“You’re my best friends.”
“Yes.”
“Forever.”
“Yessss….”
And so on it went. And on it went.
****
The young gold-digger came to Tonnie, looking for adventure and escaping the law in Virginia for some infraction or other. His name was Joe; he was all of twenty-six, lanky, buck-toothed, smooth talking. He’d hopped an empty coal car heading west, laying low and eating old biscuits he’d stolen from a grocer days earlier and stuffed into his pocket. He didn’t realize the end of the line was at the top of the mountain, but by then he was thirsty and ready to stand on solid ground.
Joe knew his wishes had been answered when he saw Rosie’s three-story house on the top of the piney rise. Rich folks lived there, he could be certain. All he needed to do was turn on the charm.
He stood on the big house’s porch, bouncing in his shoes, shading his eyes with one hand and wrapping on the door with the other. Should an old man open the door, he’d claim to be a long-lost nephew. Should a child open the door, he’d claim to be a magician who could make a pony appear out of thin air should that child let him sneak into the house without telling anyone. Should a sweet, pretty girl open the door he would sweep her off her feet with his indelible charms and great head of hair.
But an old lady opened the door and it was all he could do to keep from shrieking. Her lipstick was purple, her eyes rimmed with blue powdery circles. Her hair was wild as black-dyed seaweed. Her neck was swollen, and her belly pressed at the thin fabric of her dressing gown like a bristly pig trying to pop through a bubble.
“Um,” he said.
The woman sniffed. “Who are you?”
He drew himself up to the challenge. “My name is Joe. I just stopped by to ask where the nearest lodging facility might be – a motor lodge or tourist home - but you took my breath away for a moment.”
“What do you mean?”
“Surely you know what I mean,” he said, stretching his lips into the widest possible grin. “Just take a look in a mirror and you’ll see. A portrait of beauty! A vision of supreme loveliness!”
The old woman made to stand up a straighter. She blushed beneath the dots of red rouge she’d planted on her cheeks. “My goodness. Well, of course.”
“May I gaze at you just a moment longer, before you tell me where I might go to find a comfortable bed?”
She let him, shifting from one foot to the other, striking poses she’d seen in glamour magazines. Then she said, “I have room.”
She welcomed him inside and showed him her grandfather’s old chamber. It smelled of old skin and mold but Joe said nothing. He was a shoe-in. He could flatter the cash out of her. How much, he couldn’t imagine, but he would make it well worth his while.
The old woman went off to make supper. The house filled with the unfortunate and nose-searing scents of burnt sausage and soured, melted cheese. While she busied herself in the kitchen, Joe busied himself around the rest of the house, pocketing silver trinkets and gold bracelets and anything else small enough to conceal and looked valuable enough to sell. He’d give himself one night. Tomorrow, he’d catch the eastbound coal train the hell out of there. The mirrors were a distraction, throwing his face back at him as he sneaked around. He even thought he heard soft, scratchy voices whisper.
“Who’s that?”
“What’s he doing here?”
“I think he’s up to sssomething.”
He dismissed it, certain it was only mice in the walls.
Dinner was foul, but he choked it down, sitting across from the old lady in her dinner gown (a blue satin, floor-length outfit with orange flowers), his mouth twitching in misery, movements he hoped came across as a grin.
Then she tossed her fork aside and said, “Play with me!”
He thought, Oh, please, no. You’re old enough to be my grandma…
“Hop scotch!” she said, pushing back from the table. The chair squealed on the floor. “No, sit. Hide and peek. Play hide and peek with me!”
Joe swallowed the butter-thickened glob of scorched meat that had sat on his tongue for the previous two minutes. “I guess so, sure.” Wear her out, put her to bed, find a few more goodies, hit the road. “So, how do you play?”
****
Our dear old Rosie was giddy with excitement. Someone to play with after all these years. She took Joe into the front hall, then glanced at one of the mirrors and smiled at herself.
Her reflection wasn’t smiling back.
