by C M Muller
When he came home they ate in silence. Her fingertips were stained red. They went to bed, and we had no need of covering our ears. In the darkness we heard the click-clack of her thoughts.
We watched her open the drawer four more times in four more days. We left her a silken negligee delicate as mothwings, a pair of stockings twisted garrotte-thin, eyelashes faded grey and crumbling, painted fingernails with fleshly scraps caught at their bases. And on the seventh day, we left her a heart.
We watched her open the drawer like she was looking into a lion’s mouth. She’d turned slyfoot again. Despite the labyrinthing, she was running out of places to hide our things. She pulled back when she saw the heart, enthroned in the drawer among a scatter of dried roses. It shivered in a single beat. She leaned in. Perhaps she thought it was a kitten, butter-soft and full of mewls. Perhaps all these gifts were from him after all.
We watched her lift out the heart. She held it in her hands. She squeezed it. Hard. The flesh bulged around her fingers. Of course she did not think it was a kitten. Now we understood her thoughts and her insides as if her skin was made of glass.
He’d taken a caravan, a portable shelter, ordinary as dirt—he’d taken it and magicked it into a labyrinth for girls, a make-believe home the size of eight coffins lashed together. Some girls escaped, but we didn’t. We ignored the signs, or the signs weren’t there. We’d got lost and we’d never been found. Our tangles of hair, our bright scraps of frock: tossed up into the trees, to be worked into birds’ nests. Our straight white bones and our tender mauve organs: dropped down into the burn, carried out to sea. He thought that was the end of us.
She spoke to us then. She told how he had found her. Rescued her. Claimed her. Made her see that the world was cold and dark and hard and empty—but with him, life would be delicious, abundant. He put his hands over her eyes, and when he took them away she saw differently. The happenings before him were too hard to focus on, furled and dark like sun-damaged film. All she could see was his face.
We know, we cried, though she could not hear. We all knew his face. It was the last thing we’d seen. We shouted that it would be the last thing she’d see too. He’d tear out her heart just so he could hold it in his hands. He’d throw the remnants of her to the trees and the sea.
Some of them ran long before reaching the heart. Some of them ignored its urgent throb, staying until they couldn’t leave. But for her, this was enough. She dropped the heart. With her bloodied hands, she tore open the door. She ran away.
We knew she wouldn’t be back. We slipped back into the littlest cupboards and waited for him to come back to his crowded, empty home.
She Rose From the Water
Kyle Yadlosky
“She needs to be dead,” the grey-suit preacher tells Laura. He sips coffee; his lips slurp against the rim of the cup. The tip of his tongue runs along his off-white mustache, lapping up what’s left of the coffee’s bitter moisture. He sets the stained white mug on the dining room table. Laura sits across from him in some dingy three-day worn dress. She nods and pushes limp, unkempt curls from her sweating forehead. She hasn’t bathed in weeks. She has nowhere left to wash herself.
“You don’t float four days and come out breathing. She ought to be dead,” the preacher repeats and waves a finger toward Laura’s neck. She nods, stares red-rimmed eyes at her legs. Her lids beat. The dining room chair creaks as the grey-suit preacher adjusts his weight. “Folks throw around words, you know. It ain’t true. I know miracles. Even little girls aren’t always brought back by a holy hand. Do you understand? Other forces work under that skin.”
The preacher pushes his cold coffee to the middle of the table, and Laura’s eyes catch the ripple of coffee lapping against the inside of the mug. It beats the rim, threatening to spill over onto the table.
Waves pound rocks. Wind chills her shoulders; she bundles her wrap closer behind her head. The police lead her to the edge of the rocks. Camera lights flash. Voices babble under waves. The officer’s hand squeezes her wrist. A finger points toward the water. Voices babble. Eyes watch. Her ankles bend, feet easing over loose rock. A flashlight raises; a white orb shines on glistening stone just at the edge of the water. Laura holds her breath. The voices babble; the waves batter. The finger points. She nods. She stares as the wind dries and burns her eyes at her daughter’s little green shoe sitting sideways at the edge of the water. She collapses to her knees and lets the rocks scrape her skin, chisel blood from her legs. She screams into her hands; she cries. The waves batter over her cries. The voices babble on as a mother slashes her fists, beating them against the loose rocks.
