-onset schizophrenia. They recommended she commit me for observation, to be sure. “We’re not doing that,” Mom said, which is why she’s my hero. Instead, they gave her the name of a child psychiatrist I ended up going to for the next five years, as well as suggesting I should stop seeing Imogen. Mom agreed.
Then it was Monday again, and I was coming back to school for one last day, essentially to pick up whatever stuff I might have left behind. I walked across the bridge and through a side-route I often took in order to avoid the “populars,” a wind-tunnel triangle between the Ravine’s west slope and two residential apartment buildings in an L-shaped arrangement, following along the Ravine’s side until it blended into the yard’s back fence. But today, this path wasn’t empty like usual. Instead, it was crowded with kids, teachers, even janitorial staff, all pressed up close to the fence and staring down through the trees, the green shadows, the close-knit weeds and bushes. An ambulance was parked at one edge of the crowd, flanked by two police cars, their lights on and blinking; someone had strung crime-scene tape through the fence from one end to the other, suturing the hole Imogen and I used to go down through.
“Yeah,” he said. “Somebody called them this morning, after they went down through the Ravine coming to school. I hear they found a girl’s clothes down there, all covered in blood, like she’d had her throat cut or something. No girl, just the clothes.”
“No body, huh?”
“Nope.” He paused for a moment, not even looking at me, before adding: “The cops think it might have something to do with this girl whose mom reported her missing last week: Imogen, the one everybody thinks is a witch. They think maybe her friend Una did it.”
I don’t have a lot of memories I’m never quite sure I didn’t make up after the fact, but this is one, if only because I’ve thought about it so long as a series of descriptive sentences—no emotions attached, not even images, simply a string of events: this, then this, then this, then this. I know I must have found out the facts of what happened to Imogen, at least so far as anyone else knows them, but I might as well have read them in the papers, or seen them on TV. I do know I switched schools almost immediately afterwards, though we didn’t move house until three years later, and the new school came with a new bus route that went literally in the opposite direction from my old one—it meant I never really had to interact with any of these people or places again, not unless I wanted to. And I had no reason to want to.
I do think it happened, though. Maybe the very flatness of it proves that it happened.
I certainly don’t have any reason to doubt that in real life, things aren’t as dramatic as either Imogen or I would have liked them to be.
* * *
I’m still here, and she’s not. That’s all I know. And I know myself, the way she never got to. And whatever happened, I wasn’t there. It had nothing to do with me. It still doesn’t.
Nothing, or everything.
So, if I slip my fingernail down the inside of my wrist sometimes, along the closed seam of a long-healed scar, what does it matter, as long as I leave it shut? So long as I only think of unpicking it, of shedding blood and seeing what might happen? What light might leak in, and from where, over the lintel of the invisible? What door might begin to form, haloed in shared wounds, opening at last to let me through, even after I left her alone to make her own key?
Pay the price, make it hurt; reap your reward, fast or slow. That’s how magic works, or so I’ve always heard.
Isn’t it.
Special Meal
Josh Malerman
IT was that time of year again when I had to pretend I didn’t know math.
We were at the dinner table, me on my side, my elbows barely reaching the wood, Brad across from me with his silly spiky hair. Dad was to my left and Mom to my right, but I don’t like talking about rights and lefts because directions scare me: they’re a little too much like math.
How many of us were there?
I don’t want to say.
We were eating Chicken Kiev, my favorite, because the butter squirted out of the bird and it made me laugh and I loved the taste and because Mom said, “Amy, I’ve never met someone who loved something like you love Chicken Kiev.” That’s nice, isn’t it? The smallest compliment.
But let’s not talk amounts.
Let’s talk family. And dinner. And the television on in the living room, where Buckle Up was playing silently, Dad having put the record on the machine, the one with all the strings and swells and slow moods. The light of the TV was all over Mom, painting her blue, as there was no wall between the kitchen and the living room, that being my favorite place in the house, the exact spot where a wall might’ve been, but wasn’t.
Brad didn’t like Chicken Kiev, but Brad was “late to everything,” Dad once said and Mom said, “Is it okay to know what late means?”
I remember that discussion. They didn’t think I heard them, but in a house as small as ours, you hear. Mom was worried Dad had used math. Late, she said, implies time passing. I remember that. Dad said it was okay to know time. Mom said it wasn’t, though.
It was harder for them to pretend they didn’t know math because they grew up with it.
“And green beans,” Dad said, putting some on my plate. I loved green beans almost as much as I loved Chicken Kiev. It was like a birthday dinner but of course I couldn’t be sure when my birthday was.
We ate, quiet, for a while. Brad didn’t speak much anyway. I think it’s because his friend Melanie got in trouble. I would be quiet too if I kept remembering the time my friend told me she knew math. What was Brad supposed to do with that secret? He did what he was supposed to do.
