Apex Magazine - January 2017

by Apex Publications

  Ah Yawa. Because of her, the improv starts now.

  “Clara didn’t wait on me,” Lolonyo says. “You know why? Because you’re my waitress, baby. And the thing you don’t know is, me, I’m the one you’ve been waiting for.”

  Aliza grins her famous “yeah, ok” grin, reserved for infomercials where the car wax withstands getting lit on fire and when she hits an overcrowded nightclub where a hundred dudes lob tired ass game like molotovs.

  “I think you may have me confused for the woman whose mouth has been on that mug. She’s the one you’ve been waiting for. Now, are you going to order?”

  Lolonyo sighs as she frowns. It was worth a shot.

  He should get rid of the coffee cup. It’s got another woman’s lipstick on it, after all, and Aliza does have that slight but fierce jealous streak.

  Nah. It stays. Serendipity’s important. Some things are truly cosmic, bigger than him, no matter how small they may seem.

  What was he waiting for? This was his life and it wasn’t ending anytime soon.

  He presses pause. And life stops.

  James Beamon is an IT guy with a writing problem. He’s been in the Air Force, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and knee deep in narrative and none of that excuses him from having to provide tech support to his wife and son for their various devices. They currently live in Virginia, where you can find James either chasing down book deals or chasing down enemy snipers on Battlefield 1 . Check out what he’s up to at http://www.fictigristle.wordpress.com/ .

  * * *

  The Dark Birds

  by Ursula Vernon | 7226 words

  7,600 Words

  My mother had daughters year after year, and one by one, my father devoured us.

  There were only three names allowed in the family, and only three children. There was the oldest, who was always Ruth, and the middle child, who was always Susan. The youngest was “the baby” or simply Baby.

  When a new daughter was born, she became the baby. The former baby became Susan, and Susan became Ruth—and Ruth vanished.

  Telling the story like this, it sounds as if we knew what was happening. We did not. I am telling you this so that it will not be a shock to you, the way that it was to me.

  The Ruths, I expect, mostly figured out that something strange was going on. The trusting ones believed Mother’s story that the former Ruth had run away with a passing trader. The suspicious ones watched with hooded eyes, and thought that they had not seen any traders recently…but then again, to escape this house, who knew what the old Ruth might have done?

  And there was a new baby, who rapidly took every scrap of thought and energy that the new Ruth might have. Depending on her age, Susan might not be much help at all. Even the suspicious ones might have lost their way, waking up in the night to change a sobbing sister.

  Still, I cannot say that every Ruth was eaten by our father. Of so many ogre’s daughters, surely not every one was a fool.

  I am fairly certain that the Ruth immediately before mine was not a fool. She chose her moment and ran and took her Susan with her. There was only the baby left, who was very young. Mother gave birth and collapsed back, and woke to a gray hearth and an empty house, and Father bellowing from the root cellar.

  (I am guessing here. My mother would never have told us so much. Still, I can picture it more clearly than I like.)

  Now, there were often gaps between daughters. We would come spaced out, by four years or five, and Mother lost babies sometimes. Gaps were not unusual. But a gap where the baby was sudden Ruth, and there was no Susan at all—that threw the family into disarray.

  Mother grew hollow-cheeked and gaunt, with knuckles like red walnuts. Father growled and scraped his teeth against the foundations of the house.

  The new Ruth could barely toddle and certainly could not tend the garden or care for the baby.

  Our mother paced back and forth with the baby at her breast, her hair gray and wild on her shoulders, and finally she said “We must hire a girl. We have no choice.”

  Our father spoke from the basement in a voice like mud on stone. “Do it. A fat one.”

  “No,” said Mother, stomping her foot over the voice. “ Not a fat one. Not for you. It has been so long, they must have forgotten, but they’ll remember quick enough if you eat her!”

  “Orraaahaaahaaa…” said Father, laughing, and shook the house until dust fell from the ceiling.

