Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

Do you know that city? Where the woman takes the wood?

  A little. We’re not allowed in places like that.

  Places like what? Like Weatherhead?

  It recoiled at the name. Uh-huh.

  What does that mean? He groaned in frustration. It took a step away from him. Look, I need help. I don’t understand why—I need to know why I’m here—what I’m supposed to do?

  You should listen to Love, if it’s on your side. What more do you need?

  An outside perspective.

  Maybe we should just have sex. People’ve been having sex with buildings for millennia, did you know that? It fetched its gaze about the empty plain. No one’s looking—

  No. Are you a building?

  Imagine what you lot might call a haunting, right? ‘Kay. Now, take away the building and I’m what’s left! ‘Lararia meandering, tell us oft what thou doth desireth—‘

  You’re a ghost.

  Pshaw! Not even close. No such things.

  Whatever. I get it. You’re no help at all.

  Not here. No. Sorry. Flash a coin, I get all worked up!

  What do I do, he cried, flinging himself down onto the ground, what did I do? Why is my house here? Our house! Why is it here? His fingers raked through the dirt.

  For the wood, it said softly. With a worried glance at the crippled house, it leaned forward and touched his shoulder. It is simple, it said, you must give what you wouldn’t, what you didn’t before. Before this Weatherhead business.

  What, to her? Why should I? That beast is not my wife. She’s a monster.

  No one is born a monster, and I’ll tell you a secret that the Aftermaths keep to their selfish selves: no one dies a monster, either.

  It’s all a dream, then?

  If it were a dream, we wouldn’t be here now. It peeled off its billows and beckoned with an eternal finger. Its body was pasty white, hairless clay, without a sign of genital. It looked like lightning rent in the surrounding dirt, a flash in a nightmare. A single coin.

  He jumped up, ran to the well, and dropped the penny in it and ran as fast as he could back to Weatherhead. He dared not be caught outside the city once night came to this terrible, terrible place.

  ⧜

  He now remembered his cruelties.

  The first time he’d been unfaithful to her, was about a year after their wedding. So, with a flippant kind of guilt, that self-assured smugness that makes the unfaithful seem all the more ridiculous when unveiled, and which usually continues after revelation anyway, that sense that however he’d done right by himself, he’d, according to someone somewhere, done wrong by Maggie, he brought her home a present for cheating on her, a kit for learning the art of pressing flowers. It was called Petal to the Metal.

  Why this? Because she hovered about the fringes of a certain kind of craftiness, that which drew her frames out of wood, the way she tucked her pencil behind her ear, tip of her tongue out, the way she smoothed the ruler out when she plotted angles, as if it were made of paper, not metal, she’d tear out crossword puzzles sometimes and fold them into shapes almost always unrelated to the words she’d leeched out of the cells there on the paper, rabbits and boats. Almost always. Sometimes the shapes were ships, faces, and tiny girls, all because of her way and he needed to distract this magic she could wield of pulling meanings out of things other people couldn’t.

  “Why this?” She took the book from him and smoothed the cover down as if it were made of metal, not paper. “Huh.” She studied the first few pages. “I forgot about that, puttin’ em inside a story like that. I used to do that when I was a little girl. Man, I forgot about that until just right now,” she laughed up at him, but her eyes were so sleepy. “Oh, gosh, what was the book?” She knuckled her eyes. “Ah, shoot.” She looked back down at the flowers sitting on a page in her lap. Her fingers brushed the page. “O wither o winter,” she whispered. He watched the vertebrate poking out of the back of her neck ripple with these words. He hated her in that moment. Before he had met her, sex had felt like conquest; now it felt like slaughter. Where once he’d paraded his milks from girl to girl, now there was almost a palpable curdle when he emptied himself onto them. Why did men love such knots? What gave them such power as to make such acts of betrayal occur in magic, invisible rooms? Or was it just him? Maybe it was because of her. His lusts were of an equal vintage to her innocence. Why drown in the one and not the other?

