by Stephen King
Her cat was run over by a gray Mercedes. He joined the procession, dragging himself with his front paws, his crushed back legs ghosting over the carpet. He meowed without sound, showing his bloodied tongue and broken teeth.
Anika reached over to pet him.
“I wondered where you’d gone off to, darling,” she said. “I guess I can throw your kitty dish away.”
She didn’t, though. She walked past it several times a day, and her cat’s little catnip mouse, too, just in case he wanted to be amused by it.
Next was Adrienne. Leukemia. Adrienne didn’t like Belky much, never had, but she and D got along swimmingly. She often picked up Anika’s cat, holding him close, and he purred deep in a dimension that Anika couldn’t hear. She had to admit she was a little jealous. But only a little.
Anika sat at a table at McDonalds, drinking a terrible coffee. The dead filled the empty chairs around her. Suddenly her boss, laughably named Mr. Tibbs, wandered in, his hair and shirt disheveled, his tie undone.
“Oh no, not you! Don’t you have anywhere else to go?”
Mr. Tibbs shrugged, much more contrite in death than in life, his blue lips turned down.
Anika sighed.
“You guys have to tell him the rules. I hated dealing with him when he was alive. I’m sorry,” she said, when he looked at her unhappily. “It’s just true.”
She dropped her head into her hands. “Especially tell him about the bathroom rules.”
Showers became even more uncomfortable. The dead lined the room, for the most part, facing the wall.
“D, I see you peeking out from under your helmet. If you’re going to be that way, at least hand me the towel.”
Against her better judgment, Anika took a lover. He was a wild, mercurial thing, terrifying and wonderful, and it wasn’t long before she was carrying a baby.
At last, life, she thought, and her sigh was a beautiful thing.
Bodies aren’t built for stress. Bodies with babies are built for it, even less. She and her lover had a fight. Two fights. Several fights, over stupid, meaningless things.
“I hate your friends,” he said, but really he meant, Why aren’t I enough for you?
“Stop controlling me,” she answered back, but she meant to say, I’m terrified. Can you just put your anger away? Please?
The baby, whom she had named Jack in her head, showed up in the Dead Collection on tiny, thirteen-week fetus feet. He walked carefully, steadily, his head down, looking at his toes, and the rest of the dead looked at their toes, too.
“Oh. Oh no,” Anika said, covering her hands with her mouth, and then she began to bleed. She spent the night weeping in the tub, and nobody, not even D, flicked his eyes her way. He just stood there, holding the faded blue towel awkwardly, in case she needed it.
She didn’t. It was a night of cold bathwater and blood and a tiny body that fit in the palm of her hand.
She didn’t tell her lover, because what was there to tell, really? She stayed at home with a stomachache and unwashed hair and a dead baby, and the next time they spoke it was about loyalty and making tough decisions and he said that things would be good, he promised. But sometimes even lovers lie.
He joined the Dead Collection with the back of his head blown away and his teeth chipped from the gun’s barrel. He turned his back on everybody else, reaching for a cigarette, but Baby Jack grasped the shoelaces of his Docs with a surprisingly firm grip.
“Daddy?” The baby’s mouth moved. Anika blinked when she realized she could hear his voice, sweet and tender and so very unalive.
Her lover stared at the baby. Then he stared at her.
“My family,” she muttered, and went back to sleep. Sleeping in self-defense, she thought, and then she didn’t think any more.
Baby Jack started to cry.
The otherworldly wailing of her son sometimes made its way into Anika’s dreams, but mostly it didn’t. She dreamed of shotgun blasts and drowning victims and a child who drank rubbing alcohol because there wasn’t anything left in the house. The screams, her boy’s screams, sounded like everybody else’s screams. Terror and sorrow, in its many forms, all sound the same. They just made her tired.