  (I can see this much too clearly in my dreams. The birds must have told me, I expect.)

  So Mother dressed herself and went to town and hired a girl to help around the house.

  §

  That part, at least, I cannot imagine. She must have bought the poor girl’s indenture, because anyone who could leave would have. But she came, a skinny girl with hair like rags and broken nails from passage on the ship. One of her legs was bad and she could not run, which was likely why Mother could afford to buy her indenture at all.

  She lived out in the shed, next to the woodpile. She might have argued, but I imagine she had only to hear the sounds from the cellar and be grateful that she was not in the house itself.

  I wonder sometimes how my mother explained those sounds.

  My Ruth grew up talking to the indentured girl, who was named Lily. It is from Ruth that I heard all the stories, handed down like sermons. The Gospel of Lily, more precious than anything written in the family bible.

  She vanished one night, shortly after a new daughter was born. Mother said that her articles of indenture had run their course, and you couldn’t keep a servant forever, and that was simply the way it was.

  The new baby became a Susan within the year. And the baby that followed…

  Well. That was me.

  §

  Mother gave birth by herself, of her own choice. “I’ve done this before,” she growled. “Leave me alone.”

  My sister Susan looked at me, and I looked at her, and we took ourselves out of the house and sat in the garden. It was early evening and Ruth was pulling weeds.

  She looked up when we came out. “Has she had it yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, come and help me pull weeds, then.”

  I helped her until it was too dark to see. Lambsquarters and chickweed and wild mustard went in one pile, grass and cleavers in another. One we’d eat, and the other we’d throw over the fence.

  I could just barely remember having chickens and feeding them some of the weeds, but it had been too long. There were no chickens now, and Mother flew into a rage when we suggested getting more. “Chickens don’t grow on trees!” she snarled. “I’d have to sell you to get chickens. Maybe I should, and how would you like that?”

  Honestly, I didn’t know what it would be like to be sold. Being an indentured servant sounded bad—Ruth had explained what those were, and that sometimes you went to terrible places and couldn’t leave. Susan said that she’d at least see some other places that way, but I was too afraid to think of it for long.

  At last Ruth sat back on her heels, and I leaned on the mill stone. It was a great heavy round thing, half-buried in the earth. Mother had said once that it was there when Father had built the house, too heavy to bother moving. It was cool even in summer and you could lean your back against it like a chair.

  I sniffed my fingers. They smelled green, like sun and grass, and a little bit like earth.

  “There’ll be four of us soon,” I said. “With the new baby.”

  Ruth turned her head. I couldn’t make out her expression.

  “Will there be?” she said. “I wonder.”

  And then Mother called for tea, and I got up to go inside, which means that the last words I ever spoke to my older sister were stupid words, and the last ones she spoke to me were a question to which she already knew the answer.

  §

  Mother’s labor was easy, she said, but she was fond of saying that even an easy labor is hard enough. I brought her tea three times. She slept and woke, and sometimes she screamed, an
d we crouched by the fireplace and waited.

  It took a long time. We slept by the fireplace ourselves, which we didn’t usually do. Father grew restless when Mother screamed, and once he roared, shaking the foundations. The tin roof rattled and rang with the noise.

  Midnight came and went. “Go get water,” said Mother. “Baby, Susan…go to the creek.”

  It was a long way to go in the dark. The birds called. Some of them had low, throbbing voices like mourning doves, and others were high and keening as a hawk. Most of them, though, called a repetitive three-note call, like the whippoorwills—oh-die-will, oh-die-will. At night, they would all get going all together, the whippoorwills and the chuck-widows-wills and the dark birds around the house, making a racket so loud that you could hardly think: whip-poor- will! whip-poor- will! oh-die-will oh-die-will!

  They made Father restless when they sang like that. I liked the summer nights for the plentiful food and the fireflies drifting through the clearing, but not the birds.

