by C M Muller
Across the living room, near the hors-d’oeuvres table, she saw her good friend Jackie and her ex-boyfriend Dante. Dante had been the rarest of combinations in high school: a sensitive and even artistic jock. They probably would still have been together if Dante hadn’t moved from New Jersey on a football scholarship to the University of Michigan. Her dad had always loved Dante. She started to tear up a little and then forced them back. Dad wouldn’t have wanted her bawling a flooded river at the reception.
Jackie broke away from Dante with a small smile and nudged her way through the crowd to Amanda’s side. “Hey, sweetie, how’re you holding up?” she asked, touching Amanda lightly on the forearm. Her hair smelled like wildflowers and her black, modest dress with a delicate, silvery floral design on the left breast was the most tasteful article of clothing in the room. Jackie was always the stylish one. Amanda looked down at her own dress, a slightly shabby dark gray thing she’d found among her mom’s old belongings. She sighed. Her mom...also gone, going on a decade now.
“I’m getting by, Jackie. But...it’s not easy. I’m about ready to call up Cynthia, call her the ‘c’ word for not showing up today, kick all these people out of my house, and turn Mobb Deep up to 10 on dad’s stereo. And throw out that nasty fruit salad.” They both laughed at that, looked over to the table where Dante was quietly warning someone away from that very food item.
“That’s seriously fucked up, Cynthia not showing up. Didn’t your dad help her pay her first semester’s tuition when there was that screw up with financial aid?”
Amanda nodded silently. He’d done that and set her up with a single occupancy dorm and a sky high food allowance, too. He’d felt bad for her that her parents were both dead. And now that Amanda was in the same boat, she wasn’t going to let down her tough bitch armor for a moment to comfort her onetime best friend.
“Screw her, Mandy. You’re not losing anything by her not being here or not being your friend anymore. You’re not losing anything but dead weight.”
Mandy shook her head, like it was agony to move. “No, Jacks. I am losing something. I’m losing the ability to trust the goodness in my good memories.” She glanced over in Dante’s direction, and back at Jackie. Jackie took the hint, “Yeah, girl, go see him. He still cares a lot.”
The two friends hugged tight and then parted, Amanda finding the image of an escape pod jettisoning from a spacecraft floating into her head. Eyes back on Dante, and not in La La Land, she squeezed between people and away from their attempts to “console” her, to get to her ex. “Damn,” he said, looking her up and down. “Just...damn.”
Amanda laughed. “Bullshit, Dante. This dress is probably twenty-five years old now, and the seams are starting to fray. Either you don’t have functioning eyes, or you’re looking at Jackie.” But he looked striking, she noticed. Dark blue suit with a dark red tie, perfectly tailored to his athletic frame, a Rolex on his wrist, shoes shining like twinkling starlight and, of course, salon styled hair and a recent manicure. “You’re looking all right, though, I can tell you that.”
Now it was Dante’s turn to laugh. He’d always kept himself immaculate. “Society expects a woman to look perfect, so I’m going to put the same demands on myself, until that ends,” he used to say. Some people thought it was a line, like they thought a lot of stuff that popped out of his mouth was simply designed to sound good, but Amanda knew it wasn’t. Dante was the most genuine person she’d ever known other than her dad. “I couldn’t come to your old man’s funeral looking like a bum.”
“You’ve never looked like a bum!”
“Pffffft. Anyway, how’s grad school treating you? When’s your master’s thesis due?”
Amanda paused, reluctant to talk about the impending thesis that she hadn’t found the time to devote to at all. It was supposed to be about the use of sacrifice in antiquity, particularly in Greco-Roman culture, as a method of propitiating the gods, but also controlling the populace. Citizens of the empire were less likely to act in ways displeasing to the gods, that is, the heads of state, if they knew that the gods themselves had been invoked to secure the success of some undertaking. The larger and more ceremonial the sacrifice, the more control over the citizenry it afforded.
