The House of Dust

by Noah Broyles

  And the grave was complete.

  Missy’s eyes traveled across the gathering.

  The people had resumed their places by their lanterns and stood still.

  Then the murky-haired woman emerged from the softly glowing congregation. She paused by the digging and glanced back. Her gaze lingered on Missy as she nodded, eyelids rising and falling with the movement of her head. Then she passed over that invisible line beyond the grave, evaporating into the darkness.

  Quiet rained down.

  The hammering inside Missy’s head intensified to the level of her heartbeat. The air was gelatinizing each second with the sucrose smell. It wasn’t just coming from the dress anymore; it was radiating from that darkness. Daffodils were sprouting out there. Daffodils pushing up through the earth. Splitting open and oozing perfume. Binding her like sticky spider silk in the knowledge that she would never be free of what she was.

  Ezra clutched her. He would not let go.

  A smudge appeared in the darkness. The woman emerged from the veil. She was not alone. In her arms she clutched a small form. A body bound in white cloth strips that held the arms against its sides.

  At the grave, she lay the body down and clambered into the hole. Hands protruded from the lip of the hole and drew the body in. The form did not stir as she crouched down, bearing it out of view. A moment later, she came up, arms empty. She climbed out and faced them. Another slow-blink nod. Then she withdrew.

  Ezra’s fingers tightened around Missy’s shoulder. He propelled her toward the grave, speaking very low in her ear. “Missy, you will now complete the greatest act of love you can perform. It’s an easy thing for a person to sacrifice himself for his friends, but to see yourself in another’s face and still allow them to be offered, there is no higher devotion and no more binding tie. This act will prove your devotion to Adamah. It will solidify your bond as medium.”

  They were at the edge. At the bottom of the grave, in the dregs of flickering light, the body lay, small and still. Only the face was uncovered. It was discolored and bulging from the tightness of the cloth. But she knew it.

  “Roy,” she whimpered. “Oh God, please.”

  “With his breath,” Ezra whispered, “you give breath.”

  He let go of her. Like amber, the sweet air held her in place above the brink. She stared down at that mashed little face. The closed eyes. Was he even still alive?

  There was a soft clink, someone picking up a shovel. The gentle crunch of dirt being scooped.

  Ezra was beside her again. She sagged against him. He put the shovel in her hands. It was laden at the end with a few ounces of earth. “It’s a formality,” he whispered. “A pure formality.”

  The shovel wobbled in her hands. The little pile of crumbles shifted on the edge of the blade. If even a few went in, would that be enough? She looked down again, at the boy wrapped up like a larva in the pit. He was disgusting. He had killed the cat. He hated her. He tried to leave her. He tried to stone her.

  The shovel tilted.

  The smell of daffodils stuffed up her nose. The pounding coming out of her skull like a brick. And that man close behind her, arms folded, breathing softly. Forcing her. Turning her into his tool, his thing. Promising her a place. Like Warren Dawson at HUG, promising her a family. Like the Boss at the Club, promising her security. Like Walt, promising her a home.

  Missy’s feet slipped on the brink. The shovel jolted in her hands. Scrambling backward, she spun. Dirt showered across the ground as the blade arched upward and flashed in the lantern light. Then—thwack!

  Her arms jarred in their sockets as metal crunched through bone.

  Ezra toppled. He sprawled onto his back. The right side of his head blossomed red.

  Poor man. She moved forward swiftly even as shock reverberated up and down her body. He couldn’t move, but his eyes rolled around as she stood over him. The orbs screamed louder than his mouth ever could as she drove the shovel point into his face. His skull broke apart with a sound like an eggshell splitting.

  The pounding in her head was lost amid the slushy chopping around the shovel blade. The flower scent drowned amid a copper-

  smelling mist. When she dropped the shovel, her dress wasn’t white anymore.

  Missy drank in the air. She didn’t look at the people. She turned and went back to the hole and slid clumsily inside. Dropping to her knees, she pulled Roy upright and cradled his head in her lap. She tried to loosen the cloths. It was tough, as her hands were shaking.

