Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 23

by Kelly Link Gavin J. Grant

  "I've already finished my initiation,” Rico said. “They all danced until dawn."

  "Yes,” said the voice. “You held them, most of them, and they were deer in headlights highbeamed by your song. Those you lost you gained again as they danced bleeding. It was good. But it was not your last task. The last requires a ten year old."

  "Crap,” said Ana.

  Rico took her hand, pulled her closer, and tossed red and green colors into the air between them and the crowd. Colors settled into the shape of his tag. Ana still couldn't read it.

  "Home,” Rico said. “I'll follow when I can."

  "You have to tell me what it says,” Ana told him, but he just smiled and pushed her through.

  * * * *

  Their parents were as frantic as one might expect. Ana managed to slip into her brother's room and find green and red spray paint hidden behind the couch before her mother and father and Deputy Chad came in to look for clues to Rico's whereabouts. Ana kept the spray paint hidden under her own bed.

  It took a long time for Ana to get back to the high school, because her parents kept closer tabs on her after Rico disappeared. Bertha had already sandblasted the graffiti, and she couldn't find the forest path, and she didn't know where Garth was. She hoped he wasn't dead, or something very close to dead. She walked home, and listened to three nervous phone messages from her mother on the answering machine. Ana called her back and told her she was home, and that everything was fine even though it wasn't really.

  She went up to her room, and found her backpack sitting on her bed. She gave it a hug. It purred when she scratched behind its ears.

  "I'm really, really angry at you for leaving,” she said. It kept purring.

  Inside she found three pages torn from her notebook. They were folded in half together, with ‘Ana’ written on the front.

  The first page was in Rico's handwriting. I'll see you as soon as I find a way out of a hundred years of servitude, it said. Don't worry, I'll manage. DO NOT COME LOOKING FOR ME. Keep a pinch of salt in your pocket at all times, and stay out of the woods, and DO NOT keep following me around. I'm serious.

  Ana snorted, and turned the page. It was her seventh drawing, with a note written underneath: This is my name, dumbass.

  She turned to the last page.

  This is yours.

  Ana looked at it, and saw that it was.

  She took out her magic markers and practiced marking her territory on the back wall of her closet.

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  Three Poems

  Kim Parko

  Shiny Hair

  One was always treated better than the other because of her thick, shiny hair, but that is not to say she was treated well. She was whipped. She was chained. She was berated. But her hair was lovingly cared for. The other was scalded and prodded and her limp hair was shorn. When they became teenagers, they developed suspicions. Maybe this wasn't a normal life. In their school, the others were unmarked; their flawless skin stretched tautly around their well-proportioned skeletons. The one with the thick, shiny hair was chosen to be admired, while the shaved one was picked to be scorned. This created a rift between them that a shared bedroom could not bridge. As adults, they were let loose and could do as they pleased. When it came time for their deathbeds, how different each scene. The shorn one breathed her last from a rickety cot as an apathetic nurse looked on, while the one with thick, shiny hair gasped her final from under an elaborate canopy circled by grieving generations.

  Schoolgirl

  She eats her breakfast like a good schoolgirl. She daydreams that she is drinking a glass of milk for her bones, and that her bones are weeping for dead calves. She daydreams that she is tasting bacon while a soft pig tongue licks the slaughter of its body.

  During class, she has many desires: she wants to suck the knobs of her chest inward, away from probing boy-eyes; she wants to question authority but she looks like a pastel hooker; she wants to console Diana, who blames herself for misery amongst animals.

  It is time for lunch. The bell rings and the schoolchildren line up at the trough. Today you will consume the rendering of animals, the woman in the hairnet mouths without joy. Her own daughter's breasts have been cut off, but she spoons out the mash just the same.

  Sailor

  A wayward sailor comes to the family's doorstep ensconced in seaweed. Mother parts his salty tendrils to expose a weathered, but not all that old, face. The life of a seaman is a principled life, especially the life of the seaman without ship. Why did this sailor decide to trade in the fathoms for the family's waning hearth? The children gather round the sailor. They giggle at his eel. stay, sailor, stay. They injure themselves on his stingray. go, sailor, go away. The fire is having its last crackle. Sailor speaks after regurgitating brine. His voice was meant for water's acoustics. Father cups his ruptured ears. This will not do. He mouths to his deafened family. This will not do.

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  The Leap

  Mark Rich

  That morning, instead of walking into town to join the others around the tables at the gas station's restaurant for coffee, John Weeks turned to face the other way down the road. He felt around inside his head and could find no reason right at hand for turning this way, away from town; yet he could think of no reason not to, either, having gone this way for walks often enough before. At least this used to be the way he often took. Now that the notion had come into his head again he accepted it. Notions sometimes led places. He had noticed that somewhere along the line.