The preacher glances to the ceiling. His eyes hold the beams. “No daughter up there,” he murmurs. “She left you with the current. Mark my words. No daughter up there.”
Four days she had no daughter, until a flannel fisherman took his boat in early waters so still that he slid across them like glass. Through the low fog he caught sight of strands of hair, closed eyes, blue lips.
Laura’s eyes rise from her thighs to the door frame of the dining room and peer into the dark living room. Knocks pound the main door. She opens, and that fisherman stands with a pale girl hanging in his arms. This girl lies, eyes closed, under a brown blanket. He takes off his hat, smiles. Laura sets her little girl in bed. In an hour the girl opens her eyes. The grey-suit preacher and a bow-tie doctor stand to Laura’s sides, looking over the girl. She vomits water for an hour into the bathtub, filling a pink-grey liquid into the tub until the water beats the edges. She sleeps for three days. The bow-tie doctor assures Laura that she has no need to worry, that the daughter will sleep. She’ll be dehydrated when she wakes up. Laura must be sure to keep plenty of fluids on hand.
When the daughter wakes, a crowd circles the house.
“Water is life,” the preacher grumbles. “Nothing holy up there. Whatever it is, it’s trying to take God’s place. You know that well as I do. She spilled her life inside that tub. Let me do what needs to be done. Let me do what you know is right.”
Laura nods. She watches her knees, only hears the preacher’s chair creak, his grunt. His shadow climbs the door frame as his body twists and his lower back cracks. He straightens, sighs. “I’m glad a woman like you could come to her senses.” He rests a rough hand on her shoulder. It drives a chill into her spine. He stretches his sides and coughs into his fist. “Well, then. Best be done with it before we change our minds.”
His heavy shoes thump up every step, beating through the walls and ceiling of the house. His labored breathing rises and falls like waves pounding rocks with growing force. The floor-boards creak as he lumbers down a hallway. Laura’s eyes follow the creaking. A knob rattles, door opens. The grey-suit preacher’s voice rings muffled. “Come now, little one”—a bed creaks—“I won’t hurt you. I promise. I won’t hurt you.” The floorboards sound heavy steps back down the hall toward the staircase and farther down. Laura watches the ceiling. Her sweaty palms run back and forth over the skirt of her dress. Another door opens. Feet pound into a small bathroom. Water ripples. “Still warm,” she hears the preacher murmur.
The water ripples in the hot afternoon. The house rocks with wet heat; hundreds of bodies shuffling close together, talking, chanting, stifling every room. Laura stands in a corner, watches. Her little girl runs down the stairs handing each body a strip of paper where a number’s been scrawled in black ink. She taps wrists, reassures people. Then, she bounds up the stairs to the bathroom. She calls out a number, and a body creaks up those stairs, down that hall, and to her daughter. Laura only watches the ceiling from her corner in the dining room. Voices rise. Songs bellow out. “Oh, sweet angel. Oh, child save me. The pain is too much. Oh, surely you see. Oh, sweet angel. Oh, daughter of grace. You are the savior. Of our human race.”
The songs skitter like bugs under Laura’s skin. Hands clap; the noise bores through the walls, fills the dead air like the bodies through the house. Laura closes her eyes. She sweats, gasps. She scr
eams, but the song tears her voice away. She jabs a finger, but no one sees. She stomps her foot, but the clapping vibrates her house to the foundation. She shouts to leave her home, to leave her child alone, but her daughter’s praise crushes her outrage.
She slaps a man waiting at the stairs, shakes him by the shirt. He only thanks her for bringing such an angel to the world. She looks to the stairs. She knows she could run up them; she could grab her daughter by the wrist; she could escape what her house has become; she could save them both. But there’s something about going up there, about seeing her girl doing whatever magic she now possesses, that twists Laura’s guts.
“She rose from the water. And will rise as planned. When the great storms come. And swallow the land.”
