by Stephen King
When he finished, he slid the paperwork back in the envelope, clicked off the light, and climbed into bed, still clothed. He thought he’d lie there, unable to sleep, his mind still tuned to that just-out-of-reach channel. But he dropped off almost immediately as, outside, it began to snow.
A creak of floorboards and then Jude’s voice, that hesitant are-you-awake tone: “Benny?”
Ben opened his eyes and rolled over. Jude stood in the hall, just outside the doorway, as if it was a border he couldn’t cross. He was already dressed, his face still gleaming from just being washed. He’d gotten most of the Sharpie off, leaving the ghost of a gray smear.
Ben sat up. “Hey, bud.”
They stared at each other, Jude still visibly wary and Ben unable to find the words to the things he needed to say. His eyes kept getting drawn to the smear. Other kids did that. Not their father. Ben had forgotten—the evils of the world weren’t contained within one imperfect man and his lack of closure over a dead marriage.
“Where’s Dad?” he asked finally.
“At work.”
Ben winced. “How …”
Jude grinned. “He was talking about that at breakfast. Said he was gonna say he ran into the basement door.”
Ben thought of what he’d done, and his mouth slipped free: “What’s he gonna say when someone asks how many times?”
Jude laughed, a tinkling sound, but there was a flash in his eyes, like a brief sunburst over chrome, and Ben knew he’d just remembered how Marcus had ended up like that. He’d briefly forgotten, but now it was back.
“Whatcha need, bud?” Ben asked.
“Wondered if you wanted to go for a walk,” Jude said, then added, “In the woods, I mean. Go to the crick.”
Avoid other kids, you mean, Ben thought. “Okay—still coffee downstairs?”
“Uh-huh.”
Ben swung his legs over the side.
“Pour me a cup, will ya? I wanna change.”
Jude eyed the fact that Ben was still wearing the clothes from yesterday, then nodded.
As he started out, Ben called him back.
Ben made his mouth work. “I’m sorry, Jude. I mean it.”
Jude grinned again, the sunburst-chrome glaze of wariness banished from his eyes. The grin was awful—it seemed to make the smear darker, his skin paler.
“S’okay, Benny. I know you were just trying to help.”
Ben nodded and Jude left.
He changed out of his clothes, which felt twisted and ill-fitting after sleeping in them. As he was shoving the wad of old ones into his hamper, he noticed the blood for the first time.
He dropped his jeans and flannel and shook out his gray tee.
Three dots, like wavering ellipsis, near the collar.
He stared off, thinking of breaking his father’s nose, breaking a tooth, as Jude screamed behind them. Maybe that was what Jude was staring at. He heard the ticking in his head.
He dumped the shirt into the trash, then looked across the room at the bulging Ohio State letter.
What are you going to do after graduation? It wasn’t the internal voice now, though, but a memory of a voice.
Then he thought, I’m doing this kid no good, and the internal voice murmured, He’s doing you no good, either.
The air was crisp in his lungs, shockingly so, but Ben’s head still felt addled. He moved through the snow like a drunk, struggling to maintain balance over the uneven ground. The snow was thick and wet underfoot.
Jude walked a little ahead of him, his movements confident, as if their roles were reversed—Ben the one beaten to hell the day before, and Jude the over-worrying brother.
They reached the creek. The post-Christmas thaw had raised the water level and its intensity.
“They were playing outside,” Jude said after a moment. Ben turned to him, but Jude was staring at the water, his snow gloves shoved into the pockets of his winter coat. “With skateboards. Too cold for skating, but one of them had these cool metallic markers and they were all coloring and talking about what they were gonna do with the boards once the snow melted.”
Ben opened his mouth, then shut it again.
“They were older,” Jude went on, “but not that much older. Like, fifth graders. I didn’t know ‘em, but I don’t know a lot of people. I thought they’d be nice.”
He looked up and Ben recoiled. Jude’s eyes were fiery and desperate and confused. The smear on his forehead, partially covered by the hood of his winter coat, looked like the ash marks Catholics sometimes put on.