  Not far this direction the old pavement, cracked at the edges, gave way to dirt and crushed stone. It joined with other county roads farther to the east, which meant it drew a bit of traffic off them and into the town of Carter. Those who went to Wellner with its implement dealers and hardware store went this way, too, half the time. Still he could walk a goodly ways and then homeward again and sometimes not be passed by any of the pickups, small or large, many the folks around here drove. He remembered when he would do this almost daily, go walking this way, usually with the sun on its slipping-down course instead of in its slow climb toward 9 a.m. as it was now. He gave up those walks for perfectly good reasons. Not perfectly good in the sense that the reasons were practical. Just perfectly good in that his feeling strange about a place he reached on this road was enough to stop him.

  It had not been Lane Delancey's fault for what happened, John told himself now as he had before. John blamed Lane even though he knew it was wrong to feel so about the dead.

  He and Ginny knew Delancey from before they were married. Or rather the situation was that Ginny had known both John and Lane, in a friendly way, with John being the lucky one in the end. John had struck it lucky every which way he turned there at the close of the War and afterwards, it seemed, partly because he was too young to have seen the worst of it. Europe had gone the way the Allies mostly wanted it already, and the Japanese had just seen a blinding light that seemed a kind of truth, at the time, and a devastating one, so that their country was beginning to fall subject to reconstruction rather than destruction by the time John felt the breezes play in his hair on deck there in Tokyo Bay.

  He remembered coming back home to Carter and seeing the late-summer flight of starlings and being puzzled by their silhouettes against the blue and gray of the sky and the clouds. Then he realized his puzzlement came from all the training never put to use in spotting jets and being able to name them, and to classify almost unconsciously Allied makes and models in groupings separate from enemy ones: almost like different classes and orders, in taxonomy. And these starlings casting themselves across the spaces between trees: the triangles of their dark shapes—they caught him off-guard, for a moment. So much like arrows, they looked.

  Lane Delancey's luck had been of the sort that was doled out to what seemed too many soldiers, although really not enough of them: just lucky to be alive. Shrapnel head wound, leg wound, too, and nearly two months in a hospital. Infection, bu
t it was stopped in time. He appeared back in Carter a few weeks before Victory in Europe, and won bets with other soldiers back home about how well his head had mended by hitting targets with a knife, twenty paces, while most of them threw wild. He would throw knives at trees for hours, spend some time on amateur photography, hang out at the soda fountain where Ginny worked afternoons, and put in a few hours at his family's furniture store and funeral home.

  John figured his luck had just been a little stronger, not just in the war but in civilian life. That was all. Ginny liked them both but took to John pretty easily, after a while. If she had felt regrets she had waited a long time to do something about it. He was glad about that, at least, that she had waited so long. Their years together had been good ones. At least he had thought so, not having seen any signs they might end abruptly.

  John could hardly help running these thoughts through his mind now that he was walking this way toward Lane's house. He had not looked into the empty eyes of its windows since the day Lane fell. He wished the sister from Tulsa would find the time to come up and finish out matters with regards to its contents, just as a way to help close a door standing ajar a little too long.

  Lane had kept the house in pretty good repair even though it had seemed he was often strapped for cash. White paint covered everything except the ornamental shutters on the ground floor, painted brick red as were the doors. He had married once, divorced, then lived alone there on the town's outskirts.

  John stopped in the road for a while to watch the sunlight playing among the tree branches on the rise beyond Lane's empty house when he saw the movement upstairs at a window.

  The light was wrong to catch details of the face in the window before it pulled back. Yet John had seen it. He had seen the curtains move away from each other. They were old, gauzy ones that looked ready to fall apart out of sadness. And yet there was no truck in the driveway. The grasses before the doorway into the shed in the back looked as though they had not been disturbed in weeks, which was in fact the case as far as John knew. He wondered for a moment if the sister from Tulsa had arrived at last: but there was that empty driveway.

  John felt his scalp twitching as he walked into the yard to the sidewalk that was mostly overgrown. He knew he had no reason to keep quiet as he neared the house but stepped lightly anyway. He reached the planks of the front stoop and stepped up to the door. He peered in through one of the narrow windows alongside it. He could see little. Most of the view was blocked by sheer curtains. He tried the knob: locked, as he expected. He looked again and saw through one slender gap in the fabric a partial view of the stairs that came down from the second floor and ended up toward the rear of the house; and he realized it was lighter inside than he might have expected, the brightness coming from farther back. Other windows, he supposed. They were catching morning light.