She flinched. Surely it was just her imagination. Or bad lighting. She never did wash the bulbs.
“Now you go hide,” she told Joe. “I’ll come find you.”
“That’s called hide and seek.”
Rosie stomped her foot. The house shook. “It’s hide and PEEK! Get it right!”
“Okay, whoa,” said Joe. “Your house, your game.”
Rosie covered eyes with her greasy hands and counted to ten. She heard Joe going up the stairs. He would be an easy find. At ten, she grabbed the banister and hauled herself up. The mirrors along the stairs watched her as she passed, and she turned to see her lovely self.
The eyes in the reflected faces were narrowed, the fat lips pressed tightly. Rosie paused mid-stairs. Her mouth went dry. Maybe she had a brain tumor and was seeing things. That’s what had killed her granddaddy. Brain disease. Or maybe a bad heart. Something like that.
“Rosssie…” one of the images snarled. “You don’t need him.”
Another hissed, “You need usss….”
Rosie put her hands over her ears and continued up the steps. At the top, she paused to catch her breath, leaning over as far as she could, and wondering what pair of shoes she had put on that morning.
He was easily found, hiding in the linen closet where piles of filthy laundry nearly reached the ceiling, trying to worm his way into the tower of sheets and molding towels.
“Ha!” squealed Rosie. “There you are! Let’s play again.”
Joe clambered out of the sheets and shook himself off. “Okay, your turn to hide.”
Rosie stomped her foot again. “No, you hide again.”
“But that’s not how you play,” said Joe.
“It’s how I play!”
“That’s not much fun. People take turns and…”
But Rosie would have none of it (this is Rosie we’re talking about) and shoved Joe so hard he stumbled back. His heel caught on the fraying runner and he tumbled – bump-bump-bump-crash – down the stairs, landing like a sack of potatoes in the front hall.
“Oh, poo, you’re no fun,” said Rosie. Down the stairs she clomped, ignoring the furious expressions in the mirrors, and discovered young Joe was dead. With much grunting and fussing, she hauled the corpse out to the back yard and threw handfuls of leaves over top of him.
Back inside, she rummaged through the kitchen drawers until she found the black clothes she had used to cover the mirrors when Bondell died. She dutifully draped each of the mirrors, avoiding the faces that looked back at her. Faces that registered fury.
Betrayal.
And the week began.
The long week with no friends to talk to.
She watched the television but all those people ignored her. She went down to the store, where old men talked about some dude who had come to Tonnie on the train but vanished. She wandered into her backyard and stirred up the leaves to see how Joe was faring. Not good – a fox had eaten off his face and fingers.
And as she wandered through her house, she could hear her shrouded friends whispering, “Rosie betrayed uss.”
“Rose liked him better than usss.”
“She let him in our house. Our houssssse….”
She lay awake at night on her bed, staring at the cobwebs on the ceiling. She ate more sticks of butter than usual, feeling her friends glaring at her from behind the black drapes.
Three days, four, then five. Rosie was lonely beyond measure. She went out to the backyar
d, hoping maybe Joe really wasn’t dead but was playing ’possum. He wasn’t. His hands and feet were long chewed away, and he smelled right foul.
Back in the house again. The friends behind the cloth talked and talked. Rosie longed to see them, but knew better.
Day six. The friends went silent. This was worse to Rosie than them whispering about her. As she wandered around the house it was all she could do to keep from whipping a cloth off to see that they were still there.
Day seven. Rosie sat in the kitchen, heavy head in chubby hands, bemoaning her loneliness. She had to wait until midnight to remove the cloths. But what if they were gone?
What if they’d left her?
She could wait to find out. She had to.
But then the hidden reflection in the mirror by the door said, “Psst.”
Rosie looked up, frowning.
“Pssst.”
Rosie rubbed her mouth. “W-what?”
“Shh. Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“I miss you. The others, they are mad, but I miss you, Rosie.”
Rosie’s heart leapt.