She slept several days, at first unable to open her eyes, and then just unwilling to. Her cat hauled itself around on her bed, butting his broken head under her hand for caresses. Her lover tried to rock the baby, who would have none of it. Belky and Adrienne worked together to prepare a meal of some sort, but Belky kept bleeding into the cereal. Adrienne pushed her aside and enlisted the aid of Mr. Tibbs, and the two of them came up with some eggs that smelled faintly of chemo and clopidogrel.
She didn’t eat the chemo eggs, or the bloody cereal, or the half-masticated mouse that her cat brought her. She didn’t do anything except close her eyes, or sometimes open them halfway to stare at the ceiling light, which was on, or sometimes off, or sometimes on again, because D was trying to distract Dead Baby Jack with electricity.
Her lover pressed the howling baby into her hand, and she tried to take him, but there was nothing to take.
“Stop him,” she cried, and tears leaked down her face. She tried to pat Jack’s head, tried to wrap her arms around him, tried to slap at him with her hands.
“He’s your son. Stop him!”
Her lover looked worried, looked like himself, like when times were good, which wasn’t often. She missed him, then, and her tears became new things.
They stood there, her collection, watching her. Anika turned on her side and pulled her pillow over her head. She thought about anything but her baby. Everything but.
She woke to a soft, gray hand on her forehead. Her newly departed grandmother smiled at her. Anika broke down again and cried. Her grandmother clucked silently, and whispered without words how much she loved her. She rubbed Anika’s back until the sobbing and hiccupping stopped. When she was something near calm again, but really closer to comatose, Anika looked at the white, worried expressions of her collection, at Mr. Tibbs thumping the baby’s miniature back rhythmically with two fingers, in what he desperately hoped was a soothing manner.
She sighed.
“Oh, all right,” she said, and tried to sit up.
It was harder than she would have expected, and to be honest, the desire wasn’t really there, but she loved these crushed, broken faces. For the most part. Sorry, Mr. Tibbs. And Anika thought, is this what their deaths are all about? The wails of a miserable child, passing through two realities? And her son. Her baby. Poor Jack. There was nothing she could do to help him. Living mothers weren’t meant to have dead children.
She shuffled carefully like an old woman, like Anika the Ancient, and when she passed her lover, she stopped for a second. All of the fight, if there ever had been any, left her body.
He opened his mouth to say something, and whether it was I’m Sorry or Serves You Right or something even more colorful, it didn’t matter. She was already shuffling out the door.
They trailed behind her, a dead collection of baby dolls, of bony baby ducks. Belky. D. The cat. Adrienne. Mr. Tibbs. Baby Jack, rubbing his eyes with tiny fists. Her lover, whose name she swore she’d never speak again. Her grandmother, who tidied up Mr. Tibb’s askew shirt and looked around pensively.
This wasn’t a collection; it was a procession.
She hadn’t bothered with shoes. Her bare feet padded on the concrete in a most unsatisfactory way. When she had been a girl, she had worn cotton dresses and ran barefoot through long grasses. She and Belky had braided flowers in their hair. Looked around the city for something alive, for something natural, but the steel and pavement had stamped everything living out. It was as gray as her life. As gray as her collection.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized to them. Her body was weak with the illness of despair, and her breathing hurt. Pincushions in her lungs. Pointy stars of city spore. She felt the responsibility for their undead happiness.
“I should have chosen somewhere else to live. Somewhere more beautiful. Then
you all wouldn’t be…here.”
They tried to touch her. Smooth her disheveled hair and love her silently. She didn’t notice the tears cleaning her face.
To the subway. She deposited her token. They trailed along to the constant soundtrack of Jack’s cries. It sounded strangely lovely. It sounded like an alternate form of life.
She waited at the platform, turning and smiling at her friends. Her family. There was a rumbling and the platform shook. She smiled sweetest at all at her son.
“I’ll hold you soon, darling,” she said, and stepped off backwards, falling onto the tracks. There were screams and screeching of metal and the most intense of fireworks going off behind her eyes. She tried to take a deep breath but, like when she tried to hold her son, there was nothing to take.