  Susan and I would sleep out on the roof on those nights. Ruth slept in the shed by the woodpile. I think she might have let us join her, but there was hardly enough room for one person, let alone three. She had been the one who knew Lily, so she was the one who kept her shrine.

  Susan and I took buckets off the nail on the side of the house. The moon was bright overhead. The whippoorwills tended to quiet in the deepest part of the night, but the dark birds kept going: oh-die-will oh-die-will. Every now and again a chuck-widows-will would join in, but you could hardly hear the chuck part unless you were standing on top of them, so it was … widow-will!…widow-will! underneath the other calls.

  The dark birds looked like grackles, with moon-colored eyes instead of gold. They perched along the garden fence sometimes, but did not come nearer to the house.

  We reached the creek by moonlight, only stumbling over tree roots once or twice. The creek was low this time of year, and the water we scooped up looked black by moonlight.

  “Do you think it’ll run dry this year?” I asked. It had happened once before, and it had been a long grueling walk every day to fetch water.

  “I don’t know,” said Susan.

  I turned back toward the house, and there was a dark bird on the path.

  It was moving strangely for a bird…fluttering up and down as if it were wounded. It looked like a black rag caught on a line. I took a step back.

  “What is it?” asked Susan, nearly running into me.

  “A bird. It’s on the ground.”

  “Catch it,” said Susan. “We haven’t had meat in a long time.” She set her bucket down and began walking stealthily toward it, hands outstretched. “You go around the other side.”

  “Oh-die-will!” ; sang the dark birds in the trees. The bird on the ground flapped frantically.

  I tried to sneak around behind the bird. Last year’s leaves crunched underfoot. The bird cried out—not the three-note song but a high skree-ee of alarm.

  Susan pounced. The bird leapt out of her grasp and flung itself into the air. It left the shaft of moonlight and I lost sight of it for an instant, then it slapped into my chest, bounced off, and into the lower branches of the tree behind me.

  “Stupid!” hissed Susan. “It went right at you!”

  “I didn’t—I wasn’t expecting it to—”

  Susan groaned. “Baby…” she said.

  “I’m sorry!”

  “Never mind.” She picked up her bucket. “Let’s just go back.”

  §

  Here is a story from the Gospel of Lily—that she came from a land that was cool and green, where the fields were open and did not grow up into forests the moment your back was turned. She did not like this place, overrun with catbriar and creeper and wild grape. It was not green enough.

  “But it’s green here,” Susan said, when Ruth told the story. “Everything is green. Green’s the only color here.”

  “She said it wasn’t the same green,” said Ruth.

  I grew up dreaming of that other green, unable to picture it, wondering if it was like the blaze of sun through poplar trees or the deep green of chestnut leaves in shadow or then again, like the flat first pads on a sprouting seed.

  Ruth didn’t know. Sometimes she would make things up, to make the story better, but she could not conjure up a color that none of us had seen.

  §

  Mother stopped gasping a little after dawn. We heard a cry, like a little bird, and then silence. I dozed off again in front of the fire and didn’t wake until Susan touched my arm. “Come on, Baby,” she said. “Let’s go look.”

  “Go look at what?” I asked groggily.

  “The baby, stupid.”

  For a moment I could not understand her—I was Baby, I was right here, I couldn’t very well look at myself—and then I realized. The new baby. Yes. Of course.

  We crept upstairs. The stairs were very deep and we had to climb them like a ladder. Mother took them two at a time.

  Mother was asleep with her arms around an infant. It looked very small, no bigger than a rabbit, tucked into Mother’s elbow.

  “It’s small,” I said stupidly.

  Susan nudged me. “She,” she said. “She’s not an it. She’s our sister.”

  It was only then that it occurred to us to wonder where our other sister had gone.

  We searched around the garden, in the shed where Ruth slept, on top of the roof. We went into the trees around the house. The dark birds were mostly sleeping now, with only an occasional oh-die-will! and the blue jays were scolding each other from the trees.

  We did not abandon the search until we heard Mother calling us back to the house.