“Why weren’t they nice, Benny?” Jude asked. “I just wanted to talk to them. I thought they were cool. They called me ‘babyfag’. Real fast, like that. ‘Babyfag, babyfag.’ The whole time. They tackled me when I tried to run.” His lips peeled back from his grinding teeth—at the moment, looking exactly like Ben had when Ben had finally taken after their father, although Ben didn’t know that.
Ben cleared his throat. “I … I don’t know, Jude.”
Jude turned back to the water. “People are dogshit, Benny. They’re mean. I just wanna be nice to them, the way Mom said I should. That’s the only thing I remember about her—‘Be nice to people, Jude’—and I don’t even know why she said that.”
Ben did, but he didn’t say. Jude wouldn’t remember—Ben was surprised Jude remembered anything about their mother—but their mother was the epitome of nice. To everyone. Every door-to-door salesman and Jehovah’s Witness was welcomed in and given coffee or water, sometimes snacks. She baked things if anyone was sick on their street, regardless of who they were. It used to drive Marcus bugshit, Ben remembered.
And then their mother was nice to that fine young undergraduate, and they went off to be nice to other people elsewhere.
“But I can’t stop being nice,” Jude said now. “Even if I wanted to, I can’t. It’s like I think, ‘This time it’ll be different’ because there’s a lot of good in people.”
Jude started walking along the water, close enough for snow to fall into the water. Ben followed, feeling more addled than ever.
They came out of the trees to stand at the edge of the Buchanan River. The thaw had done its work here; Ben saw more of those ominous dark spots of thinning. A thread of river water worked its way down the center, like a black stitch.
Jude sat down along the edge. “I think you should tell Dad about college.” He looked across the river, at all the homes where the mothers didn’t fuck men too young to buy beer, and the fathers didn’t beat their youngest because the youngest reminded them of the mothers, and the eldest didn’t carry it all around like an albatross, unable to stop it all from continuing. “I think you’re wrong, Benny. I think he’d be proud of you. It’d make him happy.”
Ben thought of Marcus, face bloodied, nose broken, one eye punched shut. “Jude—”
Jude looked up at him. The fieriness was gone, replaced by a kind of resignation too old for such a young face. “That’s what kids do—they grow up and go to college. They do something, Benny. They don’t hang around forever. It’s your turn. In a few years, it’ll be mine. And Dad will be happy.”
He turned back to the river. “And you’ll tell me about college, and it’ll be nice, and when I go, it’ll be nice, too. No one will punch me because I asked them if they wanted to play on the jungle-gym. No one will call me a babyfag.”
No one will nearly pull your arm out of the socket because you’re holding their beer, Ben thought, but of course didn’t say.
Jude was looking at him again. “You can’t stay here forever, Benny.”
It felt as if he’d sidestepped into a parallel dimension—You are entering the Twilight Zone—where Ben made adult decisions about his life and Jude was self-aware of the situation he was in.
“I’ll think about it, Jude,” he said finally.
Jude nodded, and turned back to the river.
A breeze came up from the water and Ben shivered. “Hey, let’s head back. I’m still not awake enough for this.
Let me get another cup of coffee—or six—and we’ll go do something.”
For a moment, Jude said nothing. Then he said, “Okay,” and turned at the waist to boost himself up.
And his boot slipped against the packed, wet snow, over the edge, followed by his opposite knee.
An almost comical look of surprise swept Jude’s face—not fear, not that quickly—and then he was going, his waist already over the side, his gloved hands scrambling along the wet snow and not catching purchase. He didn’t even have time to scream.
Neither did Ben. His body was a spring uncoiling—leaping across the distance, chest slamming into the cold-cold-cold ground, shoving the air out of his chest, as he snagged one of Jude’s gloves. He immediately felt the yank against his shoulder—fire against the snow—as he took on Jude’s full weight.
And felt the fading solidness within Jude’s glove as Jude’s hand started slipping out.
