Spark a Story

by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  “You’re just as bad as Jack,” I mutter.

  Later that week, I’m clearing up in the art room after class when I spot a sketchbook sitting next to the sink. I flip it open to the inside cover and see the words PROPERTY OF JACK LINCOLN. PLEASE RETURN and then an address. His loss, I think to myself, and move on. But then I think about what would happen if I lost my sketchbook. I sigh and grab it on my way out.

  I find Jack’s house easily, and a middle-aged woman bearing a striking resemblance to him answers the door.

  “Are you a friend of Jack’s?” she says in a way that makes me think Jack doesn’t have many friends. She introduces herself as his mother and lets me in, talking a mile a minute.

  “Jack’s dad would have just loved you. He loved art just like you two. He was an illustrator . . .”

  “What happened to him?” I’m feeling dizzy, and my voice sounds alien in my ears.

  “Oh, he passed when Jack was eight. He had leukemia.”

  I’m not listening anymore; I’m staring at the mantel. On it sits a photograph of a man, around my dad’s age, graying hair. “Charlie,” I whisper.

  “I’m sorry, I have to go!” I turn and run from the house, into the street, as the day turns into night, Jack’s sketchbook still in my hands.

  I reach Charlie’s house in record time, and bang on the door.

  “Charlie! Charlie, please!” My voice becomes raw. No one responds. The door is locked. I run around the back, searching for another entrance. I spot a window slightly ajar, and climb inside. The house is deserted. The paintings, the books, the sunlit kitchen counter, they’re all gone.

  “Charlie!” I scream in vain, knowing there would be no answer. There never was one. I’m crazy. I sink to the floor, sobbing.

  I lose track of time. Maybe hours pass, maybe only a few minutes, but eventually I hear footsteps.

  “Sophie?” It’s Jack. “What are you doing here? What’s wrong?”

  He sits down beside me.

  “I’m crazy. Your dad, I saw him, he was here. I talked to him every day for months. But he’s dead, he’s been dead for years.”

  Jack is quiet for a long time.

  “What did he say?”

  “Whatever my deranged mind thought he should.”

  “Sophie, you’re not crazy. Maybe he was trying to send a message to us.”

  “You seriously believe that I received some kind of sign from above?” I almost laugh.

  “I—when my dad was sick, everyone in the family shaved their heads, you know, in support. But I didn’t. I was growing it out; I thought it made me look like a rock star. So we were all there, at the end, and he was reaching out and touching everybody’s heads and he’s smiling, the biggest smile he’s had in weeks. And then he got to me, and he just kind of tousled my hair and didn’t say anything. I think he was disappointed. So I just thought, maybe I could do it now, in our old house.” He holds up an electric razor. “Like a message to him.” For once his eyes don’t look disgusted or angry. They don’t look friendly, either, more like they have the possibility of friendliness. Maybe it’s why the next thing that comes out of my mouth is, “Do you want me to do it?”

  His voice says, “I guess, if you want to.” His eyes just say yes. I follow him into the bathroom, which is dingy and smells like the bottom of a pond. The electricity is shut off, so there are no lights, just the two of us staring into the mirror in the dark.

  “He was going to teach me to shave in here, when I was old enough,” says Jack to no one in particular. I engage the razor and make the first cut. When we see the flesh-colored stripe in the center of Jack’s wild crown of hair, we start to laugh in spite of ourselves.

  When we’re finished, we collapse on the tile floor. Jack absentmindedly runs his hand across his newly shaved head. It’s silent and the cold bathroom tiles are making my butt sore, but somehow I am more at peace here than in my own house. Reflected in the bathroom tiles in front of me is a blond head, staring back. I pick up the razor and place it, soundlessly, in Jack’s hand.

  “Are you sure?” His voice is barely there. I nod. As the cold metal makes contact with my head, I think about calling my father. Maybe I need to send a message too.

