Upside Down

by Jaym Gates

  “What?”

  “I don’t have it yet. Like I said, it was just something I considered. But I think I’ll surprise you with it someday soon.”

  “You’re such a tease.”

  “The worst,” I confirmed.

  We kissed again and went downstairs to the river level site of a gourmet coffee shoppe we frequented a lot less than we would have liked. She saved one of the waterfront tables and I went to the counter, returning a few minutes later with lattes and a pair of the establishment’s jumbo cupcakes, the kind of snack that could make a starving person fat just by looking at it.

  Amanda had never been a calorie-counter. She’d never needed to be. But the party we’d left had already included a buffet with a selection of comfort foods and desserts that neither one of us had denied ourselves. So she regarded the unexpected treat, a pink monstrosity that all by itself probably met a full week’s minimum required carb count, with a palpable mixture of longing and dismay, her mind racing through the hundred and one mental negotiations that would permit her to allow the additional indulgence. After a minute or so, the inner treaty with her conscience was both signed and notarized. “We can split one. I’ll store the other away for another night.”

  I shook my head and took her by the wrist before she could pull up her shirt.

  To her round and startled eyes I said, “Please, not the fridge. This one I’d like to be for right now.”

  Her smile was blinding. “Okay.”

  So she inhaled half of it in one bite, getting the required amount of pink cream on her nose.

  First Blood

  Delilah Dawson

  On the morning that Poppy Dupree crawls out of bed covered in blood, her mother makes pancakes to celebrate. The real kind — not the usual toaster crap. Poppy can smell them before she walks into the kitchen, her socks silent on the faded linoleum. Her mother’s cigarette-yellow smile is both knowing and pitying.

  “So how was it, honey?”

  With a groan, Poppy sits, pushing just-washed hair out of her face with fingernails still mooned with the deep, black soil of the forest. Three places are set at the table, although only two people live in the house. On the plate reserved for the dead father she’s never met sits the decapitated head of a red fox, the tongue lolling out onto the cracked porcelain.

  Poppy thinks for a moment, flicks the fox’s ear. “Hurts more than I thought it would.”

  Her mother slides a lopsided pancake onto Poppy’s plate and fetches a chipped mug full of hot syrup mixed with melted butter. When Poppy pours it over her pancake, it spreads out in perfect imitation of the wet, red puddle by last night’s bonfire.

  “I still remember my first time.” Her mother carries over two jelly jars of milk, pulls her own chair back with a squeak, and sits. They look so alike, with the same bear-brown eyes and dark curls, but Poppy is still all elbows and legs while her mother looks like a bunch of old couch cushions strapped together, cushy and sunken in at the same time.

  “What was it like?”

  “It was a hell of a surprise.”

  They both laugh and look down quickly, as if the fox might disapprove.

  “Your grandmother never told me what to expect. I’d heard the other girls whisper, but nice girls didn’t talk about that sort of thing, back then. That’s why I told you, way ahead of time.” Poppy’s mother chews, swallows, and keeps on talking, a ring of cheap red lipstick sliding around her mouth. “I felt normal when I went to sleep that night. A little bitchy maybe.” She raises an eyebrow at Poppy, and since Poppy can’t raise one eyebrow, she shrugs and rolls her eyes. “And then I had weird dreams and woke up covered in blood.” She rubs Poppy’s shoulder, and Poppy flinches. “Just like you, honey.”

  Poppy doesn’t stop chewing as she nudges the fox head with an elbow. “What was your first ... you know?”

  “Don’t laugh.”

  Another shrug from Poppy.

  “A goat. Guess I stopped at a neighbor’s farm for some fast food. Woke up with a horn in my armpit.”

  “What was Grandma’s first one?”

  Her mother shakes her head, stabs her pancake like she wishes it was the old bat’s kidney.

  “Your uppity, know-it-all grandma says she brought home a big-ass stag. Oodles of antlers.”

  “Figures.”