Every face floats down the stairway, peeled to a clown’s grin. The pink-grey water of the bathtub drips off each chin, and every voice adds to the choir, belting a new hymn of their child savior. Laura holds her hands over her ears, closes her eyes, and crouches in the corner. The house shakes under her feet. The house trembles like the walls might split, the foundation might crumble. This tuning fork to her daughter’s sacrilege, she wishes it would crumble. But it stands; it will always stand. An old woman paints a portrait on the wall. Laura knows the golden curls of her daughter’s hair, the olive eyes. The woman dabs angel wings onto the girl, singing on with the crowd.
Laura’s head rings too much, head rattles too hard, so she wanders from her at-one-time home in search of a preacher’s guidance.
The house stands still now. The walls wait, holding breath. The first splashes come. The little girl screams. She screams again. Water sloshes onto the floor just overhead. Laura watches the ceiling. The screams rise. The floor creaks. The grey-suit preacher belts out, “Now, unholy demon, monster of sin, you shall not hold this home captive! You shall not poison the faces of those searching for salvation! You shall not lead sheep astray from the Lord of Heaven! You shall return to Hell! You shall return!”
The floor creaks; the walls shake. Her little girl screams and gurgles on deep gulps of grey-pink water. The preacher stomps his feet, holding her down. “Back to the water!” His voice pounds through the house. “Back to the water! Back! Back to Hell!”
A stain grows over the dining room ceiling. The spot stretches dark in an oblong pool. The floor creaks, walls bang. The screams ring under water. Splashes break off the side of the tub and fall in downpours. The stain grows darker. A drop of water falls, splashes into the preacher’s mug. Laura follows another drop. And another.
“Back to Hell! You will not poison this woman! You will not poison her home! The devil has no foothold on Earth! Back to Hell! Back to Hell and tell him so yourself!”
The screams ring out, and the drips break to a stream. It pours quickly into the mug. The coffee rises and spills black across the rim. Black runs over the sides and pools across the table, then trickles onto the floor.
Her daughter stands on the floor, head barely higher than the dining room table. A green swimming cap holds her long locks back. She smiles at her mother and kicks her green shoes. Laura looks out the window. Grey clouds pull across the sky, churning the coming storm. The heat is high, and the sweat makes her daughter itch. She just wants to swim it off. Laura leans down to hug her little girl, kisses her forehead. Just an hour. No longer. It’ll start to rain after, and dinner will be ready.
Laura watches her daughter from the doorway, running down the path toward the beach.
The splashing slows, stops. The screams die. The preacher breathes. His shoes squeak from the bathroom and thump through the hallway, pound down the stairs. He nods to Laura, his face beating red and eyes standing wide. He has no words left in him, so he lumbers through the dining room, opens the front door, shuts it behind himself, and never glances back at the once-upon-a-time mother. The house falls back to silence, except for the steady trickle of bathwater falling from the dining room ceiling.
Laura doesn’t move. She sits stiff and watches as the grey-suit preacher’s mug continues to overflow and spill her daughter’s grey-pink water. Her eyes float back to the ceiling, knowing that in the room just over her head, her daughter floats dead.
Warm bathwater sloshes as Laura screams. A man with a dark face grips her hand, holds it tight. He pets her hair, whispers in her ear. He’ll be gone in a few days time, but for now his voice calms her as she pushes this body out of her stomach. The man rubs her hair. “Just one more. One more. She’s on her way out.”
Laura grunts and cries out. She pulls her eyes closed. The bathwater spills onto the floor. The man whispers in her ear. She pushes, and a weight releases from between her straining muscles. The water splashes. Laura opens her eyes. Another involuntary shudder of her body, and the afterbirth follows. The man lets go of her hand.
The water is cloudy and grey, and the red of her blood and fluids has dispersed through the tub. She breathes and pants. She doesn’t hear a baby scream.
The man dips his hands into the water. He pulls the baby up. He rocks it; he pats its back, but the infant makes no sound. Laura, exhausted and lost, begins to weep for her lost child and for the fruitlessness of all her pain.
