The Outcast Hours

by Mahvesh Murad

  It was dark in the graveyard in the night. I was almost happy when I saw Death waiting for me at the church entrance. I wasn’t going to say it though, and, anyway, it was only almost. But I had to admit this was his territory more than mine. He was carrying a lantern, which was kind of a nice touch.

  “Want me to show you to the grave?” he asked.

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  My father’s grave was a mound of earth not yet covered by grass. “They sow the grass later,” my grandmother said when my grandfather died. “After the settlement,” she added, before she was hushed by my mother.

  “You can wait here,” I said to Death.

  “I’ll hold your torch,” he offered.

  I tapped on the earth on my father’s grave. “Come forth!” I whispered.

  “For keeps,” Death whispered, looking at me.

  I refused to look at him.

  “Come forth!” I said louder focusing on the grave.

  “For keeps!” Death said louder, excited.

  “Come forth!” I yelled.

  “For keeps!” Death yelled happily.

  And that is how the pastor told my mother they found me, digging the earth up with my hands, screaming witlessly: “Come forth! Come forth! Come forth!”

  They put me in a hospital. They say it is not a place for crazy people, but a Children’s Hospital. I don’t know. All the kids seem pretty out of it to me.

  My mother visits. She really tries but I have become one of those things she hates: not a drunkard, nor an addict, but a crazy one. She comes for a while every morning, her hair is tidy and her clothes are neat but she grows thinner and thinner and her blue eyes look frightened.

  My grandmother comes too. My imbalanced grandmother. It is easier with her. She comes in the afternoon and sometimes stays long into the evenings. I don’t know where she is staying, I doubt it is with my mother, but perhaps they talked about it and agreed who would go when. As my mother hates the night, maybe my grandmother said she would do them. And the nights are the worst. Just like my father said, I have become frailer then.

  The pastor came a couple of times. He said all I needed to do was pray more and I would be fine. ‘Healed’, he said. But once when he came my grandmother was here. I don’t know what she said, because she took him out in the yard. When he left, his face was white, and his cheeks flamed. My grandmother said he was never coming back.

  Death is with me at the ward. He seems really at home, potters about, waters the plants in the common room, even makes the beds for some of the sicker kids.

  “I see Death,” I once admitted to my grandmother when she came, and Death was in my room. I studied her hands which she had crossed in her lap. Blue crisscrossed the back of them. The two gold rings were worn rubber band thin. She had put them on her middle finger where they shone bright yellow and they had a hollowness about them that was more than just their shape.

  “Oh him,” she said.

  “You see him too,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “When he will go away?”

  “Oh never. Once you have started seeing him, he sticks around.”

  I gasped.

  “Don’t worry, Irma,” she said. “After a while he becomes part of all that is ordinary. You know like a broom in the cleaning cupboard. You don’t really notice him anymore.”

  Death looked at her.

  “A casserole dish in my drawer,” my grandmother said to him, “that’s what you are.”

  I picked at the brown blanket on my bed. It was frayed, and its edges had been picked before, you could tell.

  “I had him kill my father,” I said.

  “Oh rubbish,” my grandmother said.

  “No,” I said. “For real.”

  “Oh Irma, we have no say at all in who gets to die when. I don’t even think Death decides.”

  God, I thought. He takes life whenever he wants to. It’s Him.

  “Your father had epilepsy,” my grandmother said.

  I tried the word out on my lips.

  “They should have taken his driving license,” my grandmother said. “But, it’s a small town… I guess they didn’t have the stomach to do it. Sometimes people refuse to call things by their right name, which is very unhelpful. The church is the worst in this regard.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  “To be honest, neither do I,” she said. “How old are you now again?”

  “Eight,” I said. She always forgot my birthday. She usually sent me some money in an envelope a couple of months later and scrawled on the note itself was: “Sorry I forgot your birthday.”

  “I think it is about time you started drinking coffee,” she said and took out her thermos. She put two beige plastic mugs on my bedside table and poured us coffee, the hot drink steaming. It was black as tar. It tasted bitter and strong and made my throat clutch not in a nice way. I made a face.

  “You’ll have to learn at some point,” she said. “It’ll keep you grounded when you get older.”

  I wasn’t sure about that. It made my heart race.

  “If you’re ever sleepless, you might as well make something of it,” she said. “Some people just lie in bed and agonise. Better to go up and give yourself a reason for why you cannot sleep.”

  She looked out the window. I did too. The night was black.

  “Let’s go outside,” she said.

  “Now?” I said. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  She pursed her lips.

  “We’ll be tired tomorrow morning,” I said.

  “Are you going anywhere?” she asked.

  “It looks really cold,” I said.

  “Just put your jumper on top of your nightie,” she said. “No need to make a big affair of it.”

  I dressed. We walked down the carpeted corridor and my grandmother just nodded to the warden. He nodded back as if it was perfectly normal to be going out at this hour with a patient. My grandmother pushed open the heavy entrance door. It closed behind us with a soft thud and we stood there and listened to the silence. The stars were white and large. There were millions of them.

  “I have never seen so many,” I said.

