Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  The moment we’re out of Josh’s range of vision she bends to get close to me.

  “Lexi,” she whispers against my ear, and I can almost feel my neurons bristling, receptive and alert. “Run. Get out, and never come back here. No matter what Josh says to you.”

  She grabs a black fuzzy sweater off a chair and shoves it into my hands. It’s made of thick, expensive cashmere, much nicer than anything I can remember her owning before.

  I wish I could ask what she means, demand all the details, but the awful fact is that I actually don’t need an explanation. What matters is that she means something, and she’s obviously doing her best to protect me—my God, from someone she loves. It only takes a flash before I decide to trust her.

  “What about you?” I whisper back. My photo of her and Josh together at the gorge still hangs above her dresser. It looks as if the Delbos never touched a single thing in here.

  “You saw me die, Lexi. Just go with that.” She kisses my cheek, softly and quickly, but there’s an intensity to the kiss that startles me. I feel a tear brush from her lashes, and a hard, stifled gasp against my skin. “And don’t blame Josh. He’s—not right. Get out!”

  There’s a terrible moment where a thousand replies and arguments and questions rise up in my mind like a roaring wind: like, Get out of what, exactly? Why does everyone keep telling me not to blame Josh? What’s this not right you’re talking about? You know he always used to tell me not to blame you? And: Ksenia, I can tell you’re miserable, but pretending that you’re dead is not something I could ever do, not now that I’ve seen you again. And: Ksenia, why don’t you run with me?

  A whirlwind of things I desperately want to say to her, and not a single one of them reaches my voice, because Josh has appeared in the doorway. There’s an inquisitive quality to his stare that I don’t appreciate.

  Ksenia smiles at him, warm and bright and carefully composed. “See, baby, now Lexi has to visit soon, so she can bring back my sweater!”

  “Jesus, Ksenia. Of course I’ll visit you. Nothing has been the same since we lost you two,” I say, keeping up my side of our conspiracy, and pull the sweater on over my head. If Josh guessed what Ksenia just told me, what would he do? It’s unimaginable that he would try to stop me from leaving, unless maybe he would? My heart is pattering and my mouth fills with a hollow taste, dry and gray, while Josh’s brown gaze surrounds me.

  Ksenia sidesteps around him and heads back toward the door, trying to pull us after her with her personal gravity, but for a moment Josh and I stay staring at each other. I just want to relax, to breathe deeply, to believe he’s still truly my friend, but when everything else seems to be changing its shape and warping its meaning, maybe he is too.

  “I’ve got to get going,” I say. “I’m already going to be late.”

  “Okay,” Josh says, and smiles. “Get home safe.”

  We shuffle together up the short flight back to the kitchen, past the yawning shadow of the new staircase, and then meet Ksenia at the open front door. She’s staring out at the feathers of sunset streaking the lawn, her look abstracted and sad, and she jumps when we come up behind her. I hug her, and one realization becomes clear to me through all the senselessness of the day: this might be the lasting goodbye that we missed before, when I watched her die.

  “You remember the way?” Ksenia asks lightly, and Josh flinches.

  “Josh showed me a shortcut,” I tell her, and then I hug him too—not right, she said, he’s not right, and I’m still wondering about possible meanings that phrase might have. And I walk away from them, across the lawn.

  When I reach the sidewalk I look back to see Josh standing with his arm around her shoulder, both of them watching me go, and it gives me an awful impression as if I had been to visit Ksenia in some sort of institution, maybe a mental ward, and Josh was there as her nurse, her guard, her keeper.

  As soon as I’m around the first corner, out of their view, I hear light footsteps coming just behind me.

  just enough of the truth

  I suppress the impulse to run, to draw attention to myself, even as my pulse starts to race and my hearing shivers with a residue of the bells I heard when I called Josh’s number. It could easily be a coincidence that someone is back there, or by the sound of it, two or three people; it might have nothing to do with me. I place each step with false serenity on the sidewalk, though tiny spasms grip my muscles and urge me to charge madly up the block. I can’t give in to dread, can’t allow panic to blur my vision and make me miss my path; my mind is full of an inexplicable certainty that I have to return by precisely the same route we followed here. Why is that idea so clear to me?

