Ashes and Entropy

by Laird Barron

  Dew and overripened cherries dampen her feet as she crosses the yard. The grass is too long, sorely in need of mowing, but Ysobel has never possessed a lawn of her own before and has nothing with which to cut it. Another problem for another day, considering half the growth is now hidden beneath the detritus of the broken tree.

  In the place on the trunk where the branch had clung, the tree now gapes open. Crisp, beady pincher-bugs swarm the broken bark and a plump, fat worm writhes deeper within. Beneath the interstate of the miniature world within the broken branch itself, a hollow place catches Ysobel's eye – a tangle of darkness, concealing a whisper of movement. Something's in there. Something dark and not-quite-treelike. She leans in closer, one finger out and a breath of wood-scent upon her cheek.

  "Looks like you could use a chainsaw."

  Ysobel straightens up, searches for the source of the inquiry, but all that greets her is the still and empty yard. From deep within the branch comes a sound, barely there, like the hum of a distant fan. She shakes her head.

  "Yoo-hoo! Over here, neighbor."

  The hum fades as she looks around and this time, she can see that the voice coming from the opposite side of the fence belongs to a bandana-tied head with wisps of white hair and two bushy eyebrows with small pinprick eyes. She pulls her cardigan tighter across her chest, wonders how long those pinprick eyes had been watching, wonders if she's really moved into that sort of neighborhood – the sort where folks peer over fences and into others' lives, where they say "Yoo-hoo" and loan out garden tools.

  "Need a hand?"

  "No," Ysobel says, her feet slowly retracing their dew-dappled steps. "No, I'm quite fine."

  "You sure? Looks like you'll need that branch chopped up. Can't leave it just sitting like that; it'll kill your grass."

  "I can call someone."

  "They'll charge an arm and a leg."

  "That's fine— That is, I'll be fine." Ysobel flushes, her tongue catching on her teeth, tearing on the words she didn't mean to say. It's no one's business what she can and cannot afford, none of their concern how she spends her money. Didn't they realize that she'd moved here to be alone and unbothered?

  "Just let me know—"

  Ysobel closes the door behind her, shutting out both tree and neighbor.

  ~

  An online search pulls up three tree cutters in town. The first number – selected for its alphabetical supremacy – has been disconnected. The third goes directly to voicemail. Ysobel leans upon a box labeled "Dining Room" and considers the second. It's coincidence, of course. The beauty of this town is that she knows no one here, and yet that familiar first name – though common enough – is enough for her to toss her phone upon a stack of books and snatch up the box labeled "Bath Supplies" instead.

  She draws the bathwater and slips beneath the surface, where even the television conversation is muffled and distant. She'll try the third number again tomorrow.

  ~

  Ysobel dreams of the tree, of that hollow place sinking deep within, and in her dream, it calls to her, its voice demanding and familiar. It reaches out black tendrils of glutinous sap, wrapping itself around her wrist, around her arm, around the naked base of her fourth finger, and reeling her in with slurps and gurgles. It pulls her in to its cool, slick darkness, drowning out the noise of traffic and enveloping her in the silence so perfect, so absolute, she can barely breathe.

  She wakes in the morning with mud on her heels and tree bark wedged beneath her nails.

  ~

  When the third tree cutter doesn't answer, Ysobel recites her plea into the phone, half-suspecting that the words will disappear into the aether, unheard again by human ears.

  She takes her tea to the window, where the lace-edged curtains act a veil to conceal her form from any nosy, pinprick eyes. Would it really be so terrible to leave the branches where they are, entwined on the lawn, and simply let the crabgrass and creeping vines grow up and over it until it becomes her own personal forest, blocking sight of the fence, the sky, the world?

  Tempting.

  But there's the thing in the branch to contend with. Though now, in the light of day, what is one strange hole anyway? It was fatigue, stress, too many hours out in the sun that had her thinking it was anything more. She pulls out her phone and googles "stress relief," then pulls the curtains closed on the yard.

  ~

  When the telephone rings, she answers it without looking, thinking that it must be the tree cutter.