“It’s not really coming along at all. It’s just...this…” she waved her hand around the room, taking it all in. Dante nodded. “I gotcha. Just doesn’t seem fair…” he said, and then trailed off into respectful silence. They stood like that, side-by-side, not uttering a word, until ten minutes later, when Amanda had to go use the bathroom.
“I’ll be back, Dante. I promise.” He nodded and there was so much sorrow in it, she wanted to hold him. She couldn’t permit herself that, and left for upstairs. On the way, she nodded at Jackie, who gave her a strange look that seemed to fall somewhere between “I’ll miss you” and “Bon voyage!” They think they’re never going to see me again, she thought, wondering why, and then wondering why she felt the same internal sense of departure. Permanent departure. Maybe I should go somewhere. Maybe that’s what I need. To be...away. Elsewhere.
She had to endure three more hugs and an “I’m so sorry, he was a wonderful, wonderful man” as she edged her way up the stairs before getting to the bathroom, which was just emptying out. Squeezing through the half-open, half-closed door was an elderly, Mediterranean-looking man she didn’t recognize. He smiled at her, and gave her an “I know a secret you don’t” look, before traipsing, quite merrily, down the stairs. She went in and stood completely still, her eyes on the floor, utterly unsure of what to do, feeling paralyzed.
On the white tile floor, she saw a pattern of sticks and roots arranged into the number “99.” All the branches could have been brought in from the woods behind the house. Maybe that man going down the stairs had done it? Surely, someone else seeing that would have said something to her, about an odd arrangement of tree limbs on the bathroom floor. Right? It only made sense that someone would bring that up.
Seeing her face in the mirror, Amanda was shocked by how unsurprised she looked. Was I expecting something like this? Is this what it’s all been leading to? She looked out the bathroom window, to the backyard and the woods beyond. She saw the man from the bathroom walking towards the woods. He stopped, turned, and thumbed his aquiline nose at her, and went back to strolling towards the forest. She knew it then, she was going to follow him, and those woods from her childhood were summoning her.
Memories drifted up on the shores of her mind and she wound her way deeper into the woods, the house and its guests vanishing behind an explosive outrage of New Jersey autumn leaves. The crisp air tingled in her nostrils and smelled somehow both clean and bloody. She passed the oak tree that used to have a tire swing on it. Carved into it was the number “99.” She merely nodded.
Her dad had put up the tire swing, of course. Her beautiful father, President of the local UA Plumbers’ Union. The man who taught her to never be afraid of being herself. The man who took on the duty of raising a teenaged daughter by himself, while still juggling his many union responsibilities and being a dedicated civil rights activist and political force. Sometimes, it was his influence that decided who the local Democrats would have running for town offices. Occasionally, he had stretched further, his greatest triumph being a powerhouse campaign fundraiser in support of the first ever African-American elected to Congress in their district. And he made a tire swing. And that’s the part of him that made her heart sing and scream defiance into the void of his absence.
A car accident. But some of the wounds didn’t make sense. He had cuts and abrasions that weren’t consistent with the accident. Had someone hurt him before he’d gotten in the car? Was he actually a murder victim? The investigation was still open, but seemed to be going nowhere. Amanda didn’t think they’d ever figure it out. The detective in charge had told her not to get her hopes up and, if there was one thing she was good at, aside from finding the details in history that got overlooked by the average West
ern historian, it was not getting her hopes up.
Be serious, she thought. I’ve got no hopes right now to get up.
There was a bluff that she’d fallen down at the age of five. She’d skinned her legs up pretty badly, but the worst part was that her foot got stuck, stuck in a hole down there, must’ve been on a root, but did roots tug at your ankle when you tried to free it? Did they tighten their holds? She’d just been a kid; that was all obviously in her imagination. Obviously.
The tree at the top of the bluff had been the tree her dad later said he’d found her teddy bear beneath. Did she lose it when she fell down the bluff? Was that part of the same memory? She didn’t know.
