“Oh,” she said, looking quickly up at her sister, who was grinning triumphantly. “Oh, Judith. Oh my God. What is it?”
“Don’t you know?” Judith asked her. “Do I have to tell you everything?”
Hannah picks her way over the deadfall just before the clearing, the place where the path through the woods disappears beneath a jumble of fallen, rotting logs. There was a house back here, her father said, a long, long time ago. Nothing left but a big pile of rocks where the chimney once stood, and also the well covered over with sheets of rusted corrugated tin. There was a fire, her father said, and everyone in the house died.
On the other side of the deadfall, Hannah takes a deep breath and steps out into the daylight, leaving the tree shadows behind, forfeiting her last chance not to see.
“Isn’t it cool,” Judith said. “Isn’t it the coolest thing you ever seen?”
Someone’s pushed aside the sheets of tin, and the well is so dark that even the sun won’t go there. And then Hannah sees the wide ring of mushrooms, the perfect circle of toadstools and red caps and spongy brown morels growing round the well. The heat shimmers off the tin, dancing mirage shimmer as though the air here is turning to water, and the music is very loud now.
“I found it,” Judith whispered, screwing the top back onto the jar as tightly as she could. “I found it, and I’m going to keep it. And you’ll keep your mouth shut about it, or I’ll never, ever show you anything else again.”
Hannah looks up from the mushrooms, from the open well, and there are a thousand eyes watching her from the edges of the clearing. Eyes like indigo berries and rubies and drops of honey, like gold and silver coins, eyes like fire and ice, eyes like seething dabs of midnight. Eyes filled with hunger beyond imagining, neither good nor evil, neither real nor impossible.
Something the size of a bear, squatting in the shade of a poplar tree, raises its shaggy charcoal head and smiles.
“That’s another pretty one,” it growls.
And Hannah turns and runs.
10
“But you know, in your soul, what you must have really seen that day,” Dr. Valloton says and taps the eraser end of her pencil lightly against her front teeth. There’s something almost obscenely earnest in her expression, Hannah thinks, in the steady tap, tap, tap of the pencil against her perfectly spaced, perfectly white incisors. “You saw your sister fall into the well, or you realized that she just had. You may have heard her calling out for help.”
“Maybe I pushed her in,” Hannah whispers.
“Is that what you think happened?”
“No,” Hannah says and rubs at her temples, trying to massage away the first dim throb of an approaching headache. “But, most of the time, I’d rather believe that’s what happened.”
“Because you think it would be easier than what you remember.”
“Isn’t it? Isn’t it easier to believe she pissed me off that day, and so I shoved her in? That I made up these crazy stories so I’d never have to feel guilty for what I’d done? Maybe that’s what the nightmares are, my conscience trying to fucking force me to come clean.”
“And what are the stones, then?”
“Maybe I put them all there myself. Maybe I scratched those words on them myself and hid them there for me to find, because I knew that would make it easier for me to believe. If there was something that real, that tangible, something solid to remind me of the story, that the story is supposed to be the truth.”
A long moment that’s almost silence, just the clock on the desk ticking and the pencil tapping against the psychologist’s teeth. Hannah rubs harder at her temples, the real pain almost within sight now, waiting for her just a little ways past this moment or the next, vast and absolute, deep purple shot through with veins of red and black. Finally, Dr. Valloton lays her pencil down and takes a deep breath.
“Is this a confession, Hannah?” she asks, and the obscene earnestness is dissolving into something that may be eager anticipation, or simple clinical curiosity, or only dread. “Did you kill your sister?”
And Hannah shakes her head and shuts her eyes tight.
“Judith fell into the well,” she says calmly. “She moved the tin, and got too close to the edge. The sheriff showed my parents where a little bit of the ground had collapsed under her weight. She fell into the well, and she drowned.”
“Who are you trying so hard to convince? Me or yourself?”
“Do you really think it matters?” Hannah replies, matching a question with a question, tit for tat.
“Yes,” Dr. Valloton says. “Yes, I do. You need to know the truth.”
“Which one?” Hannah asks, smiling against the pain swelling behind her eyes, and this time the psychologist doesn’t bother answering, lets her sit silently with her eyes shut until the clock decides her hour’s up.
11
Peter Mulligan picks up a black pawn and moves it ahead two squares; Hannah removes it from the board with a white knight. He isn’t even trying today, and that always annoys her. Peter pretends to be surprised that’s he’s lost another piece, then pretends to frown and think about his next move while he talks.
“In Russian,” he says, “chernobyl is the word for wormwood. Did Kellerman give you a hard time?”
“No,” Hannah says. “No, he didn’t. In fact, he said he’d actually rather do the shoot in the afternoon. So everything’s jake, I guess.”
“Small miracles,” Peter sighs, picking up a rook and setting it back down again. “So you’re doing the anthropologist’s party?”
“Yeah,” she replies. “I’m doing the anthropologist’s party.”
“Monsieur Ordinaire. You think he was born with that name?”
“I think I couldn’t give a damn, as long as his check doesn’t bounce. A thousand dollars to play dress-up for a few hours. I’d be a fool not to do the damned party.”