She strained to open her eyes, but she was missing one. Her eye and her jaw and most of her left side. But she still had one good arm, unsnapped, and that was all that she needed to hold her baby to her ruined breast. She smiled as best she could, and looked around for him.
He wasn’t there.
“Jack? Belky?”
No baby coos or baby cuddles or baby shrieks. Anika whirled around, but her collection wasn’t there at all. Instead, a man with shrapnel through his face peered at her cautiously.
“A new one. Just what we need.”
His voice hurt her head, hurt her heart. She looked around. No Baby Jack. No Adrienne. No cat or Grandmother or even Mr. Tibbs.
There was a young girl with bruising around her throat. A man missing both of his legs. He smiled.
“I know you. You used to come in every morning and get coffee from Lara. Haven’t seen you in a bit.” He eyed her up and down. “Guess I can see why.”
The living girl, Lara, looked tired and irritated in her McDonalds uniform. She flicked her eyes at Anika.
“Seriously?” She asked. “I’m the best you have?”
“Where’s my baby?” Anika asked her. At least she tried. Her jaw, it made things difficult, but she could figure it out, she could, if only she could find Jack, if only she could find her little one…
Lara turned away from her, served up another steaming paper cup of generic joe.
“She can’t hear you,” the legless man said. “You’ll get used to it.”
That was it. It for conversation. It for life. She never spoke again, never had reason to. She stood around, part of this Lara’s collection, in a semi-circle with everybody else while Lara served coffee after coffee after coffee.
WHISPER #1 ( A WARNING )
ERIK T. JOHNSON
This has not happened yet, it is a warning
Hebdomeros is born who was not born, still as fire when fire is gone,
And restless like fire burning the beautiful down
Dangles from scorched witch-woman’s womb, faceless gray boy
He is fishing lure for that beast called Future, yes
That wild Future, never more than rumor, yet always real as Always
Never having been hunted before, the Future bites the bait,
Mistaking it for a capital city, another Wednesday, dust-speck, glacier
Hebdomeros is both lure and fisherman, Future wriggling on his line
He is hour hand on minute hand when midnight is erect,
A pendulum too timeless to swing, ‘till the time is come
For Hebdomeros
This is a warning, if you heard this.
WATCH ME
MEGHAN ARCURI
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for my body to fall to the floor.
The sharp knife made the blood spill from my wrist.
I’d thought I’d been doing better. I really had. I guess the effects of mourning ebb and flow.
I saw Ava before I fell. Did she have a knife, too? Did she know about me and Ty?
He’d come to me that evening.
“Elle,” he said. ”I want you.”
We had the most amazing night of passion.
I think he liked the sexy, new outfit I’d been wearing. One of many I’d recently bought.
I was shocked he had come by, ready to seduce me. I thought he and Ava were a thing. Especially after what I’d watched them do through the window a few weeks ago.
Erotic and beautiful, I’d never seen anything like it, let alone experienced it.
All of their lovemaking sessions were amazing, but the last time had stirred something in me. Turning me on to the point where I took out my own scarf and mimicked her. Alone.
Their sexual behavior shone a light on my naiveté. I wanted to change. I needed to.
Everything about Ava showed me that.
Even before that night, I studied her. Learning what wine she drank, how her clothes fit, how she moved. I peeked at her through the curtains on my window.
I’m pretty sure she never saw me.
I know I shouldn’t have been watching Ava, but she didn’t close her curtains. Ever.
Her brazen confidence enchanted me. She was mature, lovely. And I’d be lying if I said she didn’t remind me of my mom. A younger version of my mom but with the same thick hair, high cheekbones, and big eyes.
Men reacted to Ava, too. One morning early on, I walked out of my building at the same moment she walked out of hers. She wore a simple, fitted dress and heels. Ty had been working construction across the street. As she and I reached the sidewalk, his eyes locked on to Ava’s body and followed it to the corner.
