by Ellen Datlow
“Um, okay. Thank you.”
“Yeah, thanks, Mr. H. See you tomorrow.”
After the class, Mr. Haringa had a free period. Once the hallway outside his room had grown quiet, he crossed to the door and turned the lock. Returning to his desk, he unbuttoned the scarlet waistcoat and shrugged it from his shoulders, draping it on the back of his chair. He opened the white dress shirt underneath down to his navel. A raised white scar ran up the center of his breastbone. His eyes focused on some distant, internal image, Mr. Haringa traced the ridge with the fingers of his right hand. Slowly, he dug his fingertips into the scar, grimacing as the toughened flesh resisted the tear of his nails. As his skin parted, he brought up his left hand to widen the opening. His sternum cracked and rustled. There was surprisingly little blood.
The hook was slippery in Mr. Haringa’s grasp. Exhaling sharply, he slid it from his chest. He swayed, gripping the chair with his left hand to steady himself. Tears flooded his vision; he blinked them away, raising the hook to view. Stained and discolored with blood and age, the metal reflected Mr. Haringa’s features imperfectly. The point of the implement had retained its sharpness. Mr. Haringa brought the hook to his mouth and pressed its tip into his lower lip. He remembered the bitter taste of the captain’s heart, its chewiness.
Si les dieux ne font rien d’inconvenant, c’est alors qu’ils ne sont plus dieux du tout—Mallarme
For Fiona, and of course, for Jack.
THIN COLD HANDS
GEMMA FILES
Though it’s a long time since I’ve lived in a house, I still have memories about what that used to be like which work on me constantly, mainly subconsciously. When I dream, I open a door into a composite domicile cobbled together from bits and pieces of all the houses my parents passed through during my childhood, dragging me behind them. And while I suppose it’s strange how I never seem to dream about where I live right now—this apparently safe little condominium apartment with its security guards, its concierge, its maintenance crew, its entire fee-fed infrastructure—that’s just how it is, how it’s always been. How it always will be, probably.
Instead, night after night. I shut my eyes and drift off only to discover I’m back in the dark, the dust, that symphony of too-familiar noises: scratch of claws through wood shavings as my long-dead rat skitters around in his cage, exercise wheel whirring against the bars; weird clang and hoarse, throaty hum of the furnace starting up, down deep in the basement’s bowels. Hot air exhaling through the vents, rank as some sleeping monster’s breath.
It feels like being swallowed, always, still alive. Swallowed, but never digested.
Living in a house is defined, to some degree, by the process of accidentally finding places in your “home” you can’t remember ever having seen before. In my case, this was often aided by the fact I was still young enough I didn’t mind getting dirty, nor was my “ew, gross!” reflex fully formed, making the treasures I found while exploring a mixture of the genuinely interesting and the mere disgusting. There’s a story my Dad used to like to tell, for example—before he left us—about how he once went looking for me down in the basement of a particular place (13 Hocken Avenue? 33?) only to eventually discover me crouching behind a huge piece of plywood leant against the back wall, covered in dirt, absently sucking on a dead mouse’s tail.
Sometimes, when I concentrate hard enough, I can even almost remember what doing that felt like, if not dissect what weird turn of toddler logic led me to make that particular decision: conjure how soft the mouse was in the middle but how stiff at either end, the feel of its dusty fur under my stroking fingers, the taste of its tail in its mouth, that sharply angled little corpse-curl pricking my tongue. Familiarly unfamiliar, a mere memory-sketch filtered through someone else’s version of it, someone else’s story. Because the past really is another country, and all children lunatics, in their very different ways.
I can testify to that last part for certain, especially now I have a child myself.
I don’t remember giving birth, just waking up afterwards, dazed from drugs. The feeling when they folded my slack arms around her, pressing her face to my breast. Her mouth gone round against my warm skin, seeking ring of lips so soft yet oddly cold, latching on tight; an instinctive sense of predation, of something being stolen. And then, as she started to suck, that sharp, prickling pain.
