by Al
The arm that wrapped around Ty began to tremble, and Willa felt her own tears rising, though she kept them down.
“There’s only one other thing we could be,” she said in the faintest of voices, and only to herself.
~ * ~
A while later the light show began, as it did every night before sleep came.
First came the yellow streaks, which crossed in parallel pairs overhead, cutting the maroon sky in half. Then the maroon sky split into two parts, like an overhead dome opening, and the darkest sky Willa had ever seen met the black glass plain and they could see nothing. But this lasted only a moment, not enough to keep them in darkness: for the lights of what looked like a billion stars came on overhead, coming brighter and brighter like novas until their light merged into one overwhelming brilliance like the Sun. They were blinded by the light and closed their eyes, seeing a round retinal afterimage against the insides of their lids, and when they opened their eyes again the world was as it had been, with maroon sky and black glass underfoot and the fine line of fuzziness at the horizon.
“I’m sleepy,” Ty said, and curled up on the black glass and closed his eyes, which is what he always did after the light show. Willa fought it but also found herself tired, and then they slept, and always when they woke up they expected to find themselves back in their sleeping bags in cousin Carla’s bedroom in the white two story house that, Willa was almost sure, needed painting and had an old clock in the kitchen that had a crack in the face and was a little fast.
But always, for nine sleep periods now, they found themselves here.
~ * ~
After this, the tenth sleep period, the same thing happened.
Only—
Something was different this time.
They were not alone.
In the near distance were two shapes huddled on the ground, one of which began to wail.
Ty roused himself and looked at them wide-eyed. “The sky was blue, I’m pretty sure…” he whispered.
“Yes,” Willa said, though she wasn’t positive anymore. In her own dreams the white house had been gray, the clock in the kitchen a minute slow.
The two figures saw them and began to approach, at first tentatively, then running.
“Help us!” the one in front sobbed.
Willa held on to Ty, and the two of them stood waiting.
The two figures stopped ten feet away.
They were children: two girls, younger than Ty. One had blonde hair and the other’s hair was red, curly all over.
They stared at Ty and Willa, then looked up at the sky, then back at Ty and Willa.
The red-haired one began to moan, but the other one got out: “Where are we?”
“Where were you?” Willa asked. “Before you came here?”
“In bed!” She had a breathy, annoying voice. “Asleep!”
“Where?” Willa demanded.
“At Janna’s house!” Seeing the probing look on Willa’s face, she rushed on desperately: “In Kentucky! In the U.S. of A.!”
“What were you doing at Janna’s house, in Kentucky?” Willa persisted, almost unkindly. “Why were you there?”
“We were having a sleepover!” the breathy girl answered, and then she too began to cry.
Ty joined them.
“Be quiet!” Willa shouted, staring sharply at Ty, and then at the newcomers.
All but the red-haired girl complied.
Willa looked at Ty. “They were in Kentucky. We were in New Hampshire. That means nothing.”
Tears threatened again, but Ty kept them down. “The sky was blue,” he insisted quietly.
“You’re sisters?” Willa asked the breathy girl.
She nodded, studying the sky with frightened eyes. She said, “How do we get back?”
Willa gave her a long steady look. “You don’t.” She turned to Ty, her back to the two new children, and said in a whisper, so only he could hear: “I know what happened.”
There were pooling tears in Willa’s eyes, which frightened Ty more than anything up till now.
~ * ~
The nightly light show was ending. Willa opened her eyes, still seeing a vestige of fading sun image. The two little girls, Eva and Em, were rubbing their own eyes, sitting Indian style twenty feet away where Willa had ordered them to be. Willa watched Eva, the blond-haired one, curl up on the floor and then Em nest into her like a sleeping cat.
In a few moments they were both breathing shallowly, eyes closed.
Willa waited another full minute, fighting the urge to sleep, and then shook Ty gently awake beside her.
He stirred, sought continued sleep, then rubbed his eyes and sat up.
“All right,” he said, yawning and stretching. “Tell me.”
“This is the truth,” Willa answered. She had decided not to cry, and kept her voice steady and low. “Do you remember the night we sneaked down after bedtime, and spied on Mother and Father through the stair rails while they sat at the dining room table with a bottle of wine?”
Ty was concentrating, his brow furrowed. “The dining room was brown.”
“It was white,” Willa said. “Do you remember holding your hands over your ears, because you didn’t like what they were saying?”
“The dining room was white,” Ty abruptly agreed, and then a further amazed spark of remembrance touched his face. He put his hands to his ears for a moment, then lowered them. “They said…”
“They said that some people should never have children.”
His eyes widened with a faint catch of breath. “I remember…”
“They talked about how good it had been before we came along, how much they missed those days.”
Ty’s mouth dropped open in wonder. “Yes…”
Willa said sharply, with conviction: “They found a way to send us here.”
Sudden anger boiled up in Ty’s face. “That’s not true! They would never do that!”
Twenty feet away, the two little girls stirred, and Willa said calmly, “If you don’t quiet down I won’t tell you the rest.”
Ty fought to hold his rage: he made fists, counted to ten, but at the end of it he still wanted to scream and cry.
Willa warned, “Be quiet.”
