Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2

by Nathan Ballingrud

  In frozen foods, a woman stared: somebody’s mother or grandmother, in a lime-green-colored cardigan and laced white tennis shoes. The cashier, through heavy eyelashes, kept sneaking furtive looks. She didn’t want to touch Elyse’s money, not at first; then grabbed it in one rushed fistful and shoved it under the register’s hooks, breathing out in one heavy exhale.

  Outside, Elyse leant against the store and ate an apple. Scattered birds came and sat at her feet. The wind, when it blew, had a charred spark to it: the scent of autumn or witching or both, embers blossoming, ashy and new. She licked her lips. The apple was still green, sour.

  A car pulled up, dust-covered: the sheriff. He rolled down his window. “Miss Mayhew.”

  “Linden,” she said.

  “You have an audience.” He nodded at the birds.

  “Everywhere.”

  He rummaged in the passenger seat for a moment; came back with a bundle of letters that he held out in the air. “Got something for you.”

  She stepped forward to take it. There were five or six letters, she thought. Hard to tell. Her fingers were sticky from the apple. Her hand brushed the sheriff’s. She glanced at him.

  “Told folks to bring in what they find. They ought to pay me for delivering your mail,” he said.

  Elyse didn’t know what to say. She said, “I appreciate the gesture.”

  The sheriff shrugged. “Any idea when this might end?”

  “The letters?”

  “The birds. The whole damn uncanny.”

  She moved back, minding her feet round the birds. Some rose in a rush; one perched on her shoulder. “I’m not doing it,” she said.

  “I know that. Just hunting around for some insight.” He started to roll up his window, then paused. “Got a cider tree in my backyard, been giving up apples early. If you like them. I don’t have much use for so many.”

  Elyse looked down at the core in her hand. She could see her own teethmarks in the white flesh. “I’d like that,” she said.

  “I’ll bring some around with the next batch of letters.”

  He left. Elyse watched. The bird on her shoulder toyed with an uncoiled strand of her hair. She brushed it aside, harsh and impatient. Witches had to be careful with hair, with toenails and blood, with bones and eyelashes; leave any part of yourself, unaware, and someone, somewhere, would set it against you. Burn what you shed: that was the lesson. She combed her thick hair back with her fingers, feeling its mass, its thousand snares.

  At dusk, she lit a lamp with witch-fire and sat on the porch. Moths came crawling through still air, and clicking june-bugs with hard little bodies. A few fireflies made themselves signal flares. Elyse sipped wine from a solid glass jam jar; unfolded the letters.

  Beloved Elyse,

  There is a road that leads down to the sea. I have to believe that it’s the way out, the one. I have to believe.

  Seagulls keep circling as I walk. It’s winter here already. But things keep pushing up through the snow; not plants, exactly. I can’t ever seem to get warmer or colder, but I feel it in objects: the ice, the heat. I never thought I would miss the chill, but I do; I think of when I would run alongside the wolves, in December or January, and come home to find the house full of warmth. You at the kitchen sink: peeling rosemary leaves from the stalk, slicing ginger, the smell prickling.

  I never see another person. I wonder where they all must be? No ferrymen, even; no toll-takers. Only me. I write these letters to keep words alive. It gets strange when I don’t speak. I forgot the name for an arum lily the other day; couldn’t think of it, just couldn’t—think. Then I worried I’d get like the wolves. There’d be a wilderness that I couldn’t come in from. You’d be inside a warm scented house. I’d come to the window; I’d press my cheek just there, against the pane of glass. But you wouldn’t ever let me inside. By then I’d be just claws and teeth.

  Don’t lock me out, O arum lily. O rose of Sharon, don’t forget me.

  Peter

  She put that letter to one side. She didn’t want to go on with the rest. She didn’t know if she had the strength. A moth batted up against her hand. She nudged it away gently. The witch-fire burned with a red-moon light inside its lamp, wavering. Out in the dark, a nightingale called. There was no answer. The silence waited; went on waiting.

