All These Shiny Worlds

by Jefferson Smith

  He pushed some clutter back to make room for the Rudolphs on the kitchen counter.

  “Is this a church project—making cookies for people?”

  She set the platter down.

  “Sort of,” she said and smiled. Why hadn’t she thought of that excuse?

  “Good to know the whole town’s concerned about me,” Ben said. He sounded a little bitter, but mostly tired.

  “Oh, it’s not like that,” Callie said. “Not at all.” The second wave of acute embarrassment made her eyes sting, and she blinked fast.

  “Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m…uh…you know. Really, the girls will be thrilled.”

  Ben walked out of the kitchen. Callie heard him shout up the stairs that everyone should come get cookies. Then he came back and opened the fridge. He pulled out a milk jug, but there was only a swallow left in the bottom.

  He frowned. “Damn.”

  The littlest girl was the first one down the stairs.

  “Cookies? I want five!” She looked up at Callie. “Hi, pretty lady. I want five ‘cause I’m five. Almost.”

  An older girl walked in. “Madisyn, you’re not even four and a half. Jeez.”

  Madisyn’s little face scrunched up, and she ran out of the kitchen.

  “Jazzy,” Ben said, sounding very annoyed.

  “Whatevs,” the older girl said, and rolled her eyes as she reached for a cookie.

  Tiffany walked in. She was carrying the fourth child, who looked to be a bit older than Madisyn. Callie was surprised Tiffany could carry her.

  The little one saw Callie and buried her face in her big sister’s shoulder. Tiffany stopped short and stood there staring at Callie, clearly afraid.

  Callie, in turn, was very afraid of her. Her hands found the edge of the countertop she was leaning against, and squeezed. She hadn’t stood face-to-face with a demon in a long time. It was hard not to edge away.

  “Tiff,” Ben said, rooting around in the fridge. “Are we out of milk?”

  Tiffany glanced at her Dad. “Yeah. I told you yesterday.”

  Ben exhaled in annoyance. “Miss Callie made us some cookies. Everyone can have one. Sorry about the no milk.”

  “Two,” the little one said into Tiffany’s shoulder. The word was muffled, but still distinguishable.

  “All right, Lia,” Ben said. “Two cookies. But that’s it.”

  Lia peeled herself away from Tiffany’s shoulder and reached for the cookies. Rather than coming closer, Tiffany set her down. Lia ran up and grabbed two. She looked down at them for several seconds, then smiled up at Callie.

  “Rudolph!”

  “That’s right,” Callie said. It was hard not to smile back.

  Lia ran out of the kitchen with her treats. After a few seconds, Madisyn came back in, sniffling.

  “I want some,” she said, as though she’d been denied them.

  “You can have two, Madisyn,” Ben said.

  Madisyn’s lower lip trembled, and Callie waited for the call for five to be renewed. But after a few seconds, the child collected herself and came forward. She took two cookies, biting into one immediately, then stood there chewing and looking up at Callie with big eyes.

  “Yummy,” she declared, sprinkling the floor with crumbs, and left the kitchen.

  Jazzy wandered out after her, leaving Callie alone with Ben and Tiffany. Callie stared at Tiffany, and the girl stared back.

  “Can I get you something to drink, Callie?” said Ben.

  “Um, no. I mean, yes. Uhh…some water, please.”

  “You sure? I just made coffee.”

  “Oh. Okay, if you have enough. Thanks.”

  Ben went to pour a cup.

  Callie looked back at Tiffany and gathered her courage. “Would you like a cookie?”

  Tiffany shook her head. Callie had the sense that if she so much as twitched the wrong way, the girl would bolt. She carefully looked away.

  Ben set her coffee down on the counter, then sat down on one of the tall kitchen stools. He gestured for Callie to sit as well and pushed the milk over to her.

  She would’ve taken some sugar, too, but didn’t say anything.

  “So you go to St. John’s?” he asked.

  “No, Calvary Lutheran.”

  “Ah.” Ben looked a bit confused, but let it go.