  "Ysobel! I told you to call when you arrived."

  Ysobel sets down the newspaper-wrapped plates and briefly imagines what it would be like to simply hang up, to walk downtown to the mobile phone store and trade in the number that tethers her to her old life. But she has resumés out with this number inked on top in bold hand and besides, how would the tree cutter return her call?

  "Ysobel? Are you there?"

  Is she?

  "Yes, I'm here, Bette." She tallies her lies: one.

  "You sound awful, dear."

  "Just tired from the move." She counts: two.

  "Would you like me to drive out? It's only four hours. I could help you unpack, settle in."

  "No, no. I'm fine." Three.

  "I wish you'd rethink this. No one blames you, you know. Sometimes things just don't work out, and we all still care for you. I'd hate for things to be awkward."

  "Of course not; I know that." Four.

  "I spoke with him the other day, you know—"

  "I'm awfully sorry Bette." Five. "I have to go." Six. "The doorbell just rang." Seven. "I think it's the tree cutter I hired to take care of a few minor things in the yard." Eight. Nine. "I'll call you back later, I promise." Ten.

  She hits the red button before her friend-turned-almost-sister-in-law-turned-who-knows-what-now can say another sympathetic word about how she's a wonderful person and she's sure there's someone for her and it's only a matter of time before she finds someone.

  Ysobel doesn't want to find someone. She wants to be alone.

  The wineglasses are still buried, so she dumps the afternoon-cooled tea from her mug and fills it half-full of merlot. She redials the third tree cutter's number and this time when the voicemail picks up, she recites her home address as well.

  ~

  Ysobel falls asleep watching TV, but still, she dreams of the tree.

  The darkness in the branch is bigger now, impossibly big, at least twice as large as the tree's diameter, and it no longer smells of wood and ripened cherries, but something stronger: a heady mix of cologne and cigar smoke and the stench of bitter disappointment.

  She stands before it and reaches in, but before her fingers touch wood, something luminous shifts within. The light resolves itself into glowing orbs, bobbing like champagne bubbles in a moonlit glass. They draw nearer, and Ysobel sees her own face – pale and wan and oh, so tired – in their liquid surfaces. Tiny cilia propel them forward through space, and they turn their long, sticky tendrils away to expose a single dark pupil upon each of them. Their stare pins her, immobile, to the spot.

  In the morning, her mouth is dry and when she scrubs her teeth, the brush comes out coated in dirt.

  ~

  There's a blue envelope wedged into her screen when she steps out to retrieve the mail, which flutters to her front walk when she releases the latch, like the feather of a startled magpie. Inside is a card with a Rockwell-esque image on the front, depicting a boy with bare feet fishing off a pier. It's the sort of card Ysobel's grandmother used to purchase from the drug store in boxes of dozens at a time and send out on birthdays and anniversaries. The kind of card that, unfitting for any particular occasion, somehow becomes fitting for any.

  "Welcome to the neighborhood," is scrawled along with a phone number across the inside, and Ysobel wonders if the owner of the signature – some illegible name beginning with H or N or E – is also the owner of the pinprick eyes and wispy hair, or if someone else in the cul-de-sac's silent, still houses has also taken
note of her arrival.

  In the postal box bound to the house by two rusty bolts are two bills, addressed to someone else – perhaps someone who'd fled this place, this life, without leaving a forwarding address. She imagines them in her old apartment in the city, turning the key on her old mailbox and retrieving letters marked with her name.

  A discarded cardboard box becomes a rubbish bin, and Ysobel drops all three envelopes inside.

  ~

  Shortly after noon, she finds it, tucked away deep within a box marked, "Misc." It was one of the final cardboard vessels packed, long past any pretense of labeling or organizing, past anything but blind grabbing and tossing and praying to household gods of domesticity that nothing would break, past anything but her own whispered vows that everything would be different after this, that she'd sort it all out when she arrived: her job, her life, her diet, her health, her eternally-strained relationship with her mother. And yet now, here it was, staring accusingly up at her amid this hodge-podge mess of things she never wanted but couldn't bear to throw away.

