by Logan Keys
“You idiot!” I cry. “You’ve broken my neck!”
Bran is a muttering mess, his words slur and blur together they come out so fast, but somehow, I pluck phrases from them, mostly recitations of a catholic origin. His face is pasty white like chalk with beads of sweat popping out all over it. His hands clutch the banister as if he will run and hide if only his eyes will peel away from the sight long enough.
He is looking at me like I am Satan himself. I take a deep breath ready to damn him straight to the hot place when I suddenly feel overwhelmed with pity. And he is a pitiful thing sitting there, crying like a baby.
It takes some effort, but I right myself somewhat. With loud popping sounds, I straighten out each break, a slow and difficult task.
Once I’ve bested most of the kinks, I try for my most authoritative voice. “There, see? I’m better now. Don’t just sit there, get me some ice.”
He nods but doesn’t move, eyes as wide as his gaping mouth. “Does… does it hurt, my love?”
“Of course, it hurts! You broke my neck. And you would’ve killed me had that been possible. Please Bran, get me some ice.”
Bran jumps to his feet but then trips over himself on the way to the kitchen.
He brings me the ice, and I set it on the largest lump still bending my neck. We sit there eyeing one another, me wondering what there is to be done, and him wondering what there is to be undone.
He wants to run and scream, I can almost feel that, but Bran’s fascination with me keeps him still.
The headache strikes me between the eyes, and I ask for aspirin as well. Bran shakes so hard when he hands them to me that half the bottle spills on the floor.
“What is it, Ali?”
“What is what?”
“What is it that makes you stay alive?”
“Oh, that. I wonder if it’s worth telling you when I can show you, instead.”
He looks dubiously terrified.
I sigh. “If I promise that it’s not as horrible as it seems, will you come?”
He hesitates, looking like a giant, dumb, trapped animal.
“Bran,” I say with complete exhaustion, “it’s all very simple, and I’m still me. If you’d just let me show you, you’ll see it’s not really a big deal and I’ll even…and I’ll marry you if you like.”
It’s not a full win, but he seems to regain some color at this remark. I don’t press my luck, but I want to kiss him in that moment for trying.
After some rest and many, many shots of whisky, darkness falls, and I lead Bran into the fog. There’s a path in the Woods edging my yard, and I take this, trying to keep the lightness in my voice. “I found an old shed at the end of my property; inside of it is something incredible. Bran, you’ll see nothing to worry about.”
Bran pauses at the gate, but I walk on and he reluctantly follows me. My neck and back are completely straight again, and I twirl in the mist, showing him I’m right as rain.
He pauses to watch, his look filled with awe again, like when he’d seen inside my house that first night. “But your property’s fifty acres!”
“It’s a bit of a walk, yes.”
“Don’t you need shoes?”
“I don’t, no.”
“I suppose that’s a silly question, since you can’t get hurt.”
I shrug, and he scratches his head. Shock, Bran is still in shock.
“How will we find the way?” He moves a hand around and the dense fog swirls to fill in the empty spaces and slithers away from the intrusion.
“I know the way, Bran. With my eyes closed, I know the way. Come.”
And we walk. To make him feel better, I sing his favorite song. It seems to work because Bran is more animated when we take the path, a true path for most of the way. His steps quicken after a time and I march us forward until the path ends, and then I assure him this is the way. We walk into the woods.
To make it fun, I dance around a bit, standing on my toes like a ballerina, arms stretched above me, Bran even smiles at that. And he follows although slower again and then slower and then almost a standstill. And I realize that the fog has moved in on us from all sides. It’s nearly blinding. With my hand in front of my face I can barely see it. The fog’s blocked out the moon and the stars, even the trees and forest. I look down and my feet have completely disappeared into the miniature rolling clouds.
I glance back and Bran is gone.
“Ali!” he calls, but he sounds miles away.
The fog eats up the words, and slithers into my ears, blotting out the volume. It is tickling me, rolling up my body like ocean waves.