  She circled a hand around his ankle as she turned the pages. How dare she be so lovely in that moment? There were so many midnights bundled up there in the storehouse of the nape of her neck that he either wanted to sink his teeth into it just then, or cup it with his palm. He felt a rush of clarity jolt up through him, and in that moment he knew three things that he’d never known before: he felt guilty; he loved Maggie Mechaine; he hated Maggie Mechaine.

  His crime drew him out further. Why, he suggested, she could even start a little garden off the back of their brownstone, grow flowers to flatten. Pathetic, he thought. The woman he’d screwed just ago had been one of those peculiar graveyard-shift gargoyles, one of those people who forget everything, one of those people who eat ice chips, maybe 10 or 15 years his senior, and as he looked down at his wife, all he could think of was that other woman’s warm, stripping tongue, her tangled hair, tomb for pencils, and the way she got off from the recently held-up diner by propositioning him close to dawn, in a parking lot and she lived nearby, by foot, the impressions her feet made in the terrible carpet inside her trailer were claustrophobic footprints, she instinct alone, nose buried below, mouth starving, he at once disgusted and disguised, the whole place a stain on the world’s crotch. Why this, she had said in her sultry/sullen voice as he clapped his hands to her stomach and back and flipped her over onto all fours. Because he couldn’t stand the sight of her chewing gum while they fucked nor her incessant swearing and gasps as he measured her dying by sliding his haruspex in and out of her greasy stall door. When she came, a moment he collected and classified for every woman he ever slept with, she made a sound as if a bubble of air, or maybe her gum, had become lodged in the back of beyond in her throat and she spent a good half a minute trying to expel it as she shuddered.

  Maggie turned a lop-sided smile up at him. “I could grow some m’self, yeah. Winter just takes ‘em away, though. The year should end with fall.”

  “Then,” he replied, having snuck home with a feeling between his legs that invoked for him the constant image of rotting cheese, “you can do it all over again.” Which he would, he knew.

  “Maybe. Yeah. That’d be nice.” She closed the book and put her palms on it. “Thank you,” she shyly said, “I like it. Gooey and I can play with it.”

  But what if we could do the same thing, but with faces instead of flowers?

  Hush now, sweet Weatherhead. A dream is not a constellation of string to be unbound, the stars just knots. Rather, it is a pleasant sensation of being-the-nothing-but we bind it even more tightly around our waists like belts, our chests like bandoliers, and our eyes like blindfolds.

  So, you did love her, even then?

  How could I have? And done the things I did? Please, leave me to be the nightwatchman alone—

  Who is afraid of light and lightness.

  He found flowers in his movies already. He had never been much of a reader either, more of a casual classicist, rounding out century’s best lists. Most of his stories were filmed ones, limiting her floral pollution, so when he slid the tape out of its sleeve, a darkly enchanted plummet of pinks and reds would blood-blossom around his feet or in his lap. He turned at a giggle. Maggie’s niece was staying with them for the weekend.

  “We are,” she told him with an officiousness that made his ears tingle and shrink, “playing Hide Beautiful Things. Aunt Maggie says you’re really good at that game.”

  He tried to laugh but only made it halfway. He was perfect at that game. But how could Maggie know? The child, she must have been seven then, stared at him for a long time, han
ds on her hips. “You’re supposed to say, ‘I’ll go hide Aunt Maggie, if that’s the case’!”

  He climbed to his feet, “I’ll go hide Aunt Maggie, if that’s the case! Where do you think I should hide her?”

  “She said it’s gotta be inside a storybook, in a story. Cuz that’s where the pages keep it secret and keep it safe.” He flung her around his neck, yoke, and they set off to find the fox.

  The prey in question sat bone to blossoms’ body, hips deep in petals. She and the niece had reaved the florist shop a few blocks down. Heavy metal filled the room. She didn’t hear them enter. She was sitting stock still, her eyes fixed on some indeterminate point amongst the sea of lovely, enchanted by some magic he could never even imagine, by something so primeval and lost that he and she were not even dots afloat in a vastness—they were the vastness.

  “I am here,” he announced, “to hide you.”