  It's innocuous-looking from the outside: a simple paperback with a battered cover and a title of once-silver letters dulled to scratchy gray. Its brittle leaves are so frail that it seems like the lightest touch could dissolve them into swirls of dust and the briefest wind could free them forever from the constraints of their battered spine.

  What was one moment a thought, the next is a deed. A harsh and horrible deed of cracked bindings and shredded pages, of paragraphs severed word by word, and words torn apart letter by letter. Of hot tears dissolving antique paper and the bits and pieces of what was meant to be whole fluttering down like dust-coated snowflakes.

  The hundred-year-old book she'd bought him is ruined, and a vitriolic taste of bile claws her throat when she realizes what she's done. All that money she'd wasted on what ought to have been the perfect gift, lying disassembled on the laminate floor. As if it was the book's fault or the author's that her plans had all gone wrong. As if they were to blame for her lacking foresight.

  When she returns from wedging the broom in a corner of the pantry, the light on her phone is blinking. The number she missed is the tree cutter's, but he hasn't left a message and her call goes straight to voicemail.

  ~

  She chases coffee with Red Bull and Twinkies, determined to stay awake. At least until all the boxes are unpacked, she tells herself, though really she means, at least till daybreak. Late-night talk show hosts divulge celebrity secrets and the laugh track is always too loud, but there's nothing else on besides horror flicks and Lifetime movies that hit too close to home.

  One by one, the boxes disgorge their contents. One by one, their cardboard bones collapse until there's nothing left but a pile of empty layers – a tome devoid of words.

  Near dawn, the TV blares ancient reruns of shows her mother used to love. I Love Lucy. Laverne and Shirley. Mary-cheery-Tyler Moore. She sinks into the armchair to change the channel, and her resolve to stay awake grows soft.

  The yard forms a cathedral to the darkness.

  Tree trunks form pillars to hold up the sky, and leaf-adorned alcoves house glimmering sets of eyes that peer out in keen expectation. Creeping vines create a center aisle, and beyond it all lies the broken-branch altar, within which the emptiness dwells.

  She approaches with reverence and curiosity on muffled, grass-softened steps. The stillness in the void cries out to her, breathes her in, drags her down, and she wonders vaguely if she ought to resist. If this ought to be some battle of wills. Some test of her character, some trial. If the void would think less of her for her complacency.

  Her arms extend toward it, and black tendrils curl like calligraphy around her: thicker in parts, thinner in parts. Simultaneously delicate and strong. The eye-orbs on their tar-stalks come slithering from the deep and bob in ever-smaller circles around her. From a distance, they were surreal but up close, their dilated pupils are unnerving. There's so many of them. So many eyes upon her, each filled with fervent expectations.

  Hurry, hurry, they whisper with their cilia. Hurry, for it's nearly dawn.

  At the mention of dawn, Ysobel turns to the east, where the darkness is not so black nor the thickening haze so solid. In fact, there's a warmth about it that only makes the slick tendrils wrapped around her arms and legs feel icier. The eye-orbs hiss their disapproval, and their stringent grip on her tightens.

  She gasps, pulls back against their restraints.

  Yet isn't this just what she wanted?

  "No." Her heels bite into the dew-softened dirt.

  "No." She closes her eyes, imagines them gone. Imagines just a tree. Just a yard. Just a simple cracked branch lying still and dead with nothing, nothing inside but earwigs and ants and beetles and worms and a thousand tiny things that will consume it down to dust. Harmless, wind-swept dust incapable of anything at all.

  "No!"

  Something rumbles to life, and she flinches at the sound but doesn't dare open her eyes. It's louder than the branch's initial crack, louder than the hum of the void. Louder than the laugh tracks and the rending of pages and the distant ringing of her phone. The tendrils loosen their grip, fleeing before the noise; the vines curl up on themselves; and the iciness of the eye-orbs' gaze retreats until she swears she feels the sun's warmth as the stones of the cathedral crumble around her.

  Open your eyes.

