Hex Life

by Rachel Deering

  A crash of thunder rent the afternoon, followed by a brilliant flash of lightning and a drumming on the roof as it began to rain. The heavens opened, as though the past month of rain had been waiting for the perfect moment to fall on southern Vermont. The red barn, not a hundred feet from the house, disappeared in the grey wash of falling water.

  Baker cursed to himself. If the storm stayed heavy like this, it might be unsafe to drive. He no longer cared if the Weavers paid him, he wanted to get the girl out of here, to safety. Nothing sat right: the blame, the open doors, the restraints.

  “You’re not taking her anywhere,” Mr. Weaver said.

  “I am,” Baker replied. Though he didn’t care for physical contact, he put a hand on Ani’s shoulder. Terrified heat radiated through her shirt.

  “That’s my daughter you’ve got your hand on.” Mr. Weaver started toward them.

  Baker raised his hand and moved his wrist ever so slightly, sending a firm wall of air against Mr. Weaver. A warning shot, a gentle shove to say, “stay away.”

  Ani’s eyes went wide. “You can, too?”

  Baker nodded. No time for this. Outside, the rain kept falling.

  Mrs. Weaver clutched the table, seeming to will the encounter to end. Mr. Weaver’s eyes bulged, unable to comprehend what Baker had done.

  “You can’t just take her.” He didn’t sound as fierce now.

  “I can,” said Baker.

  “That’s kidnapping,” Mr. Weaver said, with little conviction. “She’s a minor.” Baker didn’t think it was the time or place to reiterate he was a mandated reporter, that he had a responsibility not to leave children in an unsafe situation.

  Baker made a ladies first gesture to Ani. She paused, and he said “Don’t worry. It’s safe.” She walked towards the door, moving like a beaten dog.

  The repercussions of taking Ani wouldn’t be slight, but Baker had a good lawyer, and he wasn’t afraid. This wasn’t the first time.

  Zach stood before them in the doorway. “You can’t take her.”

  “Are you safe here?” Baker asked.

  “No!” Ani shrieked. “He’s one of them.” She paused, hands flying to her temples.

  One of who? Baker wondered. He had to get her out of here. The stress took its toll on her before his eyes. Then Zach lost his footing and fell, landing on his behind. He seemed fine; he stood immediately, and lunged at his sister. Baker raised his wall. Zach’s eyes were black with hate and he called his sister a slut and a witch and a handful of other names. Baker led Ani to the car.

  Outside, she slipped in the mud, pitching forward and landing on her hands and knees with the rain falling around her. Baker waited a beat for her to get up, and when she didn’t he took her by the elbow and hauled her to her feet as gently as he was able.

  “You’re all right now,” he raised his voice over the rain, then opened the car door for her.

  “My lawyer will call you,” he shouted back toward the house, but the rain took his words.

  Inside the car, Baker looked at Ani. They were both soaked. Panicked sobs shook her rail-thin form.

  “You’re safe now,” he said. “You won’t have to go back there.”

  “Nothing to go back to,” she replied, her face pale as realization set in.

  “What happened today?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t say. I can never say.”

  If she didn’t say, she might have to go back after all. Once he got onto Route 4 and found a gas station, he’d call the attorney.

  Baker inched the Volvo down Weaver Way. The windshield wipers beat frenetic time, trying vainly to keep the water at bay. The headlights barely cut through the sheets of rain. Ani sat, quiet and pale. He needed to get food into her, fluids. She looked sick.

  The covered bridge wasn’t there. The dry streambed had transformed into a churning rapid of brown water and white foam. The ground had baked for weeks and couldn’t possibly absorb the rain. Pieces of the bridge remained, splintered wood where it attached to the driveway.

  “We have to walk!” Ani raised her voice over the roar of the water. Some of the color was coming back to her cheeks.

  Baker racked his mind. His talents weren’t so great he could pause the flow of the water, or get them safely across. It was miles after the bridge to anything, even the nearest gas.

  “We’ve got to go back. See if the phones are working.”

  “Use your cell.” She teetered on the brink of tears. Panic.

  “I can’t. They don’t work around me. Magnetic energy. We have to use the house phone.”