I gasped, whimpered; tears came to my eyes. It was a moment before I could find my words.
“Hurts” I told the nurse, when I was able. “Babies aren’t s’posed t’have . . . teeth, right?
The nurse stroked my slick hair, comfortingly. “Most don’t, no, but some do; no worries, it’s perfectly natural. She’s a very forward-thinking young lady, your daughter.”
Nothing for it, after that—I didn’t have the strength to do anything but lie there and let her drain me, never letting go. They had to pull her off me at last, blind crumpled face avid and a red ring vivid around those still-pursed lips, of blood and milk admixed.
“Greedy girl!” the nurse called her, affectionately. “Well, you’ll both have to work it out, I guess, eventually. Once you take her home.”
I nodded, or thought I did. Before slipping back into sleep, my wounds salved, this vampire thing I’d birthed still clutched to my chest.
But almost six years later, I still can’t say that’s ever really happened.
I don’t remember how old I was when I first figured out that if I slid aside a basket-woven screen on one side of the front deck, I could crawl underneath the house. Indeed, I don’t even really remember which house it was, though it must have been one from the part of my childhood after Dad left, since the property in question had both a porch and a garden, as well as a back yard. In the crawlspace it was dim and cool, soil soft beneath me and stone joists on every side like squat little pillars, holding up the walls, the floorboards, the house itself. I had no idea of danger, only that elation which comes with exploring, scuffling around on my hands and knees like a badger in shorts. I enjoyed knowing what I thought nobody else knew, seeing what I thought no one else could have seen.
And it was down there, at last, that I found the grave.
I don’t know what attracted me to that spot, exactly: a slight hump under my hand, faint but unmistakable, like reading braille. I looked down, squinting, but could more feel than see it. Mapped out its dimensions with that one-handed reach my piano teacher always told me she envied, middle finger stretching elastically, thumb rotating in its socket so the nail pointed to my elbow. It was my full reach long and three slightly spread fingers wide—pointer, middle, ring. It narrowed at the top and bottom, like a seed-pod, so eventually I simply dug my thumbs into the middle and peeled it open.
Milkweed fluff spilled out, dirty white silk, along with a flood of bones I picked out one by one, reassembling them there in the part-light. Once painstakingly pieced back together, the bones reminded me of any classic fossil, crushed like an insect between two rock-beds . . . but not quite. Two arms, check; two legs, check. One skull, snoutless, eyes forward-facing, nude grin full of delicate needle-teeth. The remains of a spine, yet nothing that looked like a tail. A rib-cage, mostly intact, though with its second and third rib down on (my) left-hand side wrenched and cracked out of shape by that rusty four-inch iron nail stuck in between them—I removed it so they’d lie flat, slipping it into my pocket. Wishbone slope of a pelvis, half-cracked, a socket-hole on either side for a pair of delicate, too-sharp hip-bones. An unstrung spray of what could only be finger-joints scattered at either end of its out-flung radiae and ulnae, tiny as caraway seeds.
And oh, but they were cold to the touch, all of them—so damn cold. Cold enough they crisped and pulled at my skin like freezer-burn.
Light as a bird’s yet impossible to break, with two more things spread out like huge, dried oak-leaves left at the very bottom, frayed but intact. And though I couldn’t possibly have known what they were back then, whenever I think about them now, they look just a b
it . . . just a little bit . . . like wings.
Tinkerbell, I remember thinking. Someone murdered Tinkerbell.
But even as I stroked those bones a light began to kindle at the heart of them, icy-colourless, traced thin as a thread along where the vertebrae should have been strung. And I thought I heard a thin ringing like a half-full glass’s rim being toyed with begin, almost at the same time, somewhere off in the distance . . . or no, maybe not; far closer, maybe, though muffled by my own skull’s echo-chambers. A sick, dim bell tolling out from deep inside, fluttering like some insect mired in wax and cartilage alike.