  They eat in companionable silence, and Poppy’s pancake is gone too soon. She’s ravenously hungry despite the fact that her stomach’s clinched hard enough to make her teeth grind. It’s a different kind of pain than she’s experienced before — cramps. Her mom left the supplies she needed on the bathroom counter this morning: a pink box of pads and a bottle of ibuprofen. She must’ve noticed the rusty footprints and twigs trailing from the back door to Poppy’s room. It’s a weird, messy feeling — constantly leaking blood. Poppy squirms in her chair, waiting for the pain and squishiness to go away as she watches her mother spear another floppy pancake and flip it onto her plate.

  “Why weren’t you there? Jessie’s mom was there.”

  Her mom smirks. “Jessie’s mama ain’t Jessie’s mama.” When Poppy just stares, her mother sighs and sets down her fork. “Jessie’s adopted, and her mama can’t make babies. It starts when it starts, but it ends when you get pregnant or quit your cycles. When you’re done being a maiden, as they say.”

  “Not when you…”

  “Give it up?” Her mother laughs, a shockingly bawdy sound that makes Poppy even more uncomfortable. “Sugarfoot, this is small town South Carolina, and it don’t change much. There’s nothing to do here on Saturday night but get drunk and find a quiet spot to make out in your boyfriend’s truck. If losing your virginity was what ended it, this whole county would go to hell.”

  Poppy tries to resettle her bottom on the hard chair, but she can’t get comfortable. The pain, the physical discomfort, the creepiness of discussing her newly arrived womanhood with her mother, and the dead black eyes of the fox all combine to make her breakfast feel like less of a celebration and more like a case of the flu. She’s been waiting for this to happen, but she thought she would wake up with some sort of magical knowledge, that she would feel and look different, maybe suddenly be a few inches taller or have bigger boobs. But she’s the same old country girl in the same old Walmart jeans with the same old dark brown eyes and the same old quiet sullenness. And there are things her mother still hasn’t told her.

  “There was a boy there,” Poppy says to her pancake.

  Her mother perks up, the fork dropping from her hand with a clank.

  “Who was it?”

  Poppy closes her eyes and tries to remember, sinking back into the dream.

  She sees firelight and starglow and dark green and moonbeams and wet red and foxes screaming and girls laughing and old clay bottles of sweet red wine and bare feet dancing through the smoke. On the other side of the fire, always on the other side no matter how much they dance, there’s a shadow man sitting in a throne that sometimes looks like a camp chair and sometimes like a majestic sculpture of antlers and leg bones twined with vines. The skin of a fawn flaps around her thighs, the inside wet and sticky from when the other girls ripped it off the still-warm creature, welcoming her with hugs and bloody hands. She feels sorry for the deer for just a second, but when the shadow man begins playing the pipes, the regrets curl away like smoke.

  There are dozens of women gathered around the fire, from a few other girls in Poppy’s grade to older girls to Jessie’s adopted mom to the mousy lady who works at the post office. It’s not a big town, and Poppy knows everyone. They’re all dressed in fawn skins, barefoot, with hair down, digging their hands into the dirt as if looking for buried treasure. Jessie herself isn’t there, which tells Poppy something she’s been dying to ask about her friend’s weird, week-long case of the stomach flu last year. That trip to the specialist must have been to the free clinic. It would have been good, to hold hands with Jessie and dance, but the women there feel like family, like sisters, and she’s happy eno
ugh to be among them.

  Unfamiliar, unnatural shadows burst into the clearing, and the women stop dancing around the flames. It’s an older girl in a sundress and sandals, dragging behind her a good-looking boy in a letterman’s jacket. He’s slightly out of breath and reluctant to approach the fire, probably because it’s surrounded by half-naked, mad-giggling women wearing garlands of ivy and necklaces of garter snakes over moonlit skin splattered with fawn spots and gore.

  “Becky, come on. I’m not into this. Let’s go back,” the boy says.

  The senior girl with the long blond hair and perfect dress is popular and beautiful, and Poppy has never spoken to her, never dreamed of being near her. Becky isn’t one of them — the wild women in the fawn skins — but Poppy can feel that she was once, that she knew exactly what she was doing, bringing this boy to their circle.

