The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  7.

  Maybe, you say, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to go home now, and I nod, and I wipe the blood off your lips, the strawberry life leaking from you freely as ropy cheesecloth, muslin ectoplasm from the mouth, ears, nostrils of a 1912 spiritualist. I wipe it away, but I hold it, too, clasping it against the loss of you. So long as I can catch all the rain in my cupped hands, neither of us shall drown. You just watch me, okay? Keep your eyes on my eyes, and I’ll pull you through. It looks a lot worse than it is, I lie. I know it hurts, but you’ll be fine. All the blood makes it look terrible, I know, but you’ll be fine. Don’t you close your goddamn eyes. Oh, sister, don’t you die. Don’t speak. I cannot stand the rheumy sound of the blood in your throat, so please do not speak. But you say, You can hear the bells, Bobbie, can’t you? Fuck, but they are so red, and they are so loud, how could you not? Take me and cut me out in little stars . . .

  8.

  So fast, my love, so swift and sure thy hands, and when Catfish leaned forward to press the muzzle of her 9mm to my head and tell me to shut up and drive, you drew your vorpal steel, and the razor folded open like a silver flower and snicker-snacked across coal-haired Haddie’s throat. She opened up as if she’d come with a zipper. Later, we opened her wide and sunk her body in a marshy maze of swamp and creek beds and snapping-turtle weeds. Scum-green water, and her guts pulled out and replaced with stones. You wanted to know were there alligators this far north, handy-dandy helpful gator pals to make nothing more of her than alligator shit, and me, I said, hey this is goddamn Mississippi, there could be crocodiles and pythons for all I know. Afterwards, we bathed in the muddy slough, because cutting a bitch’s throat is dirty goddamn business, and then we fucked in the high grass, then had to pluck off leeches from our legs and arms and that one ambitious pioneer clinging fiercely to your left nipple. What about the car? The car’s a bloody goddamn mess. And yeah, I agreed, what about the car? We took what we needed from the Impala, loaded our scavenged belongings into a couple of backpacks, knapsacks, a pillowcase, and then we shifted the car into neutral and pushed it into those nameless waters at the end of a nameless dirt road, and we hiked back to 78. You did so love that car, our sixteenth-birthday present, but it is what it is and can’t be helped, and no way we could have washed away the indelible stain left behind by treacherous Catfish’s undoing. That was the first and only time we ever killed in self-defense, and it made you so angry, because her death, you said, spoiled the purity of the game. What have we got, Bobbie, except that purity? And now it’s tainted, sullied by one silly little thief—or what the hell ever she might have been. We have us, I replied. We will always have us, so stop your worrying. My words were, at best, cold comfort, I could tell, and that hurt more than just a little bit, but I kept it to myself, the pain, the hollow in the pit of my soul that had not been there only the half second before you started in on purity and being soiled by the thwarted shenanigans of Catfish. Are you all right? you asked me, as we marched up the off-ramp. I smiled and shook my head. Really, I’m thinking, let’s not have that shoe’s on the other foot thing ever again, love. Let’s see if we can be more careful about who we let in the car that we no longer have. There was a moon three nights past full, like a judgmental god’s eye to watch us on our way. We didn’t hitch. We just fucking walked until dawn, and then stole a new car from a driveway outside of Tremont. You pulled the tag and stuck on our old Nebraska plates, amongst that which we’d salvaged from the blooded Impala. The new ride, a swank fucking brand-new ’96 Saturn the color of Granny Smith apples, it had all-electric windows, but a CD player when all we had was our box of tapes, so fuck that; we’d have to rely on the radio. We hooked onto WVUA 90.7 FM outta Tuscaloosa, and the DJ played Soundgarden and Beck and lulled us forward on the two-lane black-racer asphalt rails of that river, traveling dawnwise back to the earliest beginnings of the world, you said, watching the morning mist burning away, and you said, When vegetation rioted on the earth, and the big trees were kings. Read that somewhere? Yeah, you said, and shortly thereafter we took Exit 14, stopping just south of Hamilton, Alabama, because there was a Huddle House, and by then we were both starving all over again. There was also a Texaco station, and good thing, too, as the Saturn was sitting on empty, running on fumes. So, in the cramped white-tile fluorescent-drenched restroom, we washed off the swamp water we’d employed to wash away the dead girl’s blood. I used wads of paper towels to clean your face as best I could, after the way the raw-boned waitress with her calla-lily tattoo stared at you. I thought there for a moment maybe it was gonna be her turn to pay the ferryman, but you let it slide. There’s another woman’s scabs crusted in your hair, stubborn clots, and the powdery soap from the powdery soap dispenser on the wall above the sink isn’t helping all that much. I need a drink, you said. I need a drink like you would not believe. Yeah, fine, I replied, remembering the half-full, half-empty bottle of Jack in the pillowcase, so just let me get this spot here at your hairline. You go back to talking about the river, as if I understand—often I never truly understood you, and for that did I love thee even more. The road which is the river, the river which is the road, mortality, infinity, the grinding maw of history; An empty stream, a great goddamn silence, an impenetrable forever forest. That’s what I’m saying, you said. In my eyes, in disposed, in disgrace. And I said it’s gonna be a scorcher today, and at least the Saturn has AC, not like the late beloved lamented Impala, and you spit out what the fuck ever. I fill the tank, and I mention how it’s a shame Ms. Austin Catfish didn’t have a few dollars on her. We’re damn near busted flat. Yeah, well, we’ll fix that soon, you say. We’ll fix that soon enough, my sweet. You’re sitting on the hood, examining the gun she’d have used to lay us low. Make sure the safety is on, I say. And what I think in the split second before the pistol shot is Please be careful with that thing, the shit our luck’s been, but I didn’t say it aloud. An unspoken thought, then bang. No. Then BANG. You look nothing in blue blazes but surprised. You turn your face towards me, and the 9mm slips from your fingers and clatters to the oil- and antifreeze-soaked tarmac. I see the black girl behind the register looking our way, and Jesus motherfucking-fucking-fuck-fuck-fucking-motherfucker-oh fuck me this cannot be goddamn happening, no way can this be happening, not after everything we’ve done and been through and how there’s so much left to do and how I love you so. Suddenly, the air is nothing if not gasoline and sunlight. I can hardly clear my head, and I’m waiting for certain spontaneous combustion and the grand whump when the tanks blow, and they’ll see the mushroom cloud for miles and miles around. My head fills with fire that isn’t even there, but, still, flash-blind, I somehow wrestle you into the backseat. Your eyes are muddy with shock, muddy with perfect incredulity. I press your left hand against the wet hole in that soft spot below your sternum, and you gasp in pain and squeeze my wrist so hard it hurts. No, okay, you gotta let go now, I gotta get us the fuck outta here before the cops show up. Let go, but keep pressure on it, right? But we have to get out of here now. Because, I do not add, that gunshot was louder than thunder, that gunshot cleaved the morning apart like the wrath of Gog and Magog striding free across the Armageddon land, Ezekiel 38:2, or wild archangel voices and the trumpet of Thessalonians 4:16. There’s a scattered handful of seconds, and then I’m back on the highway again, not thinking, just driving south and east. I try not to hear your moans, ’cause how’s that gonna help either of us, but I do catch the words when you whisper, Are you all right, Bobbie? You flew away like a little bird, and isn’t that what Catfish called me? So how about you just shut up and drive, Little Bird. And in my head I do see a looped serpent made of fire devouring its own tail, and I know we cheated fate only for a few hours, only to meet up with it again a little farther down the road. I just drive. I don’t even think to switch on the AC or roll down the window or even notice how the car’s becoming as good as a kiln on four wheels. I just fucking drive. And, like agate beads strung along a rosary, I recite the prayer given me at the E
nd of Days, the end of one of us: Don’t you fucking shut your eyes. Please, don’t you shut your eyes, because you do not want to go there, and I do not want to be alone forever and forever without the half of me that’s you. In my hands, the steering wheel is busy swallowing its own tail, devouring round and round, and we, you and I, are only passengers.