  RUSHALEE NIRODI

  The Cabin

  SHE AWOKE WITH A START, her heart pounding as if she had just outrun a storm. It was dark all around her, and for a moment she began to panic, thinking she was still dreaming. She sat bolt upright, gasping in cooling breaths, and jumped when a soft hand landed on her arm.

  “Shh . . . just relax. You hit your head pretty hard.”

  She squinted in the darkness, but all she could see was the vague silhouette of a man. He had an amiable sort of voice, light and mellow, the kind that you instantly wanted to trust.

  “Who are you?” she whispered.

  “My name is Mark,” said the voice, and she could hear the reassurance in it. “I found you out in the woods, unconscious. I think maybe you slipped and hit your head on a rock.”

  She lifted a hand and raised it to her forehead, wincing as she found a lump the size of an egg. “I don’t even remember falling.”

  “Don’t worry about it too much,” Mark said, patting her arm. “The heat probably got to you. You’ll be just fine.” She heard a shuffling noise, and then felt something soft slide into place behind her back. “What’s your name?” said Mark gently, fluffing the pillow up.

  “Eleanor,” she said, swallowing as her heartbeat began to regulate again. “Ellie.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Ellie,” he said. “Why don’t we get a bit of light in here, what do you say?”

  She heard him get up (he must have had a chair by the bed) and move to the other side of the room. There was the noise of a drawer opening, the scratch of the match, and then light erupted from the tiny pinprick. He picked up a candle and lit it, shaking out the match as the flame fizzled out. “That’s better,” he said, raising the candle up to light up his face.

  All at once, Ellie felt a sickening lurch in her stomach, something she couldn’t quite place. All she knew was that something didn’t feel right. Mark looked at her curiously, the candlelight illuminating his dark brown, almost black eyes and sandy blond hair that fell across his forehead in chunks.

  “Is something wrong?” he said, watching her closely.

  “No,” said Ellie uncertainly. “I don’t—have we met before?”

  He looked puzzled. “I don’t believe so. Why?”

  “I just . . .” she said, hesitating. “I just thought I recognized you.”

  He shook his head. “I think I’d remember meeting you,” he said, smiling.

  “Oh?” said Ellie, arching an eyebrow as she struggled to get off the bed. “And why is that?”

  He didn’t reply, just smiled shyly. “Here, let me help.”

  He strode across the room and let her hold on to his arm as she heaved herself up. “Thank you,” said Ellie, swaying slightly, “for that and for letting me rest here. But I really should get going.”

  “Got a boyfriend to get back to?” he said innocently enough, but she caught the connotation underneath.

  “No boyfriend,” she clarified, “just a cat who will be very angry with me if I don’t get home in time to feed her.”

  “Well, eat something before you leave, at least. Just a little,” he added as she began to protest. “One bowl of soup and then you can head on your way.”

  She hesitated, then smiled. “Alright. Thank you.”

  He released her and went over to the stove in the corner of what she was beginning to realize was a small log cabin. It was just one room, with the bed she had been sleeping on in one corner, a small sofa across from it, and the kitchen diagonal to the sofa. Ellie sat down at the table, wincing as her head throbbed horribly. She lifted her fingers to her temple again, and as she did the faintest vestige of a memory began to form in her mind’s eye.

  She could feel her heart pounding, sense the eyes following her
through the trees. Twigs snapped behind her, and she quickened her pace, but the growing volume of the footsteps told her they were getting closer.

  “Everything okay?”

  She jumped, and the memory disappeared as quickly as it had come. Mark was scrutinizing her, his eyebrows knitting together.

  “I think I remembered something,” she said, biting her lower lip anxiously. “When you found me, was there anyone else around?”

  “No, it was just you,” he said. “Why?”

  “I remember someone following me,” she said quietly.

  His expression changed, almost imperceptibly. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  He turned away from her to open a can of soup, and for a moment the only noise was the grinding of the can opener. Then, as the can clinked open and he tipped the contents into a small pot, he said, “Maybe you shouldn’t leave, then. What if whoever was following you comes back?”

  Ellie shook her head. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. It was probably just another hiker. Maybe I overreacted.”