The very idea, in turn, coming with an image attached, so sharp I could almost see it: a flash-bulb going off behind the curve of one ear to show the culprit caught inside, fluttering between hammer and drum, silhouetted to its delicate little black leg-hairs.
None of which I much liked, so I recoiled instead, knocking my head on the boards above—scrabbled back, feeling blind behind me for the screen, afraid to avert my eyes; missed it not once but twice before I found it again at last, wrenched it breathlessly aside and spilled back out into sunlight, my hair full of dirty cobwebs. Before Mom heard me scrambling around in the grass and threw the back door open, yelling: “You better not be under that goddamn deck again, Emme, goddamnit!”
That night, in the bath, I watched dirt sluice off me down the drain, turning the clear water gray; waited for my mother to come tell me to get dressed, brush my teeth, turn that light off too, because we weren’t made of money—and thinking, as I did (glimpsing it briefly between the lines of my own mind, pretty much, in the very fuzziest, least explicit of ways) how everything I did, everything I was allowed to do, was only ever at someone else’s sufferance. Since that was always the scrambled background signal lurking behind all my childhood memories, same as everyone else’s—the part I, like them, only grew to understand later on, when I was finally old enough to put a name to what I’d never been able to recognize before. That constant feeling of helplessness, of misunderstanding, that everything was decided for me, that I had no control . . .
Because I just didn’t, ever, from birth almost to the moment I moved out. Because some would say I never had more than the illusion of control, even after that.
Thus all the small rebellions, small sins, small betrayals which make up every coming-of-age narrative: cruelties practiced on me versus cruelties I didn’t yet know better than to practice on whatever other, weaker things I could get a hold of—kids, animals, objects. The first blunt, sticky stirrings of sexuality paired with an equally itchy feeling of being not yet fully formed, both equally impossible to do much about. And knowing, on some level—not accepting, just knowing—that all those unslakable aches are only ever half the problem.
I found the iron nail in my pocket when I threw my jeans aside and fell asleep holding it, clutching it between two fingers. Hours after, meanwhile, I jerked straight up in bed with no earthly idea what I might’ve heard to wake me, ‘til it came again: a drone pitched somewhere between cicada’s whine and bumblebee’s buzz, so deep it almost read as a moan. No sleeping through that, so I crept to the door instead, heart in my throat—cracked it, stared out, took a pair of shaky steps into the hall, nail raised like a cross with its sharp end pointed towards that noise, angling further up the louder it became. Then watched the same sort of wintry light I’d seen beneath the deck begin to form at the corridor’s other end, moving ever-closer, casting a flickering, fluttering shadow against the wall . . . but when it finally drifted ‘round the corner, that’s somehow all it was: just empty light, a fire without a -fly.
The shadow projected on top of it, though, self-lit to twice natural size—it was a hovering figure whose outline reminded me of that body-bag pod I’d found while rooting through the deck’s cool dark turned inside-out, its silhouette half down, half dirt. Spread finger-claws like two bundles of pins against lace-leaf dragonfly wings, not two but four (or maybe six), all blurred and trembling with motion; profile deformed by bulgy beetle-eyes and a gothic pair of mandibles, those horned jaws spread as if to speak, though any pretence at words stayed caught in its invisible throat’s curve. And all with that glass harmonica buzz soaring ever higher, painful enough it made my eyes cross, my sight winking out so fast I barely felt the floor hit my face—
My mom still tells the part of the story I have no clear access to, sometimes: how she heard a thump and got up to investigate only to find me passed out in the hall with my pants urine-soaked, my forehead bruised and some sort of weird rash ‘round my mouth, lips digestive-acids puffed like I’d puked myself unconscious. How my throat hurt too much to talk. How I’d also fallen on my own wrist, bending it underneath me at an angle, full body weight coming down on it at once; they found a hairline fracture at the hospital, casted me up and would have sent me home, but I had a panic attack when I heard that so they let me stay a few days more. In the intervening time, Mom arranged for me to go visit my dad out of season, and by the time I came back she’d not only sold the house, but already found another one.