There was a carving on the tree. The letters XCIX. 99, blazed in her head, and she swallowed the sharpened rock she imagined was in her throat. And, below that, more carving in the shape of two figures. One, indistinct, standing behind the other. The one in the foreground, a detailed portrait of a person, empty eye-sockets staring from the bark at her, the expression on its face more one of resignation than fear. And the indistinct figure was massive, and appeared to be holding aloft some kind of clawed hand or a blade. She touched the carving and her fingers came away red and wet. Once, that would have sickened her. Now, she merely shook her head and sighed with bitterness.
Up ahead, there was a clearing. Her father had always warned her against going there. The one time she’d disobeyed, all she found were empty liquor bottles, ragged shreds of porno magazines, and what she later learned were joint roaches. She hadn’t gone back there, because it had still given her a very bad feeling, far worse than knowing there were delinquent teenagers using it as a party spot. When she’d asked him why she shouldn’t go there, his only response had been, “It’s old. Too old.”
Entering the clearing was like having a stone rolled onto her chest. She had trouble breathing, the weight pushed her breath from her lungs, and her heart felt compressed. There was no evidence of teenagers partying anymore. Instead, she saw laid out on the ground, in eleven rows of nine, what looked like serrated and warped bear claws, each tipped with a spray of blood. Ninety-nine claws. She looked at the last one and knew everything she needed to know about what had happened to her father.
There was something rustling in the woods behind her. Something loud and large. Making no attempt to be silent, and not in a rush to get to her. It knew she wasn’t running anywhere. Amanda thought back to her studies for her thesis on the hecatomb. One-hundred creatures sacrificed to one of the gods, often Apollo, Athena, or Hera. She looked up and saw the Sun staring down at her. It seemed to be smiling, a dark and secret smile. Maybe that’s why the heat seemed to be rising, like a hand slinking underneath her clothes and leaving a trail of damp sweat behind anywhere it slid on her skin.
With a tiny whimper, Amanda raised her eyes back to the path she’d traveled from the house. The way was blocked by what appeared to be the entire crowd from the reception, including the man with the aquiline nose, standing in-between Jackie and Dante. Dante had his arms across his chest and was rocking from foot-to-foot. He did not meet her gaze. Jackie was smiling gently, and threw a small wave.
The rustling became louder, insistent. The sunshine continued to pour down on her and the man with the Mediterranean complexion and the nose of a Caesar shouted, “One-hundred! One-hundred! One-hundred!” The rest of the group picked up the cry. Then, he stepped aside and a familiar face appeared. Cynthia. Licking her lips and staring at her one-time best friend. For the first time since he’d died, Amanda wept for her dad.
Cynthia sucked in a deep breath. She raised her hands in the air and Amanda was immediately filled with a sense of presence behind her. A sense of expectation. The stone-faced young woman cried out for the assembled friends, acquaintances, and strangers, “Kneel before our high priest! Hail the high priest!” Her call was echoed as everyone gathered fell to their knees.
There was a sensation almost like static and white noise tickling the skin of Amanda’s back. A blast of warm air that felt almost slimy, like the roots of a tree deep in mud, encircled her neck. The rustling had stopped directly behind her. She heard a swooshing sound, like a scythe being swung back in preparation to strike. In that briefest moment of her brief life, she was back in the tire swing. She was holding her rescued teddy bear. She was hugging her dad before he left for work the morning he’d died, something she’d not done because she was too busy primping in the bathroom when he left. The moment passed and she was alone in her skin and in her fate.
She wondered about ninety-eight other people, and decided that it was too late for that to matter much. They’d all had their own burdens, their own lives, their own endings. She wondered if her own burdens, life, ending, mattered. And she saw the entirety of her dad’s burdens and life and ending washed away in a blaze of murderous light. He’d died in the early afternoon, coming back early from work, to surprise her on her last birthday, her 23rd. He’d never made it. She knew why the investigators weren’t telling her what they’d found and why his funeral had to be closed-casket.