Another count of ten, and Ty snuffled. “Tell me.”
Willa took a halting breath. Her eyes held a faraway look, as if she was staring at a place she didn’t want to believe had existed, but knew had been real. “They wanted to be alone again. They would never kill us, or drive us out into the country and abandon us, or put us on a bus with no identification and just enough money for one-way tickets. But in the back of their minds, they knew that if they ever had the chance to make us go away without hurting us, they would take it.”
Willa was gazing over Ty’s head, her voice flat with shocked belief. “And they found a way…”
Ty’s anger returned. He stood up, yelling, “They would never do that to us! Dad would never do that to me! He helped me build a model airplane! He taught me how to throw a baseball! And mother taught me how to tie my shoelaces!” His face was livid with anger and fear. “They loved us!”
The two little girls were awake, holding on to one another.
Willa said, “They loved us because they had to. But I’m talking about what people really want, in the center of their hearts. Haven’t you always felt it, Ty? When they went away on vacations together and left us at cousin Carla’s? The way they looked at each other even when we were with them?”
Willa’s eyes were haunted. “Haven’t you always felt that the two of them had no room for four?”
“I don’t believe you!”
Em, the one with red hair, began to wail, and her sister, the breathy one, sobbed, “Stop talking! It’s time for sleep!”
Willa continued, “Did you ever watch the way Uncle Bill and Aunt Erin looked at cousin Carla? They never had those thoughts. They were meant to have children. Their hearts were big enough.”
“Sleep!” the breathy
one insisted, curling down to troubled slumber beside her sister.
Willa ignored them. She was staring hard into a place of remembrance that was fading. “That night,” she said to Ty, “when you put your hands over your ears, Mother’s face got a strange look on it, and she told Father she’d found a way.”
“You’re lying!”
Willa gave a single, strangled sob. “And when she brought us to the sleepover at cousin Carla’s, she had that same look on her face.”
“I won’t believe you!” Now Ty clung to her, and closed his eyes, and shivered. “I’d rather be dead…”
Suddenly—so suddenly it made her gasp—Willa wasn’t sure if Aunt Erin’s kitchen had had a clock in it after all.
Or even what a clock was.
Ty moaned, “No…”
And then he closed his eyes.
Willa whispered, stroking his hair, “We’ll have to make a new life here.”
She stifled an abrupt, overpowering yawn.
Beside her, Ty was asleep, still trembling. This time he wasn’t looking for attention. Willa lowered him gently to the hard obsidian surface and lay down beside him.
She looked over at Eva and Em.
“And now, other parents know the way…”
She snuggled close to her brother, and closed her eyes.
~ * ~
She awoke to a wailing moan to transcend the sadness of Limbo, and a world filled with children.
Beside her, Ty sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“Chickens were green,” he said.
Willa answered, without hesitation, “Yes.”
EELS
By Al Sarrantonio
They were out on a mirror of green ocean. The land, save for a jetty of sharp rock a hundred yards to the east, a single pointing finger of the island, had disappeared into the hazy distance. At the far curves of the horizon mist squatted, but closer in the air and sea-waves were as sharp as knives.
Davy’s father baited two hooks, whistling between his teeth, but Davy sat with his hands folded in his lap. Despite the warmth of the noon sun, and the brine tartness of the salt air, he felt cold: as if this were early morning and the mists had not yet retreated. He wore his jacket buttoned over his sweatshirt, and clenched his hands together as he turtled his ears down into his jacket’s collar.
The boat rolled gently in the swells. His father, still whistling, now looked at him and suddenly scowled.
“What is it, boy? You sick?”
Davy shook his head no.
His father’s scowl remained; he looked impatient to be back to his baiting of hooks, his whistling.
“What, then? You didn’t have to come, you know; I would have been happy out here alone.”
“Mother wanted me to.”
His father’s scowl deepened. “Your mother…”
For a moment a cloud hung over the boat. But then his father went suddenly back to his tackle, and began to whistle again. Davy was left to contemplate his cold clenched hands, his rolling stomach.
“Father, I’d like to go back…” he said weakly.
“What’s that?”
Davy took once hand away from the clenched other, and pointed toward the finger of rock eastward. “If you could take me…”
“I won’t!” his father snapped. “I told ye before we came out to either come or stay. I won’t be rowing back now. ‘Twould be near two by the time I rowed myself back out. That’s not enough time to make a day of it.” His coarse, unshaved face turned away from Davy, his eyes back on his hook. “You’ll stay, and be content with it.” He added, “You know what I think of you anyway, boy.”
Davy’s hands joined again. If he had had anything in his stomach he would have emptied it over the side.
~ * ~
The sun inched upward. A wheeling pair of seagulls appeared, complained loudly over the boat and circled up and away, disappointed. Davy thought of home, the house on the island, and the chair by the large window in the family room. The hearth fire there was warm. It was dry in that corner of the room, there was no sea-smell in that dry corner…
“Here,” his father said abruptly, thrusting a fishing rod into his hand. It was one that barely worked, with a sticking reel. Davy’s hands opened in benediction to take the rod, but already his father had turned away from him, tending his own two good rigs. With a plop his father dropped one sinker into the water, snugging this untended rod into the oarlock before dropping the other rigged line into the ocean. Davy heard the thin scream of the filament and then its sudden stop as the weighted end hit wet sand far below.