  “Maybe.” He didn’t say anything more, just ladled soup into two mismatched bowls. “Dinner is served,” he said, sticking a spoon in one bowl and offering it to Ellie.

  “Thanks,” she said, inhaling the rich tomato scent.

  “So,” said Mark, sitting down opposite her with his own bowl, “what were you doing in the woods? Just hiking?”

  “Actually, I’m a photographer,” said Ellie as she swallowed a mouthful of soup. “Well, amateur photographer. Anyway, I went looking for some new inspiration. Now that I think of it,” she said suddenly, glancing around her, “have you seen my camera? It was the only thing I had on me.”

  “I picked it up,” he said, smiling. “It’s in my bag.” He nodded behind her, and she turned to find a brown knapsack on the side table by the bed. “I figured you wouldn’t want to lose it.”

  “Thank you,” she said, relieved. “I was afraid it was gone forever.”

  They ate in silence for a few minutes, and Ellie found herself glancing around the cabin. It was fairly minimalistic, but in the corner by the door there was a small rack filled with various hammers, ropes, and knives.

  “This is my hunting cabin,” said Mark, noticing where she was looking.

  “Strange hunting weapons,” she commented, glancing over at him.

  He smiled, and something in it seemed slightly inhuman. “I hunt strange prey,” he said, but he didn’t elaborate, and she didn’t ask.

  She stared at the rack again, something struggling to connect in her mind. “That hammer,” she said, suddenly remembering. “The one with the orange handle. I’ve seen it before.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” he said, laughing. “It was five dollars at Home Depot. Probably everyone you know has one just like it. Can I take your bowl?”

  She handed it to him wordlessly, and as he headed to the sink, she retrieved her camera from his knapsack. She pushed the on button and it booted up, taking her to her saved pictures. She began to flip through them, recognizing the close-ups of squirrels and flowers she had snapped on her hike. As she clicked through picture after picture, she noticed that they were getting shakier. There was one of the ground that must have been accidentally taken as she was running.

  Then, all of a sudden, a familiar face stared up at her. It was contorted in fury, dark eyes boring into her and sandy blond hair wildly blown over his forehead. Her heart began to hammer in her chest as the memory came back all at once.

  She was racing through the trees, her breath coming out in short gasps. Her camera banged against her chest in rhythm with her pounding heart, and as she ran she heard his footfalls grow closer and closer. Then his hand clamped around her arm, and as the orange hammer came down, her fingers slipped across her camera. She heard the click of the shutter, and then all she could do was scream before the awful pain sent her spiraling into darkness.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  Her heart seemed to still in her chest, and she sucked in a breath as she whirled around to face him. His jaw was set, his eyes like dark tunnels. Before she could think to move, he had snatched the camera out of her hands.

  “It was you,” she whispered, swallowing hard. “You were the one chasing me. You kidnapped me.”

  He sighed. “I really hoped it wouldn’t come to this, Ellie.” He made a move toward her, but she dived out of the way, streaking toward the door, running faster than she ever had in her life. But just as her hand closed around the handle, he seized her around the stomach and flung her backward. She screamed as she fell, flailing out; her foot hit the weapons rack and tools came tumbling down. She heard Mark’s grunt of pain as the rack fell on top of him, and she tried to scramble away, but his hand closed around her ankle and yanked her back toward him.

  She felt herself being flipped over, and then she was staring straight into his black eyes. His forehead was bleeding where the rack had hit it, and his face was contorted in a snarl. “You can’t run,” he said, his breath hot on her ear. “You think you’re the first to try? I’ve brought a dozen other women here. None have escaped. Well,” he said, laughing low in his throat, “not alive, anyway.”

  She struggled to get away, but he pinned her arms down with his legs. “Any last words?” he sneered, panting.

  Her frantic fingers closed on something thick and heavy. “Yeah,” she gasped. “Go to hell.”