  Then he heard feet on the stairs. It raised the hackles on his neck to know no one was supposed to be in there and then to hear that noise. No one belonged here. John already had talked himself out of believing he had seen anything. He had not seen the curtains up there move and had not seen the slender face appear and most certainly had not seen the face of Ginny up there wreathed by dark hair. Would her hair have looked so dark? No. Unless he had seen her and his memory had played him tricks, giving her the slender and unlined face of youth, not that he could have seen her well from that distance, anyway: but at least that full head of curling and often messy hair that could dance around her face when she moved and spoke and laughed: that would have been just memory. It was all just memory anyway. She would not be hiding there. She was not the sort to hide. But he had thought she was not the sort to run. And now he had to have the shifting curtains of that second-floor window come back to his eye and remain there not to be denied, with this noise telling him someone had been there upstairs. Through the thick double doors he could hear fast and heavy footfalls descending and their heavy landing there at the rear of the hall. He pushed his head nearer the glass to see better and then backed suddenly away. What if whoever it was had reached the hallway and rushed now toward the front door? But John had just tried the door and found it locked. He went back up to the window and heard more muffled sound from within and then nothing. His sliver of vision into the house showed him nothing not already seen. The back door: that was it. Whoever had been upstairs, probably rummaging around and looking for left-behind treasures from three months before: the intruder had broken in the back door to look around and then, after seeing John near the house catching a glimpse and then walking closer, had rushed out that way. To where, though? John felt twinges in the muscles of his back and the pain in his knees he felt when he walked too far, although today he had hardly come any distance at all. He backed away from the door again. What if whoever it was had burst out the back and now was running around the edge of the house through the overgrown hydrangeas and the sumac and past the battered cellar door and around to the front to—to do what? Confront John? John had no weapon. Did she? He still confused whoever was there with Ginny, although it could not have been her.

  "What's up over there?"

  John's heart was beating so strongly he had heard nothing at all of the car slowing and stopping on the road.

  "Tom,” he said, seeing who it was, “there was someone in Delancey's house. I caught sight as I was walking by. Now I don't know but he ran out the back."

  "Then let's go see."

  Tom Bishop was in his off-hours clothes, in his light blue Chevy. He stepped out and into the yard.

  John joined him in going around the house to the rear, where they stared at the door hanging open, swinging slightly in the chill breeze coming from the northwest. Light shined fully enough on the rear patio but hardly seemed to touch inside where they could see onto the landing between the main hallway and the stairs into the cellar.

  "We won't know what's missing inside,” said Tom.

  "We could track the guy."

  "Don't see tracks here, though,” said Tom. “He wouldn't have gone the other way around the house, would he? I would have seen him."

  "I'd think so, too. Unless it was when we were coming around this other way, and he went that way."

  "Then let's circle, opposite directions, and see what we see."

  They returned to the back door again after meeting out front. Both of then looked into the loose woods, then. With the leaves down from all but the oaks, someone moving among them should have been easy to spot, although all the mixed textures of fallen leaves and tree bark and wiry underbrush and light-colored soil could hide a lot. The ground rose a little farther on. It was the color of dirt and dried grass, there having been no snow for two weeks.

  "Let's go look,” said Tom. “If he got out beyond the hill before we came around back here then he must have been running and we might see the trail up there under the trees."

  The grass had grown long here in the back, and was lying slumped over with brown winter weariness. John remembered the trim lawn Lane once kept back here, and the chairs by the outdoor fireplace. It had been a nice place.

  "Look there,” said Tom.

  He pointed to a spot of bare ground nearer the trees: deer spoor, looking fairly fresh.

  Tom lifted his hand toward where those tracks were leading: up and over the hill, if they kept on going straight. Then he swung his hand back the other way. Back into that house's open door—if, again, they had come straight from that direction.

  "You think?” said John.

  "You think what you saw might have been a deer up there?"

  "Didn't look it, but from the distance I suppose it could have been. I was certain right then it was someone's face but with the glass and the curtains and me just being surprised to see anything at all, I could have been wrong about that."

  "Man's face or woman's?"

  John laughed awkwardly. “Woman's."

  "Well, I sometimes see women's faces where I ought not to. I suppose you're not seeing Ginny's face still, after three mont
hs now."

  "I suppose not."

  John figured from what he said that Tom thought he had seen her.

  "Well, a deer,” Tom said. “Listen, I was on my way into town since it's about my shift at the department. Let me bring Dan down and we'll check the woods more thoroughly for prints. Dan's a good eye and if you and I go walking around here much more he'll complain we've wrecked it for him."

  "Should we check in the house?"

  "If there's damage or missing stuff, with that door being open—I mean, it must have been open already, for that deer to get in—then I guess that's something for Dan to do, too."

  "Good enough."

  "You were out heading anywhere?"

  "Just a walk."

  "Maybe we'll meet you on your way back."

  "Morning's kind of not so peaceful any more, for a walk,” John said. “I'll ride back with you."

  * * * *

  For some reason, when Dan Anderson called the next day and asked John to drop in the office, John found he was thinking about Ginny again. “For Christ's sake,” John wanted to say to her, “what are you thinking? You don't just up and leave just because of some old heartache you finally gave in to!” He had written that postcard a dozen or a hundred times in his head, awake and asleep, but had never set it to ink and stamped it and sent it away, out of having nowhere to send it. Her own note had no return address. “I'm leaving,” she said. “I'm leaving because I have to. I'm not going to the city today the way I said but to do something that will hurt you too much for me to say it. But I have to do it and then I'm leaving because I can't help myself. Can't help myself about anything. I need to do this even though it is not because I do not love you, and because I need to do this I need to just leave and let my heart settle back in place for a time."

  Three months.