The fastest move we ever made, and I wasn’t even there to help.
Sometimes I go into my daughter’s room, all pink and sparkly, and look at her while she’s asleep. While her eyes are closed, at any rate; she’s very good at lying there, flat chest going steadily up and down. I look at the pillow she clutches in her arms and wonder how fast I could rip it away, press it to her face—if I could trust myself to be fast enough, strong enough. To not slacken, for once. To stop believing in the lies that are her life.
Other times I wake to find her standing in my room, looking down on me. Her eyes give back the light, even with my blackout blinds pulled down.
“I love you, Mommy,” she tells me, smiling. “Just like you love me.”
“Yes,” I agree.
“All mommies love their children, and all children love their mommies. Isn’t that true?”
“Yes.”
“That’s why the fairies used to steal the real children, you know, and replace them. Because they didn’t have any mommies of their own.”
I swallow. “Then why didn’t they steal the mommies, instead?”
She tilts her head to one side, not quite smiling. “Now, that I don’t know. What do you think?”
Because they like to lie, I think, but don’t say. Because they’re old, and evil, and cruel. Because they wanted it to hurt as much as possible, when the mommies found out what they’d done. Because they didn’t think we were capable of doing anything about it, ‘til they found out better.
Ah, but then they figured out another way, some of them—or only just the one, maybe. Long after we’d already killed them all.
I look up at her, my daughter, saying none of this. Because she is my daughter, after all; half of her, or even a little more. My flesh and blood, my only. And that thing squished down inside, it can’t really be most of her, can it? There has to be something else, another percentage—a little more, a little less, whatever. Some parodic variety of human soul, even with that shard of something else stuck inside of it—those delicate skeleton wings too flesh-pinned to flap, shadow-bones caught in a calcium cage. Disease and cure born interlocked, zero sum, each forever at war with its own potential.
What she was before, I’ll never understand. And what she is is now—
Something that can change, now it’s enough like us to be able to, I think. She’s changed already, after all, just to become herself . . .
(whatever that is)
“Those are just stories, though,” I tell her, trying my best to believe it. “Right, honey? You know that.”
“Of course, Mommy.”
I open my arms. “Hug me, please,” I tell her, to which she nods, and does. The way she always has, oddly enough, from the very first—something I never predicted, not ever. Something I never thought I’d grow to need.
But she always lets go first.
“Good night,” she says, turning her back on me, as I feel all
my empty parts turn cold once more. That hole inside me where she once hid, folding back upon itself again; this scar yet unhealed, never-healing, gaping wide under my stomach-set hands like that grave beneath the deck.
So: from a childhood rooted in nightmare, I grew up, liking myself a little better with every passing year. It wasn’t that I’d been actively unhappy, by most standards, but it was never my favourite thing, either—the loneliness, the social weight, the dependency. Being dragged from one place to another, having rules set and re-set apparently at random, never fully understanding why. Being unable, as yet, to see the adults around me not as infallible authority figures but imperfect human beings like the one I was flowering into, just as trapped in their own roles, by their own mistakes.
Some people talk about the golden light of childhood, call it “the best time of [their] li[ves],” but those people must have been lucky at best, stupid at worst. Whatever they felt, I didn’t.
Then again, whatever I saw, they didn’t.
“Why do you find people so exhausting?” my mother asked me once, when I was still in university. “Is it because you think they’ll judge you? You shouldn’t. My friends all think you’re charming. ‘Emme’s so easy to talk to,’ that’s what they tell me.”
I laughed. “You do get that I work at that, right? I have to watch myself, all the time—make sure I don’t talk about anything real. Just let them talk about themselves, and act like I’m interested.”
“So . . . you’re not? Is that what you’re saying?” She paused. “What about with me?”
“I’m always interested in what you have to say, Mom.”