Men used to look at my mom like that, too. Her beauty matched Ava’s. Up to and including the day the cancer beat her.
I had a hard time after she died. We’d always been together, just the two of us. My dad never part of the picture. I became depressed. Almost suicidal. Our home had so many memories, I needed to move out.
The new place was in a group of old apartment buildings, built one right on top of another. My bedroom window almost touching-distance from my neighbor’s. I bought thick curtains and always kept the window locked.
Then I saw my neighbor: Ava. And her resemblance to my mother comforted me.
I’d heard through the grapevine she was different. Mysterious. Her eyes otherworldly. Even though I’d watched her often, we’d never talked or made direct eye contact, so I knew nothing of that.
I was just glad to be in a new place, starting a new life.
A new girl moves into the apartment building next to mine, our bedroom windows facing each other.
The grapevine tells me her name is Elle. Her mom died and now she’s on her own.
Like the others before her, she is curious, peering through the window.
I leave the curtain open. I like it that way. I don’t care who watches me.
I want them to watch me. Especially the young, pretty ones. So they can see what a real woman looks like. How she acts. Who she is. Maybe they can learn something. And once they meet my eyes, they’re mine.
This one always looks at me through the window. She thinks I don’t see her watching me from behind her curtains. But she’s more obvious than she realizes.
Elle watches me for weeks. She sees what food I like, what clothes I wear, who I sleep with.
A few weeks ago, she saw me with Ty. He likes a little kink.
“Ava,” he said. “Use the scarf.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and put his hands behind his back, letting me tie them together. Taking my time, I stood between his legs and undressed for him. Then I covered my body with a long, sheer scarf. A red one. I slid it over my skin, the movement of the fabric exciting me. Exciting him. I twisted and turned my hips, letting the scarf caress every part of me.
He pulled his hands from their restraints—I always kept the knot loose. He tugged the scarf. It fell to the floor. He ran his fingers up and down my sides. Pulled me on to his lap, my legs straddling his hips. He was ready. So was I.
This morning, I see Elle walking out of her building as I walk out of mine. Her skirt is tighter than usual, her blouse cut lower. She wears a red scarf around her neck.
Ty’s been at work across the street for a few hours. As Elle and I reach the bottom of our respective landings, Ty’s eyes find her.
Not me.
They follow her down the street.
When night arrives, I sit at my bedroom window and wait. Elle returns home a few minutes later. Ty is with her. They kiss, nip, pet. He makes her tie his hands with her scarf. Then she strips for him, slowly, seductively. He is ready for her and she is for him. But she’d tied his hands too tightly. They use a knife to cut him free. Then they slide, thrust, sigh.
After a while, Ty leaves. Elle lies on the bed, limp and sated. But I know she can’t help herself. She peers at me through her curtains. And when our eyes meet, hers haze over.
She is mine.
Her emotions, her will. Mine to manipulate. Mine to collect, keeping me youthful. Beautiful.
She sits at the window, her position mirroring mine.
I smile at her. She smiles at me.
I raise my left hand. She raises her right.
I pick up a sharp knife I’d retrieved from the kitchen.
I graze my wrist. A small drop of blood flows.
I’ve done this before.
She picks up the knife she’d left on her nightstand.
She slices her wrist. A lot of blood flows.
She has not done this before.
A few minutes pass. She slumps to the floor
WHISPER #2 ( A PROPHECY )
ERIK T. JOHNSON
What does not bleed breaks, this is a prophecy
Caulbearer, you do not bear the caul alone
Your victim is your servant, holding up this sack of rain
Caulbearer, murdered your own twin
One You alive and another You dead
How will you dispose of the corpse, Caulkiller?
How will you deny your crime?
What does not bleed breaks, this is a prophecy
Don’t you know there’s no worse place to hide than the womb
You will be born, your cry of greed mistaken for health