by Andy Cox
I grabbed a can. Already its coppery weight felt so much better than any candy-coated pixie stick. On the ragged bit of label, I could make out the word ‘Hospital’ in bold, black letters. And higher up, typed in fainter print, was a name. ‘Maisel’.
“Amber, check this out.”
“You fucking promised.” For once Amber was looking straight at me.
“Explain why again,” I said, striding back with the ‘Maisel’ can in my hand.
“Dad left them here. When they closed the hospital, they didn’t even bury their ghosts. Just left behind all that ash. He was the only one who cared. Well – knew how to use them,” she amended.
The light bulb above Amber drew strange shadows across her face. Still, there was something funny about her expression. Sadness maybe? Anger? Euphoria, as well. The girl was ready to burst with it.
“Looks like he already opened some of them.” I grabbed Amber’s can opener and gave the ‘Maisel’ can a quick shake. Even before I cracked it open, I could feel the ashes inside, just waiting for the two of us to say hello. “What’s the worst that could happen?” I said, grinning.
Amber stared at me, but didn’t answer.
***
Despite Amber’s rules, turns out swallowing ashes works just fine, no snorting necessary. Ghosts really aren’t all that fussy.
That first time I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Amber though, her hand trembled as she held the red-and-white straw to her lips.
“Old souls take me away,” she mumbled, and then tilted her head back, swallowing the contents down in one long slide. She didn’t even bother with a sugar chaser. Almost immediately her face seemed to harden, her skin flushed a bloody red, her lips pinched and cracking. When she spoke her eyes looked far too dark. “Your turn, dearest.” The laugh that followed was a gritty rough sound, nothing like my Amber.
I sucked in my own strawful. It was like being rinsed clean, my own thoughts tossed aside as I slipped into someone else’s groove. Forget indulging in her sad-sack games. Maisel and I had another agenda.
Amber didn’t look angry anymore and she didn’t look scared. Her entire torso trembled, as though under the thrall of some kind of palsy. She stood in the middle of that damp basement, the musty scent of mold filling her nostrils as her eyes rolled and her cracked lips bled. Meanwhile, my own body was getting warmer, burning up. No shakes, though. No spirit visions either. Just heat, as though the energy from Amber’s shaking body was combusting me from the inside out. My hands reached for her, tearing at her T-shirt, her jeans, at that thin piece of cotton between her legs.
“Don’t worry, baby,” Maisel said, using Amber’s voice. “I still like to fuck.”
Maisel, it turned out, was good at transporting things – one piece at a time. He wasn’t the only one. But Maisel was the first. A fragment of Amber traveled through to the other side with our very first hit of ash. Fairy tale transformation ragged piece by ragged piece.
***
“Amber…” I leaned toward her, brushing the hair away from her face. Even in the dim, morning light, I could see the bruises along her neck. My own body was no better: nail gouges across my lower back crusted and stiff, across my cheeks as well.
“Don’t,” Amber said, wiping a thin coating of ash from her lips.
“Sunstone?” a voiced called from the top of the stairs. “Are you down there?”
Footsteps followed and then the click of an overhead light.
Amber’s mom kept her eyes on the desk and the three open cans, rather than our own blood-and-bruised selves. “I told you they could help.”
“Sometimes. They haven’t taken you anywhere,” Amber managed to shoot back.
“They will. Of course, they will. It was your dad’s fault. He’s the one who told them to keep me out.” Mrs Destros glanced our way, not quite catching our eyes, then turned and headed back toward the stairs.
“She always was a burnout,” Amber whispered.
And then, just like that, Amber and I started laughing, Maisel too, his voice ice-cold as it exited my throat and lungs. The other ghosts joined in: Josephina with her blood-red scream – and little Wallace. Only a boy, Wallace, stayed mostly silent, just wanting to draw more of those black cartoon elephants on the basement floor.