  She swung her arm up, ripping it out of his grasp, and the hammer in her hand drove home into his skull. There was the crunch of metal on bone, and then his expression went slack and he collapsed on top of her, his dead weight heavy on her chest. She flung him off and scrambled to her feet, nearly slipping in the rapidly growing pool of blood. She stared at the hammer, hardly able to believe it was her hand holding it. For a moment she almost regretted it; then she took a shaky breath, dropped her camera around her neck, and left the cabin without a glance back, the dripping hammer still hanging from her limp fingers.

  JOSHUA PECK

  Etiam Doloris

  EVERYONE DIES, and it ultimately becomes the responsibility of those who live on to decide what to make of that life. As for hers, well, I don’t know really. After all these years and all that pain, I should know her as well as I know myself, but I don’t. Yet, I can say one thing with absolute certainty: she had the most painful life of anyone I have ever known, but you can be the judge of what it amounted to.

  As I stand here, at the foot of a grave I never wanted to see. I remember her life, all the time we spent together, all the things I didn’t do for her, all the words I never said. I cry out, scream, rage at the sky itself even as it bursts out a clap of thunder in reply.

  I sink to my knees and weep, the fear, anger, loss, and grief of the past few days, weeks, and years finally hitting me. I suppose I look very much like a child, my fists clenching the dirt and my face buried in the soil as tears stream down my face, to drip down into the earth and become some part of new life.

  With my tears drying in the dirt, I can’t help but be reminded of another time, another place, when I watched someone else crying, just like I am now. It was the first time I had ever seen her.

  She was eight years old, kneeling in her front yard, hands squeezing the earth in her knotted-up little fists. The shouting from inside the house is what caught my attention, two people, I assumed they were her parents, were going at it. Yelling and screaming, arguing with a ferocity that displayed their naked hate. For all that noise you would think such a small girl would cover her ears, but she didn’t, she just kept on squeezing the dirt until her knuckles turned white and the grains of sand and stones left imprints in her palms. Then she let go, not because of the pain, but by a change in volume from the house. The arguing had stopped, now only one voice yelled; the other was quiet but for occasional screams of pain and anguish. That’s when the girl’s forehead dropped to the ground, her tears simply water for whatever may live in the dirt.

  At the time,
I was only seven years old; I could not grasp the gravity of the situation, or even describe it like I do now. But a child can understand much that an adult cannot, maybe that’s why I did what I did. If I were to witness a similar situation now, when I am much much older, I would not act with such wisdom as I did all those years ago, unintentional as it was.

  As I watched all this unfold from the other side of the street, I held a red ball, common on any playground, to children it was the equivalent of a Swiss Army knife. While she still knelt there in the dirt, that ball slipped from my fingers. It bounced down my driveway, rolled across the street, and somehow managed to stir up the momentum to hop that little curve and come to rest just a few feet from her. She didn’t look up, didn’t acknowledge the ball at all, and I wasn’t about to go chasing after it, I was much too scared for that. In fact I was so scared now that I ran inside the house, back to my soft bed, and back to my window, where I could more safely watch that girl and my ball.

  You must understand, I was new to the neighborhood. I had spent the previous six years in Colorado and moved to Southern California only months earlier. My father had come looking for work, so we weren’t in the best of homes. Like so many neighborhoods in that part of the state, it was painfully obvious which race lived on which side of the street. My house had a well-trimmed lawn, and while it was not large, it did have a nice flower bed and a short white picket fence surrounding the yard. My house lay on the extreme outer edge of “respectable society,” hers did not. It had no fence; the flower bed had been a garden at one point, but now it was barely a compost pile. The tree in the front yard was massive and its roots lifted up the street. The branches seemed to almost fuse in and out of the house itself. There was no garage, only a battered E-Z UP that served as a car park.

  However, I remember something very vividly when I first stepped out of my father’s battered Ford Taurus. When I looked at the building I was to live in for the foreseeable future, I thought, That’s a nice house. And as my eyes moved to the opposite side of the street, That’s an ugly home. That day, I realized that my second statement might not be correct, but you can be the judge of the covers of books and the labels we do and do not give them.