“Ali!” The call is almost a whisper now.
The air is almost undisturbed, though I know Bran is running every which way by the soft thuds and hissing sound I hear in the grass, only it’s another world away from me because of the veil of smoke. The cloying mist is stifling almost, it’s so heavy now that I am completely blind, and I swear I can feel the fog on my eye balls.
It’s enough to drive a person mad. I know it’s driving poor Bran mad because I can hear him sobbing and screaming in a gentle, distant way.
I cock my head to listen to him moving about until he tires. He walks in circles, some large and some smaller, but I can almost picture him fighting the fog. I want to tell him to just let it come, don’t struggle, Bran, but I don’t.
He is crying and saying over and over, “Whywhywhywhy I don’t understand.”
And then he is praying. It is a nice prayer if you like that sort of thing.
This, I listen to for a long time before I walk through the woods, find the path again and return home.
The sun is out the next day and the police are at my door with sad news about my lover. I crumple to the ground when they say he must have left the house and gotten lost in the fog. I remember what I should say, hearing this bad news, “Whywhywhywhywyhy” and “I don’t understand.”
How he’d died, no one knew, but they tell me a whiteness along his hair line had formed in his fright.
Poor Bran, I think, and then somberly attend his funeral.
I meet his mother and I sit in the little plastic chair before his grave until they are all gone, dutifully.
At least he will be buried here in Rosewood with the mist and the cool, what better way to rest. I would have burned him, though, had we been married.
“Miss?”
I turn to find a tall, handsome man holding a bouquet of flowers.
“I think that Bran would have wanted you to have these,” he says, handing them to me.
His suit and tie are rumpled and his eyes are red at the rims.
“You must be Dane,” I say.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“And I for yours,” he replies.
“You mind?” I lift my cigarettes and he shakes his head, even takes one.
I feel a smile creeping across my lips as he inhales.
“Come for tea,” I say. “It’s a beautiful day, if you like that sort of thing.”
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY TROLLS
Sally’s steps slacken on the path, her legs rubbery from years of pacing a level catwalk, and not an artery through dense forest that grades up and down. She’s on a hill now that overlooks a small community of wooden barns where she pauses to frown at the cloistered nothingness. It all seems like a veritable void of civilization ready to swallow her up forever. It even smells like nature.
I hate you frigging wackos, Sally thinks, fists punched into jean pockets so she won’t touch her face again. With a sound of disgust, she treks deeper into the woods with the moon lighting the way. And the way is what winds through the trees—giant pines she’s only seen during Christmas time. But it’s too warm for that image to stick, and besides, there’s no decorations on these looming peaks that have replaced her beloved skyscrapers.
To her, this wild-ness is the end of the earth, a complete wilderness, and she stifles a laugh at the idea that ma
ybe the word wild is part of wilderness for that very reason. And she, Sally Maybelline, by hiking even this most obvious pathway, is a daring explorer for once in her short and pathetic life of twenty-three years.
Clean summer winds fill her lungs, but she coughs up the stuff, craving cigarettes—an action that tills up memories of favorite clubs back home, where martini glasses of Fuzzy Navels, and Sex on the Beach slosh pink and orange over their rims. Slender stems pinched between fingers of buzzed sycophants spun-out under the bright lights of disarray, and in the middle of them all, her.
Come drink with us, Sally! Be free with us, Sally!
City life echoes back with a pang, an aching loss for her once exciting nightlife, urban and tough, New York—a city that’s never slept—unless it’s around. Congested streets, like her congested lungs, people teaming through like wind-ups defenselessly caffeinated, and Sally perched on a bar stool alongside sparkling icons who smirk down on her verged-precipice of stardom.
To be there again, sipping skinny drinks with people who use words longer than her waistline, and she, maybe a not-so-witty banterer, but able to perform every dance jiggle on sticks as long as the Hudson. She had certainly left… her mark.
