Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  I can’t imagine much worse than going through that crushing earth again, but I’ll do whatever it takes. I swore it. I turn and throw myself back on my grave, and even as I’m falling I see that the hole I came through is gone. The grass is a scarless sheet of green. I smack down, and the ground hits my chest with a brutal, unyielding thud.

  “Sennie!” the me-thing chitters. “Not that way! Used it up, that way!”

  You don’t say. “So what do I do?” The thought of those inhuman creeps prodding at Lexi, dragging her into their dances, kissing her cheeks—it’s so nauseating that my muscles seize with rage.

  And now the second half of what this thing said hits me. And Joshua. Took them away!

  Which would seem to imply that he didn’t go voluntarily. “Was Josh fighting back?” I ask. And the Ksenia-imp nods its sliver of a head, its single gray eye wide and solemn.

  He finally did it. Josh found the strength to be himself again. If the situation weren’t so desperate, I’d crack up weeping from sheer relief. I knew you could, baby. I knew you were still in there! But there’s also the flip side to his defiance: if Prince has Josh, what monstrous things will he do to him, for daring to turn against his masters?

  Josh reclaiming the freedom of his own mind: that would be Prince’s idea of the gravest possible insult.

  “Unselle has the hat,” the Ksenia-imp says. I could slap her for picking this moment to blurt nonsense, but then she keeps going. “The hat ate them, Sennie. It ate them all the way through! Josh said no to killing Lexi’s mother, and the hat ate him up! Lexi thought the hat would help, they tricked her with taking it, but when she saw what … she grabbed on.” A pause. “And maybe now, what happens from eating?”

  Digestion.

  “My hat?” The idea opens up some peculiar questions, but there’s no time for them. “It ate them through? You mean, through to that—other world?” Another nod. “Then could it eat me so I go there too?”

  Hope spikes in me: it might be better this way, actually. The hat might take me straight to wherever Josh and Lexi are trapped. If I burrowed back through my grave, how would I track them down?

  Another nod. “But Unselle has it! And she is evil, evil, bad.”

  “Then we’ll fucking take it from her.” Unselle, with her billowing lace and her bloody script and her metallic simpering. Unselle with the yawning, snapping mink where anyone human would have a heart. Out of all of them she’s the one I’d be happiest to kill, except for maybe Prince, if only killing them was something I could figure out how to do. “So can you help me find her?”

  Hesitation. “Don’t know where. Unselle has a horse.”

  Right. I should have known that a creature sliced off from me wouldn’t be much use. I look away, trying to stop myself from saying something mean. It’s not actually her fault.

  “Sennie? Lexi calls me Kay! She gave me my own, whole, very own name!”

  “That’s great,” I snap. I’m not paying much attention, just scanning the tame suburban streets, the bloated spill of blue shadows. The sun is up far enough to launch sparks through the trees. Where in all this bland serenity would Unselle be? We’re on a hill, so I can see the town rambling into the distance: the hot glitter of cars on Grand, the midnight groove of the gorge.

  Even if it’s on the dull side, our old town, it’s real. It’s made of car alarms and trees and vinyl siding, people and cats and sprinklers. Not sick, distorted dreams. I’m standing on real ground, even though it feels weirdly light, disconnected from my feet. Still, if only Josh and Lexi were with me, I might fall to my knees and soak the grass with my tears.

  But I’ve got to go back. Of course I do. How can I deserve a real life if I don’t save the people I love?

  “Unselle can find you, though, Sennie. She has your blood in her. She can tell where you will go.”

  The gorge. The clearing where Josh and I first stumbled into them. That’s where. Now that I’ve thought of it, it’s obvious: how Unselle will come sidling through the trees on her cloud-horse, her mouth pitching like a boat in a storm, and curl a cold hand on my neck.

  We have a date.

  this ground i’m lying on

  “Get up,” I tell the imp-thing—right, Kay. “Hitch a ride, however you do that. I’ve got to run.”