  Still, she eventually got the fabric around his head and neck unbound. She massaged his throat and peeled his eyelids back. They stayed open. Slowly, they blinked. They focused on her and she smiled. Then they turned upward and she tilted her head to follow them.

  The people had gathered around the grave. Their toes sent little cascades of earth down the walls. Their gazes were avalanches. She kept her head up and did not blink against the torrent. Then those in sight shifted. Mr. Irons emerged from their ranks. His hands were bloody, his face bloodless. He stood at the foot of the grave for a minute, staring down and rubbing his hands together, as if the blood would cleanse itself.

  Quite abruptly, he squatted down and held out his hands. “Come out, Queen of Hearts.”

  She accepted the help and came out of the hole. The crowd moved back.

  Rotating, holding Roy close, she looked at them. “Put him in.” Her whisper carried in the quiet. They knew what she meant.

  Two men grabbed Ezra and dragged him toward the hole. The remnants of his lips twitched. Still breathing. Her own breath lightened at that. Her heart, too. She held Roy close and watched the people begin to move once more in their twisting procession. Shovels crunched. Voices murmured, then melded into a chant as they refilled the grave. “Queen! Of! Hearts!”

  A feeling like sinking carried up Missy’s body, like water stroking away sand beneath her feet. Like standing in the shallows of a flat sea. An eternal feeling, filling her up. Smoothing away the tremors and tiredness. Calming. Vast. So vast it pushed at her seams, stretched her heart, throbbed through her veins. She looked at her hand resting on Roy’s head and saw the skin flushed and full. Rippling, almost. It made her smile to remember it pinched and dry. That had been the call. This was the answer.

  “Queen! Of! Hearts!”

  Smiling still, she looked up and watched the burial and noticed the few who passed by without joining in the chant.

  37

  “You were that little boy?” I asked Hettinga.

  “I was Roy. The Queen of Hearts raised me. And I raised her son, Sorrel. I wish I could have helped him escape that place.”

  —“The House of Dust”

  Southern Gothic

  The clock on the dashboard said 3:01.

  Brad killed the engine and dug an old flashlight from the trunk. Overhead, trees entangled the power lines, and thick leaves shredded the light from the streetlamps before it could reach the pavement. It was so late that even the bugs had gone to bed.

  In the dimness, Hettinga was a black spidery figure unfolding from the door of his vehicle. When he slammed the door, Brad winced. The other houses, with their shuttered windows, seemed full of sleepers he did not wish to wake.

  “This is where she grew up, isn’t it?”

  “Until she was ten,” Hettinga replied. “Let’s see if the door’s unlocked.”

  Brown glass bottles and waxy fast-food wrappers clogged up the weedy lawn. Golden oak pollen carpeted the driveway. It hazed the windows of a green late-nineties model Toyota Camry parked up near the house. The vehicle sported expired Tennessee tags. Brad glanced between it and the house.

  “The place isn’t occupied,” Hettinga assured him. “I was here just recently.”

  The house itself was a mildewed greenish-white. The gutters drooped from the low roofline. Hettinga opened the metal guard door a
nd tried the handle of the warped wooden door. Brad’s phone had recharged in the car, and he snapped a picture as the door thunked open.

  “Ooh. They should get that carpet out.” He coughed and stood aside to allow Brad first entrance.

  The wet smell of a moldy washcloth slapped his face. Powering the flashlight, Brad panned it across a jumbled living room. A sagging couch along with pizza boxes, takeout bags, cups, clothes, blankets, plastic containers, and toys littered the spongy carpet. As he stepped deeper into the room, something split beneath his shoe. Flashing the light down, he scooted his foot off of a broken DVD.

  “It’s a mess,” Hettinga breathed. “You might find something interesting in the bedroom on the left.”