  An awkward silence passed.

  “How’s the boycott going?”

  Callie shrugged. “All right, I guess. Fewer people have gone in this month than last.”

  Ben nodded. He looked down and stirred his coffee. Callie found herself watching his hands, which were large and calloused. Suzanne had told her he ran Gene’s Building Supply and Lumberyard. She’d never been in the place, but she imagined working there meant handling tools and stone and wood and other rough things, even if you were a manager.

  Ben glanced up at her. His hands looked strong and capable, but in his eyes, he looked lost.

  Callie understood that.

  “It does get better,” she said quietly.

  Surprise crossed his face, then something verging on anger. He studied her for several long seconds. With relief, Callie saw him decide not to take offence.

  “You lost someone?” he asked.

  “Not ‘lost,’ exactly. It was more…” This was difficult to talk about. “It was more that I escaped from him.”

  Ben was watching her intently.

  She shrugged, uncomfortable. “You don’t get over it, exactly. I guess you learn to live with it. Build a life that fits around the fact that it happened.”

  He continued to look at her. She found she couldn’t look away. Finally he shifted his gaze and nodded.

  “You don’t think she’s going to come back,” Tiffany said from across the kitchen.

  Ben and Callie both jumped. They’d forgotten the girl was there.

  “I don’t know that,” Callie said carefully.

  “What about Beth?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a lie. She didn’t know about Beth—not truly. But Callie didn’t think people came back from Hell. Not even good people like Beth.

  Tiffany saw it in her face. She turned and left the kitchen. Callie heard her going up the stairs.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Ben said. “She’s really struggling with everything that’s happened.”

  Callie nodded.

  Tiffany hadn’t eaten a cookie. Maybe she’d eat one later. But no—in the vision, Callie had very clearly been present. She’d felt herself smiling.

  With an unfamiliar mixture of fear and excitement, she realized she might need to visit the Ryder home again.

  ***

  As sometimes happens after you meet someone, Callie ran into Ben and his family several times in the coming days. The grocery store, the gas station, Center Street—they seemed to be moving through Dorf on the same schedule.

  Every time they met up, Madisyn would grab Callie’s hand and start talking to her about some funny little-kid something or other. Lia would smile shyly and hold up a doll or other toy for Callie to see. And Ben would watch them and smile his sad, proud, overwhelmed smile.

  Soon she was finding it difficult to think of the girls as anything other than ordinary children. From Madisyn’s sensitivity to Jazzy’s obnoxiousness, they were so relentlessly normal. She prayed on it but received no new guidance, only repeated flashes of what she’d already seen: Tiffany eating a Sweet-’n’-Salty Rudolph.

  So Callie kept making cookies. Unfortunately, the time never seemed right to show up on Ben’s doorstep with another batch. Instead, every pastor in town got a box of Rudolphs. It was a good thing, Callie reflected, that Dorf had a lot of churches.

  By Christmas Eve, Callie was starting to worry. The vision had begun to fade from her mind. That never happened. Things she saw that way, as a fully-formed sensory experience—they always came true. It disturbed her to think she had somehow disrupted the order of things by not letting the vision play out in
reality.

  As the evening drew on, Callie made herself some dinner and turned on the TV. Miracle on 34th Street was on, as it was most years. She settled down to watch but couldn’t relax into it. Things felt troubled, wrong. In the end, she turned off the TV and went on patrol. Demon activity was the most likely explanation for her antsy feeling.

  She drove around town, looking through windows, down alleys, and behind dumpsters. She saw nothing. The town was calm and quiet. People were doing what you’d expect: spending time at home with their families.

  By the time Callie headed home, it was quite late. In fact, it was probably Christmas Day.

  She felt tired and oddly empty. Patrolling on Christmas wasn’t a good experience. Driving by house after house and thinking about the people inside spending time with their loved ones—it made her feel more alone.

