A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

by Krystal Sutherland

  “Why are you sad?” she whispered. A superfluous question, perhaps. In the broken remains of the Solar family, there were so many reasons to choose from. Still, despite how bad the situation had gotten, Esther didn’t feel the need to drag blades through her skin.

  Something more plagued Eugene. Something deeper.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered back. “It’s just the way I am.”

  Esther couldn’t fix that. She couldn’t help him. She couldn’t change Eugene being sad any more than she could change that his eyes were brown or his hair was black. There were temporary fixes for those things—hair dye, contact lenses—but underneath, really, they were what they were. She couldn’t help him, didn’t know how to help him, and that killed her.

  Not for the first time, she wished that his injuries were more obvious. That whatever swollen, infected thing inside his head that made him feel this way could be seen, could be sliced away, could be stitched up and covered with a bandage like any other wound.

  Eugene was always waiting for the jump scare even though it never came. Always waiting for a face to appear in the mirror behind him. Always waiting for a demon to snatch at any ankle skin not covered by a blanket. Always waiting for the lights to flicker out and a serial killer to be watching him with night vision goggles.

  To the kids at school, the ones who were drawn in by his magic, he was tall and dark and beautiful, a boy witch made of mystery.

  To Esther he was a reedy figure, like taffy stretched too thin. And behind him, dragging him back, dragging him down, a thick black mass, a swelling tar creature that he fought with all his might but could never beat. There was no Eugene without this darkness. And maybe that was the problem.

  Maybe Eugene wasn’t afraid of what was in the darkness.

  Maybe Eugene was afraid of the darkness that was inside himself.

  • • •

  WHEN ESTHER WOKE AGAIN IN THE MORNING, the hall was white with frost. Rosemary was sitting in the kitchen, wrapped in a blanket, her hand curled around a steaming cup of coffee. Fred’s head poked out from beneath the layers, and four soft rabbits nestled into her legs.

  “The heating,” she said, motioning to the frosted patterns spreading on the walls, as though Esther might not have noticed, “is broken.”

  The rest of the week was unnaturally cold. A bitter freeze crept across the state, slipping its way under doors and through the cracks in windows, shifting blankets off feet so it could turn the pink and tender flesh of toes to stone overnight. Death was busy, with the elderly, alone in their houses, and with the homeless on the street. He was busy rocking the cradles of newborns, kissing their cheeks to infect their tiny lungs with pneumonia. He was busy wandering through thickets of dying woodland, laying his fingers on all the squirrels and rabbits and raccoons and foxes that would rot and bloat in their holes when the warmth returned, their small bodies unable to fend off the cold.

  The cold came for the Solars, too. It wandered the increasingly barren halls of their gloomy home. It seeped into their bones and made them shudder as they slept.

  By Monday, Esther had a cough and could no longer feel her fingers.

  By Tuesday, she gave in.

  “Call someone to come fix it,” she told her mother through chattering teeth. All along, this had been a game, who could stay cold the longest. Hardly fair when you were up against a ghost boy and a woman made of wood. “I’ll pay for it. I have some money saved. I’ll pay.”

  Rosemary actually smiled when she told her this. She smiled because she knew she’d won.

  • • •

  THE HEAT GUY came the day before Thanksgiving while Esther was home alone after school. She let him in and stood in the kitchen close to the steak knives in case he got any ideas, but he wandered around the house without attacking her, so she relaxed a little. He didn’t normally work so close to Thanksgiving, he explained, but he knew Rosemary from the casino.

  It was a bad situation, heating-wise. The guy poked and prodded at the house’s guts for ten minutes before asking her where her mom was. She started to give him Rosemary’s cell number but he said he already had it, then stepped outside onto the porch to call her.

  Esther listened through the mail slot. She heard only half of the conversation, from the guy’s end: “The whole system’s dead. It’ll need to be entirely replaced. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. Then: “Two thousand,” he quoted for the job. “Two thousand, minimum, and that’s with a friend discount.”

  Esther left before he’d even finished talking. She rode to Jonah’s. They were supposed to go hiking, but she couldn’t muster the energy for it, so they sat in the bitter cold in the gutter outside his house and looked out at the whole wasted world—the trees stripped of leaves, the cars stripped of paint, the damp trash collecting on people’s lawns, the bleached and hazy sky.

  What a shithole.

  Jonah put his arm around her shoulder even though he knew that wasn’t allowed.

  Esther said: “I hate it here.”

  And he said: “Tell me about it.”

  She said: “Do you ever feel like a rose that grew from a compost heap?”

  And he said: “No.” Then: “Do you think your family is the compost heap? Or this town? Or me?”

  “How could you think I mean you’re the compost?”

  “Because I’m not a rose. So I must be part of the heap.”

  “You’re a rose. The most beautiful one I’ve ever seen.”

  “Stop trying to woo me.” He elbowed her playfully, then took a strand of her hair and twisted it around one of his fingers and stared at it contemplatively. “You’re gonna get out of here, Esther.”

  “I’m gonna take you with me.”

  “Sure.”

  They didn’t say anything more for a while because they were both such terrible liars.