  Well, if it didn’t matter, if I could take whatever streets I chose, then why would Ksenia have asked me if I remember the way?

  I turn the next corner—it was just here that Josh and I came around the bend, wasn’t it, by this house with the green shutters, the swan in flight painted on the mailbox? The footsteps stay directly behind me, crowding closer now, with a muttering, soft-soled sound. And I shouldn’t look back, I know it, but for a moment fear defeats my self-possession and I glance over my shoulder. There are three of them: a pale girl in dragging lace with some kind of animal head sewn as a decoration on her chest, a softly brown girl in golden scales that reflect the sunset like dazzling tangerine brushstrokes, and a boy in tight, silver-glazed gray with a fountain of snow-bright hair.

  The pale girl catches my glance and smiles at me, with a dainty curl of her rosebud lips. “Josh,” she murmurs, “can she get away?”

  The voice coming out of her mouth is Ksenia’s voice, low and plaintive and worried. My knees waver and I glance again, unsure which I should distrust, my sight or my hearing; did I hallucinate Ksenia speaking, or could it possibly be that Ksenia is trailing after me, and I somehow imagined a different face in place of hers? The girl is tall and blond like Ksenia, but with a torrent of whipped-cream curls, and her face has a doll-like, simpering prettiness, nothing like Ksenia’s knife-edged beauty.

  She catches the bewilderment in my look, and leers. Prickles course down my back. Her cheeks appear oddly peaked, as if they were crowded with too many tiny bones. I keep stumbling, haphazardly, my head still twisted over my shoulder; I can’t make myself look away.

  Her companions titter, then the brown girl in the goldfish dress rolls her eyes at me. “I don’t know. I mean, she’s not all the way here yet, just the first couple of steps here? But I don’t think Prince will be super excited about Lexi just walking out. I don’t know what they’ll do.”

  It’s Josh’s voice. Unmistakably. As if that girl’s lips were opening, and a radio broadcast were pouring through them. They all grin broadly and I finally tear my eyes away from them and focus on the sidewalk in front of me, just keep going, just keep going, though at every step I feel as if my calves are about to collapse. They’re only a few paces behind me, and all three of them are taller than I am, longer-legged, almost certainly fast enough to chase me down if I run.

  “You should have gone with her,” Ksenia’s voice says. “Or let me.” I won’t look again, I refuse to, but from the voice’s position I think it must be the boy who spoke this time.

  “Oh, Kezzer, you know that wouldn’t help! They’ll do whatever they decide to do. Anyway, Prince is so weird about you that they’d probably mess with Lexi more if you were there, just to watch you freak out. You know, he thinks it’s cute.”

  That was one of the girls, I can’t tell which, pouring out Josh’s warm timbre, and I stumble a bit from the breathless understanding that everything I’m hearing is what Josh and Ksenia are saying to each other right now, this moment, in what they must believe is privacy. I’m eavesdropping, not because I want to, but through the mouths of these freaks. Where on earth am I, and what is happening to me? But I can’t think about that, not yet; all I can do is concentrate on getting away.

  The trio behind me bursts into giddy laughter. I’ve arrived at the next intersecti
on, and the asphalt glimmers citrine and bronze, and the trees sway like an illusion of calm while I stagger to a halt. Because I know we turned repeatedly on the way here, turned at every corner, but now as I gaze into rippling blue shadows and elongated light I can’t remember which direction is the one I need, to get back to the woods. To Josh’s special shortcut.

  I can hear them breathing, those people, those creatures who are following me, and I almost expect to feel their hands seizing my body, but nothing happens. I gaze left and right, hoping to catch sight of something I remember, something that will reveal the way home, and they wait at my back.

  “Josh,” one of them says, channeling Ksenia, “Lexi has to get home! She—I know you did it for me, baby, and I’m grateful, but this place isn’t right for her. It’s only for people who don’t make sense anywhere else. Like us.”