  At last she stood and gathered the letters. She would read them, she thought, when she was in bed. She doused the lamp and went indoors. The air was sticky: the end of summer. It promised no easy sleep.

  Elyse,

  I cannot remember the names of colors. I put my ear to the railroad tracks and hear a rumbling. Something moves under the earth, a light or a dark thing. Do you think that if I die in this place, I’ll go in the ground and find another country, just a little bit dimmer and stranger than this one? I don’t want to die again, Elyse.

  At night here the stars are very thick, and I think that none of the animals sleep. I hear them moving out in the forest. Pacing, clawing; the stir of air when they breathe…

  Distant, silent, surly, beautiful, so-dream-like Elyse,

  Sometimes I think I could walk on this water. The world here is flat and like a dream. I walked on water once before—you remember—the old mill pond—handspan insects—Spanish moss drooping—soaking our socks right up to the ankles. It smelled like a color. Cut vegetables. Herb beds. Dowsing rods. Grave digging. But how could I make the spell last so long here? You’re far from me; I see how far. It just stretches on, the sea. Sea, is what we used to call it.

  I see catamarans out on the horizon. Catamarans: is that the word I mean? Something floating, something with sails. It looked like a cut lily. Then I was homesick, crying for you, but I can’t cry in this country. I make the motion but no tears come. What is the name for that kind of motion? It isn’t a color. It tastes of salt. It’s like and not like breathing. I know you’ll remember the word for it…

  Elyse,

  I woke in the dark green wild of a forest, filled with birds, all migrating…

  It rained for a week, and the birds started dying. The sky up over the fields was blue—not the cloudless blue of an arid August, but a peat-smoke color. Peter’s blue. His eyes had once been almost that color. Elyse waited to feel melancholy.

  The rain was a steady, scouring fall. It turned dirt to muck and washed out seeds that Elyse had planted in the herb garden. She went out to eye the ongoing damage. Her blouse and skirt plastered flat under siege; her hair stuck to her face and shoulders. She wiped the water out of her eyes and saw two dead birds: a crow and a starling. They were lying feet-up by the lemon verbena. Rain had distorted the shape of their wings.

  Elyse scraped them into a cardboard shoebox and brought them inside. They did not smell like anything: not particularly of death, nor even of herb beds. No worms or beetle-marks could be seen. When she touched them, Elyse could feel the echo of witchcraft under their feathers, very faintly. She resisted the urge to cut them open, to check for letters. If every bird had a letter, she thought—all the sparrows and larks, the nightingales, all the geese, every bird that had crawled its way up …She imagined the envelopes moldering in boxes, more than she could ever read.

  The next day she found three more birds in the front yard: three grackles, dead, with storm-battered wings. She picked them up, carried them to the porch by the hooks of their little clawed feet. Over yonder the crust of the earth was upset, by the root of a live oak tree, where another bird was scrabbling to surface. Its curved beak poked up. A kestrel, she thought, or some kind of hawk.

  It was still raining.

  The sheriff came by one morning, early, when Elyse was still asleep. Later she woke and went out on the porch. A milk crate of apples was waiting, and a grocery sack filled with water-stained letters. The apples were small and hard, but sweet-smelling. She rolled one in the palm of her hand. Broke its skin with her teeth. It tasted like autumn, red and familiar. A note on the crate said:

  Hope didn’t wake you. Harvest good. Need t
o talk re: plague of birds. Will swing by later this wk.

  She smiled, and was mystified by the motion. She touched her hand to her lips, her cheek. The smile remained. She finished the apple, bemused, watching the branches of wide trees bow in the rain. She could see on them the tips of autumn, leaves beginning to shine like copper. Soon the whole would be ablaze.

  She carried the apples indoors to the kitchen, thought of pie-making. The letters she left in their bag on the porch. They could hardly get more battered or wet. She left the door open to smell the rain. Clouds shifted on the far horizon. The light got darker, then lighter again. She went barefoot all day, enjoying the feeling, the thrill of the first cold starting to set.