  “No!” Ani cried. “We can’t. We have to go, now.”

  “You have a house phone, though, yes?” He had to be sure. No point in going back if they all only had mobiles.

  The rain cast odd, ever-changing shadows on her face as she clutched the arm rest and nodded. “Please. We can walk.”

  “I can’t walk that far,” Baker said.

  “Someone will pick us up.”

  He kept his voice calm; he was essentially talking to a panicked animal. “In this weather? They’ll be more likely to hit us.”

  “We’ll make someone stop.”

  “No.”

  “You can, though, can’t you? Make them?”

  “No.” Whether he could or could not was irrelevant.

  Ani frowned and drew into herself, crossing her arms over her chest. She grew paler, and her breath gave a little hiccup. Baker could see the red marks on her wrists. As the rain fell, the creek rose. As they watched it grew higher. Baker put the car in reverse, and tried to execute a k-turn. The passenger back wheel lodged itself in the mud and spun.

  Ani started to weep into her hands.

  “Stay here. I’ll be back in…” Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? “I’ll be back soon.”

  “You can’t leave me!”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “You can’t go back to the house!”

  “I won’t let them hurt me.”

  “They can’t hurt you,” she mumbled.

  His strengths weren’t all that impressive. The pushing he’d done earlier combined with the walk to the house and back would lay him up for a week. Now he ran on adrenaline… when it subsided, there’d be hell to pay.

  He stepped out of the car. At least the rain was warm. He began to walk.

  By the time he got to the house, it didn’t feel so warm. It soaked him to the skin, his teeth chattering, and his legs, lower back, and lungs ached. The lights were on in the house, a good sign, the power was still on.

  He tried not to limp across the driveway. Before he knocked he took a moment to catch his breath. Baker waited, pulling himself into the door to get out of the rain, listening so he could pull back when he heard them coming.

  He knocked again. He wished the rain would subside so he could hear. After one more loud set of knocking, Baker tried the door. Unlocked. It swung inward.

  Though he’d only been gone a half-hour, the house had an uninhabited feel. A light glowed in the kitchen, and the rest of the rooms lay shadowy and dark.

  “Hello?” No answer. “This is Paul Baker. I need to use your phone.”

  He took a few steps inside, wondering where they kept the phone. Kitchen? That seemed most likely. Yes, there it was. Lightning brightened everything and left his eyes aching. The thunder that followed sounded a little farther away. The storm was moving east. He hurried to the phone, the muscles in his thighs and back screaming. He picked it up, a dial tone.

  Something caught his eye, pale in the dim light. If it had rested only on white carpet he wouldn’t have noticed, but it jutted out over a checkered floor tile. A woman’s hand, the fingernails painted an impersonal crimson.

  He tried to blink it away. Common sense told him to make the call, get out of the house, and go back to the car.

  Instead, he lowered the phone to the cradle. He could protect himself.

  An outstretched hand rested on the floor between the kitchen and another
dark room. It lay on the lip where thick carpet became sleek black and white linoleum. Red-painted fingernails, black in the unearthly storm light. Mrs. Weaver.

  Baker reached for a light switch. The room was a study, and Mrs. Weaver lay prone on the floor, blood pooled around her head. Baker couldn’t see a wound. The blood seemed to come from her mouth, her ears, her eyes, and her nose. It soaked her blonde hair. Around her temples he noticed her roots were growing in brown, streaked with grey.

  Baker backed away.

  “Mr. Weaver? Zach?”

  He glanced at the phone. He should call 911. Instead he headed up the stairs, calling their names.

  He knew this type of injury. He tabulated his reactions to the Weavers, his anger and his escape… he’d spent decades controlling his talents; he couldn’t have killed a woman without realizing it.

  Mr. Weaver lay in the hall in front of Ani’s door. The floors here were hardwood, and the blood pooled in the cracks.

  The rain let up a bit, reducing to a gentle drumming on the roof. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

  They were all dead here. Baker didn’t need a third body to prove it. Yet something pulled him, drew him to find Zach.

  The second child lay in the bathroom. He’d been standing at the sink when he died, and his body slumped back into the tub. He left a great bloody streak on the wall as he fell. One eye was pushed out of the socket from the pressure.