  FAIRY TALE OF WOOD STREET

  1.

  I’M LYING IN BED, forgetting a dream of some forested place, a dream that is already coming apart behind my waking eyes like wet tissue between my fingers, and Hana gets up and walks across the bedroom to stand before the tall vanity mirror. The late morning sun is bright in the room, bright summer sun, July sun, and I know by the breeze through the open window that the coming afternoon will be cool. I can smell the flowers on the table by the bed, and I can smell the bay, too, riding the breeze, that faintly muddy, faintly salty, very faintly fishy smell that never ceases to make me think of the smell of sex. I watch Hana for a moment, standing there nude before the looking glass, her skin like porcelain, her eyes like moss on weathered slabs of shale, her hair the same pale shade of yellow as corn meal. And I’m thinking, Roll over and shut your eyes, because if you keep on watching you’ll only get horny again, and you’ll call her back to bed, and she’ll come, and neither of us will get anything at all done today. And you have that meeting at two, and she has shopping and a trip to the post office and the library to return overdue books, so just roll over and don’t see her. Think about the fading wet tissue shreds of the dream, instead. And that’s exactly what I mean to do, to lie there with my eyes shut, pretending to doze while she gets dressed. But then I see her tail.

  “Look at us,” she says, “sleeping half the day away. It’s almost noon. You should get up and get dressed. I need a shower.”

  Her tail looks very much like the tail of a cow. At least, that is the first thing that comes to mind, the Holstein and Ayrshire cows my grandfather raised when I was a girl and my family lived way off in western Massachusetts, almost to the New York state line, the cattle he raised for milk for the cheese he made. Hana’s tail hangs down a little past the bend of her knees, and there’s a tuft of hair on the end of it that is almost the exact same blonde as the hair on her head. Maybe a little darker, but not by much. It occurs to me, dimly, that I ought to be shocked or maybe even afraid. That I ought, at the very least, to be surprised, but the truth is that I’m not any of those things. Mostly, I’m trying to figure out why I never noticed it in all the months since we met and she moved into my apartment here in the old house on the east end of Wood Street.

  “I smell like sex,” Hana says, and she sniffs at her unshaved armpits. Her tail twitches, sways side to side a moment, and then is still again.

  “Maybe you should just forget about the shower and come back to bed,” I say, and while the sight of her tail didn’t come as a surprise, that does, those words from my mouth, when what I was just thinking—before I saw the tail—was how we both have entirely too much to do today to have spent the whole morning fucking. I realize that my hand is between my legs, that I’m touching myself, and I force myself to stop. But my fingers are damp, and there’s a flutter in my belly, just below my navel.

  “You don’t really want me to do that,” she says, glancing back over her shoulder. And I think, No, I don’t. I want to get up and have a bath and get dressed, and I want to forget that I ever saw that she has a tail. If I can forget I saw it, maybe it won’t be there the next time I see her naked. Maybe it’s only a temporary, transitory sort of thing, like a bad cold or a wart.