  She vanishes, squeaking. I feel the eeriest rustling sensation against my leg, like a parasitic newspaper crawling on me. And then we’re off, charging down the hill with spangles of morning sun dashed into my eyes. The green world heaves and tilts. Maybe I’m not acclimatized to reality anymore, because it’s rougher going than it ought to be. I’ve always been a strong runner, but now I’m battered by waves of nausea. Dizzy with alternating light and shade as I race below the branches. My legs aren’t pumping like they should.

  God knows how they’ll torture Josh. And Lexi—I’m picturing her captive, disoriented, maybe in some cage that’s even viler because, to glance at it, you might think it was the everyday world.

  But if Kay knows what she’s talking about, it’s even worse than that. What happens from eating. What is it, anyway, that powers Prince’s realm?

  How far is it to the gorge? More than two miles, I think, but even though I lived in this town for years I’m foggier than I should be on how to get there. It’s connected somehow to how sick I’m getting. I have this horrible feeling that I’m not all the way here. That my feet aren’t quite striking the ground.

  Whatever. What I’m feeling is of zero importance. All that counts now is what I do.

  The town is starting to look weirdly messed up. Lots of snapped branches, toppled poles, cars with their roofs staved in, as if a violent hurricane had passed in the night. But the sky is blue and golden, the breezes as soft and floppy as dog ears. Sirens wail in the distance, and I get a distinct sense that I’m looking at the trail of devastation left by a legion of changelings—with Josh in the lead. Is his army still here somewhere, now that he’s gone? Or did they go home, once they had Lexi?

  I’m still racing as fast as I can, but the dizziness is making me swerve as I go. Out of nowhere, a dry heave doubles my body. I keep running, contorted with cramps. The view of our town arches into my eyes and then ebbs into darkness, over and over again. What is wrong with me?

  But I think I recognize the street on my right. I think it ends at the woody margin by the gorge, so if I can just keep going straight, if I can just not fall on my face before I get there …

  I pass a street sign, and the name flares up, horribly bright, before it collapses into darkness again. Whistler Drive. It’s not where I thought I was, not where I should be. All at once I’m not sure if I’m even heading in the right direction.

  A face veers into mine, glaring like a headlamp. I see light brown curls and gray roots and a gaping mouth. Eyes so shocked they look like windows at the exact instant a rock ruptures their glass.

  And yet I’m not thinking about who it is, not at first, because all at once I get it: I’m feeling like I’m not all the way here, not truly in this world, because I’m not here, not really. I ate their food. I did everything Josh asked me to do. Prince and them, they still have a hold on me.

  The woman in my face screams wordlessly and swings a fist at me, sloppily. Misses, so I don’t feel the need to punch her back.

  Then she starts adding discernible comments to her shrieking. “You ghost! You ghost! You vicious, nasty little ghoul! You bring him back! Do you hear me? Bring back our Joshua! Oh, where did you hide his body?”

  She grabs hold of my dirt-smeared vest and then lets go, maybe in astonishment at my solidity.

  “Hi, Emma,” I say. I was never under any illusions that my foster mother was all that crazy about me, but her reaction to seeing me alive still comes as a disappointment. Then her raving starts making a little more sense to me. Of course, it’s all about how much she misses Josh, not that he ever really gave a damn about her. “I’m trying to bring Josh back, actually. Maybe you could give me a ride to the gorge?
”

  Because with the way I’m swaying, I’m not all that sure I’ll make it there on my own.

  Emma staggers back a few feet. “You murdered him. And then you came back to torment me.”

  I don’t want to be cruel to her—don’t want to be anything except away from her, honestly, if I didn’t need a ride—but I still crack up at that. In a hysterical, unhinged, knee-rocking way. It’s just so preposterous.

  “I’m the one who got buried. So, really, it might be more accurate to say Josh murdered me? On a temporary basis. At least, that’s what I’m hoping.” It’s true in a way. Josh helped set up my fake death, and he let that poor changeling keel over in my place. But from Emma’s glare, it doesn’t look like she’s buying my version of events. “Listen—I have to get to the gorge. I think there might be a way to get Josh back. But I’m feeling too sick to run.”