  “They are always there,” she said. “Sometimes you can’t see them because you are too close to other lights. It is often like that—a person is too close to something to really see.”

  “Nights are dangerous,” I said.

  “Oh, rubbish,” she said. “Nights are when you can potter about on your own and eat cookies.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay again,” I said.

  “That’s alright,” she said. “Most of us are a bit damaged. But know this; that which has been torn down, can usually be built up.”

  It sounded like one of my father’s lessons.

  When we got back into my room, I lay down.

  “Do you want me to stay the night, Irma?” my grandmother asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  She nodded and clapped me on my cheek, a clap that turned into more of a tap.

  At some point during the night, I woke up. Grandmother wasn’t in the chair by my bed. She had moved to the table with the two chairs and was sitting there with Death. It looked as if they were playing chess. My grandmother grinned. I swear she was winning.

  (‘This is what you always do.’ She wonders for whom he’s performing when he says that: they’ve known each other less than a month. This is their second argument and the first was over something very different. She shrugs. He can take it as an apology if he wants, though it isn’t.

  ‘Fill your pen,’ she says.

  ‘Seriously, you’re loving this, aren’t you?’ Is it some ex he’s angry with? It feels to her like a character. A woman from a play. Don’t recruit me to your dramas, she thinks.

  ‘Just fill it.’

  They lean-he as if he’s doing her a favour-over the broken bones and smashed innards and the ruined trembling feathers. At the other t
ables the diners look away, to their own pigeons.

  ‘Your turn with the gall,’ she says, thinking See? I even give you that. She submerges the nib of her own fountain pen into blood, and levers the little pump.)

  Above the Light

  Jesse Bullington

  Like many a questionable practice, we got into it when we were young. We didn’t have a name for it, didn’t even really talk about it. It was just what we did.

  We met at Swift Creek Middle School, in the yeasty armpit of the south that is Tallahassee, Florida. We were both weirdoes. He was cast from the shy-yet-sly mold, with a mountain of curly dark hair like a tween Eraserhead. I was even more awkward and less inclined to socialize, but Caleb drew me out with his charming dorkiness. Initial points of mutual interest were B-movies, Douglas Adams, and Vampire the Masquerade, which it turned out we both owned but neither had ever successfully cajoled another person into playing. Within a couple weeks of being seated next to each other in Pre-Algebra we were getting thick, and that inevitably led to the first sleepover. I rode the bus home with him on a Friday.

  For a recent New England transplant, even my suburban neighborhood felt a little wild, with a thickly wooded lot abutting our property and deep swamps bordering the edge of the development. But Caleb’s place was positively primeval. The bus let off kid after kid after kid, sometimes alone and sometimes in herds, until we were the last ones aboard, rolling down a narrow road, the boughs of the ancient, moss-draped live oaks forming a canopy overhead so it felt like we were sliding down a living tunnel. The bus finally let us out where the paved road juked to the left. Caleb led me down a dirt track into the woods as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

  The Miccosukee Land Co-op was what you’d call an intentional community these days—a bunch of hippies who went in on a group-buy for a ton of acres of Florida swamp. Most of the houses we passed on our walk were pretty mundane affairs set back in the trees, but then we left the dirt road and crossed a long wooden boardwalk that threaded across the thickly wooded bog. It was a strange, sepia-toned realm where everything from the placid pools to the bald cypress rising out of them were the same shades of brown. I had never been anywhere like it, and I was already in love with the rural commune before we even reached Caleb’s place, which sat at the end of another serpentine boardwalk over still, tannin-stained waters.

  Caleb’s house was far bigger than any of the ones we’d passed, resembling a wooden castle whose three-story wings were joined by a screened porch and long hallway. Blue tarps covered most of the windows on the right wing. His dad was an architect and the place had been a work in progress ever since Caleb was born, with additions and more boardwalks and a nearby guesthouse springing up over the years. As sprawling as it looked from outside, the inside was cozy enough, with exposed wood and stone tiles and bookshelves everywhere. His parents weren’t home, and we set up in a kitchen that was like something out of a fairy tale, with cast iron pots hanging over the gas stove and jars of herbs and teas everywhere. We came up with Vampire characters at the scuffed and scored wooden table, and, when we got hungry, Caleb introduced me to tofu, tamari, and nutritional yeast. It was better than I expected, almost cheesy with a crispy pan-fried exterior.

  Later, he introduced me to something even more savory.

  “Want to go for a walk?”

  It had been dark for hours, but we had already established that we were both the sort of sensible person who stayed up as late as possible on weekends, rather than squandering our precious freedom with anything as mundane as sleep.

  “Sure.”

  By the time you’re twelve you have a pretty good idea of whether or not you like the night. I definitely did. Stargazing, huddling around campfires, playing manhunt—all that good stuff. Yet just heading out the door for a nocturnal stroll had never occurred to me. Probably because I didn’t really get along with any of the kids in my neighborhood, and, unlike this swamp child I was hanging out with, the thought of being alone in the night still creeped me out a bit. It still does, even as an adult; but then that’s all part of the charm, isn’t it? Fear can be fun. Euphoric, even.