  “Too late, Wade.” Becky flashes her trademark smile, which is so sweet they made up a yearbook category for it. Her lips go just a little too wide, betraying the still-sharp teeth within.

  The night goes still, ice-cold. Puffs of breath rise as they wait.

  “He is a rapist. He enjoys hurting women.” The voice from across the fire is ancient, old, deep, and brooks no refusal. “Destroy him.”

  The boy tries to pull away, but Becky’s hand on his wrist might as well be carved of wood. The other girls surround him, and Poppy presses close enough to smell with faraway longing his drugstore cologne mixed with the iron tang of fear. As one, the girls tear their nails into him, rending flesh from bone. Becky backs away slowly and disappears into the night as Jessie’s mom pops the boy’s head off like it’s a beer cap. Poppy bares her teeth as her fingernails dig deep; it’s like deboning a raw chicken. His jacket flies into the fire to snap and crackle with the scent of burned flesh. He didn’t even have time to scream.

  Poppy gently lays the fork across her plate and meets her mom’s eyes. “It was Wade Castleberry.”

  Her mother nods, thinking.

  “Football team?”

  “Linebacker.” She says it too fast and immediately knows she’s been caught out. She blushes. “Or something. I don’t know. Doesn’t matter now.”

  “Doesn’t happen often, but it happens enough.” Her mother’s face is sympathetic and yet hard as stone, the same face she wore when their cat had to be put to sleep for drinking antifreeze. “It has to happen.”

  “But won’t the police … I don’t know. Investigate?”

  A chuckle. “You go back up the mountain today. Ride Maisy, if your feet are too sore to walk it again. See if you can find a single shred of evidence. Look for the fire. Look for the wine bottles. Look for the bones and the blood-soaked dirt.” Mama nods knowingly. “You won’t find nothing.”

  “But how do I know it’s true? That Wade really did … what they said?”

  Her mother’s dark eyes go far away as her voice goes soft and loses its country twang. “Gods don’t lie. They don’t need to. The ones who are brought to the fire are a danger to society, to women especially. The rapists. The wife beaters. The baby shakers. It doesn’t happen every month. But when it does, it makes the world a better place. It makes our town a safer place. The police can’t help until the crime’s committed, until it’s too late, and even then, they’ll cover it up if they can. They won’t believe a beat woman until she’s dead. But the old gods know. They remember.”

  Poppy doubles over as another cramp rips across her stomach like a fist squeezing her guts. She feels too hot, and she thinks she might be hung over for the first time, and she knows she’s in too much pain to saddle the old mare and take her mother up on her dare. The pancakes threaten to come back up, and she drinks the rest of her now-warm milk, tasting honey and dirt from last night. There’s this deep down certainty in her chest, an understanding that this is how things are, and this is how they’ve always been. She’s just another tool fit to a masculine hand, to be held and discarded by gods and men, as women are doomed to be. Just another weapon. She can’t get away from it, and she can’t get out from under it, and no matter what she does or how much she wishes things were different, that invisible fist has her guts in its grip and is going to crush her from the inside out until there’s nothing left.

  All Poppy has ever wanted is to get out of Cadmus, South Carolina, for good.

  “Why, Mama? Why us?”

  Her mother sits back, one hand unconsciously on her now-soft belly.

  “A long time ago in Greece, the god Dionysus came down to earth. He went to the city of Thebes, where he was born, and nobody knew who he was, even though he was the god of wine. The people wouldn’t worship him, and that made him angry, so he drove their women crazy. They started ripping everything apart, including the king. All because he wouldn’t say boo to a goat for Dionysus.”

  “This ain’t Greece. And nobody worships Dionysus.”

  Leaning close, her mother lifts a long, wet black curl from Poppy’s shoulder. “You ever seen a real Greek? You’d fit right in. This whole damn town’s descended from the Greeks. Straight from Thebes. I know most of our neighbors act like your usual redneck assholes, but when our ancestors came, they brought their gods with ‘em. Old Dionysus likes being worshipped, and about all this town knows how to do is drink and screw, which suits him fine. Lucky for us, he stopped tearing people up just for being ignorant. Now he’s a god of vengeance.”