  Not that I have anything like a plan for getting him and Lexi back. But if I can reach them, that will be a start.

  I’ve always been a stranger—here, and everywhere else. I could never make myself love my foster parents, and I know I had no right to expect any love from them. But still, nothing has prepared me for seeing such hate on the face of someone I lived with for six years. I always tried, at least, to do the right thing. To be responsible and decent, even if I couldn’t be warm.

  Her enraged face is dialing in and out, like a time-lapsed moon. My sense of the ground is getting more remote by the moment. And it’s really sinking in, now, that I need her help. Right now, with no more delay. How can I fight Unselle if I can’t stay conscious?

  “I don’t care if you hate me,” I tell her. “Just give me a ride already. Then I promise you’ll never see me again.” I get a quick hit of inspiration. “If you won’t drive me to the gorge, I’ll haunt you till you die.”

  A momentary snarl, then she nods at a nearby car. I hear the bleat of unlocking doors. It worked.

  I’ve just made it into the passenger seat when the whole world falls away.

  I come to with the door next to me hanging open and Emma yanking on my arm, my limp body sagging sideways into a border of grass and dandelions. “Get out! I did what you asked. Now get your scrawny, murdering carcass out of my life!”

  I almost fight back, but then I remember: the whole point was to get here. I let myself topple out of the seat and onto the patchy turf, but I’m not sure I can stand.

  “I didn’t kill Josh, Emma. I can’t tell you he’s fine, because he’s not. But I don’t think he’s dead.”

  Emma is the one who’s dead; I see it now. Dead at heart. She used to be an okay person, probably even better than average. But now it’s like her insides have been steeped in poison until there’s nothing left in her but toxic rot.

  That’s another consequence of everything we did, Josh and me. And of everything that was done to us too. Poor, pathetic Emma is another casualty of it all.

  I see a single dandelion, growing bigger and more blaring than the sun. I hear the car pulling away, feel the gust of its departure. How was I dumb enough to think I could escape, that Prince and his scummy followers would just let me go? My body can’t survive in this world anymore. Sweat is pouring off my head and I grip fistfuls of grass to stop myself from plummeting into the sky.

  There’s no way I can save Josh and Lexi.

  Not while I’m busy dying.

  “Sennie,” a horrible little voice pipes in my ear. “Sennie!”

  God, how I hate that name. “Whatever you want, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the time for it.”

  “Sennie, look!” The imp-thing—right, Kay—is waving something in my face. Garish red and yellow, shiny and rectangular, catching the sunlight in unbearable snarls. “Potato chips! From that car!”

  The mention of food is enough to send my guts into violent spasms. I’ve never felt nausea like this before. “Jesus. Just leave me alone.”

  “Sennie, no!” I hear the shrill crinkling of the bag ripping open; the sound fills my whole head, as if my skull was stuffed with crumpled, metal-voiced garbage. I can’t believe a sound can hurt so much. “You must eat!”

  This dying business should really pick up the pace. My guts are made of sun-glaring tinfoil; the smell of those chips jabs in and turns into a fist crushing the foil. I gag so hard my throat feels torn, but nothing comes out. God, the vileness of that smell: sizzling dust, acidic grease, an ancient, stale wheeze of long-dead things …

  I realize too late: Kay is straddling my neck. Her little folded-paper hand is shoving that oily, ashy spew into my mouth. I try to spit, and feel the chips snapping like dried spiders. I try to get ahold of Kay, fling her away from me, but somehow she slips through my hand.

  And then a few fragments of chip claw their way into my throat. I heave again, my whole body bucking helplessly, with Kay riding my throat like some kind of flattened cowboy. Kay takes advantage of my twisted lips to shove in another mouthful.

  Here’s the interesting thing: this time the potato chips taste a lot more like food.

  I chew them on purpose, and the spasms stop throwing me around. I swallow, and it feels like an okay thing to do. It becomes clearer where I am: on my side, staring toward the woods where delicate spring trees spray up like emerald froth.