The Sun caressed her cheek, kissed the top of her head, and in an act of solar mercy, burned out her eyes.
100.
Apartment B
Steve Rasnic Tem
Tom chose to bring very little from his old life into the new apartment. A few clothes, a few random artifacts, but most of his clothes and furniture were new. “I hope you won’t take that the wrong way,” he told his adult son. He knew that might sound as if he didn’t care about his son’s feelings, which wasn’t true, but he didn’t have all the language he needed to explain himself. The reasons were complicated and hard to understand, even for him. But if he were to greatly simplify he would say that he needed to avoid pain. He didn’t want to feel haunted anymore.
Of course he still kept photos of his son and his dead wife, and he hung some of them in his new bedroom in a place of importance—on the wall just above a sock drawer in his new chest of drawers, so that he might look at them as he dressed each morning. But they had no real relevance in his new life. His son lived hundreds of miles away, and his wife—he no longer had his wife. Over the three years since her death that had become somewhat easier to say. He was in this new life and in this new life he was unmarried. The only sane thing to do was to accept that. You shouldn’t live in the past—people always said that, didn’t they? Living in the past was something everyone did, but everyone seemed to agree it wasn’t healthy.
He had never lived in an apartment before. He had gone from his parents’ house into a small house with his new bride and from there into increasingly larger houses until their son had left home and their interests had stopped expanding. His wife had liked to sew and play with clay. He’d liked to read, and tinker. Now no one did any of those things. Whatever life was left to him was unusually free of distraction. Someone else might have used the word “empty,” but Tom refused to.
His new second floor apartment had two bedrooms—one he would sleep in, and one he would put things into until he could think of a better place for them. The living and dining rooms were combined, and relatively small. The kitchen was an island of sorts in the middle, small enough to discourage a long stay, which was fine with him. He had never really understood cooking, and intended to eat pre-prepared meals and salads from the local deli, or perhaps some soup or stew from a can.
Off the dining room there was a small sliding door and a balcony beyond—something he had never had before. He ventured out onto this narrow platform his first evening in the new apartment, and saw that his son had placed a lawn chair from the old yard as furnishings—something he hadn’t asked for but could see the sense in. He sat there for almost an hour and looked out and down on the large back lawn of the complex. He was glad he didn’t have to mow anymore, or plant, or worry about how people felt about the outside of his house, and what they therefore might assume about what went on inside his house. What they might assume about him.
Other people were out on similar balconies and one or two of them waved. He did nothing to encourage them, and they stopped. Here and there were traces of a lit cigarette or an illuminated phone screen. Tom let the darkness swallow him, and when he went back inside doubted anyone noticed.
The first few nights sleeping in his new home felt like overnights at some lower-priced motel. This was a good thing—he felt it relieved him of any responsibility for the experience. By week’s end, however, he was feeling critical of the bed and the color of the walls, and wondering why people cared so little anymore about standards and good service.
He did dream, but not about his dead wife or his distant son. He dreamed of trips never taken, cities never visited and yet oddly familiar, meetings with strangers who were so like friends from his past he felt like he had known them forever. They were inviting him on a journey, it seemed. They didn’t promise he would like it, but they made it clear he had no choice.
He had taken early retirement and so there was no particular plan to his days. He usually woke up when the sun came up, but his new bedroom window was shaded unpredictably so sometimes hours would pass while he debated whether it was a new day or not. He tried a simple clock to fix the problem, but he finally had to get rid of it. He didn’t like the way it sometimes sped up, sometimes slowed down, and sometimes didn’t appear to change at all. He decided he didn’t really need it—his body and his circumstances would somehow tell him what to do.
He didn’t leave the apartment the first several weeks. He didn’t even open the front door. There was no real necessity—he had plenty of food and other supplies—but he recognized the strangeness of it. He’d never been in the least socially adept, but he’d also never imagined himself a hermit before.