“If you come over here, we can talk.”
“But…” Rosie frowned. “It’s dangerous.”
“You misjudged the time. The week was up twenty minutes ago.”
“It was?”
“Mmm-hmmm. C’mon, let’s have a peek. Please? Give the others ’til tomorrow. They’ll come around.”
Up she struggled, heart pounding. She went to the mirror and pulled off the cloth. She saw her reflection, smiling back at her. But then the smile went odd.
Edgy.
Cold.
It said, “Hi, Rosie.”
Rosie swallowed hard. “Hi.”
“Guess what?”
“What?”
“I lied about the time. You’re three hours early.”
“What?”
“You turned against us.”
“No, I…”
“So bye, Rosie!”
With that, old Rosie dropped down dead. The house shook.
And the reflections, both the covered and the uncovered, laughed and laughed and laughed, and talked late into the night about what a vain, creepy, mean old gal Rosie turned out to be.
****
Remembrance by Elizabeth Massie
I sold my very first story ever to Dave Silva. Okay, let me back track a little. I’d gone to a writers’ conference in Massachusetts in the summer of 1983 because Stephen King was going to be one of the speakers. Saying hello to King was great, but the best part of the conference was meeting Brian Hodge, who had just sold a story to Dave’s The Horror Show. Brian told me I needed to write shorter stories (Dave was taking tales up to 3,500 words and my shortest story to date was somewhere around 8,000 words) if I wanted to be considered for the magazine. As soon as I got home, I penned a tale that was 750-word story called “Whittler.” Holding my breath and slapping stamps on the manila envelope (yes, this was long before electronic submissions existed), I sent it off to Dave. Two weeks later, on my birthday, I received a letter. Dave was accepting my story. I would receive $2.00 for it. At ¼ cents a word, that was 22 ½ cents more than I should have expected. And yes, I was elated! I was now a professional writer! So I wrote and sent in a second story, “Dust Cover,” which was accepted fairly quickly. On a roll, I sent a third story in. Dave sent it back. He was kind, but perfectly clear. He didn’t like it, and explained why. At all. Wait, I thought. Really? I’m rejected?? Yeah, I was rejected. And rightly so. The story was a bust. Several lessons well learned from Dave Better-Weird-Than-Plastic Silva: 1. Not every story is a gem, 2. Not every story suits every editor, 3. If you’re a writer you can learn from each acceptance and rejection, and 4. If you can’t learn from your acceptances and rejections equally, if you get all pissy about rejections and pompous about sales, your life as a writer is going to be pretty miserable. So THANK YOU Dave, for teaching me simple lessons early on. Miss you! Love you!
Elizabeth Massie
ETERNAL, EVER SINCE WEDNESDAY
Brian Hodge
It all sounded like fun at first, and at first, it really was.
Mom and Dad had let him stay up past his bedtime in anticipation of the late news, because, face it, one look out the window was enough to tell anyone with half a brain that it wasn’t going to stop snowing any time soon. Maybe all night. The weatherman only confirmed it, while below him, names of more schools than Jakob ever realized existed slid across the bottom of the TV screen.
He only cared about one.
After he saw it, and whooped with raw, unfettered joy over tomorrow’s snow day, and was told by both parents to shush, that he’d wake his sister, the weatherman sweetened the deal with the news that what they were really in for was a two-day blizzard.
His dad reacted with a defeated groan, and his mom with an indifferent shrug that implied it could be worse, things could always be worse. She could usually work from home in a pinch, as long as the power didn’t go out. She turned to Jakob with a grin.
“Chocolate-chip pancakes sound about right for in the morning?”
“That’s a weekend breakfast,” he said.
“It sounds to me like the weekend’s started early.”
Four days. Assuming Friday held. Four days. It was practically an entire vacation, like a surprise gift someone gives you for no particular reason, only because they saw it and thought you might like it. Time stretched ahead of him like a tunnel with no end, and a part of him instantly resisted the idea of going to bed, because if he could find a way not to sleep this entire time, it would be like squeezing an extra day out of it.