  • • •

  WHEN THE COLD got its long fingers inside their jackets, they went inside. Jonah worked on her portrait for a while, and Esther tried not to let him see her cry. Two thousand. Two hundred would’ve been too much, but two thousand? Two thousand would break them.

  Jonah was quiet as he packed up his paints and came to lie next to where she was curled up in a blanket. He wiped a tear from her eyelashes and put his hand on her cheek, but there was nothing he could say to make it better, any of it, so he didn’t try. They fell asleep together, huddled close to ward off the cold, both dreaming of another life—any life—that wasn’t the one they’d been dealt.

  When Esther woke, it was with a start. The sun had gone down, and a man was standing over her, screaming. She couldn’t make out most of what he was yelling, except for “SLUT” and “PREGNANT.” Jonah was pushing her roughly toward the door and chanting, “Go, go, for fuck’s sake Esther, go.” She moved as if in a dream, desperate to go faster but unable to get her heavy, sleepy body to do exactly what she wanted.

  Remy was in the backyard, hiding in the long grass behind the house, crouched and unmoving. She watched Esther as she stumbled toward the side gate, her scarf bundled up in her hands.

  When she finally stopped shaking, she texted Jonah.

  ESTHER:

  Fuck.

  I’m so sorry.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  We shouldn’t have fallen asleep.

  Are you okay?

  Please let me know you’re okay.

  Then she waited at the end of the street until the streetlights came on and the sun slid below the horizon. Fall sunsets were her favorite, so crisp and cool, a vast pane of clear glass tinged with green in the last moments before the whole sky blinked into blackness. This was the only time of year and the only time of day that magic, the kind from storybooks, felt like it could be real. The buttery sunlight of summer dissolved from the world, leaving the light thin, the atmosphere
thin, the space between realities thin.

  Impossible things from other realms could slip through the sky on nights like tonight, Esther was almost sure of it.

  Something smashed inside Jonah’s house. Glass. Esther sucked in a breath of cold air. It was strange that such beauty should exist alongside such ugliness.

  Jonah didn’t come out. He didn’t message her back. The windows of his house stayed unlit. Nothing impossible slipped into our world from the sky.

  Esther walked home in the dark, wondering if she was more of a coward for not calling the police, or for still dreaming of magic in her senior year of high school, when it was pretty damn clear that there was no magic now. At least not for her.

  The nazars whispered welcomes to her as she threaded through the oak trees. The house, as always, was bursting with light.

  Rosemary was curled up on the couch, asleep, her face puffy from crying. She looked so small, like a child, the rings that dripped from her fingers slipping over her skinny knuckles. There were bowls on the ground beside her, each filled with water and some herb meant to bring prosperity: basil, bay leaves, chamomile. Tonka beans spilled from her hands. Emergency measures, meant to bring money their way in a hurry.

  Seeing her mother cry made Esther want to cry. She hated not just that they were broke, but that everything they touched seemed to turn sour and curdled, breaking to pieces in their hands. She hated their life. She hated the bits of it they’d chosen for themselves and the bits of life that had fallen on them like dandruff, unpleasant and unwanted. She hated that she couldn’t pull her father from the pit of sludge that had become his existence, that he would drown there and she’d have to watch his last gurgled breaths because she wasn’t enough—strong enough, smart enough, brave enough, enough, enough, enough—to save him.

  Not enough to save Eugene. Not enough to save her grandfather. Not enough to save Jonah. Not even enough to save herself.

  If Dad dies, she thought as she watched her mother, it will be the end of her. If he dies, she’ll unravel, and our family will be over.

  Esther wanted to ignore her. She wanted to walk past her into her bedroom and close the door. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t. Rosemary was lying there on the couch, her cheek resting heavily on her hand, as still and pale as a statue, and she wanted to yell at her and tell her it was her fault, her fault, all her fault, but she couldn’t do that either. Whatever primordial magic that bound them whispered to Esther and said, Comfort her. So Esther pressed her hand to her mother’s clammy cheek, still wet and warm with tears. Rosemary opened her eyes wide and looked up at her as a small, sleepy smile spread across her face.

  “Hi, baby,” she whispered, still somewhere between sleep and waking.

  “Hi, Mama,” Esther whispered back. She crouched next to her and rested her head on the sofa and let Rosemary run her fingers through her hair, like she’d done when she was a child. Esther breathed in the scent of her mother and tried to remember exactly when they’d started drifting apart. The rift hadn’t been a sudden thing, more like something that happened inch by inch, so you couldn’t see how far apart you were until the distance was insurmountable.

  “I’ll pay for it,” Esther mouthed. She said it twice before she realized no sound was coming out of her mouth, only breath. She cleared her throat. “I’ll pay for it.”

  “No, you won’t,” Rosemary said, but Esther could feel the way her muscles relaxed in her hands. “You worked hard for that money. That’s for your college fund.”

  “Is there anyone else.” It wasn’t a question, because questions were things you asked when you wanted an answer, but she already knew the answer. “Anyone else who could loan you the money.”

  “No.”

