Mrs. M.: Of course there are more, Mr. Rossier, countless throughout history. These are just the ones who fall under my purview at the moment.
Me: Okay. Who are you?
Mrs. M.: I am Mrs. Meadows, Mother of five.
Me: How do you know all this, the circumstances of my wife and her death?
Mrs. M.: You’ve not even made the leap to believing in your own power. How can you expect to believe in mine?
Me: It doesn’t matter what I’ll believe. Tell me. Otherwise, this is over, and that is a promise.
Another long pause. Then:
Mrs. M.: I am a practitioner of the black arts, Mr. Rossier, using many varied types of arcane magic in an effort to help people. Years ago, I experimented with allowing certain individuals to really “see” themselves for the first time, thereby enabling them to admit to certain fatalistic traits. I did this by showing them a sort of reduced reflection of themselves. I resurrected my five children, tethering them to a temporary life with ribbon the color of midnight, and sent them to their targets with a kind of script in their heads to guide them.
Me: And then?
Mrs. M.: They performed said missions. They were returned to a restful state by the severing of their ties.
Me: How did your children die initially?
Mrs. M.: That information has no bearing on what we are doing here, so you have no need to know it.
Me: Did you kill them?
Mrs. M.: No.
Me: Who were these individuals, how did you find them, and how were you made aware of their “traits”?
Mrs. M.: Their names are unimportant here. I learned of their ways by spying on them, of course, them and many others. Those were just the five I thought I could help.
Me: And it was only five because that’s how many dead children you happened to have lying around.
Mrs. M.: Is that a question?
Me: This is: How did you spy on them? How did you spy on me?
Mrs. M.: I have what some refer to as a “third eye”. I can send it out virtually anywhere I want, even through electrical wiring. It searches. It watches.
Me: Right. Bullshit, of course. But if it were so, why me?
Mrs. M.: I sensed—or “saw”, if you will—great power coming from your direction.
Me: Sure. So tell me about my vast critical-mas power.
Mrs. M.: The power is not so much a radiation as it is a magnet. A great PULLING IN.
Me: You mean it sucks.
Mrs. M.: Yes, after a fashion. Imagine this: You’re a poor man living in a ramshackle house, you need money desperately, and, hey, you might as well shoot for the stars and hope for ten million dollars. Your imagination grasps the image of someone you know, or at least whose face you know, who has such a fortune. Donald Trump, for instance. The chances of him deciding, on his own, to send you ten mil right out of the blue are so miniscule that they don’t even show up on the probability radar, right? So, you picture Trump stepping into a huge library of telephone books. He locates the one for your city, opens it at random, closes his eyes, and stabs his manicured finger down on the open page. On your name. He draws up a certified check for ten million dollars and mails it to you. Voila!
Me: Right.
Mrs. M.: Again, the likelihood of such an occurrence is so incredibly small as to be nonexistent. But. The power. That awesome magnet can actually pull the likelihood of it up, up past the realm of the possible, the probable, and into the It-Is-Happening-As-We-Speak.
Me: That would be a lot of suckage. It’s also a load of horseshit, five miles high.
Mrs. M.: Then try it.
At ten thirty yesterday morning an overnight FedEx arrived from Donald Trump. Rather than a certified check (No way was I going to do exactly what Mrs. Meadows suggested—and wouldn’t I just show her!), it contained four large glossy photos. The first, of his first ex-wife, Ivana; the second, Rosie O’Donnell; the third, Barack Obama; and the last, news anchor Megyn Kelly. Each face in each photo was embellished with a nicely scrawled Snidely Whiplash moustache.
Mrs. M.: It’s time for you to wrap up what you’ve done and move on to what you’re going to do.
Me: I’m not going to do anything. Tell me about the shrouds.
Mrs. M.: Fine. As it’s time for wrapping up, that seems apropos. You put your wife in a shroud with your imagination, your dark miracle. The other kind of miracle—the kind you expected that Christmas Day—is all about wellness, happiness, and/or prosperity. Dark miracles are about shrouds. Death. And while that seems pretty bleak, a certain degree of wellness, happiness, and/or prosperity can spring from them as well. Even a dark miracle is, after all, a wish come true.