His father turned around and said, “Well? You going to fish it or not?”
Davy nodded and then looked away, out at the tip of his fishing pole. An old sinker was tied there like a rutted lead teardrop, the thin green filament of the hook’s line angled sideways and then curled down to the barbed hook imbedded in the struggling red bloodworm thrashing this way and that—
Davy lay the pole down and heaved his empty stomach. He held his straining face over the side of the boat. A thin acidic line of bile dripped from his mouth into the water.
“Christ’s sake!” his father said behind him. Davy felt the hard dry hands on his shoulders as he was pulled back, his teary eyes looking into the angry red face above him, the hard hand now pulled back as if to strike.
“I’m…sorry, father—” he blurted out, between sobs.
His father’s hand stayed, then lowered, and his father turned away, shaking his head.
“Nothing to be done about it now,” he said, ignoring the boy once more, but pausing to grab the old rig and let out the bail, dropping the sinker and thrashing worm over the side of the boat and into the blank cold waters, before thrusting the pole into Davy’s hands once more.
~ * ~
“Ho! A good one I’ll bet!” his father cried, straining against the sudden fight in his pole. He began to turn the reel’s handle furiously, half standing to stare over into the water, watching the tightened line for signs of the caught beast.
“A fighter!” he laughed—but then the line went abruptly slack. He sat down, scowling once more.
“And you, boy?” he called back, not looking around. “Checked your bait?”
Davy stared at the rod tip, saying nothing, and in a moment his father had forgotten about him, whistling once more, as he pulled his own hook from the water and cut a fresh blood worm in half to replenish it.
~ * ~
Off in the distance, at the hazy edge of the world, Davy heard the long, sad call of a foghorn. In the sky, the sun had turned a sour lemon color as it now sank toward the growing fog. At the limits of vision, gulls wheeled out on the water, diving one after another to hit the waves and then rise again. One of them clutched something long, black and struggling in its beak. Davy turned to stare again at the tip of his own fishing rod.
His father spat over the side of the boat. “Damned fog’ll be here in a half hour or so. Thought I’d get the whole day in but it was not to be.”
Without another word, he went back to his own equipment, checking the extra rod that laid in the oarlock before turning his full attention to his other pole.
A sudden tremble shot through Davy’s hands. The edge of his fishing pole flicked, and then the pole end bent down, straining toward the water.
The pole nearly leapt out of Davy’s hands before he tightened his grip on it. His fingers fumbled for the bail as line unraveled with a thin high screech. “By God, boy, you’ve got something!” his father shouted. “Keep the tip up, dammit! And don’t let so much line out!”
Abandoning his own pole, the old man made his way back to Davy, his face flushed with excitement.
“The way you’re holding that pole, he’ll get away, damn you!”
His father reached out angrily to take the rod from Davy’s hands.
At that moment the bale caught and the tip of the pole bent down into the water, lost in the waves. His father’s face flushed in surprise as he tor
e the rod from Davy’s hands and fought with the line.
“By God! What have you got on here, boy?”
Standing in a crouch, his father managed to get the pole out of the water and then loosened the bale to let out a bit of line.
“She’s deep, that’s for sure!” his father said. A smile came onto his features as he battled, one eye turned to the approaching fog and late afternoon.
“It’ll be close!”
Humming fiercely through clenched teeth, he began to inexorably reel the line in, letting the catch run when it needed to, but gradually drawing it up from the depths and closer to the boat. The sour-yellow sun was edging the horizon; the mists began to caress the rowboat with their tendrils. Davy shivered and drew deeper into his coat, but his father seemed oblivious now to everything save the thing on the end of the fishing line.
“She’s almost up, boy! Get the net!”
Roused from his chill, Davy moved to his father’s abandoned spot on the boat and lifted the wide net by its handle.
“Hurry, damn you!”
He turned back. His father’s angry face motioned him to hold the net over the side of the boat.
“Damned beast’s about up!”
Kneeling, Davy dangled the net over the side. Now, in the late afternoon, the water’s surface was a sickly, deep, impenetrable green. It smelled of salt and overly-wet vegetation.
Bile rose in Davy’s throat, but he held it down.
“Here it comes, boy—here it comes!”
From the soupy depths something became visible, twirling as it reluctantly rose. Davy held the net ready. The shadow became more distinct: a long, slender shape, heavy in the water.
His father peered over the side, squinting.
“Can you see what it is, boy?”
“Yes…”
The thing broke water. Its black, thin, slick head rose out to stare up at Davy with leaden eyes—
“Snatch it with the net, boy! Can you see—?”
His father’s voice suddenly turned full of disgust. The black thing’s head held suspended for a moment, mouth opening to show the embedded hook in its jaw, its head now seeming to expand in the air, to change shape, before there was a snap and it dropped back down into the sea. It’s shadow held for a moment, as if it might rise again on its own. But then it sank toward indistinction, the curl of its long sinuous length essing once before it was gone, back into the deep.