  Brad stepped into a tiny hall and nudged open the door to the left, raising the light. A putrid mattress lay beneath a window masked by broken blinds. A pair of dimples in the wall beside the window. “Bullet holes,” Brad said. They were like moon craters under the cold flashlight. “I wonder how many people have lived here since?”

  “Many. But I think we can assume the environment was not so different when Missy Holiday grew up here.”

  Brad took a picture, then peered around the jumbled room.

  Hettinga lingered in the doorway. “What will you do with all this?”

  “Write it up. Publish it. With a healthy acknowledgment of your help.”

  A wheezing chuckle. “You’re sure folks still read?”

  Brad twisted out a smile.

  “Where are you from?” Hettinga asked.

  “Originally from Rhode Island.”

  “What brought you down here?”

  Stepping past him, Brad crossed into the other bedroom. “School. Went to Poynter and published with the magazine shortly afterward.”

  This room was painted blue. A twin mattress sat on a low bed frame, and solar system stickers decorated the wall beside it. This was a child’s room. This had been her room. But nothing distinctive remained. He took a picture anyway.

  “Parents? Do they read your stuff?”

  “I doubt it.”

  In the living room, he shone the light across a decaying couch and fallen box television.

  “Do you know when she came here?”

  “No. Mid-forties, most likely.”

  “And the neighborhood’s condition at that time?”

  “From what I have been able to learn, remarkably similar. Were the conditions you grew up in amicable?”

  “Decent.”

  The man’s interest in Brad’s background had grown. Was he reconsidering the wisdom of handing over all this information for free?

  The dark mouth of a doorway stood at the back of the living room. Stepping through, he advanced down a short hall. At the end, to his left, a heap of laundry festered in front of a washing machine. To his right was the kitchen. Green tile peeped through mushy newspapers, and insects clung to the slumping ceiling.

  Straight ahead was another set of double doors, wood and plexiglass inside, metal guard door beyond. “She lived with her grandmother, you know,” Hettinga called from behind. “Losing her was painful. But not having her parents during those formative years perhaps fractured her. I’m sure you can understand?”

  Brad stepped toward the door and then caught himself short. The pointed nature of the man’s words collided with a flare-up in his imagination. For an instant, the light burrowing through the dirty plexiglass revealed a person standing just outside. A grubby little girl with brown hair. She was gripping the rods of the guard door and screaming in at him.

  “Missy!” Grandmama called. “I don’t want you playin’ out front tonight.”

  “You’re not havin’ another visitor, are you?”

  She dragged her feet across the mangy lawn and looked up at Grandmama standing there, arm holding the door open.

  “Just go round back, inside the fence.” She grabbed Missy’s topknot and tugged her inside.

  “But I don’t wanna play in the back!” Missy wailed as Grandmama trundled her across the living room and up the hall. “There’s dog poop in the backyard.”

  “We’ll have chicken noodle soup for dinner, if you’re a good girl.”

  “You’ll be in here a long time.”

  “Just a few minutes.”

  “Hours. Hours and hours!”

  “Put your sandals on.”

  “They make blisters on my feet.”

  “You’ll be fine.” The back door whined open and Grandmama nudged her out.

  On the back porch, Missy folded her arms.

  It was always the same: lock Missy outside when a man comes over. As if she didn’t know they were doing something dirty. As if she hadn’t sat out here and listened to breathing and bellowing, ’cause the visitors never cared about being quiet. Not many people wanted to play with her, because of Grandmama; because she was dirty.

  She decided to keep on crying. She pounded on the door until it rattled on its hinges. “Grandmama! Grandmama! It ain’t fair!”

  Grandmama came back into view. Missy took a step back when she saw her face. “What’s wrong?”

  Grandmama didn’t say anything, just looked at her the way she looked at a big pile of dirty dishes. Then they both heard the front screen door squeak, and Grandmama went away.

  Feeling suddenly very empty, Missy sat down on the warm, dirty patio and watched the ants detour around her. Mutt peered out of his doghouse across the yard, then slowly followed his well-worn path through the grass and sat down beside her. The locusts hissed in the trees, and a plane flew over, heading for the airport.