It was a matter of moments and a two-dollar can opener, and then Amber was taping another paper straw, shaking out another bit of ash onto the water-stained desk.
“Maybe this time they’ll take me all the way through,” she said, always the true believer. Her magic, fairy tale ending just one ashy, line away.
Me? I was too busy reaching for her naked and bruised body to even notice.
***
Outsiders think of Portland or maybe Salem as the heart of Oregon, but the truth is it’s the empty stretches that hold our state’s deepest secrets. Oregon’s fairy tales are dry and brutal, scattered with dust.
I wasn’t the only one. Most people miss the important things. Few have even heard of Oregon’s sunstone. One of those seemingly worthless gems that people think are best left below the ground. Amber’s mom wasn’t entirely wrong. Shine them up just right and the copper platelets in those sunstones look exactly like the sunset flecks in Amber’s eyes.
Don’t know how I missed it. The girl was a goddess even before she finished traveling through.
And me, I’ve lived in Oregon long enough to finally learn some of her secret truths. Drive those vacant, mid-state miles and eventually you’ll find her. You’ll find them all: Josephina, Maisel, even sweet little Wallace. Amber’s copper eyes are shining out from each of those unwanted Oregon rocks.
Waiting.
Perhaps one day, if I drive long enough, I’ll find the way through. Perhaps Amber is trying even now, trying to show me the way to her secret path.
***
Julie C. Day graduated from the Stonecoast M.F.A. program. She also holds a masters degree in microbiology. By day Julie writes IT documents, as well as documents of the more clearly fictional variety. Either way she works while standing and with a regular infusion of tea. You can find Julie online at www.stillwingingit.com and @thisjulieday.
CRIMEWAVE
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Christopher Priest • Stephen Volk • Joel Lane • Kristine Kathryn Rusch • Melanie Tem • Tim Lees and many others
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Crimewave 13 coming soon
SONGS LIKE FREIGHT TRAINS
SAM J. MILLER
Illustrated by Richard Wagner
“I’m worried that a song will never again change my life.”
My husband doesn’t look up from his phone. Windshield wipers flick water away as fast as they can. Autumn, full dark; driving to Albany to our daughter’s first dance performance. He is dressed up, scented, slightly uncomfortable. We rarely wear nice clothes. Three minutes pass before he says “You’re not going to give me any more context?”
“So you are listening.”
“I am.”
“Because…you don’t look like you’re listening.”
He smiles, sets the phone down, leans sideways to aim an ear at me. I’m not mad at him. Not really.
“That never happened to you? You heard a song on the radio or at a party, or you went to a punk show, and you knew you’d never be the same?”
“Sure,” he says, his voice all Christine-you’re-not-thinking-things-through. “But that’s not necessarily a good thing. The only reason a song or movie or book can change your life when you’re a kid is because you don’t know who you are. Because you’re so uncertain or unhappy or scared that you’ll grab onto anything.”
“That’
s a good point,” I say, because it is, because he is full of them. The phone comes back out. I want to say so many things. I say none of them.
Instead, I turn the radio on. I keep one hand on the wheel while I dial through layers of static. Occasional squawks of pop and classical, Christian bluster and NPR calm, settling on some harmless barely-remembered rock jangle.
Silence blooms between us; the easy silence of the long-married. Except lately I wonder how easy it is. Whether this calm peaceful comfort I feel when we’re together is something we share, or is all in my head. What he’s looking for, when he looks into his phone.
And then, over the fade-out of one song, a too-familiar series of chords. My chest has time to tighten, before—
***
“For all I know everyone can do it,” Ariel says, her mall-dyed hair bright as fire in the candlelight. “But I don’t think so.”
Wind rattles the glass in her windowpanes. The house is old, big, bought by Ariel’s freight-train magnate father, full of ghosts and sounds and furniture terrifying to trailer-park-raised me. We are sixteen. My skin prickles, as if from a sudden temperature drop – as if, an instant ago, I was somewhere else: somewhere warm, dark, safe, dry in spite of rain. A faint whiff of man lingers in my nose and then is gone.