  She started as if asleep. He’d shrugged off most of that off-palm against vein feeling from the day before when he’d laid with that other woman. This void had not been filled with a like aftermath of Maggie. Indeed, as the shades of the other woman began to wear off, he desired another even more, the way one finds veils erotic, or blindfolds, or fogged-up windows with matching handprints left on them, wanted to coat himself in that other woman. Maggie could never be—

  Fox, Queen of the Royal Secret of the Kith and Kin of the—

  Quiet.

  “I want you to be a mommy!”

  Maggie’s face brightened and her eyebrows shot up. “Me too! And I hope she looks just like you! An’ she might!” She looked at him with a sad look. “Where are you going to hide me?” And from her piercing blue and the fall of her face, he saw that somehow she could read his thoughts, that he’d hide her in the center of a field of rushes and rolling winds where no one would ever see her excepting old wings on their way to buzz the scarecrow. All exposed there under all the weathers: in fall, she’d wilt and sag; in winter, she’d be covered in snow; in spring, she’d weave a new dress out of the green grass; in summer, she’d make love to the sky above and her sweat and fuck would be like honey, thick and excruciating. But she’d be alone.

  What kind of music is jailor’s tears to the dying?

  No, not a prison. I wanted to keep her—

  Nothing ever dies the same way. Did you know that?

  Or loves. Nothing loves the same way either. This is why I failed.

  Their niece was long asleep and it was cool and early October, that midwife for autumn. He’d hid Maggie next to him, in the end, on the bench on their tiny back porch. She’d even broken out her winter’s arsenal, her shabby, plaid wool jacket.

  He felt oddly serene next to her. It felt good, this having an affair. She didn’t even notice, did she?

  They swapped spit on the end of a joint. She didn’t like to have that in her around Gooey, so she waited until the little one went to sleep in the little bed her aunt had made for her in her room.

  “I remembered that book, the one I put flowers in. It was called Runaway Rhymes and it had this cute little picture of a little boy in it, running away from home I guess, with a little puppy dog. I think my granpa musta given it to me ‘cause it was pretty darn old. I remember the spine of the book, it was all comin’ apart and the blue, the blue strings inside looked like blue hair, an’ we had had to be all careful when we were lookin’ in it. My brothers never looked at it that much anyhow, though it was more of a boy’s book. It had King Arthur n’ all in it but the one I really remember really well was there was some little stories or poems about Robin Hood in there an’ especially the last part when he dies, I don’t even remember how now, but when he’s layin’ there dyin’ he gets somebody to open the window and he shoots an arrow outside ‘cause he knows where his grave is gonna be and his last—the last thing he says is, ‘Bury me there’ or somethin’ like that. And I thought it was so sad and scary that he knew, maybe forever, he knew where he’d end up, to the point that he could shoot an arrow straight to where his dead body would go. Shoop! Just like that.” She traced an arc before them. “Right to the signpost for his grave. And,” she closed her eyes, “An’ I just remember feelin’ really sad for him layin’ there like that ‘cause I thought everybody ran out to find the arrow and he was, like, all alone there, layin’ there dyin’, so I put, ha, I put some flowers in there. I remember—they were red ones, roses or somethin’—and I pretended I was his wife, some dumb little girl thing, and I was the only one who stayed there with him ‘cause I didn’t care where he’d end up, all I cared about was bein’ with him when he went.” She fell silent. “I wonder if I still have that book somewhere—maybe I gave it to Louis.”

  He had nothing to say.

  “Huh,” she continued, “kind of a funny book for kids to be readin’. All those King Arthur stories—all the killin’ and knights runnin’ around, what’s-his-name sleepin’ with the queen—“

  The Queen of the Maraud and the Red Ditch, the Queen of the Angels Sick of Heaven—

  A.S.H. That woman in the diner wasn’t that old, was she?

  Old enough that you never went back. Who was next after her? The girl made out of water who worked in the doughnut shop? The bored one? The one who you had to take out a few times before she’d—

  “—another funny one. It was King Arthur, too. Some lady in a boat.”

  Shalott, he thought.