  Nineteen birds died in the garden that week. She picked them up and stowed them in boxes; set them on the porch with the rest.

  *

  It was dusk when the sheriff drove up the gravel. The clouds had cleared, but the twilight was heavy: damp and filled with swollen scents. Elyse sat on the edge of the porch. There was mud on the narrow crests of her ankles. She drank cider cold from a jar in her hand.

  The sheriff approached. He said, “Storm’s broken.”

  “Not much of a storm.”

  “You say that, and yet I got a river over in Woodbine’s been flooding. Water up all the way to the town line. Carrying off houses. Power’s down.”

  “Is it.” She’d never had much use for that kind of power.

  “Funny thing: lot of dead birds in that flood. Not just river birds. Eagles. Cactus wrens. Your fair number of sparrows, seeing as lately we’re overrun.” His eyes strayed to the back of the porch, where the bodies of all the dead birds sat. Elyse had not bothered to cover them over. She had found that the wolves and the foxes and vultures were not interested in them, not unless she took out the heart, took the witchcraft and made them just birds again. They took up a lot of room on the porch. She’d stopped counting them.

  “Seems you have a problem yourself,” the sheriff said.

  Elyse took a sip of murky cider. “Why don’t you sit down,” she said.

  He did: settling long legs on the porch stoop. She offered him the mason jar. He drank from it and grimaced. “Are those my apples?”

  “Put to good use.”

  “I remember them having less of a kick.”

  They sat in silence for a while. Moths moved in the early darkness. A mourning dove uttered a short sad cry and plunged to its death, pale gray and not particularly graceful. Neither Elyse nor the sheriff paid much mind to it.

  “They’ll all die eventually,” Elyse said. “It’s in their nature.”

  “And then? They die, but they don’t go away. Can’t seem to burn or bury ’em.”

  She didn’t know how to answer that statement.

  He sighed. “I was real sorry about what happened to your husband.”

  “It’s the law. He knew the risk he ran.”

  “And you?”

  “The witch woman of Auburn County?” She laughed. The sound rasped her throat. “If you’ve come for repenting—”

  “No.” He drank again from the jar. “I was there that day at the station. You know.”

  “I knew you might have been.”

  “I should have done something. I wanted to.”

  Elyse pushed one bare toe down in the dirt. The rain had left it rich and wet. “They planted quick-tree—witchbane—all around his grave so witches can’t come near. Standard procedure. Can’t even visit.”

  “They don’t want him coming back.”

  “He’s not coming back,” Elyse said. She covered her mouth.

  “No,” the sheriff said.

  She felt his hand on her hand in the dark. Just a touch, nothing more or less.

  She asked, “So what the hell do I do with all these birds?”

  He laughed: a low and gentle sound. “Have you considered witchcraft?”

  “It’s against the law.”

  “I promise not to look.”

  He stood up and turned his back, placing his broad hands over his eyes. A joke.

  “No,” Elyse said. “Look. I want you to look.”

  It was almost night by then, but she could still see his face. He leveled his curious eyes on her. She walked out in the yard and picked up the dove. It was still slightly warm, like a stone in summer, ghosting with heat when the sun has gone down. She could feel the magic inside it, inert.

  “I can’t bring them to life,” she said. “Not in a way you would want. The witchcraft doesn’t work like that. I don’t think they were real birds to start with, you know. Just other things made into flesh.”

  “Sure seem real enough when they’re eating the sweet corn. They’ve got bones and blood, don’t they?”

  “Lots of things have that.” She thought of Peter, lost somewhere on his ocean, long underground. For a moment she felt his lips on her neck, his breath against her collarbone. But he was not really Peter anymore. He was speaking a language, a kind of wolf-language, that she had not learned yet.

  She held the dove up close to her heart. A white glow started between her hands. There was no heat to it, no smell and no texture. Still, it made her flinch. She forced herself to hold very steady. She felt the dove fold up like paper. The weight of it lessened. When she opened her hands, there was nothing in them up pale gray ashes. Fistfuls of ashes, and bits of burned paper. She could see the ink on some of them. She let the wind take them out towards the cornfields. She wiped her hands against the skirt. The air smelled of witching, a mournful scent.

