They were text messages from a 202 area code, so they were probably from Xavier. She swiped until she reached the messages, finding a series of pictures rather than words. The pictures showed a mural crawling across a wall. Each picture, four in total, dripped with color, green-gold, wet blue, and blazing magenta. The third picture was one of those panorama shots, where you could spin the view around.
The fourth picture was a picture of the marsh woman. The dark muse. Someone—Xavier?—had painted her. Her trademark robes were made of a thousand tiny blossoms. The blossoms were also entwined in her braided hair. She floated above the landscape, a nature goddess. Our Lady of the Marsh. She radiated with power, like Oya and Yemaya. The painting—or drawing—was outlined with a glowing aura. Iris wasn’t sure if the aura had been painted or if it was, indeed, an aura.
Her examination of the fourth picture was interrupted by a fifth message. This one was a video. It showed a tall, gaunt man filling in more of the painting with his fingers. The video was short, maybe five seconds, but she recognized the location. The rickety light from the Bayside Motel glowed through the curtain, competing with the magenta light.
Iris called the number. It went to voicemail. She called the number again and again, seven times. The eighth time, it picked up. She heard voices, Xavier’s and another guy’s, in the distance, along with the cries of gulls. She said Xavier’s name a few times, but it was obvious that he wasn’t listening.
The muse was summoning him, as she had once summoned her.
Iris found herself getting her car keys.
***
“She is alive in me,” Tamar told her on that day, five years ago. It had been late April and the heavy rains had just stopped. The trees had begun to bud, and new grass sprouted. They had driven to the edge of the Shimmer Marsh, because Tamar wanted to collect some marsh flowers to use in her new creations. They gathered larkspur, foxglove, phlox and rose mallow blossoms. Animals watched as the women reaped the shores, circling gulls and wading herons.
Iris found Tamar on the kitchen floor earlier that week, along with hundreds of images cut out from magazines, bottles of glue and discarded scraps. Tamar was a mess, sweating and wild-eyed as she cut out figures and sorted them. Iris watched her unobserved for a while, both intrigued and disturbed. She saw Tamar murmur as she worked, placing various images here and there on pasteboard, as if she were arranging a puzzle.
Then, Iris stopped her. She took the scissors away, and gently pulled her away from the chaos. Tamar had looked crazed then. Her hair, usually so carefully styled, was chaotic with random braids, stray glitter and petals. She stopped her because Tamar had never looked so beautiful. Her skin was the color of river clay, rich and brown. The freckles were dark silt scattered across her body. Tamar had become the angel of the marsh. They had sex then. Ugly, feral, devouring sex. They writhed there, among the brushes, paper and images of flowers and the faces of black women. Their bodies blended, and the marsh waters rose flooding them.
Iris was almost washed away by it all. Images flashed in her brain. The marsh populated by brilliant flowers. Flowers that became people who endlessly built the marsh out of yarn, paint, ink, tile. Tamar was one of their number, placing a bird in the flawless blue sky, shaping a cattail reed. The rush of euphoria filled her, then. She wanted to be there, forever. To finally belong somewhere. This timeless, placeless place was paradise. She felt, rather than saw, the muse or angel nearby. She was an orchid, feeding on the dreams of the outcast.
“That wasn’t you, was it?” Iris said, at the edge of the marsh. The ruin of the Whitby mansion lingered on the bank behind them, reclaimed by nature. “When we…. A few days ago.”
“I don’t know where she ends, and I begin,” Tamar said. “I have to leave this place. Or I’ll drown. That’s what she does, Iris. She fills your head with such beauty, such color that you have to get it down somehow. And you want to, too. To her, color is sacred. It’s life itself.”
“You can resist it,” Iris replied after a while.
“No,” Tamar said. “You can resist her. I cannot. Neither could the others.”
***
Amarantha
The two men were dark and light, or colors that clashed. Lincoln was mud and dark, and his chthonic secrets blistered beneath his skin. Xavier was the glitter of light on water, cool water on tortured skin. Lincoln was the wound, and Xavier was the salve.
