“I don’t know,” says the rusalka.
“But it could?”
“I don’t know.”
“Try,” says Claire. “Pull me down. And let’s see what happens.”
On the edges of the canal, tiny, glowing marbles. The eyes of the herons, watching. The rusalka begs them, beseeches them. She needs them to share just this one secret, just this one and no others. But the herons only watch. The wind whips their filthy little mohawks, but they are otherwise still.
“Hey,” says Claire. “Hey, come on.”
The rusalka floats toward her. Places her hands on Claire’s shoulders. She says, “I’ve never done this before.”
“Me neither,” laughs Claire.
The rusalka tries to pull Claire down. Tries to find the parts of Claire’s skin that will yield to her fingers, to dig in, to sink. She closes her eyes and waits for the feeling of water rising above her shoulders, her chin, her nose, her eyes, waits for the streetlights and the moonlight to fade as the dark of the depths casts out dry light. But nothing happens. Neither of them move. Both of them float obstinately.
The rusalka opens her eyes. It’s been a while since she cried. “There are rules,” she says. “I can’t break them.”
Claire nods, though her breath hitches in her chest.
“I want to,” says the rusalka. “I want to.”
Claire nods again, but she also brushes the rusalka’s cold hands off her shoulders, swims to the canal’s edge, grabs hold of the ledge.
The herons watch. It’s impossible to tell if they feel anything about this. The rusalka begs them to be sad for her. To wish this could have gone differently.
Claire, soaked, walks away from the canal. Her pace, her gait, they re-adopt that same desperate defiance with which she approached the rusalka’s tree. She stops and picks up the phone she threw to the pavement. Laughs, kind of, in the way people sometimes do when something’s funny in a painful way. Flashes the screen at the rusalka. “Didn’t even crack,” she says, then stalks back toward her apartment building. The rusalka can’t hear it, but she can see, through the glass walls of the building’s vestibule, that Claire is sobbing. Big teenager sobs, even though she must be at least as old as the rusalka was when she drowned.
The herons cannot comfort the drowned girl. They can’t pet her hair and tell her that this is not forever. They can’t be sad for her in any way she would understand. What they can do is catch the eyes of wandering men; the rich men who own the leaning canal houses, the drunk men who signal each other with wordless howls, the men in uniform who kick homeless folks out of Centraal Station and raid squats. But not just those men. Good men, too. Sweet men. Any men. The rules that govern ghosts are amoral and undiscerning.
And so, it turns out, is the heartbroken rusalka. She reaches out of the canal beneath a bridge in the red-light district and pulls down a group of three, all at once, and screams her anguish into their eyes as they go blank. She pulls men from the ferry that runs between the city center and Noord, right in front of everyone, and her fingers find their soft spots and sink like they couldn’t with Claire’s skin, and she shakes them until their lungs fill up. She punches holes in the bottoms of tour boats, and as the women on board sputter and struggle and swim to safety, she chews out the throats of the men who remain. Not because she hates them. Not because she desires revenge. But because this is her only recourse.
“I’m sorry,” she shouts as the blood of these men clouds the canals. “But you knew this city didn’t want you here. And I have to follow these fucking rules.”
She murders men until dawn. The city is full of screams. In the morning, although it is not yet June, not yet the one week in June when she is permitted to climb, she tries to climb. And she finds that this is a rule that, for some reason, she is allowed to break. She weaves her way up the tree’s thick branches and drapes herself across its perfect V, and she lets the sun bake away the canal water and fill her with warmth. A heron pads across the pavement, stops at the base of the tree, looks up at her. She looks down at it. Then the heron turns away, stands guard at the trunk of her tree.
Just as she is beginning to feel warm, the city changes its mind, and the rain comes.
The Skeleton Archer Speaks
by Jeremy Paden
Resurrection plants, they call them,
a Sahara tumble weed
that rolls over sands for hundreds
of years ’til water brings life,
* * *
& seeds fall & sprout in the sand,
only to shrivel & curl
into a ball that the wind drags
across the barrens ’til rain.
* * *
I stand, my body a sack
of bones—no, that’s not right,
as if I were a bag of skin,
when I am but nothing.
* * *
Nothing but skeleton,
I stand, & how I stand,
who knows? No muscle, tendons,
ligaments, bind bone to bone
* * *
& bone to flesh. The bow bends,
as one hand pulls the string
& the other holds steady
against the force until release.
* * *
Once there was a man who said
his love was constant beyond death.
He promised his flesh had burned
so brightly that when senseless dust
* * *
it would still shine & yearn for love,
that scattered earth would gather
& throb like a heart aflame,
for love is stronger than death.
* * *
I am the Resurrection plant.
I am the bones left in the valley.
I am the ashes turned body,
the archer with bow pulled taut.
* * *
I am nothing but desire
& intention. I walk among
the living, dead. I am nothing
but arrow aimed at the heart.