  This ground I’m lying on: it’s my ground. The molecules flung from busted stars, the ones that made this planet? They made me too. The grass is so close to me that I can see the iridescence streaking up each blade of it, the waxy green perfection.

  And when Kay offers me another handful of potato chips, I wolf them like a fiend. Because they’re real.

  I almost feel like I can get up. And then I do, with Kay swinging off the ridiculous sliced-up tuxedo jacket Josh chose for me—last night, if that’s a concept that has any meaning now. I must have dropped my blood-soaked shirt somewhere.

  Kay. As my mind comes back into focus, I realize what she just did. “You got me out. You broke—whatever the hell kind of hold they had on me.”

  It makes sense; eating on the other side locks you in, eating on this side undoes it—with the savage repugnance I felt for food here as a pretty solid guarantee that nobody would try it on their own. I would have preferred starvation to eating those chips, if Kay hadn’t forced me.

  She chirps happily. “See, Sennie? I helped you!” Then, wistfully: “Not enough, though.”

  “You definitely did enough,” I say. “You saved my ass.” But even as I speak I’m staring into the woods; is that a stir of something white, something bloody? “Hang on to the rest of those chips, okay? I think we might need them.”

  I walk in—a little light-headed still. But I feel more like I belong on the planet than I ever have in my life. If I’m a stranger, then I’m the one who carries a secret charge, a disguised power, and it doesn’t matter if no one recognizes that at first.

  But I still have to reclaim the only two people who ever recognized me, years before I recognized myself.

  my version of love

  Unselle’s not in the glade where we used to gather on summer nights, of course. Deeper in, there’s that second clearing where Josh and I first heard their music; where their bells shimmered down on us and we danced in their arms. I failed Josh then. I let him dance on, didn’t heed the apprehension running through my body. From the moment Prince first said his name they got their hooks in him, and I should have seen it. That his mind was sliding. That he wasn’t right.

  So this is the day I make it up to him. And to Lexi too, for all the times I was so walled inside myself that I couldn’t appreciate how she kept trying to reach me, whether I deserved it or not. It’s awful, that I had to go through so much before I could let her kindness cut me to the quick. A familiar, mossy boulder crests out of a green shadow.

  Ksenia, trust me. I know how lucky I am, and I’m not complaining, or comparing my life with yours. Lexi said that to me once, on a velvety, endless night when we were perched together on that boulder, a bottle of wine squeezed between us. B
ut I think we both live with the burden of a lot of expectations. Ones that other people have put on us. So, I’m expected to automatically become an economist or something, and you—

  Probably I’m supposed to wind up in prison for identity theft. I didn’t say it gently. I thought I knew what she was doing, and I resented it. She’d been going out of her way to confide in me, to flaunt her vulnerability. I thought it was a game, or a trick: to coax me into opening up in return.

  But even positive expectations are limiting. That’s my point. We both have to push back at people who think they get to tell us who we’re meant to be. She hesitated. You have such great grades. Why don’t you try applying for scholarships? Why just assume that community college is the best you can do?

  I knew she was right, and I seethed. I thought, I’m nothing like you. I thought, no matter how vulnerable Lexi pretended to be, in reality she was safe and happy and strong. Even worse, what she was suggesting: it implied that I should be planning for a life away from Josh, which was enough to start up a burn in my guts. Now who’s putting expectations on me, Lexi? I snapped. And she looked down. I didn’t care that I’d hurt her, or not enough.

  I cringe now, thinking of it. Because who else ever believed in me enough to give me advice like that? And all I could do was be rude to her. I stagger a little as I walk, just from the sting of remembering. What a lousy friend I was to her. How she kept giving me more chances anyway.

  It was never possible to keep track of time on the other side, but I might have guessed it was more like August there. But here it’s spring; drifts of blossoms whiten the woods. They offer good camouflage for something else white and waving and full of lace. It’s hard to pick out which pale disturbance might be her dress, her cloudy horse. But then I spot a black blotch, pitching against a snow-colored blur. My hat, held brim up in Unselle’s spindly hand.