“You need to start with a song you have a really strong childhood connection to,” she said. “Preferably one that you associate with a vivid sense memory. Like, a song you heard at the county fair, while eating fried dough. Something like that. Understand?”
“I guess,” I say, thinking frantically.
“It has to be something we can actually listen to, here and now,” she said. “The Beatles are best. Because my parents have all their albums, and I bet yours do too.”
“They do.”
Kurt Cobain looks down on us from a dozen posters. His death is a raw fresh wound that throbs whenever I make eye contact with his image. I am still a little bit scared of my best friend: her wisdom, her fearlessness, her hunger. Her money. She is a marvelous specimen of a separate species. A witch. A monster. So I wasn’t surprised when she told me she had trained her brain to travel through time just by listening to music.
“Okay,” I say. “‘Octopus’s Garden’. The day of my grandma’s funeral, my mom played it a lot. And she had taken back all this catered food from the funeral home, and there were these slices of ham, and I ate like a million of them.”
“Off of Abbey Road,” she says. “Perfect. We’ve got that one. Wait right here.”
When she is gone, and I am alone with the Kurts, I stand up to stretch my legs and then casually explore her room. Every time I come here it has transformed: there’s a shrine now, before a mirror, with a stack of women torn from magazines, and a circle of ash where she’s fed their sisters to the flame. And a tiny steel rectangle: the razor she uses only on her inner thighs, now, where no teachers can see and call her parents.
“Jesus, Christine,” he says, switching the music off, jerking the wheel from my hands.
“Wh—” I start, and then stop. I don’t know whether I want to say What happened? or Where am I? or Who are you? And then the present comes crashing in, Ariel’s bedroom fading like the bad dream that it is. I am married, I am a mother, I’m inching towards forty.
“What the hell is wrong with you? Thirty seconds of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and you go into a fucking fugue state?”
The car settles into a stop. The wind shrieks, rocks us.
“Sorry,” I say, shaking. A weird rare form of epilepsy brought on by music, I told him, long ago, when we were first dating, at a party, when a song made me trance out so completely that I collapsed mid-dance.
“Do you need to see somebody about this? A neurologist, or something? It’s getting worse.”
“No,” I say, foot to the gas pedal. “No. I’m fine. I’m just tired. I haven’t been sleeping so well, lately. Because of her.”
He grunt-nods. Our daughter is sixteen. A smart, beautiful, talented nightmare. She has changed us; made us better and worse. Me more than him.
“There’s a convenience store up ahead,” I say. “I think we could both use a cup of coffee.”
In the thin light from strobing streetlights overhead, the years can’t be seen on his face. He is still dashing. Still desirable. Men leave for lots of reasons. If I got sick, or lost my job, would he bail on me? Does he see the new inches at my midsection? Does he dream of finding a pre-motherhood me?
When he’s inside, I switch the radio back on in time for the final thirty seconds of the song.
***
“Oh my god that is so weird,” I say, clamping both hands over my mouth, which is full of the taste of funeral ham.
“It worked?”
I nod. Ariel shrieks in delighted triumph, throws up her long lean arms. “I didn’t know if I could really do it. Teach someone else.”
‘Octopus’s Garden’ bleeds into ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, my least favorite song on the album. But even that one feels too raw, too real, now. For the first time I am conscious of the incredible weight of a song, how much power is contained inside of it. What a song can do to you. “Magic,” I whisper.
“Not magic,” Ariel says sternly. “Science. There’s a method to it. Anyone can learn. It’s a glitch of the brain that I accidentally figured out how to exploit.”
“And nobody in history ever knew about it before you?”
“Maybe they did. Maybe everyone can do it, to different degrees, and I just have a particular sensitivity, and figured out how to crank it up. You need to keep practicing those thought exercises I taught you, on your own. It’s a skill, like playing the piano. Pretty soon you’ll be able to do some amazing things.”