  Was he sure he hadn’t done this?

  He took inventory of his aches and pains, of every thought he’d had upon finding Ani tied to the bed. No. He was certain.

  Something caught his eye, though, as he headed for the stairs. In Zach’s room, papered in posters of half-clad women and fast cars, a door connected the two bedrooms. On Zach’s side, a lock.

  Baker moved down the stairs toward the phone as thunder rumbled in the distance. He didn’t call 911 after all. Instead, he placed his call to the lawyer. He thought of himself at Ani’s age. There was still help for a girl like her.

  BLESS YOUR HEART

  Hillary Monahan

  Pamela “Pammy” Washington asked specifically for Audrey’s seven-layer bars for the PTO meeting with a whispered aside that if Audrey didn’t make them, Janice Motts would, and Janice’s bars tasted like hot baked garbage. Pammy wouldn’t tell Janice that on account of the bad crazy—admittedly Janice was a few sandwiches shy of a picnic, even by Audrey’s standards—but if Audrey would be so kind, Janice could stick to something simpler.

  “Like chocolate chip cookies out of the tube,” Pammy said. “That’s more her speed. Poor thing.”

  Audrey’d come real close to telling Pammy to shit in her Stetson. She wasn’t wrong about the hellscape that was Janice’s kitchen; Audrey’d damn near lost a tooth biting into Janice’s shingle-like peanut brittle at the Christmas social. It was just that Pammy’s boy was Colton, and Colton was a little bastard.

  Or, not so little anymore at six feet tall and two hundred pounds, with all that thick football muscle. The bastard part remained the same, though.

  He should shit in his mama’s Stetson, too.

  Audrey poured melted butter over her graham crackers so she could fashion the crust, bypassing spoons because working with her hands was more effective. She squished and kneaded, turning it over again and again so it’d get good and flat in the bottom of the baking pan. It was sticky work, but cathartic; she was pummeling it to shit and back again thinking about Colton’s chiseled jaw, black hair, and blue, blue eyes.

  His outsides were pretty as pie supper.

  His insides were so ugly, the tide wouldn’t take them out.

  Son of a bitch. You’ll get yours, just you watch.

  It’d all started when her son, Tucker, was seven years old. Tuck was always a little different than other kids. He was short and slight, with dusty gold hair and Coke-bottle glasses over big eyes. He preferred Barbies to GI Joes, and crafts to sports. His favorite color was purple and he watched Queer Eye reruns so much, he could quote most of Carson’s lines right down to the inflection. All you needed was two minutes alone with the kid to know the big gay writing was on the big gay wall. She’d birthed a boy queer as a three-dollar bill. She was fine with it, but others? Well?

  Others could be real mean.

  The last thing she figured she’d hear out of his mouth was that he wanted to join Cub Scouts, but he dropped that on her one night over red beans and rice. She’d been happy to oblige—Tuck’s best friends were Netflix and his cousin Samantha who lived an hour and a half away—but she had her hesitations, too. When your kid sticks out like a sore thumb, you know other folks are going to notice, and where they lived was big on Jesus, small on kindness. It was a strange juxtaposition. She’d been raised Christian, been raised to see Jesus as love incarnate, but somewhere along the line someone fucked it all up and they were preaching that Jesus only loved certain types of folks, and her little boy with his freckles and baby face probably wouldn’t grow into that type.

  It was shit. She knew it was shit, told others it was shit, but people didn’t listen. They kept passing out those pamphlets for conversion camps whenever “the gays” came up during sermon. For the bargain price of two thousand dollars and two weeks’ time, you could torture your kid straight, satisfaction guar-an-teeeed. It was the end of church for her. It would have been the end of the entire town if she could have swung it, but being a single mom with no support and bills to pay, Podunk it was and Podunk it would have to remain until she could afford a big time move. Montrose, best case. Houston if she was careful with the neighborhood.

  Until then, her job was to keep her baby safe and happy, and he insisted Scouts would make him at least happy, so she’d signed him up with a wing and a prayer. At first, it was good. Better than good, even—Tucker came home from meetings sparkling. Pack leader Jason was a real Marlboro Man minus the terminal cancer, and Tuck took to him like a fish to water. He’d made a friend, too, a kid named Alex who lived one town over. He was a short, round black kid who loved comic books and got Tuck into them, too—especially Miles Morales, who she was pretty sure was Tuck’s first kid crush.