“BENNY! ” Jude screamed, flailing, kicking at the side of the overhang, his other hand whipping around, and Ben wanted to yell at him to hold still, to reach with his other hand, but he couldn’t, his lungs were empty, hollow chambers, convulsing, trying to force air in. He whooped in wet snow and it burned.
His eyes locked on Jude’s. They were empty of anything but terror, deer-in-the-headlights, animal-in-the-trap-hearing-the-hunter- approach fear, but they were also aware; Jude knew exactly what was happening to him. Jude’s eyes saw all, blazing out of a pale face bruised and marked with faded marker, nailing Ben in place. They were the eyes of someone who could count the remainder of his life in minutes and seconds instead of decades and years.
Jude’s hand slipped from the glove. Ben lunged forward, grabbing with his other hand—
—and missed.
Jude didn’t have time to scream before hitting the ice.
Ben yanked himself forward to look over, and already the current, swollen with the previous thaw, had pulled Jude from the edge, dragging him and the broken ice chunks to the center, bobbing up. He watched Jude’s arms fly, hands scrabbling to grab a chunk of ice, any chunk of ice. In a blink, he was in the center of the river. In another, he was fifty yards off.
Ben tried screaming, but there was no air. His brain yammered at the edges of total mental static roar: CALL 911 CALL 911 CALL 911—
Jude was a hundred yards away.
He was no longer flailing.
Ben couldn’t move; his muscles twitched with the residue of adrenaline and nothing more. His brain, addled before, had switched off entirely, overloaded. There was a spark, deep in the back of his mind, slowly growing brighter.
The pressure on Ben’s shoulders pushed him into the ground. The knot in his throat expanded.
Images came to him, riffling snapshots of memory: Jude trying not to cry after some assault—it could’ve been the night of holiday break, the morning after, or any other time.
Another image: Jude’s eyes ringing double-zeroes when Ben shoved him away.
Imagining the bruises still to come, the blood still to flow, whenever he looked at Jude’s punch-me face.
Thinking often, I can’t protect him.
Thinking, He’s not going to make it.
Remembering his father: It only takes an instant to regret a lifetime.
Jude’s body was a speck, bobbing languidly down by the Route 67 bridge. Still Ben’s brain yammered on, CALL 911 CALL 911—even as he knew in his gut it was useless.
Two final images, and the spark in the back of his mind grew, blossomed into horrible burning life:
The Ohio State packet, all filled out, on Ben’s desk, waiting to be mailed.
Jude’s eyes, terrified and aware, looking up at Ben as his hand slipped from the glove.
And the spark spoke: You don’t have to worry about him, now.
The clock in his head stopped ticking.
The knot was gone from Ben’s throat and he sucked in a lungful of freezing air.
The pressure lifted from his shoulders, replaced by the most crushing guilt Ben had ever felt, a guilt like nothing he’d ever experienced, a guilt that couldn’t compare with his feelings of never been able to protect Jude enough, of being there enough.
Because Jude wouldn’t need protecting now.
Jude wasn’t there now.
And Ben Sheever, finally, screamed.
Eventually, one of the residents across the river called the police. Eventually, the police—Marcus, to be specific—found Ben, still screaming, his voice a ragged, ruined croak.
And, eventually, they found Jude.
BLACK RIVER #1
ELIZABETH MASSIE
Cracked upon my ice-thick surface,
He is there,
Fragments of a grimace, straining,
Glaze-eyed stare.
Youth in wool coat, tri-corn, vest
Caked in mud,
Stockings torn from thorny branches,
Red with blood.
Voices, loud, calling orders,
“Cross the ford!”
Fingers aching, clutching firelock,
Praying, Lord …
From the bank into my waters,
Cold as Hell,
Stumbles over slime-slicked stones,
Rancid smell.
Sees his face tossed back to taunt him,
Sure to die,
Shot within my frosted rapids,
Left to lie.