  “There,” she said. “Just wishes and paper. Nothing to it.”

  She looked at the sheriff. She thought he’d been crying. The magic sometimes took them like that. She affected not to see his expression. Men got odd. She leaned against the porch railing.

  “I’ll have to do all of them, one by one. Better to get it done fast,” she said.

  “You want to make a night of it?” His look was not very readable.

  Elyse tilted her head. “You won’t be needed.”

  “I know,” he said.

  After a moment’s pause, she said, “It’ll be a long night, so you’d better come in, then. Have something to eat, find a place to set down.”

  The doorway was still guarded by gunpowder. She broke the line of it as she passed. Later she could take down the cloves, unmark the lead; redo the witching, to keep out what needed keeping out, and keep in what needed keeping in.

  Elyse,

  It stretches so far, this scentless water. Every day I forget and forget. I wave to the flowers that drift in the distance. What is their name again? There was something I promised not to lose. I locked it in the cage of my chest. I can feel it there, like a bright-winged bird. But the bird is restless …

  Elyse

  Elyse. Elyse I. Everyday I think. Elyse. Elyse, Elyse: forget.

  Sometimes a bird still struggles through to the surface, breath coming in unsteady gasps—even in the dead of winter. Elyse finds and carries them in her bare hands to the reed birdcage at the back of the house. They don’t live long. But she feeds raw seed to them, coaxing the life in them while she can. At night they sing (they are all songbirds) and when she wakes, she feels she can almost finish it: the last line of the song they are singing. She feels it in her bones, that coming warmth, the completeness.

  KAREN JOY FOWLER

  –

  Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story

  RAIN LASHED THE house. Fiona heard it, drumming on the roof and rushing through the gutters. A handful of drops hit the window so hard the glass shook. A sudden sheet of light, and there were the black trees at the end of the yard, their branches bare and tossing wildly about. Underneath the window, in the other bed, Dacey was crying, great gulps of agony because the thunder was scaring her and she couldn’t find Moe Bear. Could there be any two twins so different from each other? Fiona’s knees were bent, the covers tented, so that no one would see the lump that was Moe Bear under her legs.

  S
he wasn’t the only one taking things that didn’t belong to her. Nanny Anne was wearing their mother’s locket. The pendant was hidden under her bulky sweater, but she was kneeling now, looking under Dacey’s bed, and Fiona could see the distinctive chain around the white back of her neck. When the time was right, Fiona would return Moe Bear, pretending to have just found him, saving the day. Fiona loved to save the day. She did it a lot. What was Nanny Anne’s plan? No one was looking for her mother’s locket.

  “Nanny Anne is what makes it all work,” Fiona’s mother often said. Fiona and Dacey’s parents were very particular about who took care of their children. “There’s an old soul in that young body. I never worry for a minute. And she’s got a playful nature. The girls adore her.”

  “We never planned on twins!” Fiona’s father always said.

  But sometimes women asked Fiona’s mother if she didn’t worry just a bit to have such a beautiful, young woman in the house. At eight years old, Fiona was already very good at hearing what she wasn’t supposed to hear.

  Fiona’s mother and father had both gone off to a conference to give a paper they had written together and they were both supposed to be home in plenty of time for Christmas. But yesterday their flight had been canceled and they hadn’t been able to book another. Yesterday they’d called and they’d still promised to be home for Christmas, but now Fiona had her doubts. “Let me talk to Nanny Anne,” Fiona’s mother had said, and Fiona wanted to tell them that she didn’t adore Nanny Anne any more, that something was going on with Nanny Anne, but Nanny Anne took the phone away, so she couldn’t.

  Now Nanny Anne sat in the big chair between the beds. The light from the lamp fell on one side of her face, turning her hair from black to gold, making her eyes shine. She was giving up on finding Moe Bear and Dacey was slowly giving up on sobbing about it.