  That night, Esther used her phone to transfer her mother the money to have the heating fixed. Two thousand dollars. Just about all the funds she’d saved from her baking business. As Rosemary kissed her cheeks, her eyelids, her forehead, Esther wondered if they would ever find their way back to each other, or if the continental drift that separated them would only continue to wrench them apart, so slowly that neither of them felt enough pain to try and stop it.

  “I’ll pay you back,” Rosemary assured her daughter as she rinsed her hands in chamomile tea. “I’ll pay it all back to you, I promise.”

  How could you save people who were drowning in themselves?

  24

  15/50: DEAD BODIES

  JONAH HAD messaged Esther on Thanksgiving to let her know he was okay, but that he couldn’t hang out again until Sunday. Now it was Sunday morning, and Jonah had been at her house since sunrise, lying on her bedroom floor and helping himself to all the books on her walls like he owned the place.

  Esther hadn’t asked him why he was there so early. Why he crawled in her window, thinking she was asleep, and cried for a little while on the floor until she’d sidled out from under her covers and laid down next to him, her palm pressed gently to the bruise swelling darkly along his cheekbone. Jonah was a talented makeup artist, but he wasn’t this talented. His skin bulged out beneath her touch. His eye had been consumed by his face, too vicious to be fake.

  “I’ve figured out another way we could meet Death,” he whispered to her as she traced her fingertips along the fresh bruise. “We could cut out the middle man. Bring Death right to us.”

  “Oh?”

  “I could kill my dad.” Only half joking.

  Esther shook her head. “Don’t throw your life away. Not for him. You’re so close to finishing school and going away to college.”

  Jonah pulled away from her touch and looked at her like she might be an idiot and laughed this kind of bitter laugh. “You think I’m going to leave Remy in that house with him? You think Holland’s going to let me leave? Don’t you get it? There’s no way out for me. Until Remy’s grown up, this town . . . it’s all there is for me.”

  “But . . . you’re so talented. You told my mom you wanted to go to Hollywood.”

  “Yeah, well, you can’t exactly tell someone’s parents that you have no career options except working full-time at a fast-food joint until your baby sister is old enough for college. This is all I’ve got, Esther. This”—he motioned to the film equipment he’d brought with him—“is probably the closest I’ll ever get to working in movies, at least until Remy is old enough to get out.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “Shorter than a prison sentence for murder, though. Those are my only two options at this point.” Esther could tell he was trying to make her laugh. She didn’t. “Would you leave Eugene?” he asked eventually.

  They both knew the answer.

  No. No, she wouldn’t.

  Esther told Jonah to ice his swollen face and then she went back to sleep, thinking about how, for the past few months, she’d believed this boy thought he was saving her, which she hated, because she was not a damsel in distress. All along she thought he thought he was saving her, but she could see it now; they had both, each of them, been saving little bits of each other.

  At 10:00 a.m., after Jonah had poked and prodded her for half an hour and draped Fleayoncé over her face, Esther finally got out of bed and they made their way to the kitchen and she cooked them breakfast (which was difficult, because the Solars still had very little food). They didn’t talk about what they’d discussed earlier in the morning, or the bruise on Jonah’s cheekbone, or anything that would only make them sadder. Instead he asked her, for the fortieth time, how exactly they were going to see dead bodies.

  Esther had decided to plan 15/50, partly because she had a good idea and partly because she thought Jonah might dig up a grave and drag a fresh corpse into her house if she left him to his own devices.

  “Never you mind,” she said as she made a smiley face on a plate out of the last of the oatmeal.

  “I don’t want to see, like, dead puppies or anything,” he said,
sitting on the kitchen floor because all the chairs were gone by then. Esther thought that the rabbits were doing a very poor job of being lucky. “I’ll be very upset if you take me to see dead puppies.”

  “There’ll be no dead puppies.” She paused. “At least I’m pretty sure. There might be dead babies though.”

  “You take me on some really weird dates.”

  Esther tried to suppress a smile; you had to admire his perseverance. “We are not dating.”

  Jonah chuckled. “Why do all my girlfriends keep saying that?”

  Esther dressed as Rosie the Riveter and then gave Jonah directions to the School of Medical Sciences, a small research university that had somehow ended up in their town. The campus was quiet on a Sunday morning after Thanksgiving. The odd student or two bustled about, but for the most part, the place was deserted.

  “Oh, I know what we’re going to see,” Jonah said as they walked toward the college library. “Med students don’t actually count as dead people Esther. They may look like zombies but they still have a pulse. Shocking, I know.”

  Tucked behind the library was the small, squat building they’d actually come for. The sign above the entrance read THE MUSEUM OF HUMAN DISEASE.

  “What’s this?” Jonah asked.

  “It’s a museum,” Esther explained, “of—wait for it—human disease.”

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

  The Museum of Human Disease, as it turns out, was also not a happening place on Sundays. Or maybe ever. The caretaker was asleep in her chair and Esther had to ding the bell to bring her lurching back to consciousness.

  Jonah paid for their tickets. They were warned by the woman to show respect to the specimens. Each of the three thousand bits and pieces inside came from real people, real humans with lives as rich and complex as their own, and to mistreat them would be disrespectful to their memory and the generous donation they’d made upon their death.