They sent him anyway, Dad telling him not to oversleep, that he’d still need Jakob to help shovel in the morning so that he could get his car out of the garage and down the driveway. That was always the way of it here – a little jubilation, then Dad was there to bring it down a notch or two.
When he got upstairs and was trudging along the second floor hallway toward his room, he saw Fiona’s door open a crack, and the tip of her nose. He stopped, and she opened the door wider.
“I heard you yell,” she said, her voice full of hope. “It was a good yell.”
“No school tomorrow. For either of us.”
She beamed at him like he was the one who had made it so. The giver of the gift.
“Probably no school Friday, either.”
Her eyes popped wide and she sucked in a gasp of disbelief. He was the best brother in the world. She retreated into her room and launched herself back-first onto her bed, kicking her legs in the air, her insane mop of black curls flying. And he got the excitement, he really did, because he felt it himself… but Fiona was six. A first-grader. What kind of school day did she have to escape, anyway? Practicing a few letters of the alphabet on paper whose lines were so far apart you could lay a finger between them? That was no school day. That was camp.
Middle school, now that was a whole different world.
After he peed and brushed his teeth and shut himself in his room, Jakob left the light off as he stood at his window and gave thanks to the night – the white ground and the pale sky, and the warm lights still shining in the homes of the neighbors close enough to see, and best of all, the thick churning flurry showing in the orb glowing around the lawn light out front.
He unlatched his window and pushed it up, then fiddled with the screen until he could slide that up too. The cold slapped him in the face, along with a swirl of suicidal flakes that wanted to breach the security of the house.
Jakob dragged his fingers along the windowsill, scooping a wad of snow that he left squishy enough not to hurt when he pressed it to his left eye. By the time he’d awakened this morning, it had opened up enough that he could see out of it again. While he didn’t mind the bruise – in fact, the longer the bruise stuck around, the better – the skin remained swollen and pulpy and sore, and he had no use for any of that, especially now that they were on snow days and nobody he stil
l wanted to see it was likely to.
He went to bed with one warm hand and the other one cold, pressing both of them together. For a time they seemed to even each other out, like he was something not quite alive but certainly not dead, kind of the way he figured people eventually got once they grew old enough, his parents’ age for sure.
Within a few more minutes he brought himself back to life again, all the way.
Maybe it only took paying attention to keep it from happening in the first place. Maybe the ones stuck that way just weren’t trying hard enough to live.
****
Teachers didn’t assign themes like that anymore, not in middle school, but if they’d had him write one on the best snow day he could imagine, he doubted he could’ve improved upon the way he actually spent Thursday. It was that good.
It still started with shoveling, of course, heaving snow alongside Dad so the car could leave the garage. But once it was done, and Jakob saw his father off, Dad’s Audi slaloming down to the roads that would take him to the studio for the day, everything only got better.
There was the weekend breakfast on a Thursday morning, and then there were hours of outside time. He spotted a line of tracks, like fingerholes in a pie crust, that must have been made by a hare bounding along one tiring leap at a time. He followed them while he could, but by the time he got down near the Crenshaws’ property at the bottom of the hill, the tracks were already filling in and nearly erased.
He built a snow fort and stocked it with an arsenal of snowballs, and although Fiona joined him, she wasn’t much of an opponent, especially wrapped up so densely she looked like a ball of blue and red yarn.
“I know,” she said. “Let’s build a Russell Burns.”
It was a good idea, even if there wasn’t a lot you could do to make a snowman look like anyone in particular. Jakob worked the face, packing on extra snow to mimic Russell Burns’ heavy cheeks, and the way his brow overhung his scowling eyes. Close enough. They gave him branches for arms and, after they studded his head with twigs for his spiky hair, he looked so ridiculous that Fiona collapsed to the snow in laughter so long and incapacitating that he thought he’d never get her on her feet again.
Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva Page 20