Let’s address the lines: “What are the odds that you are the one?” I can’t be wrong, Mr. Rossier, can I? Are you, in the case of Heather’s mole, the one? We control freaks often get so tunneled in our vision, don’t we?
“Is your path to discovery meant to be run?” Of course. To remain ignorant is to deny your self-entire.
“The wounds of love and war do bleed.” Obviously, you know that.
“Name a method, a means, a way to proceed.” This you will do in the next phase.
“Everyone you know has a tag and a plan.” A tag is a name you go by, or that I go by, or those closest to you. And we all have plans, whether we realize it or not.
“‘Sees the truth, I do,’ says the sailing man.” The sailing man was my husband, a great man, a great teacher in the ways of practical magic.
“Sewn into the fabric of the night.” That fabric, and the ties that bind it, contain the lessons taught to me, some of which I will instruct you in, by way of the apparatus you are currently using. Your computer.
“To begin in the black is to begin in the right.” Further instruction from the late Mr. Meadows.
“Her fate is but a peeling, a flick of your wrist.” You know that.
“Imaginary outcomes are done with a twist.” Ditto.
“Shrouds, at burial time, receive their fill.” My husband filled his, my children filled theirs, your wife filled hers, and you know the basic stories behind the other women here. Each of them had a sender. YOU are the fifth and final case, and after we tend to you and your future, I can go and fill my shroud.
Me: My future is mine to tend to alone, woman. Go and fill your shroud.
I shut down the computer at about noon yesterday. I spent the rest of the daylight convincing myself that none of it happened, and a good portion of the night realizing it had. Questions and comments popped in my head like kernels of popcorn, but I resisted the urge to return to the computer, not so much because I’d given up the gluttony. No, this was punishment, a new punishment, a self-torture that sang to me in sweeter and more painful tones, more painful than punching walls.
Sunday. This morning. I began the day’s pacing, and at some point, I noticed that Mr. Trump’s absurd gifts were not on the kitchen counter where I’d left them, nor were they anywhere along the usual traffic routes in the house. I peeked into my bedroom, and then into Kenny’s. He slept, snoring lightly. The eye-catching angles of blue, orange, and white of the FedEx envelope, balanced on a stack of compact discs, caught not only my eye but also my breath.
Kenny slept on.
I crossed the room, snatched the thing up. Looked inside.
Empty.
When the deliveryman handed the envelope over to me the day before, I’d given the label only a cursory glance. Now I brought it up nearly to my nose and read it.
Mr. Kenneth Rossier
Another memory: A bright and beautiful Saturday with little puffballs of clouds decorating a deep-blue sky . . . the kind of day Heather always said was made for bike rides and backyard sex. Baby Kenny sequestered in the playpen, Mommy and Daddy rolling around on (and within) a red-checked blanket, laughing and moaning in turns . . .
and, hey, suddenly there is Baby Kenny, pacifier dangling from one chubby hand, a clump of lawn clenched in the other, inexplicably free of his baby jail and standing over Mommy and Daddy, sprinkling them with brown earth and green grass . . . and he laughs.
Kenny?
I went to my desk and found my scratch-paper scribblings (What Is the Name Everyone Sees Sewn to Her Imaginary Shrouds) and checked the beginnings, and the beginnings of each of those beginnings. Letter by letter.
W-I-T-N-E-S-S T-H-I-S . . .
And then the women’s names: Dahlia, Elizabeth, Abby, Trina, and Heather.
D-E-A-T-H . . .
What are the odds that you are the one?
Mrs. M.: You do have a power, Mr. Rossier, but it is small compared to that of your son. I was wrong—tunnel vision even in the third eye. I’m truly sorry.
Me: But why would he do what he did?
Mrs. M.: Imagination. That’s all it is. As a baby, he picked up what you sent out, the images and the results, and then he pulled it all into reality. Quite without malice, I’m sure. Look at it as if he were the camera and the film, while you were the lens. Or as if he were the loaded cartridge, and you were the gunsights.