Sally, the one to watch.
Sally, the semi-famous girl.
But tonight, her Louis Vuitton’s are packed safely away from the tree roots and moist dirt, all this terrifying grime in the world’s horror—nature. Her teetering heels are replaced by stolen boots for the midnight hike. A size too big, they fart air every few steps beneath the pinned pant legs keeping her fashionable flares from dragging in the needles.
Her hands tingle inside their pockets. They itch to touch her face, the fingers twitching like squished spiders as they long to trace the scars.
Industry Moguls had scouted her symmetrical perfection before she was even fifteen, and then her entire life had been from fashion in to fashion out. Before she’d been out too. But being fired from the agency, or quitting it, depending on who did the telling, was the least of her issues.
Sally, the model—ex-model.
Now, this many years later, when Sally finds she can’t avoid the mirror or that constant slither of unease when someone recognizes her—or worse, doesn’t! —she’s run back to the only family she has left. Here to the plantation in Tennessee. With the Amish.
So far: thirty-two days of archaic domestic living, and counting, all spent with her estranged family. But what choice does she have? And the Mennonites who run the small town, who loathe anything that needs an outlet who are already prepping her to marry one Hans or another… they’re like Mormons, but without electricity and stuff. Must she endure a life of subservience, pop out babies like a Pez dispenser, remove orgasm from her vocabulary…?.
Sally misses the city life like a limb, and if it weren’t for... those mirrors...
Besides, what would she do now in the Big Apple, anyway?
Sally, the waitress.
Sally, the nobody.
Anita, don’t go into the forest over on that side of the fields, especially at night.
They still call Sally by her real name, Anita. Old Jimmy is the only one who listens, who refers to her as she asks. He’s also the only sane one in the community. Meaning: Jimmy’s absolutely off his rocker, but not a total zombie-ish, fully conformed Quaker-man. He doesn’t believe you have to be Amish round the clock, like act all sweet and give nervous titters whenever a body of the opposite sex comes into the room. No need to scuttle around the place in a hurry to churn butter or milk cows and goats… and more cows, and… cows. No. Jimmy’s a rebel. He chews tobacco, cusses, and is her great-uncle on one side. An oldie but a goodie.
And the more they warn Sally about the forest, the more she’s certain there’s some kind of modern establishment inside of it. Superstitious folks that they are, she imagines she’ll find a landside Atlantis with plugs, and free access to the internet—no wooden shoes allowed. The thought of a surge protector makes her spine tingle.
A bar or a strip club are her top bets for what she pictures canopied high in the trees or carved into a giant pine, like Hobbits.
Twenty minutes into her hike and Sally’s already thirsty for a Perrier with lime. Moonlight fractures through the trees, painting shapes on the ground, and she steps off the dirt path into a grassy clearing, thankful for the easier going on the flatter ground. It’s a large area, maybe a football field in length, but then again, she’s previously considered the six-hundred square feet that made up her cramped city apartment humbly spacious, so her estimation really doesn’t count for much.
Sally pauses in the middle of the clearing to gape at the star-filled sky. Who knew things like this waited outdoors? Had she ever even seen them in the city? Probably not.
Giving herself a movie magic moment, she lies down on her back to watch them twinkle. She supposes she’s more fanciful than she gives herself credit for.
After only a few minutes of gazing, she falls asleep, and without one single touch of her face before drifting off.
Horns honk, and people chatter in their latte lingo: Hold the foam, extra soy-no whip-double-shot-sugar-free-vanilla! The voices fade as Sally flicks her eyes open to catch a blinding splice of sunlight before clenching them shut again. Dreams of smog and sewer grates dissipate with a stomach drop as she sits up.
The meadow! Strangeness tickles her senses, and she creates a new dance move to evict any spiders that might have taken residence in her clothing.