  “Where’s Ruth?” asked Susan, poking her head over the top of the stairs. “We can’t find her.”

  Mother rolled her eyes. “She went to town,” she said, sounding irritated. “For herbs.”

  Susan and I exchanged glances. None of us had ever, so far as we knew, gone to town. In fact, we didn’t even know which way the town was.

  “When will she be back?” asked Susan.

  “No idea,” said Mother shortly. “Later. Never. I don’t know. Go make some more tea.”

  Susan went out to the pump to get water. I hooked the kettle over the fire and got the little crock of tea leaves out of the cupboard.

  When the water was steaming, I threw in a handful of leaves and bent over them, inhaling the smell of mint and bee balm.

  “Are you worried about Ruth?” demanded Susan.

  I tried to ignore her. The smell of herbs was in my nostrils, and perhaps if I could pull the scent deep enough into my lungs, it would chase out the sudden dread.

  “Baby!”

  “Yes,” I said wearily. There was no point in trying to put Susan off. She would jab at you until she got the answer she wanted. She was the stubborn one, the brave one, the one who squared up her jaw and prepared for a fight.

  I was the soft one, the peacemaker, always running after to try to smooth things over, to stop her squabbling with Ruth or needling at Mother.

  I knew perfectly well that Susan despised me for being soft, but that was fine. I despised myself for it as well, but there was no point in trying to change. It was simply the way of things. There were not enough of us in the family for anyone to be allowed to experiment with different roles.

  I brought Mother the tea, creeping quietly along the floorboards. Father was silent in the basement, not bellowing or scraping, but I didn’t want to wake him.

  Mother looked tired, her gray face set in creases like an old towel, as she lay in her nest of blankets and hides. All I could see of the baby was the back of its head.

  She took the tea. “Thank you, Susan.”

  I wasn’t Susan, but it didn’t seem worth bothering over.

  “Is it a girl?” I asked.

  “It’s always a girl,” she said tiredly, lying back on the hides. “Go away.”

  I crept away again.

  §

  Ruth
didn’t come back that night. We stayed up very late waiting for her. She didn’t come back the next day either, even though both Susan and I stayed out in the garden watching for her.

  The great golden mangel-beets were coming in, their tops sticking up above the ground like yellow fists. We pulled up clumps of grass and purple-flowered henbit. The flock of birds in the trees around the house sang, their voices rising and falling like ragged breathing.

  Susan pulled up great handfuls of henbit, not talking. I thought she might be crying, but I didn’t want to ask, because then I would find out.

  I did not want her to be crying.

  Bees swarmed around the edges of the garden. I played tag with one, chasing it, then retreating back over the line. It buzzed at me, hanging in mid-air, but wouldn’t come any closer. Bees wouldn’t cross the line where the shadow of the house might fall, even if the sun was over the top of the clearing. It was annoying because you couldn’t plant anything that needed bees close to the house. Ruth grumbled about it sometimes. We piled the wood up there instead, on either side of the windows.

  The paw-paw trees would grow in the shadow all right, though. Flies didn’t mind the house. Neither did wasps. At least once a season, Ruth had to get a long, long pole and knock down a wasp nest. She was really good at it—she could smack the nest away in two hits and then drop the pole and run and not get stung.

  I wondered who was going to knock down the wasp nests now that Ruth was gone.

  It had settled into my head, some time in the last day, that Ruth was not coming back.

  Because Susan is crying. Susan is the brave one, the smart one, the fierce one. She’d know. If she’s crying, then Ruth is gone for good.

  “Where do you think she went?” I asked.

  It was the wrong question, or perhaps the right one. Susan sat back on her heels and wiped a green-streaked hand across her face. She said, on an angry sob, “I don’t know, Baby. And why didn’t she take us with her?”

  “Do you think she left at night?” I asked. “I don’t remember her leaving. Maybe she didn’t want to wake us.”

  We went back inside as it started to grow dark. Mother was sleeping, so we did not wake her.