Oil Under Her Tongue
by Rachael K. Jones
Carlos and Erin were seventeen the summer they invented blackout spells and repaired old cars and adopted an orphaned android. They were both working part-time at the shittiest gas station in Boilingbrook, wiping swear words off the dusty pumps and stocking the shelves with bagged pickles and boiled peanuts. The manager always made Erin de-clog the toilets and clean out the corndog fryer, and once Erin threw out her back loading Pabst into coolers. But Erin lived for that job. It was her only escape from the Evangelical Fellowship Bible School summer program her parents believed would save her from her budding atheism and budding breasts.
“You’re lucky you don’t have to go,” she told Carlos. His family attended Evangelical Fellowship, too, but not as religiously as hers. “They give homework.” She wasn’t on duty that night, but she’d told her parents she had a shift, just to hang out with Carlos. He was grabbing some fresh air on his dinner break, chewing through a bucket of fried chicken beneath the flickering lamplight just out of reach of the falling rain, a plastic poncho pulled over his Stop-N-Fuel uniform.
“Like math problems?” He offered Erin the bucket. She took a drumstick and gnawed a circle around the breading.
“Worse. It’s sex stuff.” She showed him the worksheet. She was supposed to sort twenty different physical activities into three categories: Permissible, Questionable, and Sinful.
“How do they rank hugs?”
Erin checked her work so far. “Front hugs definitely constitute ‘purpling’ and fall under Questionable. We’re supposed to be—” She held up the worksheet— “above reproach. Side hugs are okay.” It needled her, all of it, the worksheets and sermons, the prayers and endless memorization. It was supposed to bring you peace beyond measure and joy that lasted, but mainly it just depressed her.
Carlos grinned wide as the chasm inside her and opened his arms. “Well. Bring it in, then.”
“Hey now. One more year, and we’ll graduate.”
“And then what? It’s not like they’re sending me to college.” They didn’t get to sit together in church anymore. Erin’s dad put an end to that. “One more year, and I’ll be married off and perma-pregnant. Sooner, if my dad gets his way. He wants to take me to that Christian marriage convention in Kentucky next month, the one where he found my brother-in-law.”
“They can’t force you to marry anybody,” said Carlos. “It’s against the law.”
“April said the same thing. Now she’s twenty-two, and already gestating Kid Number Four.”
“Well, you’ll be an adult at 18. In a few more months, they won’t be able to touch you.”
Erin pulled into herself, tugging on a strand of hair just to feel it hurt. “You don’t get it. You’re a guy. You don’t have to get married before your dad lets go of you.”
Carlos circled the blacktop, collected a couple of crushed beer cans, erased the word fuck from a dusty pump display, set a limp gas nozzle back into its holster. “My shift’s over in 45 minutes. Let’s kick off down to the pond after that. I want to show you something.”
Erin hugged Carlos again, mostly for the principle of the matter, but also because he smelled good. “Sounds like a plan. Dad doesn’t expect me home until midnight.”
While she waited, Erin leaned against the icemaker and finished the worksheet by streetlight. She clenched the pen so tightly her nails dug into her palms, willing away those columns, those categories, those neat little boxes that sorted away possibilities before you could even try them.
Carlos and Erin always hung out behind the Stop-N-Fuel, down where an old bridge fell away into the pond. You could keep a six-pack chilled in the water, looped on a stick to pin it in place. You could laze on the tire swing in the shade of the old oak, waiting for a listless breeze to stir the heavy air. Most importantly, you couldn’t see the spot from the road.
Carlos kept Erin’s eyes covered on the walk down, taking the slope slowly because it was so dark. He flourished his hands, unveiling the old junker. “Ta-da!”
Erin walked a circle around it, tracing nicks and scratches in the silver paint by the dim streetlight from the gas station. “Whoa. This is really yours?”
“Got it from Ralph. Cost me $50 and a month of Saturday shifts.” He stood a little straighter, grinning shyly.
“Will it run?”
Carlos shook his head. “Not yet. I think the battery’s dead. Some guy from out of town stumbled into the Stop-N-Fuel with his daughter and left the keys with Ralph. Said it’d conked out and Ralph could have it. Then he bought $40 in beer, and they both left on foot. They haven’t been back in a few weeks, so the car’s mine now.”
Erin wanted to floor it across the country and never stop. She wanted an open road and some faraway ocean where nobody knew shit about Boilingbrook. Someplace where nobody classified your hugs. “What’s inside?”
They popped open the trunk and found a tangle of rusty tools, bungee cords, and greasy rags. Mostly tools, some robotics manuals, and a first aid kit.
Erin slammed it closed with hands blackened by engine grease. “At least we don’t have to buy tools.”
“Let’s check inside the car.” Carlos tried the key on the passenger door, but it was jammed shut. “Damn it. Did you see a crowbar?”
“I bet Ralph has one.” Ralph kept tons of parts around to help the odd stranded driver. It made him feel important.