  “Ain’t it funny how silly those stories all seem when you’re bigger? People killin’ other people over love, kingdoms and castles all fallin’ to pieces over some dumb guy and some dumb girl doin’ what they shouldn’ta.” He stiffened. “An’ the women all end up nuns and hidin’ away from the world.” Her light, little laugh came from somewhere deep down, below her heart. “But, I guess there’s somethin’ to it all, maybe. Everybody just wantin’ some kind of beautiful life, lookin’ for it, always lookin’. Life ain’t no romance novel. I just want—where’s the beautiful things in our stories? I hope—they’ll all come after the end, maybe. The stories only seem beautiful, maybe, to the people readin’ ‘em later. Prolly seems kinda shitty at the time, right? Oooh, I’m dyin’, open the window—funny thing is he didn’t wanna like look at the sky or listen to the birds or whatnot, he just wanted to show everybody that—dwoing!— he knew, he knew, you know?”

  He said nothing.

  What was under the table that day when she came back?

  “Me, I wish I knew somethin’. Not like where I’ll die or whatever. But,” she drew her coat around her, “where we’ll be when—I dunno. Will our kids be with us when we die? Will people be afraid to touch our hands layin’ there in the coffin? I was always afraid of that.”

  “You say all that,” he half-joked, “making it sound like we’re gonna die together?”

  She squeezed his knee suddenly, scrambled for his hand, and smiled up at him. “Naw. I hope not. I mean, that’d be nice. Not bein’ alone. But that ain’t gonna happen, I guess, just in stories. Do you enjoy me?”

  He was caught off guard by this question. “Yeah—I—“

  “Don’t like, it’s ok. I’m not anything,” she emitted a short, silent laugh, her chin was teeming with her smile, “a nobody, I guess, but that’s okay, I’m just like everybody else maybe. I’m not pretty or really smart—I don’t do things—I don’t do things you like—I do things you don’t like—I dunno—“

  He swallowed. Not 24 hours before ago he’d been brutally invalidating everything that their life together stood for, in every position possible. Confronting his wife’s sudden, sanguine appraisal of all her myriad faults or lacks was something currently beyond his powers because, frankly, he didn’t care. The thrush and spanker of his so-not-ago tryst still whet the backs of his ears and all he could think of as she spoke was whether or not he’d scrubbed himself sufficiently clean or not yesterday because he wanted to have Maggie right then and there—she was a creature of the late hour. Oh, and she could never have oblivion. How could she? She was replete,
he saw now, complete. She was at the whim of everything because she could be: it was her height, her depth. No, there could never be any oblivion for Maggie Mechaine. She was too colossal in her quiet. No way to tell her, assure her—

  There are, though, in Weatherhead, many ways to tell her.

  “—why I never thought I’d marry anybody. Don’t get me wrong—but that’s why I said no. I never liked the idea of bein’ constantly responsible to somebody. And now—now I don’t feel that at all the way I thought I might. The way I might want to now, to feel that. You know what I mean?” She stretched out on the bench, legs out, arms up.

  “Sure,” he lied. He could see that her shirt had holes in the armpits. What was it with her that made her so beautiful at this moment? Bared and simple, she was in that instant, laughing softly at her own weakness, indifferent without disdain to her own confessed lacks, her heart was laid open to him, a murmuring passion, craving for him to love her. She was devoid of all emptiness in that moment.

  She perched herself between his legs, staring out into their tiny yard. She had two faint red berms of hair that dripped down out of her reds. His mother had always praised these faintnesses in her daughters, saying that hair on a woman where it shouldn’t be was a sign of strength, vitality.

  She leaned back against him. “Fuck, I’m so tired, my eyelids feel like those things that lower coffins down into the graves.”

  He suddenly became angry. How could she act like this on this of all days? Smack of death and dying? Be so grave of heart? With his peculiar rage, the air shifted about them: “Maybe if you didn’t spend half the day high and the other half the day laying around in your underwear—“

  She jumped a little and shot him a black look. “You asshole. You make me sound like some kinda lazy bum. I work. A lot. I own my own business and I’m only 23.”

  “No, it was given to you. You didn’t earn it.”

  “Oh, right. Like me an’ you.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “Given,” she thumped her chest, “not earned.”