THE BLACK CROW OF
BODDINSTRAßE
EMILY B. CATANEO
I’VE BEEN LOST FOR WEEKS. Maybe months. Perhaps even years. I can’t say how long I have spent fluttering from angry black elevated subway to gray boulevard to linden-lined canal, tap-tap-tapping on windows, beating my wings against glass and receiving only the backside of lace curtains.
But perhaps, at last, I am lost no more? Could it be that I’ve finally found a family? I have alighted on a third-story rusted-out window box—geraniums dead with winter, or maybe dead a long time ago—and I’m peering into a tall thin warped-glass window. Through two layers of glass shimmer people, warm, well-fed people. The glass swirls like eddies in the muddy Spree River but still I can see them, see enough to feel as though I already know them. The way the mother tugs on her tooth as she talks. The way the father slides across the warm wood floor in his stocking feet.
I lift off the window box, flutter around the corner of the building to a concrete balcony adjacent to the rest of the flat. A girl appears in the window and I lurch backwards, nearly fall off the balcony. She’s chubby and it gives her face a vapid, ironed-out look. She wears overalls and pink wire-rimmed glasses with bent arms and as I watch her, she runs a hairbrush through the tail of her messy braid.
I wait for her to notice me and for her to tap on the glass, yank the curtain aside so I can’t peek in, but she simply stares out the window, not letting me in but not shutting me out either, running the brush through her hair.
Sometimes, when I soar through the city on long nights such as this one, I see flickers of silver-edged night-dark wing, of other creatures that are perhaps like me. And I feel more than hear whispers, whispers rising from the sidewalks like steam from a manhole cover. These whispers tell me that somewhere in this city, a place percolates beneath the ground, calling to me—I think it’s named the Place of Lost Things—a cold place but a place where I belong, where I would fit in easy as the click of a bicycle lock.
I visit the family again the next night. They live on a street of off-white former Mietskaserne, facades done up with neo-classical flourishes and cement balconies tacked on after the last war. A plastic bag from a späti floats in the poplar tree outside the girl’s window. When I alight on the balcony railing, I’m so cold I can barely stand to touch the metal. Smokestack smoke rises to the east but other than that the night is very clear, clear enough to reveal stars.
I cozy up to the window. The girl stands there again, running her brush through her hair. It’s down this time, all loose and messy over her sweatshirt. She bats th
e brush against a brambly knot, then purses her chapped lips and reaches forward. I tense against frozen cement and I press myself against the pane.
Open the window, please, hairbrush girl, turn the latch and slide it open with the crackling of old plaster. Let me flutter inside, let me curl in the corner of your bookshelf and sleep in your white-sheeted bed. I remember beds, I know I remember them from somewhere far back in a hazy corner of my memory, but it doesn’t have to be a bed. Even the faded rug on the floor would do.
She doesn’t open the window, but presses fingertips against the glass, and makes eye contact with me on the balcony. I’m sure of it. She sees me, and there are only two panes of glass between us.
We stay like that, not moving. Tinny church bells ring somewhere far away, and she sighs, and turns away from the window.
Certain questions tug at me, when I see those silver-edged night-dark creatures, when I hear the whispers about the Place of Lost Things. The foremost question: what are those creatures, and what am I? I can’t say I’ve ever been too good at seeing myself, but I can tell you how I feel. Some days, when I see the Aaskrähe—black crows—lighting on graffitied benches in the park, or picking open a bio trash bag in a yellow bin, I think yes, that is me, all greasy gray feathers and black undercoat, fluttering around trying to peck my way into things.
Other times I feel like I could have been a person once. Why else do I long to sit on polished floorboards while fathers slide across floors in stocking feet and mothers tug on their teeth? Why else do I know that my longing stems from more than just the animal desire for warmth, but from a memory, faint but aching, of what it means to encase yourself within four walls with people who love you? I feel like I could have been a person who died a long time ago, or maybe just last week. I really don’t know. It makes sense: I’m colder than the coldest January day, when the sky is blue and deadly and no one salts the sidewalks.