Her time slithering in Lincoln’s soul gave her back her name, and the shape of her life. It was something she wanted to forget, and leave behind. She knew she had died in the marsh, probably from exposure to the cold. In Xavier’s soul, her story was transformed into abstract patterns, like houndstooth or damask silk. Her pain and confusion and voicelessness were designs or textures.
She echoed back and forth between the two men as they completed the wall mural.
More green here, less blue there. Capture the bite of razor grass, the speckles of algae, the iridescence of a moth’s wing. Xavier sketched the shapes—the creatures, the sediment, the rocks, the tufts of grass. Linc filled them in with color. What colors he lacked in his meager palette, bought at some hardware store, she supplied. Honeygreen. Crimsonwhite. Beetleblack. Aquasilver. With each stroke, they painted the world of her dreams.
***
Iris
When Iris pulled into the Bayside Motel parking lot, she felt like a fool. How was she going to find the right room? The motel was a glorified motor lodge, a relic from the 1960s. She guessed, but did not know that the thin, tall maintenance man from the Whitby-Grayson Museum might live here temporarily, but she didn’t recall his name. Was it Logan, or Lawrence? It was an L name. But she couldn’t very well go to the office with that little information.
She scrolled through her pictures to see if maybe there were some clues in the videos and pictures Xavier had sent.
Neither the video nor the pictures were there.
“No fucking way,” she said aloud. Mona Broome would have not approved of her unladylike cussing. Neither would Pop-Pop. Heaven sounded like one bland, boring place. Vanilla, and not the artisanal kind, either. She shooed the thought away, with a bitter laugh. She had seen the pictures, and heard her phone beep twenty minutes ago. She had not imagined it. Yet here she was, in a run-down motel parking lot, feeling like a fool.
The motor was still running. She moved her steering wheel—
The fuchsia flashed in the corner of her eye. She turned to her right, and saw it. A ball of glowing light, like a hovering Christmas ornament, floated toward the motel lazily. The gaseous sphere of flame drifted up, up to the second floor railing and hovered in front of one of the doors with moth-like quiescence.
Iris let her mind go dormant. She tried her best to tamp down any emotion she felt. She felt it anyway. Dread, tinged with excitement. It grew in her chest, nearly as bright as the will-o’-the-wisp. She was certain that she was going to see something amazing. Something wonderful, something terrible. It didn’t matter which one.
She turned off her car. She was up the stairs before she realized it. Did I lock my car? Did I lock the door to my house?
She found that she didn’t care.
She knocked on the maroon door.
***
Amarantha
The wall glowed when the woman entered the room. It glowed with the stuff of her soul. The mural was almost complete. The grass shivered though there was no wind. The sky was brilliant blue though there was no sun. The water rippled, and the birds flew. She named the things in the marsh on the wall. Paw Paw. Osprey. Blue crab.
Amarantha was tired. Her flame was fading. She had been away from the dream world for too long. It felt like forever. For too long, she had wandered, trapped in the minds and souls and dreams of broken people. Her most recent two acolytes were also tired, souls worn smooth. They could work no more. She was almost home. Almost. But something was missing.
The third acolyte had arrived just in time to finish the mural.
; Iris moved over Xavier and Linc, who huddled together on the motel bed, and picked up a brush.
She added words in one corner of the mural.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the Wyrd Words crew, who saw earlier drafts of this novel: Valya Lupescu, Stephen Segal, Jason Heller, Sam J. Miller, Scott Woods, Eric San Juan, Mary Anne Mohanraj, John Klima, Emily Jiang, R.K. Kalaw, Bo Bolander, K. Tempest Bradford.
To Word Horde/Ross Lockhart for taking on this project.
And finally, to the Outer Dark community, for their support.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Craig Laurance Gidney is the author of the collections Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories (Lethe Press, 2008), Skin Deep Magic (Rebel Satori Press, 2014), the Young Adult novel Bereft (Tiny Satchel Press, 2013) and The Nectar of Nightmares (Dim Shores, 2015). His work has been nominated for the Lambda Literary and Gaylactic Spectrum Awards, and he has won both the Bronze Moonbeam and Silver Independent Publishers Book Awards. He lives in his native Washington, DC. Website: craiglaurancegidney.com. Instagram, Tumblr & Twitter: ethereallad.
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