Me: Could Kenny wish Heather back to life?
Mrs. M.: No. Far too late for that.
Me: But why the stupid Trump FedEx?
Mrs. M.: Again, he got it from you, just as he did the poisonous mole image.
As I said at the beginning of this thing, the truth hurts. And sometimes its sinking in is slow, caustic. The time between comprehension (staring idiotically at the FedEx label) and the plea for answers (from Mrs. Meadows), I freaked.
I thought of suffocating Kenny with a pillow, then thought, No, stabbing would be better, and I even ran to the kitchen for the knife. I thought of torching the house with both of us in it. I thought . . . well, I thought of a lot of things, but that isn’t really thinking. It’s reacting.
So I started actually thinking. That led me back to the laptop, and after communicating with Mrs. Meadows, I thought some more. That led to what I’ve written here.
My continued thinking has led me to this: I—or rather we—cannot bring Heather back, cannot, in fact do a whole hell of a lot about the past. But, together, Kenny and I can do a considerable amount about the future.
Sure, Mrs. Meadows, I could be a lens. I could be gunsights. With a little training, I could also be a scalpel. Or better yet, an eraser.
You were right: we all have plans.
And there are miracles.
Watch out, cancer, you life-sucking fucker, a new day is dawning!
Speaking of which, Kenny’s up now. I hear his door opening.
I wonder what he’ll think of my pla—
Lockjaw
David Annandale
The following story held us because of the compelling voice of the narrator and the gradual rise in tension and expectation of where things could eventually lead. New writer Annandale weaves his story together with the heavy threads of obsession, faith, delusion, and dread . . . and we have a feeling you will not soon be forgetting this one.
Gil Wainwright winced. How could this hurt? he wondered. Rough passes of charcoal on paper, a cat’s cradle of jagged smudges. Dirt and wood pulp, nothing real, a representation more suggested than actual, so how could it hurt? Still facing the easel, he shifted his gaze away from the sketch, focused on the light switch on the wall. “What . . . ” he began. He paused, put care into the question, tried again, “Where do you see this going?” he asked his wife.
“I’m going to paint it,” Judy said. “Black and white. Some airbrush. Not quite photo-realistic, but . . . ” Her voice, stick brittle, faded with her confidence. “I have some X-rays I’m going to work from,” she said in a tiny whisper.
Gil looked at the sketch again, his eye movement involuntary. A jaw yawned at him, stretched beyond wide, a jaw of bone and teeth and nothing else, the gape taking up the entire height of the paper. Though Judy’s charcoal lines barely hinted at the connection between upper and lower sets of teeth, Gil had the sense of a steel spring poised at the last edge of tension before snap-down return. The sense of the teeth was already strong enough for him to feel atavistic twitches in his gut. The jaw was not human. It wasn’t animal. It was, somehow, the concept of teeth given form. Gil didn’t like the idea of photo-realism adding weight to that form.
Judy said something else, her voice so faint this time that he couldn’t catch it. He turned around to face her, and now he felt a different sort of pain. “What was that?” he asked.
“I thought maybe a study. A series.” Her eyes, shadowed in the deep hollows of fatigue, were staring at the floor.
Now, Gil, what do you say? God is testing you here, seeing just what your mettle is. And what was the purpose of the test? Was it to humble him? To make him question how good a shepherd he was? How could he minister to his flock at the church if he could not properly tend to his own home? He pushed the questions away. They weren’t his to ask. The test was only his to pass or not. The reasons would become clear later, or they would not.
(Thy will be done.)
That’s nice, Gil, but what do you say? Judy’s waiting for something. Just what do you make of her project?
(It frightens me.)
How do you react?
(Gently.)
“It strikes me as . . . well, it’s quite dark.”
Judy nodded.
“Is that what you want?”
Judy nodded.
“I guess . . . ” fragile dancing, eggshells to the left of him, land mines to the right, “ . . . the series doesn’t seem . . . inspirational. Exactly.” He held his breath, worried he’d pushed too hard. What really worried him was not that the paintings wouldn’t be inspirational. What gnawed was wondering what the source of the inspiration was. Wondering just who was whispering to his wife’s heart.