  She wakes with a gasp, fingers gripping the armchair. Across the room, the television blares gray static. And somewhere beyond, in the yard, the rumble persists, loud and steady.

  Outside, the morning sun momentarily blinds her to anything but vague shadows and noise. With a hand shading her forehead, discernable shapes slowly take form: The flailing branches of the cherry tree. The wings of magpies taking flight. And the shape of a wispy-haired, bandana-clad woman with her chainsaw pressed to the branch's end, its moving bits dissolving the wood into harmless plumes of dust.

  Ysobel watches from her stoop as the sawdust dissipates through the sky – an orange cloud against red sunrise.

  Then she returns to the kitchen, flicks on her kettle, and sets out two mugs for tea.

  THE KIND DETECTIVE

  by Lucy A. Snyder

  One Sunday at exactly 4pm, Detective Craig McGill was nursing an Irish coffee and poring over the cold-case murder photos spread across his cigarette-pocked kitchen table. His eyes ached. There had to be some small but crucial details he missed the first twenty times he studied these black-and-white snapshots of death and misery. He was certain, sure as a priest about the truth of a loving God, that if he just looked at things the right way, he’d solve these grisly puzzles. Justice would be served. And if a horror could be met with no meaningful justice, at least grieving families could finally gain some closure.

  A loud bang! made him reflexively dive to the worn yellow linoleum floor. His ears popped as if he were on a jet that had taken a sudden 20,000-foot plunge. Vertigo surged bile into his throat as he rolled sideways to draw the .38 revolver he kept in a holster bolted beneath the table.

  He crouched in the shadow of the table, waiting for another bang! None came. It hadn’t been gunfire. Too loud, too low. But it had come from the street in front of his house. Maybe closer. A bomb? His mind flashed on the pressure cooker IEDs the narc squad had recovered from a backwoods meth lab. Who would have tossed a bomb into his yard? The local Klan, angry that he’d sent one of their boys to Angola for murder? Gangbangers? A random lunatic?

  After a ten count, he crouch-ran to the living room window and peeked through mini-blinds. The only thing that registered at first was that something was terribly wrong with his yard. But for a couple of seconds his brain rejected the missives from his eyes because what he beheld was an impossibility.

  The massive pecan tree that shaded the front yard of the shotgun bungalow since his grandfather built it in 1930 was gone. Not exploded, not burned down – gone. It had a canopy as wide as the house and a trunk he couldn’t get his arms around and
there wasn’t a stick or leaf left of it. Not even the main roots remained. A wide, perfectly hemispherical scoop of dirt and concrete sidewalk was gone, too. McGill was relieved that the water and gas mains hadn’t been broken.

  Nobody was visible on his street except for his catty-corner neighbor, Mrs. Fontenot. He gave her all his pecans every fall, and the pies she made from them were one of the purest joys in his life. Before he tasted one, he’d scoffed at people who declared that this or that food was a religious experience. Mrs. Fontenot made him a believer. Upon taking his first bite, he declared that she should be a pastry chef. She laughed and replied that it would be the ruination of a fine hobby.

  Mrs. Fontenot was dressed in her gardening hat and matching lavender gloves and rubber boots and sat beside a scooped crater in her front yard. Her magnolia was gone. She was hunched over, listing to the side in the way that people do when they are in profound shock.

  McGill shoved his pistol in the back waistband of his cargo pants and hurried out to see if she needed help. The heavy smells of tree root sap and fresh overturned soil were thick in the humid air. He glanced down at his missing tree’s crater as he hurried past it. The remaining roots were cleanly severed at the margin of the hemisphere. What kind of machine could have done such a thing? And why?

  “Miz Fontenot, are you okay?” he called as he scanned the street for strange vehicles. His snap judgement that this was the work of criminals he’d crossed seemed ridiculous, now. Someone who could take a pair of big old trees like this could have taken his whole house with him inside it. But someone did do this strange, powerful thing, so maybe the perpetrator was watching? The hand of God hadn’t just scooped out their trees. The universe didn’t work that way. Did it?