Peter picks the rook up again and dangles it in the air above the board, teasing her. “Oh, his book,” he says. “I remembered the title the other day. But then I forgot it all over again. Anyway, it was something on shamanism and shapeshifters, werewolves and masks, that sort of thing. It sold a lot of copies in ’68, then vanished from the face of the Earth. You could probably find out something about it online.” Peter sets the rook down and starts to take his hand away.
“Don’t,” she says. “That’ll be checkmate.”
“You could at least let me lose on my own, dear,” he scowls, pretending to be insulted.
“Yeah, well, I’m not ready to go home yet,” Hannah replies, and Peter Mulligan goes back to dithering over the chessboard and talking about Monsieur Ordinaire’s forgotten book. In a little while, she gets up to refill both their coffee cups, and there’s a single black-and-grey pigeon perched on the kitchen windowsill, staring in at her with its beady piss-yellow eyes. It almost reminds her of something she doesn’t want to be reminded of, and so she raps on the glass with her knuckles and frightens it away.
12
The old woman named Jackie never comes for her. There’s a young boy, instead, fourteen or fifteen, sixteen at the most, his nails polished poppy red to match his rouged lips, and he’s dressed in peacock feathers and silk. He opens the door and stands there, very still, watching her, waiting wordlessly. Something like awe on his smooth face, and for the first time Hannah doesn’t just feel nude, she feels naked.
“Are they ready for me now?” she asks him, trying to sound no more than half as nervous as she is, and then turns her head to steal a last glance at the green fairy in the tall mahogany mirror. But the mirror is empty. There’s no one there at all, neither her nor the green woman, nothing but the dusty backroom full of antiques, the pretty hard-candy lamps, the peeling cranberry wallpaper.
“My Lady,” the boy says in a voice like broken crystal shards, and then he curtsie
s. “The Court is waiting to receive you, at your ready.” He steps to one side, to let her pass, and the music from the party grows suddenly very loud, changing tempo, the rhythm assuming a furious speed as a thousand notes and drumbeats tumble and boom and chase one another’s tails.
“The mirror,” Hannah whispers, pointing at it, at the place where her reflection should be, and when she turns back to the boy there’s a young girl standing there, instead, dressed in his feathers and makeup. She could be his twin.
“It’s a small thing, My Lady,” she says with the boy’s sparkling, shattered tongue.
“What’s happening?”
“The Court is assembled,” the girl child says. “They are all waiting. Don’t be afraid, My Lady. I will show you the way.”
The path, the path through the woods to the well. The path down to the well…
“Do you have a name?” Hannah asks, surprised at the calm in her voice; all the embarrassment and unease at standing naked before this child, and the one before, the boy twin, the fear at what she didn’t see gazing back at her in the looking glass, all of that gone now.
“My name? I’m not such a fool as that, My Lady.”
“No, of course not,” Hannah replies. “I’m sorry.”
“I will show you the way,” the child says again. “Never harm, nor spell, nor charm, come our Lady nigh.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Hannah replies. “I was beginning to think that I was lost. But I’m not lost, am I?”
“No, My Lady. You are here.”
Hannah smiles back, and then she leaves the dusty backroom and the mahogany mirror, following the child down a short hallway; the music has filled in all the vacant corners of her skull, the music and the heavy living-dying smells of wildflowers and fallen leaves, rotting stumps and fresh-turned earth. A riotous hothouse cacophony of odors—spring to fall, summer to winter—and she’s never tasted air so violently sweet.
…the path down the well, and the still black water at the bottom.
Hannah, can you hear me? Hannah?
It’s so cold down here. I can’t see…
At the end of the hall, just past the stairs leading back down to St. Mark’s, there’s a green door, and the girl opens it. Green gets you out.
And all the things in the wide, wide room—the unlikely room that stretches so far away in every direction that it could never be contained in any building, not in a thousand buildings—the scampering, hopping, dancing, spinning, flying, skulking things, each and every one of them stops and stares at her. And Hannah knows that she ought to be frightened of them, that she should turn and run from this place. But it’s really nothing she hasn’t seen before, a long time ago, and she steps past the child (who is a boy again) as the wings on her back begin to thrum like the frantic, iridescent wings of bumblebees and hummingbirds, red wasps and hungry dragonflies. Her mouth tastes of anise and wormwood, sugar and hyssop and melissa. Sticky verdant light spills from her skin and pools in the grass and moss at her bare feet.
Sink or swim, and so easy to imagine the icy black well water closing thickly over her sister’s face, filling her mouth, slipping up her nostrils, flooding her belly, as clawed hands dragged her down.
And down.
And down.
And sometimes, Dr. Valloton says, sometimes we spend our entire lives just trying to answer one simple question.
The music is a hurricane, swallowing her.
My Lady. Lady of the Bottle. Artemisia absinthium, Chernobyl, apsinthion, Lady of Waking Dreaming, Green Lady of Elation and Melancholy.
I am ruin and sorrow.
My robe is the color of despair.
They bow, all of them, and Hannah finally sees the thing waiting for her on its prickling throne of woven branches and birds’ nests, the hulking antlered thing with blazing eyes, that wolf-jawed hart, the man and the stag, and she bows, in her turn.