  “I just hate for you to be lonely, Kezzer. I thought you’d be happy!”

  “I know. I know you were trying to take care of me. But we can’t do that to her family.” A pause, a dimple of silence; did we pass that red car half a block away on my left? I’m almost certain that we did, and that just around the next bend I’ll find the woods. A flash of that precise scarlet seems to rise up in my mind, beckoning and persuasive: a color that reverberates like a bell. “Josh, please help her!”

  “Oh, Kezz, you know that’s not a fair thing to ask!” Josh’s voice sighs inches from my right ear now, and lace billows, dry and airy, at my ankle. I gaze straight ahead but milky curls lap in the corner of my eye, and then the golden-scaled girl starts sidling up too, hemming me in on that side. A single slim, pale finger caresses my jaw, and the blonde leans so close that her frothing hair nods across my cheek. “Did you say something to her, Kezzer? Is that why she wouldn’t stay?”

  Trembling cascades through my limbs and my throat feels thick and choked, but I understand what they’re doing, jostling up on me this way. They want me to bolt in the opposite direction and lose myself forever—and it will be forever, I know it, I can feel it, if they drive me from my path. How I know it, how these creatures can carry my friends’ voices into my ears—none of that matters. What matters now is listening to what I know, paying close attention to my own heart and the memories impressed on my mind.

  We never passed a red car.

  Something warm and wet and slippery probes my collarbone and I do not permit myself to look. Something furry nuzzles me.

  I lunge right, bowling straight into the lacy blonde; she topples down in a cloud of her own curls and I leap over her. And, my God, that animal face on her chest is snarling at me as I fly above it, its teeth bared and shining. I land in the spill of her ruffles and the fabric slides beneath my foot and sends me wheeling forward. Needle-sharp fangs rake my left shin as I stagger; just before I crash facefirst into the pavement I catch hold of a lamppost, pull myself upright, and run.

  I can’t tell if they’re chasing me. All I can see is the blurred street, the swimming trees, but for a sustained moment my ears are so glutted with that bell-toned resonance that I can’t hear anything else; I can’t hear the sound of their feet and I don’t dare to glance behind again. My lungs feel on the verge of bursting. I’m almost positive that at the next corner I’ll see the woods, the wavering green, and then the path back to that blackberry thicket.

  If they know everything Josh and Ksenia were saying to each other just now, if they can catch their voices and release them again like birds into the air, then they also know everything Ksenia whispered to me. They know she told me to run. Will they punish her somehow? But I can’t think about that, not yet, not yet; I can only think about reaching the next street, about the houses rushing past and my pumping legs and the way out of here, wherever and whatever here might be.

  I reach the intersection and the woods loom high and vein-blue with the sun dropping down behind them. One more block to go—though for all I know those creatures might follow me in there, or there might already be more of them, dozens, lurking in ambush among the trees. I don’t believe they’re precisely human, those girls in lace and scales, that spume-haired boy—but that’s another thing I can’t think about. Get out, and never come back here. That’s what she told me, and now there’s no more question as to why.

  I can see the path’s opening into the woods, a blue-black mouth. And standing directly in front of it is Ksenia, somehow looking even taller and paler than usual. She stretches out a hand to me, her eyes wide in appeal, and staggers forward on her bare, heron-thin legs.

  All I can think is that she made it this far, how doesn’t matter. Wherever this place is, whatever strange distortion swept her here, we can escape together, and Josh will just have to catch up with us. He knows the way.

  I race toward her, ready to grab her, ready to pull her along with me. She doesn’t look well, and maybe they’ve already injured her somehow, but we don’t have far to go—assuming that blackberry thicket marked some sort of transitional zone, and it did, I know it. I know it by the way Josh announced my name on its far side. Once I get her to safety I’ll call for help, and then she’ll be alive again, really alive, where anyone can see her and talk to her, where people’s voices stay put in their own throats.

  “Ksenia!” I shout. “Come on! I know the way out of here!”