  “Everyone’s got somewhere to be,” she muttered.

  Mutt looked at her with gooey eyes, then licked her ear.

  “Aw, yuck. Get off.”

  Mutt trudged back to his house.

  When the concrete had cooled and her bottom had started aching, and the ants had gone to bed, and the first stars were peeping out, she trudged across the yard and picked some of the daffodils growing along the back fence. There was a big patch across from Mutt’s house, so she carried them over to decorate his roof.

  It was too late for proper dinner now, so there would be no storybooks afterward. Her mouth got that hot, tight feeling. Well, maybe she’d just stay out here tonight. She’d eaten Mutt’s dog food plenty of times, and she could sleep in his house. Somewhere else in the neighborhood a dog was going off.

  “That’s the only good thing about you,” she told Mutt. “You never make a racket like—”

  The sound of a hand slapping a face. Again and again. A man yelling and Grandmama crying out.

  Missy dropped the flowers and ran along Mutt’s path to the back door. A greasy sort of satisfaction moved in her belly: Too bad, that’s what she gets for spending time with those men instead of her own granddaughter.

  But then the slapping started again, and all that feeling went away. With her tongue, she felt the place where her tooth had broken last year. Grandmama had told her never to get in the way again, but—

  A thud inside, like something getting thrown.

  That did it. She wasn’t a baby.

  She jammed her fingers against the top part of the door till the screen tore off and she could get her fingers around the little iron hook that held the door shut. It popped open.

  As she slipped in, only the man was yelling; Grandmama was trying to yell but kept getting stuck on crying. Missy went into the kitchen, to the silverware drawer. Behind the plastic silver rack, hidden by the lip of the counter, she felt the gun. She held it carefully in both hands and went down the hall to the living room, then to Grandmama’s room.

  She stood outside the door. The gun was heavy, making her shake. And the words the man was yelling made her flinch. Grandmama’s low, wrecked wail made her want to cry.

  Why did Grandmama invite these p
eople over? Why did she have to be locked outside? She wasn’t a baby anymore. She’d show them she wasn’t.

  The door was slightly ajar. She used the end of the gun to push it open.

  The floor lamp lay on the floor, casting light and shadow onto the ceiling. Grandmama lay slumped beneath the front window. She was only wearing her underwear. The man wore no shirt and the suspenders on his pants hung down. His hands were fists except for the finger he jabbed toward the floor.

  They didn’t notice Missy. They went on yelling and crying. She tried to say “Quiet!” but nothing came out because she was crying, too. So she pointed the gun at sort of where they were. She would fire a warning shot—they always did that in storybooks. That would get their attention.

  That’s when Grandmama saw her and began to stand up. When the man whipped his head around, she squeezed the trigger.

  The sharp bang made Grandmama sit back down. It made a red dent in the wall where she had been getting up. It made the man yelp and stumble and fall down. It made Missy’s hands and ears vibrate. She dropped the gun.

  The man got up. Grandmama didn’t. The man came over to where Missy stood. Through a blur, she saw him raise his hand. She tried to back away, but he hit her hard.

  She fell against her bedroom door, and everything went out.

  When the world came back, Mutt was barking. The overturned light in the bedroom glared in her face as she sat up. Then she remembered. Getting up, she went in and found Grandmama still sitting against the wall. Her head was down, her chest red. Missy squatted beside her. “Are you . . . I was just tryin’ . . . ”

  Grandmama never cared about her excuses. Crying hard, Missy made her lie down so she could put her clothes back on her. Then she went into the bathroom and washed her hands and brushed her teeth while she was there, being careful around the broken one.

  She went back to the bedroom. She sat across the room from Grandmama and said, “If I call anyone, they’ll put me in jail.”

  She sat there until her bottom was sore again, and with the soreness came a realization. Not what she should do, but something she could do. She got up, and stripped the rumpled sheet off the bed and rolled Grandmama up inside it.