I nod. She presses buttons, and the taut taunting guitar line of ‘Come As You Are’ starts up. A freight train wails, in the valley far beneath us. Rolling slow through the scattered trailer parks where my parents will be wondering where I am.
I am me, still. Now Me, Married Grown-up Me, alive and conscious inside Teenage Me. An observer; along for the ride. Shocked at the strength and joy and fear inside this little body. Frightened of the love I feel, still, for Ariel. The conviction I would follow her anywhere.
“An artist committing suicide is, like, tampering with the space-time continuum,” she says, looking up at Kurt Cobain. “Think how much shittier music will be now, without him. Think how different music would be, thirty years from now, if he had stayed alive and kept making music.”
In two weeks, she will be dead. She’ll hang herself from the high bare beams of that old and haunted house. She will tamper with my space-time continuum.
***
The song ends. He is still in the store, on line, behind three teenagers. Trying to keep from looking at the cigarette display case. I lift my fingers to my face and smell, still, on my hands, the expensive soap of Ariel’s bathroom.
It wasn’t always this bad. In the years after Ariel’s death her magic trick – her scientific skill – got stronger, got worse, as I went deeper. I practiced the tricks Ariel taught me, the concentrations and the repetitions. Sense impressions like scents spread, until a song could conjure up whole scenes. My passion for music was such that I couldn’t stop myself, couldn’t keep from wading further into the river of Ariel’s magic trick. Because it was always magic to me. As much as she rationalized it as science, a form of elaborate self-hypnosis that allowed the physical re-experience of past memories, for me it was always time travel, sorcery, with all the terror and transgression that entailed.
By college a concert was dangerous; by thirty I had stopped listening to my favorite albums. Because there was no telling what wild and desperate moment the Pixies or Prince might plop me back into. Every time I heard a song, it added a whole new set of memories – mix tapes on midnight road trips, summer evenings sitting drunk on the porches of rented beach houses. The winter circle of firelight; autumn rain in the garden. Every listen added another car to the freight
train, and every listen after that could spin me back into any of them.
His phone is still on the seat. I switch it on, scroll through his recent stuff. I don’t know why. Or what I hope to find. There are no dating site apps, no browser history of Craigslist hook-up posts. He reads the news, his RSS feeds. He scans the social media statuses of friends we no longer see. Life is very sad, I think, seeing a comment he left on a photo posted by his childhood best friend.
My daughter thinks there’s something wrong with me. What kind of person doesn’t love music? Doesn’t ever play records? Leaves the room when a song comes on; gets anxiety about supermarket shopping because you never know what will come on over the in-store radio? She doesn’t know about my sorcery-science, or even the epilepsy cover story. She thinks losing your passion for music is something that happens to grown-ups when their hearts die. I want to protest the unfairness of this – it’s not that I have no passion, it’s that I have too much! But sometimes I’m not entirely sure she’s wrong. What’s the difference, really, between abandoning the music you used to live for because it no longer moves you, and abandoning it because it moves you too much? Does everyone reach a place where a song can no longer change their lives?
“Hey,” he says, handing me my coffee. Dark and sweet, perfect.
***
We drive in silence. I watch the road, he watches his phone. A new pack of cigarettes sits on his lap. Looking guilty, he slips it into a pocket. My love for him has sharpened, suddenly, into something I haven’t felt in a long time. Not romantic, not sexual: something deeper, purer, more terrifying. A child’s love, greedy and primal, coupled with an adolescent’s certainty that this person can make me the person I am meant to be. I feel her in me, the child I was when I knelt in Ariel’s bedroom amid candles and careless heaps of thrift-store clothing, the first truly safe place I’d ever found. I feel all over again how desperately and helplessly she loved her best friend, that girl I used to be. I want to cry. I try to take deep breaths. I can’t. I remember her, Ariel, so terrified of change she’d choose death over entering adulthood.