  We’re only a few yards apart now and she seems to be having difficulty staying upright. Her stilt legs poking out of black cutoffs seem to be growing, hinging into new joints, growing excess knees that bend in abnormal directions. Her skin looks faintly gray as she lurches toward me on those inhuman limbs, each step slicing the air into weird polygons. She’s at least seven feet tall.

  “Lexi!” she croaks. “Lexi!”

  Not her, not her, not her.

  Momentum nearly sends me crashing into her, and it’s only at the last moment that I manage to pull myself up short, to rear back before her fingers touch me. I retreat a few paces, gaping in disbelief.

  “I don’t want to die, Lexi! Don’t let me die again!” Her arm is still reaching toward me, sagging with impossible elbows she can’t quite control; even her fingernails are growing at terrific speed, clawing the air in their eagerness to reach me.

  I have to get around this tottering thing, whatever it is—not her—but God, that’s Ksenia’s face, her hazel-rimmed gray eyes, and maybe those are truly Ksenia’s tears streaking down, stolen from her the way they stole her voice before. How much did she risk, trying to save me?

  “You were going to abandon me,” the Ksenia-thing wheezes, pitching on its spidery legs; they’re so grotesquely long now that they zigzag out to either side of her, with her torso swinging in the middle. “You were going to leave me to die again. I can’t think about that, that’s what you thought. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

  The real Ksenia wanted me to escape from here, at any price; she wanted me to leave her behind. Even in this labyrinth of false voices and mirages, that’s how I know it was truly her, absolutely my friend, even if she wasn’t sure herself. But still this thing’s wounded Ksenia-eyes, its tone of raw accusation, catch at my heart, because what it’s saying is true.

  I feel something scraping my chest; it’s those nails, jutting a foot from fingers just as long, scratching at my sternum like a cat at a door. The thing cocks its head at me, blond hair twitching, gray eyes as senseless as they were when Ksenia sprawled dying on the ground.

  “It was mostly my fault you died before,” I gasp, still out of breath from my wild dash, and I don’t even know why I feel the need to confess to this monster. The endless pale legs and arms pleat like a fence across my path now, but they look weak and brittle; possibly I could crash my way through, snap this sick, sad thing into twigs. But how could I do that to something that might be—not really Ksenia, of course, but that might contain some trace of her? “I told Josh—things I shouldn’t, and he completely flipped out. I didn’t trust your capacity to speak for yourself, was the reason for it, and because it made me so angry that you couldn’t seem t
o be direct with him. But that still didn’t give me the right to speak for you, Ksenia. I’m sorry.”

  The Ksenia-thing can’t exactly walk anymore, not with so many of its knees grazing the pavement while others poke at strange skyward angles, but it shuffles closer, and now even more than fear the most complete and killing pity takes over my heart. This thing isn’t her, it’s not the true Ksenia—but it’s also more than an illusion, I think, it’s partly and imperfectly my friend. And I’m almost positive I recognize the part of her I’m talking to, now that it’s come out of hiding. Its pallid face gleams with tears and snot; like a heartbroken child, it doesn’t even move to wipe its cheeks.

  And its name is not Kezzer.

  “If you’re so sorry,” it rasps, “then stay here, Lexi. Don’t leave me!”

  All at once I see that those multijointed limbs are still extending, bending into a kind of cage around me. I’m surrounded by bars of thin, white, wiry flesh, by bulging elbows, more and more of them at every moment, and all those bars are covered in ivory down. My heart leaps with the understanding: this thing has kept me mesmerized until it’s almost too late. The violet mouth of the woods shows through the gaps in this fence of skin, and in the descending light the tree-shadows have slipped into a darkness nearly black.

  “The real you would never ask me to do that, though. Maybe you were never your own friend, Ksenia, but you’re mine, and you care too much about me to want me to be some kind of sacrifice.”

  Its pale face bobs and jerks only a foot away from mine, now. Just for a moment, it looks confused. “That’s what she says,” it sneers. “But you know how she never says everything, and anyway it’s all mixed up with lies. She can’t tell a whole true thing, not ever.”