  She turned onto Church Street and was surprised by the knot of cars around St. Mary’s. Then she remembered that Catholics celebrate a midnight mass on Christmas Eve. She slowed and edged past the parked cars that had overflowed from the church’s small parking lot onto the surrounding streets. The church itself was aglow from within. It was, she realized with a pang, just another home—God’s home—where people had congregated with their families.

  She drove on, passing the graveyard behind the church.

  Once again, there was something at the northern end of the property—a small, dark figure.

  Tiffany, she thought. Maybe I should tell Ben she’s sneaking out at night.

  Oddly, she didn’t feel afraid. Perhaps you couldn’t remain afraid of someone when you constantly associate them, in your mind’s eye, with Christmas cookies.

  She drove past the church and pulled over on the shoulder beside the Jensen farm. She reached under the seat for her flashlight, but when she got out of the car, she found she didn’t really need it. The moon was waxing toward full, and the fresh snow that had fallen that morning reflected its light over everything.

  Callie pocketed the flashlight and walked back to the cemetery.

  Tiffany was still there. Once again, she was standing in the tall grass and trees that formed a boundary between the farm and the graveyard.

  Like a wall of life, holding in all that death, Callie thought, then dismissed the idea as rather silly. It was December, after all, so most everything on the Jensen farm was dead too.

  “Hi Tiffany.”

  The girl didn’t react. Once again, she was underdressed. Callie was going to have to get all the Ryder girls some long underwear and boots.

  “You okay? It’s awfully late to be out by yourself. Awfully cold, too.”

  After a long beat, Tiffany said, “I think he’s dead.”

  Callie was mystified. Then she realized the girl wasn’t ignoring her. She was looking up at something. Callie followed her line of sight and saw a thing up in the branches. It looked like a sack—one of those canvas shopping bags.

  “He always comes out when I call, but now he’s not moving,” Tiffany said.

  Alarm washed over Callie.

  “Is something in that bag? A…a creature of some kind?”

  Tiffany nodded. “I found him in the fall. I could feel it from my house—that there was something here that was like us. So I came and looked for it. At first he ran away, but after he got to know me, he liked me. Maybe just ‘cause I bring him mealworms.” The girl patted the pocket of her huge parka. “But I guess the cold got him.”

  She sounded calm and rational, but when she finally turned to look at Callie, her face was wet with tears.

  “Could you check? Could you see if he’s alive?”

  Callie looked from Tiffany to the sack. Reaching up and touching that thing was about the last thing she wanted to do, much less open it and look inside. But she felt she should. Someone was asking for help, and she was the only one there who could give it.

  She licked her lips. Immediately the dry air sucked the moisture away, leaving the thin skin tight and ready to split.

  Tiffany was looking at her.

  “Okay,” Callie said. “Okay, let me see if I can reach it.”

  She stretched up and touched the sack. There was no reaction. She put her hand on it more firmly. When nothing moved inside, she began to pull the sack off the branch it was hanging on. It didn’t come easily. A dozen little twigs seemed to reach out and snag it on purpose.

  “Did you put this up yourself?”

  “Yeah,” Tiffany said, “in October. I could see he was getting cold, so I put a bunch of old scarves and mittens and dry grass in there and hung it up.”

  Callie worked the sack slowly off the end of the branch, then lowered it. She wanted more than anything to hand it to Tiffany, but that didn’t seem right. Tiffany was only a child.

  She stood there holding the bag, so frightened that she thought she truly wouldn’t be able to make herself open it. But in the end, she opened it and looked in.

  She couldn’t see anything. The inside was full of darkness.

  Callie looked up at Tiffany, but the girl just stared back at her, her face a horrible mixture of grief and hope.

  She couldn’t do it, Callie realized. Tiffany couldn’t be the one to reach into the bag and touch the dead body of the little friend she’d made.

  So Callie did it.

  If you asked her, years later, what the bravest thing was she’d ever done, reaching into that bag would be the thing that popped into her mind but went unsaid because it sounded so silly.

  She felt fur, soft and dense. She was touching some small, fluffy animal, like a rabbit.

  It felt cold.