He turned Melanie in.
“We need more milk,” Mom said. That was often how our conversations began. Little things. What we needed. What we didn’t have. What we’d used.
“Okay,” Dad said.
“And other things.”
“Okay.”
Yes, half of Mom’s face was painted blue by the television. I remember worrying about that word: half.
I was so busy stuffing my face, I hadn’t noticed the mood was off. Brad wouldn’t look me in the eye. Which was okay. Which was normal. But Mom and Dad, there was something there, too. The way they kept looking across the table, asking if I was okay, asking if I wanted more, then going quiet again. They didn’t even get up to flip the album when it came to a stop. One of them usually said, Wanna play the other side?
Because who would be caught saying they knew which side was which?
“The car sounds funny,” Mom said. She knew all these things. What we needed. What sounded funny. And there was always hesitation, before every time she spoke, when she considered what she was going to say. I overheard Dad tell her once she was thinking too much about it. When they said we couldn’t know math, they didn’t mean we couldn’t know when it was midday. Mom shushed him when he said that. But Dad continued, saying there was math in everything, literally everything, and people couldn’t be expected to not know that a couple made two.
Mom freaked out when he said that. Hurried Brad and me into the basement. Locked the basement door. Waited. While we were down there, she talked about colors. She sat on a stool under the light bulb and talked about moods and feelings and colors, all stuff that Dad would call safely vague. Dad was upstairs then. Mom was waiting to hear sirens, I think. Waiting for someone to come ask Dad what he knew about a couple being equal to two.
He was angry up there. Pacing. Dad didn’t yell, wasn’t a yeller, but you knew when he was upset. He couldn’t sit still. He talked to himself, but really he was talking to Mom, knowing we could hear him down below. Brad hadn’t done what he was supposed to do with Melanie at that point in our lives, so he was talkative still, talked with Mom about colors.
But I listened to Dad. I heard him say, It’s in everything. Age, time, space, outer space, nature, work, rest. Everything!
Except feelings, Mom said, her head cocked to the ceiling, and we knew she was talking to Dad whether or not Dad could hear her.
That night was bad. But nobody came to ask Dad what he meant by two.
“More beans,” I said. I couldn’t get enough of them. The chicken, the beans, and the bread rolls. Oh my. Mom worried I ate too much but Dad said no, it was fine, it was good, it was nice to see.
“Oh, wait,” Dad said, getting up from the table. He went to the refrigerator and came back with a pitcher of grape juice.
“Oh,” Mom said, “I almost forgot.”
“Amy,” Dad said. “Your favorite.”
“Is it my birthday?” I asked.
Brad looked up then, only for a moment. Mom and Dad exchanged a look and then Mom smiled my way and it looked like her face might crack in half.
That word again: half.
That’s math.
It’s in everything.
“Do you really not know what today is?” Dad asked. “It’s okay if you don’t.”
“No,” I said. “Stop being silly.”
“Amy, honey,” Mom said. “Tonight’s your test.”
I set my fork down.
Oh.
Had it been a year? What was a year anyway?
“We received a letter a few…” She considered how to put it. “We received a letter recently. Remember I told you about it?”
Dad looked like he was going to cry.
“Oh yeah,” I said. I picked up my fork and started eating. It was so good I thought I could eat that dinner forever. “When are they coming?”
“Well,” Dad said, pouring the grape juice. “We don’t know that kind of thing. Not exactly.”
“Right.”
Brad’s fork scraped the plate and it sounded bad.
“Tonight,” Mom said. That smile again.
Dad sat down.
“So,” he said. “Amy. You know we gotta ask you a question before they come by. Right?”
“Yes.”
“And you know what that question is, right?” Mom asked.
“Yes.” Then, “You need to ask me if I know math.”
Silence. Not because I’d said something shocking. I was right, this was the question. But because now that I’d said it, it had kinda been asked, and they were waiting for the answer. Even Brad.
How could they not know if I knew math, right? Well, I think it has to do with kids being young. And getting into things. And who knows what they do all the time and what they think and what they pick up, too.
Maybe even what they teach themselves.
That’s what I’d done. I’d learned math on my own. It wasn’t from a book. It was from listening, closely, to Mom and Dad. They used numbers all the time, even when they didn’t mean to. Dad was right, of course, there was math in everything. And if you kept quiet and listened, you could hear it. Math. Want an example? One night in Mom and Dad’s bedroom, a storm outside, Brad and I were in bed with them. And Brad asked if we could stay that way forever, if we could stay in their room and make jokes and watch television. Dad said, no, Brad. One day you won’t need us. One day you’ll be on your own two feet.