  And then there’s the satisfaction of subduing your apish instincts, of reminding yourself that you’re not ruled by animal fear of the unknown. The natural world hasn’t just been conquered, it’s been beaten into a coma—all the mysteries have been hunted down and shot for sport, and the once-terrifying night harbors little peril. That’s what you tell yourself, anyway, when you’ve moved far beyond the light and hear a far off sound in the midnight woods…far off, but never far enough.

  The only threat I had to contend with was myself—if I wasn’t careful, I might twist an ankle, tumble off a boardwalk, or even step on a snake when I crunched through an unseen carpet of dead leaves. There were no more panthers or wolves in North Florida, I didn’t think, and any bears were few, far between, and in the words of our favorite author, mostly harmless.

  There are worse things than mundane animals in the night, as every small child knows, but by twelve you’ve either gotten good at talking yourself out of the monster spiral or you’re not going to be the type who enjoys being out after dark anyway.

  I don’t remember what we talked about on that first night walk, though monsters almost definitely came up. We were twelve, after all. What I do remember was the moment after we’d crossed the first boardwalk, when Caleb flicked off the flashlight that had illuminated our path and stowed it in his pocket. How he carried on as if it were the most normal thing in the world to set off down a dirt road in the deep dark woods with only a thin hook of a moon lodged between the upper boughs of an oak to light our way. And how satisfying it felt to hustle after him, tripping over the occasional shadowy root, but otherwise finding the sandy track as easy to follow under the moon as it had been under the sun.

  As my eyes adjusted, the impenetrable walls on either side of the road splintered into individual trees and bushes. When we reached the next boardwalk Caleb didn’t take his flashlight back out. I was glad for it. We must have walked many miles that night, all over the sleeping Co-op, but that’s the moment I still feel the keenest, down all the years—how happy it made me when I realized we didn’t need the light anymore.

  How at home.

  Easy jetlag avoidance: book a red-eye, stay up all night the night before, and don’t close your eyes until the cabin lights dim on that transatlantic flight. You’re so excited to wake up in a new country, you barely notice that you feel kinda like shit.

  We hadn’t lived in the same state since high school, so our night hikes were a rare indulgence even before Caleb married Claudia and followed her back to Germany. That made them all the more precious. We’d both taken other people out over the years, but never with any regularity. And most nights after dinner I’d go for long walks out along the Boulder Creek Path, through the industrial barrens east of town where the stars burned bright in the vast prairie sky. But that wasn’t the same, either. For something that loomed so large over who I was—who we both were, I suspect—night hiking was a difficult appetite to regularly sate; imagine living in rural Kansas and constantly craving sashimi.

  Dreams were a different story, though. Ever since I was a kid, I probably spent one night a week trekking through my dreams. Sometimes Caleb was there, but mostly I was by myself, or with those dream companions you know so well on the other side of sleep but have never met in the waking world. Regardless of whether I traveled alone or with those imagined comrades, there were always other figures hiking the trails. In places, throngs of them as thick as you’d find on an easy trail in Yosemite or Rocky Mountain National Park in peak season… when the sun is high, that is.

  It was always night in my dreams, and I was always in the mountains. Not familiar mountains, either…or not real mountains, I should say, because while I never dreamed of places I’d actually been, those imaginary landscapes were as mundane and well-known to my dreaming self as the Flatirons are to my waking mind.


  That was where I went while my body cramped up in a window seat—to the range of my dreams. The city I departed was the largest in the high country. There were wide winding lanes, coursing down like a cataract amongst the buildings built out of the solid slope of the white-stoned mountain. I pushed open a wrought-iron gate in the low wall on the upper edge of town and followed the trail up to the crest of a high arched bridge, spanning a gushing creek. From there I had my vantage and could see the moon-crowned dome of the summit leering over the lantern-lit burg below, its ridgeline smooth as an egg and just as full of possibility. A milky lake lapped at the foot of the slouching peak, feeding the stream below me. There were figures clustered on the bank, but I couldn’t tell if they had just emerged from the pool or were bracing themselves to enter it. Above them, more black silhouettes moved against the grey face of the summit, navigating the web of trails. But were they climbing or descending?

  I felt an eagerness, then, and acted on it, rushing down the other side of the bridge and ahead up the trail. It’s idiotically dangerous to hurry on a night hike, especially in the mountains, but this thought only came to me as the vision dissolved into a too-bright airline cabin, seatbacks and tray tables returning to their upright positions.

  Caleb met me at the baggage claim. He had left Dresden in the middle of the night to make it down in time, and had bags under his eyes about as big as the Kelty pack I pulled off the carousel. We hugged, shot the shit, and hustled out of the busy airport and into his little green continental ride—an Elf, naturally. The Austrian village Caleb had found us was only a few hours from Munich, and we spent the first leg of the drive catching up. He was finally swapping out the hell of online academia for plain old programming, Claudia was teaching, their cats were catting. I’m sure my tales of insurance underwriting thrilled him to no end, and we were both relieved when we neared the Austrian border and the mountains commanded our full attention.