It’s extra quiet in the forest as she hoofs it back to the house in a rush and her skin burns where the pants rub her left shin. It gets so painful; she finally flops down on her butt to lift the cuff. The jeans slide up to reveal three long scratches, ankle to knee. They look red and angry.
What in the hell?
Sally jogs the remaining distance, feeling a sudden, unexplainable fear. As she picks up the pace, she grows even more frightened, thinking maybe something is behind her. Soon she’s flying down the path, tripping over logs and boulders, her face getting smacked by low hanging branches.
“Hello!” she calls from the edge of the wood, now in a sprint. “Hello!”
No one answers her from the house and she finds the screen door propped wide. It isn’t normal for no one to be up and about, so Sally searches the empty rooms one-by-one before she realizes they might be looking for her too.
The neighbor’s place is empty as well. Coffee and breakfast sit on the table, still steaming, but everyone is gone. She’s tempted by the bacon, her tongue even peeks out and wets her lips, but she decides to eat the smashed protein bar still in her pocket instead.
It’s a short walk to the farmhouse, but she drags her feet with exhaustion. Mentally counting calories for her last forty-eight hours, as is habit, she searches the barns before spotting the group in one of the pastures. Thirty people at least, all in their dresses and bonnets, or pants and suspenders. They stand in a half circle around something, a few shaking their heads.
When Sally reaches them, a stench, putrid and strong, hits her nose, and turns her stomach. Thirty sets of eyes lift to her face and she freezes at the group’s edge, blinking. It’s a bright day. The scars will be so shiny in the sun.
Stop looking at me, she thinks, stop looking at me.
And that’s when she notices the grass. It’s like red paint has been spilled all over the ground. Buckets of it. When she presses through the crowd, she recoils at the sight of a cow, or what’s left of it, smeared across the pasture.
The unofficial leader of the group, Diane, stalks forward. “Where’ve you been?” she asks, her voice like nails on a chalkboard. “We looked everywhere for you!”
Cataract blue eyes pin Sally in place, making her spasm. Diane’s always suspicious of Sally in every way a person can be suspicious of another.
“I… um...” Sally chokes back her rising protein bar. “I just went for a walk. What—what happened?”
She focuses on something besides the cow’s sever
ed head and Diane’s filmy pupils. Jimmy, her uncle, is also there with his raisin eyes peering over from deep within the prunish face, a gun on a shoulder, pipe hanging loosely from his lips.
He turns away again with a slight Harrumph. Jimmy never looks at Sally overly long. Her uncle is a kind soul.
“Mama,” Jane says, gripping her mother’s hand with both of her tiny ones. “Is Nelly eaten by a bear?”
The weather-faced woman drops down eye-level to answer the tow-headed version of herself. She explains how it is likely the case before leading her pack of children away.
Jimmy’s folded face says: most definitely not a bear.
Sally leans down to rub her burning shin. She decides to head back to the house in search of something for the throbbing that’s begun in her head to match the painful aching in her leg. She can’t help with a dead cow anyway, and she needs to rinse out whatever might have crawled into her hair last night.
Who knows what they will come up with, to explain poor dead Nelly. They’ll probably decide she was too modern for a cow, that she’d sinned by having oversized udders and therefore imploded… from sin.
Buckets of water wait next to the basin in Sally’s room. The swirl of clear liquid is natural, as opposed to the bleached, filtered, and then softened water from the city. It does wonders for her skin and hair but stays a tepid, unheated and unsatisfying room temperature. It gets the job done but Sally misses hot showers like she misses lattes, TV, and people who don’t have to find meaning in... anything.
The scratches sizzle like hell once they hit the shallow sudsiness and she gasps and lowers herself slowly. The pain stays, and she thinks maybe she’ll go visit what counts for a doctor.
While scrubbing away the dirt from her body, Sally imagines how Amish-ians get it on. She pictures a cloddy husband toying with his beard. "Remove thine head coverin’, Marta.” She giggles at her own impression. “No, no, mutter of my forty ninth children, do it slowly."