And Judy nodded again. “These days, I’m . . . I’m finding it very hard to raise my eyes.”
“Heavenwards?”
That nod. And her eyes floor locked.
“You shouldn’t be afraid to try. God is smiling on—”
“I just feel so dull,” Judy interrupted.
“The medication?” The question was stupid. He knew the answer. He’d seen the film come down over her eyes when the regime started. “It’s just for a little while,” he tried to comfort. “Only until you’re better.” Only until you’re better. Even he was disgusted by the platitude, fed by the doctors to him, fed by him to Judy. The words were an indefinite prison sentence dressed up as comforting vagueness. But he had to cling to them as if they were a biblical promise. They were the hope that he would get his wife back. The wife whose creative energy, even when he didn’t entirely approve of it, pushed them both to new levels. The wife whose questing was her own.
Judy made a gesture with her left hand, part wave, part shrug, the half-formed language of frustration and despair. They hadn’t turned the lights on in the studio, and in the descending gray of dusk, Judy made Gil think of a phantom, fading into the evening limbo of pain. “The pills won’t let me work.”
Gil noticed the agency she granted the pills. Medication in the active voice, drugs with their own agenda. Should he start worrying about that too? “You mustn’t stop taking—” he began.
Judy shook her head, a sharp jerk of terror. “No. No, of course not,” she said, and Gil felt stupid for having opened his mouth. Her fear of the consequences of going off the medication was worse than his. Much worse. The fear was why she had the prescription in the first place. Now she looked at Gil and he saw the film lift from her eyes for a moment. He saw urgency. Need. Clarity. “I can do this series,” she said. “It’s in me, and it wants out. I need to do this.”
“You think it will help?” He wasn’t encouraged by any of this.
“I don’t think I have a choice.”
He wanted to ask her what she meant by that. He wanted her to explain herself. But even more than that, he wanted to avoid the answers she might give, answers that would force him to take a stand as a Christian and a minister, and he simply did not have the courage for that right now. He did not want a confrontation. He did not want to do more harm than good. So he took the better part of valor. “All right,” he said. He reached out and gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Work it out. Do what you think is best.” He smiled encouragement.
She didn’t smile back. She looked past him to the easel, her eyes glittering with uncertainty, a woman about to confront an enemy. Maybe she was right, Gil thought, maybe the paintings would be a form of catharsis, a purge. Maybe she was on her way back to health, and before long she would be channeling her creativity back toward the ministry, back toward paintings that would gather, inspire, lift up. Gil had always felt uncomfortable with art. It was too undisciplined, too unpredictable, too subject to temptation. Some of Judy’s work years ago had struck him as worrisome. Especially when she had worked briefly with nudes. He had done what he could to shift her interest toward the church, and that had seemed to work. Her murals were Sunday school gold mines, and her work with the children, getting them to express the truth of their lessons, was genius. Maybe she would be able to return to those efforts.
Maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
In the next room, Lisa began to cry. Judy tensed, eyes widening with strain. Gil squeezed her shoulder again: Calm down. It’s all right. “I’ll look after Lisa,” he said. “You get to work in here.”
His wife—dry, dry sticks in the second before the snap. But she didn’t snap. He felt her muscles turn to taught cables, and then a slight release. “Thank you,” she said.
One more squeeze, and Gil left to take care of their daughter.
Lisa’s diaper was wet, but she stopped crying almost as soon as Gil lifted her. He carried her into the bathroom to change her, and her fingers curled around the lobe of his ear, the uncoordinated touch of a month-old infant’s absolute trust. When Gil felt the brush of her tiny hand, the bottom dropped out of his stomach, and his knees almost buckled with love. As he cleaned her up, he looked down at her, into her eyes that looked back at him with an openness so beautiful his throat tightened, and he had no thought of the taut jaws on Judy’s easel. All he could think of was wonders and miracles. All he could formulate was thanks.
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