While Carlos went to have a peek at Ralph’s office, Erin sat on the hood with a Bible and a permanent marker and continued her pet project. She’d begun by blacking out all the nots, and it improved things so much she’d kept going. By the time she reached the Psalms, she’d decided it should be a spellbook of sorts.
She turned to the Gospel of John and blacked out the words of Jesus with her Sharpie so it said, One miracle, and you are all amazed. She slipped the page between the door panels. Yanked and twisted against the handle. It popped open so suddenly she tumbled butt-first into the mud.
Carlos jogged back to help her up, only laughing a little at the muddy streak down her backside.
“Keep it up, and I’ll hex you next,” she threatened, but she was laughing, too. She showed him her amateur spellbook, leaning into the heat of him, that sweaty, musky smell, while he hovered just behind her, craning his neck to read.
“Okay. Show me another miracle.”
Erin paged slowly to the middle section. “I turned Psalm 23 into a love spell.”
“Okay. Let’s hear it.”
She pitched her voice low, trying to make it sexy, but also ironic for maximum plausible deniability:
lie down in green pastures
evil you
your rod your staff
comfort me
prepare me
with oil
overflow
“Not bad,” Carlos said. “Definitely improves on the original. Have you cast it on anyone yet?”
“I’m still working out that process,” Erin confessed.
“Stick them under people’s tongues, like how rabbis make golems,” Carlos suggested.
She wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, right. Like anyone’s going to hold a love spell under their tongue just because I ask.” She tucked the Bible into her armpit and wrote another spell on the car’s filthy bumper. Would you betray me with a kiss?
“Okay. I volunteer. Try it on me.”
He was a complete mess, hair slicked straight up by sweat and static electricity, leaves and dirt from the trunk plastering his stubble.
“Ew, no. What if it works? You’ll be all up in my face with that greasy shit all over you.” The profanity tasted like cinnamon in her mouth. You could practically hear God’s chalk dragging down the wrong side of her slate.
“Okay. Let’s check out our car.” He opened the door for her. Erin liked how he said our.
They’d never been alone like that before, squashed together in the dark, in private. His thumb brushed her knuckles. A warm, tingling feeling spread through her fingers and toes. She creased the love spell, folded it down small.
“Open your mouth,” Erin ordered. She slipped the folded Bible page beneath his tongue. Then she kissed him.
They weren’t very good. Their teeth clacked awkwardly, and first there was too much puckering and then too much spit. The onionskin paper refused to dissolve away. It tasted like church and engine oil and Carlos. When they came up for air, the spell stayed in Erin’s mouth. She spat it out on the floorboard. A warm feeling spread through her middle. She didn’t know if she wanted to kiss him some more or move from the Questionable column to something decidedly Sinful. The worksheet had given her a lot of ideas.
Just when they were getting into it, someone rapped sharply on the window. They sprang apart, snatching back their hands from all the warm, forbidden places they’d wandered into.
A pale, teenish face pressed against the foggy window, stringy blonde hair all damp and tangled around huge, unblinking eyes.
“What are you doing in my dad’s car?” she snapped, low and sharp.
Erin backed up so far she was crushing Carlos against the other door. “Who are you?”
The girl ripped open the door so hard the whole car rocked. A black oil slick soaked her T-shirt and dripped over the shredded skin of her arms. Coiled wires and metal rods in her wrists glinted in the streetlight like earthworms wriggling through grave dirt. “I’m Hailey. What did you do with my dad?”
Using Carlos’s smartphone, they pieced together Hailey’s history from obits and po
lice reports and the robotics garbage in the trunk. The android’s namesake, one Hailey Flowers, had died in a car accident three years before. Their Hailey was a memorial android, made in the image of the dead, expensive and one-of-a-kind. One evening, a man named Thomas Flowers rolled up at the Stop-N-Fuel drunk out of his mind, abandoned his car with Ralph, and wandered into the desert with only his android daughter for company. There he met some accident that ended his life, or else he killed himself. Two weeks later, an officer found his body partially decomposed and pecked apart by carrion.
Erin wondered about Thomas’s last moments out there in the desert with only the android by his side. Wondered how long it took a corpse to rot so much that Hailey’s programming couldn’t recognize her father. How she left his body to search for him, unable to understand an ending like death.
But instead, she found Erin and Carlos.
They tried stashing Hailey in the car’s backseat overnight, but it hadn’t gone well. By the time Erin finished Bible school and biked over to the gas station, Hailey had torn up the car’s cab trying to leave, shredding up the brown pleather seats and cracking a window. She’d peeled the skin from her artificial fingertips while gouging lines in the ceiling.
“Dad!” Hailey called and called, inconsolable. “Dad, where are you?”
Carlos studied an android manual he’d found wedged inside the spare tire well. “She imprints on her owner,” he explained, flipping through the instructions. “She doesn’t realize her dad is dead.”
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