Sumanth Prabhaker (1983– ) is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He founded Madras Press, which publishes small books by such writers as Donald Barthelme, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, and Ben Marcus, with all proceeds going to a charity of the writer’s choice. He has worked as an editor with the literary journal Ecotone and is currently an editor at Orion magazine. Madras Press released his novella A Mere Pittance in 2009, and his other writing has appeared in Best American Fantasy, Post Road, Mid-American Review, Slant Magazine, Weird Fiction Review, and elsewhere. “A Hard Truth About Waste Management” was originally published online by Identity Theory in 2006.
A HARD TRUTH ABOUT WASTE MANAGEMENT
Sumanth Prabhaker
THE FAMILY LIKED SO MUCH to flush their trash down the toilet that they sold their TV and used the money to buy three chairs to arrange in their upstairs restroom. This was a time when trash flushing was not an uncommon practice, but, even so, the extent of the family’s enjoyment was rare. Where most families who resorted to trash flushing were ashamed of their behavior, this family looked forward to the sight of their trash bins filling up. They would recline in their chairs and watch their trash get sucked down into the hole at the well of the toilet, where a black gossamer ring had grown, and they would cheer and punch their fists together.
None of the chairs in the restroom matched in size or color. The father’s chair was upholstered with a brown polyester finish and gave out an electrical cord through a slot in the back. When he plugged the cord into the restroom wall, the chair would shiver beneath his shoulders and around his knees. The mother’s chair was more like a chair and a half, attached to a sidecar where she stored her portable whiteboard. She used the whiteboard to communicate with others, having lost the ability to speak during labor. The son’s chair was made of gingerbread. Many of the fondant seams were by now covered in hairs and little sticky papers, but the son did not mind this. Every day after school he sat in his gingerbread chair and picked off little bits to eat while watching loads of trash sink down the toilet, occasionally tamping the telescoping plunger to sort out the drain without getting up.
At first the family had tried simply to repurpose their waste. They buried food scraps in the earth and plugged the soil with upturned bottles of water. They stirred into their stews many panades of shredded newspaper. They deep-fried old Post-it notes and covered them with a spreadable cheese, brie or ricotta or port wine. When the son performed well at school, they dipped his homeworks in simple syrup and made of them a kind of proud and shameful baklava.
The father put this diet to a stop when he untangled a voided check from his quiche.
“I’m putting this diet to a stop,” he said.
“Let’s sleep on it,” the son said.
I know you toiled over that quiche, the mother wrote. But you can’t un-paper a paper.
“We’ll do what we have to do, but there will be no more eating of trash in this home,” the father said.
The family began trash flushing that evening. They gathered in the restroom and shook the uneaten quiche off of their plates into the toilet. The son pressed the flusher and watched the scraps spin around in a circle and slowly lower.
Look at it spin, the mother wrote.
Trash flushing soon became a habit for the family. When they no longer needed something, it went into the toilet and was immediately taken away. They cheered at the growth of this habit, at the sight of trash piled so high that they had to steer it with brooms to keep it from upsetting. They cheered when the mother got sick from the smell and leaned forward and vomited into the toilet bowl; she cheered this as well, applauding along with her son and husband. And they cheered when the toilet shook and made a wet guttural sound after inhaling the afternoon’s trash, and a small gray animal emerged from the depths of the plumbing.
The animal shivered in the cold bathroom air, urged on by the family’s cheers. It shook its leathered skin and curled around th
e graham cracker leg of the son’s chair. It was a cat, they believed. They named him Bleachy. “You’re better than anything we ever put into the toilet,” the son told Bleachy, scratching the leathery surface of his neck.
The family loved especially to bring Bleachy on walks around their neighborhood at night. Trash flushing had grown commoner by then, but few other families boasted the practice to such an extent, and there were undeniable looks whenever Bleachy coughed up a ball of their old trash. This was something he did very often, so the family trained him to cough into the toilet, in the privacy of their restroom, and for a while things were very fine.
But Bleachy soon grew to be emotionally needy in ways the family couldn’t satisfy. He ate all their food and cried all night. He constantly was found asleep in the father’s chair, and he never remembered to turn the massage function off when he left. He even borrowed the son’s sweaters without asking, which stretched them in difficult shapes as he grew larger and longer.
It was a relief, then, when the son returned home from school one afternoon without being immediately greeted by Bleachy’s typical plea for long hugs. Neither did any of his shoes appear to have been chewed while he was away. Upstairs in the restroom, his mother was seated in her chair. Her face was flushed.
I’ve done a terrible thing, she wrote. I flushed Bleachy back down.
“Well, he was very codependent,” the son said. “I guess maybe he was too big for a cat.”
It was so strange, the mother wrote. He said he missed his home. I flushed him back down and now the toilet’s broken.
The flusher flipped carelessly in all directions with no friction at all. The telescoping plunger didn’t help, nor did the coal-burning pipe snake, which the family reserved for emergencies. “Let’s table this discussion,” the son said.
Something toxic in the bathroom, the mother wrote when the father came home from work that night.
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