  “Tiffany—”

  It moved a little. Callie jerked her hand out of the bag with a yelp.

  “Is he alive? Did he bite you?”

  “Yes. No. Hold on.”

  Callie reached back into the bag. The creature again moved a little when she touched it. Slowly, she slid her hand under it and pulled it out of the bag.

  It wasn’t a rabbit. Callie wasn’t sure what it was. A small monkey, maybe, or some kind of ‘possum. It was curled up in a ball, its feet and face all tucked in together under its body. It shifted slightly and sighed, as though in pain. Something small and wet touched her hand. It had licked her.

  Without even thinking about it, she unzipped her down coat and tucked the little animal inside.

  “Come on. We have to get it out of the cold.”

  She headed back to her car. Tiffany grabbed the fallen bag and followed her, asking over and over if the creature was going to be okay.

  ***

  Callie turned away from the stove, leaving the pan of milk on a low heat.

  Tiffany was sitting at her kitchen table. The creature was curled up in a box in front of her with a heating pad and a thick shawl. It was starting to move sleepily and make little chirruping sounds. Its fur was a strange silvery color that seemed almost to glow under the kitchen’s fluorescent lights.

  “What do you think it is, Tiffany?”

  “Some kind of lemur. I looked online when I found it. See how he has such big eyes? That’s for seeing in the dark. And he has fingers too, just like us.”

  The creature did indeed have fingers. Very long, thin, creepy fingers.

  “They’re for catching bugs,” Tiffany said.

  At that moment the animal opened its eyes. They were a brilliant shade of lime green and improbably large, like golf balls. In the bright light of the kitchen, its pupils shrank down to the size of poppy seeds.

  The creature looked up at Tiffany and made a soft chirring sound. She reached into the box and started petting it.

  “It’s from the other world,” Tiffany said.

  “Are you sure?” Callie said. “It could be an escaped pet.”

  Tiffany shook her head. “Its essence feels like it came from far away.”

  So the girl was a tracker, like Zion.

  “How do you think it got here? Through the strait that was open in the spring?” Callie suddenly rea
lized she was talking to the child as though she were one of the blessed. “Um…do you know about that?”

  “Yeah. Beth told me. Something came throughthat was hunting my mom, and that’s why she has to stay in New York for now.”

  Callie blinked. Beth had told the girl quite a bit.

  “I think Fluffy belonged to Bob,” Tiffany continued, “that big white gorilla thing that used to live in the cemetery. I think Fluffy was his pet. Bob was furry enough to keep him warm in the winter.”

  “Fluffy?”

  Tiffany shrugged. “That’s what I call him. Anyway, I guess Bob left him behind, for some reason.”

  Callie contemplated the incongruous idea of demons having pets. She wondered what, if anything, the demon lemur could do. She hadn’t felt any essence-working capacity in it when she touched it, so the answer was probably nothing.

  She heard the milk on the stove approach boiling. She got up and made two cups of cocoa, then set them on the table.

  Fluffy had nestled down against the heating pad and gone back to sleep. Tiffany sipped her cocoa with one hand and petted him with the other. A comfortable near-silence filled the kitchen.

  After a few minutes, Callie remembered. She got up and lifted the latest batch of Rudolphs down from atop the fridge, pulled off the plastic wrap, and set them on the table. She sat back down and, after a moment, took two cookies for herself.

  Tiffany took one as well.

  “These are really cute,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Are they always chocolate?”

  “They don’t have to be. You could leave out the cocoa powder. Then they’d be more like sugar cookies. Would you like that?”

  “Yeah,” Tiffany said. “But these look really good, too.”

  She turned the cookie over in her hands.

  “Callie,” she said hesitantly, “do you think you could keep Fluffy over the winter? So he doesn’t freeze?” She glanced up and then quickly lowered her eyes again. “He’s not loud or messy. And I can bring you these to feed him.”

  She pulled a puffy plastic bag of yellowish mealworms out of her coat pocket and set it on the table.

  Callie looked at the worms, which were wiggling sluggishly.