  “So?”

  “So we got our curse, just like every small town. Some places have a ghost or a famous Civil War general or a pedophile mayor. But here in Cadmus, we got low crime rates and the safest, happiest, prettiest little city you ever seen. Only difference is that our girls get real bad PMS.”

  “And kill people?”

  Poppy waits, watching her mom carefully, feeling judged by the fox head for asking what she knows is an obvious question.

  “Only if they deserve it. Real justice is hard to come by. One day, you’ll be grateful.”

  Poppy stands so violently that her chair clatters to the ground behind her. She feels a rush of blood and clinches her knees together. Her fingers are splayed on the kitchen table, and she wishes like hell she had scrubbed under her damned nails instead of leaving the dirt and blood there to mock her like smug smiles.

  “Grateful? For this?” She points at the fox head, accidentally knocking it over with a sick thump. “I’m a vegetarian. I never drank before. I don’t want to be like you and the other dumbass, go-nowhere, didn’t-get-a-GED girls in this shithole town. I want to get out. I don’t want to be a …”

  “Maenad?”

  “A goddamn murderer!”

  “You’re not a murderer, honey. You’re a hero.”

  “Heroes don’t kill people!”

  “You’re doing a god’s business. A public service. Did you feel like you had any choice?”

  Poppy remembers again the shadow across the fire, the voice commanding her. The glee she felt, giving herself up to the madness.

  “No one in this town ever has any choices, Mama.”

  She rights her chair and sits back down, mainly so she’ll quit gushing blood.

  “We stay here because it’s home, Poppy. Because we’re tied to the god and the god is tied to the land. Because he takes care of us, and we take care of the bad guys. You go somewhere else, you don’t know where you’ll end up on that day of the month. But I guarantee you’ll miss it. They call it ecstasy, that feeling, when you give yourself up to Dionysus, and he uses you.”

  Ecstasy. Yes, Poppy remembers it. It’s like flying, like dreaming, like having a fever but loving it. Maybe she was drunk on the wine, or maybe it was the god. She hates loving it, but she loved it still.

  “Is it always this messy?” She’s practically begging now, and she hates that, too.

  “Only on the first day. After that, it’s easier. Less blood, less pain. But if you need to skip school, Nurse Betty will understand.”

  “Her, too?”

  “All of us. Every girl born here.”
<
br />   For just a moment, her blowsy mama doesn’t look like a middle-aged single mother who works at the Dollar General and eats too many Little Debbies. She looks like a statue, like some timeless maternal goddess with dark eyes full of starlight and destiny and knowledge. For just a moment, Poppy sees the wild woman she once was, the girl dancing in the fawn skin one night a month as the god behind the fire played his pipes. And then the moment ends, and she gets up for another pancake and spills syrup on her Snoopy sweatshirt, and she’s just a mother again.

  While her mama’s back is turned, Poppy finds the strength to ask the question that’s been on her mind ever since she woke up with Wade Castleberry’s blood in her eyelashes.

  “Did Dad know?”

  Her mother turns around, leans back against the counter.

  “Only at the last moment,” she says softly, one hand to her cheek. “When I pulled him toward the fire.”

  Red Light

  Sara M. Harvey

  It’s an occupation as old as time, lingering in the dark corners of all of human history.

  For me, it is more than a job, it fills a need, it satisfies my hunger. Hunger is the nearest analogy that a creature like me can make. I am far past physical hunger, mortal hunger, but I require sustenance. And so, I hunt.

  I am very good at what I do, both the hunting and the fulfilling. Too good, usually. I have to be careful, I have to move around. Someone always catches on that there’s something different about me. And it scares them.

  Lots of times it’s the other girls, they get jealous, they get paranoid that I’m taking their customers. So they call raids on me, or get their pimps to do it. The pimps don’t like me, either. I make it clear that I’ve got no need for them or what they do. They don’t like that, they think I’m going to upset their precious system, make the girls uppity so they won’t do as they’re told, won’t pay them their due. They think that I’ll set a bad example and they will lose control.