  For months it was right as rain. The boys were inseparable, hanging out every Saturday poring over issues of Spider-Man and The Avengers, sometimes at her house, sometimes at Alex’s apartment, depending on if Alex’s father had the car that day.

  ’Til the fishing trip.

  Audrey’d dropped Tuck off as per usual so they could go to the lake and work on their camping merit badge. They weren’t supposed to be back ’til suppertime, but at four that afternoon, Pack leader Jason called her at the office to let her know there’d been “an incident.”

  Audrey straightened up behind her desk, the hairs on the back of her neck bristling.

  “What kind of incident?”

  “Well, you know how kids can be—” he started.

  “Is he alright?”

  “Not a hair out of place, promise.” Jason sighed. “He wouldn’t thread the worm. Got all upset that he’d have to run the hook through the worm so the other kids—well, you know how they are. I told them to knock it off, that it wasn’t Scout-like, but Tuck’s real upset. I think maybe you should come get him. He won’t calm down.”

  “Knock what off? You still haven’t told me what’s happened to my son.”

  The pause on the other end of the line was pregnant with rotten.

  “They chased him ’round. Called him a faggot and threw worms at him. I’ll talk to their parents later, but—”

  “Who?” she demanded. “Who would do that to my boy?”

  “Eh, a few of them were involved,” Jason hedged.

  “I want names. Who’s the ringleader? There’s always a ringleader.”

  The Scout leader let loose with another long, defeated sigh, like asking him to tell her all the truth and not just what was convenient for him was beyond the pale. “A kid named Colton. He’s not all bad. Just a little too big for his britches. I talked to him. Made h
im apologize, but Tuck’s… like I said, he’s real upset.”

  So Audrey’d climbed into her car and driven a half-hour out to the lake to retrieve her traumatized kid. It hadn’t been good—Tuck refused ever to set foot in Cub Scouts again, and when he’d asked her through tear-swollen eyes what “faggot” meant, she had to explain it in a way that wouldn’t destroy him forever. She wasn’t sure she succeeded. He’d looked so solemn in the listening, like an old man trapped in a tiny, seven-year-old body. She could practically see a layer of his childlike sweetness stripped away as Tuck grappled with concepts far bigger than him.

  It’d been a disaster, but at least Alex and the comic books stuck around. They were the silver lining to Colton’s first big, nasty fart cloud.

  Audrey’s fingers were greasy thanks to all the melted butter. She paused to eye her crust. It was perfectly uniform, like something you bought at the store. Satisfied, she reached up to swipe at her sopping brow. September heat had taken its toll while she’d worked; droplets of sweat curled down her hand and curved around her thumb. She shook them off onto the crust, watching them settle on the pale brown paste before being absorbing into it.

  Under any other circumstance, it’d be an abominable thing.

  Not this one. Not for Pammy Washington.

  Audrey reached into the cabinet to gather the chocolate and butterscotch chips she’d need next. Her mama always told her folks like them shouldn’t bake mad unless they were willing to carry that burden later, but Mama hadn’t lived long enough to meet Tuck. To know his sweet smile. To hear him singing musicals in the shower or while he took out the garbage. He’d have tickled her pink, and Audrey liked to think Mama would have helped Audrey make the angriest damned seven-layer bars in all of Texas were she still around.

  Heck, knowing Mama, they’d have been even better than Audrey’s.

  By some backwoods swamp witch standard of better, anyway.

  She measured out the chocolate chips in her Pyrex cup, muttering all the while. Colton, Colton, Colton. His name polluted her mouth like the dollar-fifty taco she got from the Grab and Go that one time. Tuck should have been done with him after Scouts, but no, they weren’t that lucky. When Tuck moved from elementary school to middle school, Colton was there, too, and Lord, he remembered Tuck and the worms. He made sure every other kid knew about the worms, too. Recess became a time for kids to dig up worms and torture Tuck with them, throwing them at him, putting them into his books. It got to the point the poor kid had to take his recesses inside alone, supervised by a teacher.