The man continues to pat the infant’s back, and it coughs. It spits up a trickle of water onto the floor. It spits again, it gasps, and it starts to cry. Laura looks to her baby, and the man rests the newborn in her arms. She rocks it gently and continues to weep.
The baby looks up at her, and it croons. It splashes a hand into the murky water her mother made and reaches up. It runs its fingers over her mother’s face and paints all the tears away with that grey-pink water.
Animalhouse
Clint Smith
There are times when the lines around the human eye seem like shelves of eroded stone and when the staring eye itself strikes us with such a wilderness of animal feeling that we are at a loss.
—John Cheever, “The Country Husband”
The uneven serrations of the house key scrape into the front door’s deadbolt like teeth tumbling over bone. He twists the knob. A forearm netted with dark, dried blood rises and shoves the door, which glides open.
When he’d left earlier that morning, Gary Mountjoy had neglected to pull the blinds. Now, near-evening light glows throughout the house, casting sharp shadows, as if someone has done a negligent job of hanging dark blue wallpaper.
His fever is insistent—nearly as assertive as the pulsing pain within his arm. Then there is the matter of the body in the trunk of the car.
Priorities.
Nashton was close, about twelve miles away.
It was that twelve miles that separated where he’d grown up—in the fielded outskirts of Nashton—and the suburbs with which he identified his current existence.
Courtney had left town the day before—to visit her family, she’d said…to take some time to think, she’d said—and his wife’s abrupt two-or-three day absence presented Gary the perfect opportunity to do some thinking of his own, which is precisely why he decided to dismiss much thinking altogether, opting to call in sick to work and spend Monday daydrunk alone.
Well, not alone. He had Gamble.
The morning’s checklist had contained two items, both of which had been enthusiastically exed-off: Call in sick to work and drop by the liquor store for a bottle.
As Gary drove further into rural stomping grounds, the radius became more tolerable, more enjoyable. It was during this time of seasonal transition when the leaves were turning, altering from green states to tints of nectar, rust, lemon, uncountable tinges of orange. The roads became more narrow, the trees lining those thoroughfares became more prominent, dense.
An atmosphere insulated with Rorschach stretches of forests and cordoned fields, now set in tall stands of harvest-ready cornstalks.
He’d never been one to denigrate his former stomping grounds—not that he’d ever intentionally reside here again. Nevertheless, he identified with Nashton.
Gary grew up out here in an area t
hat had four vital set-pieces in his formative years—forests, farm houses, fields, and railroad tracks which cut through the center of this place as a sort of carotid landmark—the steel rails a symbol of the bygone days when locomotives brought people here. For a brief period in the mid-nineteenth century, this small community was poised to rival towns in their campaign to become Indiana’s state capital. That candle of ambition, though, guttered in light of other community campaigns. It was a matter of not being big enough, not being rich enough. A matter of not being enough.
Oh yes, Gary Mountjoy identified with good old Nashton. Nice try…better luck next time.
As a sentimental exercise, Gary took a detour through the town itself. Ghost town was too much of a cliché, though it did seem like some sort of campy reenactment could occur at any moment. Outside the diner were two filthy men smoking, perhaps accosting patrons for a handout. The railroad’s doing, Gary thought. Back in the old days, there’d been stories of rail-riders, hobos hopping off as the train slowed or stopped at Nashton’s depot. Stories of wayside vagrants creeping through the community, wandering from yard to yard, or casually soliciting folks for a handout or a hitch out of town.
The two men held their beady gazes on Gary’s car, their faces containing a mummified sort of dignity.
Toward the southeast, the railway eventually connected with Cincinnati, and on toward the northwest met up with the spider-web network of Chicago.
The elementary school he’d attended as a kid was still out here, yet had been shut down due to some funding issue which spurred a shift in district lines and transportation. Now, kids who were supposed to attend Nashton Elementary were being fed to the nearby and slightly larger town of New Bethel.
Gary pulled into the front lot of the now lifeless school, appraising the low-lying, one-story structure with its mannequin-composed facade—no boards over the windows, no broken glass, just absent energy. He continued his circuit around to the back of the school, the secluded side screening him from the town proper.