She looked over her shoulder and down at me. In the gathering dark, her eyes glowed. Without any warning, she sprang up and launched herself towards me. I yelped. I tried to catch her, but she slammed right through my outstretched hands. The thump of her body against my chest threw me to the ground on my back. Only the cushion of my hair prevented me from cracking my head against the pavement. For good measure, she dug her claws into my sweatshirt and hissed at me, as though the rough ride had been my fault. I swatted at her. “Fucking hell, Butter! Get off me!”
She did. She leapt and pounced onto the back of something low to the ground and snarly. The something reared up to stand on two legs. Oh, gods. My haint. “Butter!” Today it was a troll. At least, that was the first word that came to mind at the sight of it. If Butter hadn’t shoved me off balance, it would have grabbed me by the legs.
Butter had dug her claws into the haint’s back. It tried to drag her off. Nothing doing. Then the cat really got busy. She spat, she snarled, she clawed. She had puffed up to three times her size. She nearly took off one of the haint’s clutching fingers. I tried to reach for her. A woman passing by pulled her young daughter by the hand and made a pointed detour around me. “Don’t look,” she told her little girl. “Those people are always brawling in the street, like dogs. It’s a disgrace.”
The haint turned to face me and opened a fanged maw. I could smell the spice of its breath. I backed away. Butter jumped down, bounded off the ground right back into the fray. She was like a fur ball of pure hell, leaping everywhere, hissing and scratching. She was only about a fifth the haint’s size! My water gun was under the seat in the van, just around the corner. Could I make it there and back before that thing bit Butter in two?
Butter decided the question for me. She sank her teeth good and proper into one of the haint’s limbs. It yelped like an injured dog. It shook her off and bounded right into the traffic on the Esplanade. Horns honked and brakes squealed. A car fishtailed. Its driver fought for control, managed to bring the car to a halt halfway into the intersection, facing diagonally across both lanes. By the time the dust had cleared, the haint was nowhere to be seen.
Butter rubbed herself affectionately along my leg, then sat to lick her pale yellowish-beige fur clean.
“I suppose you want me to thank you now,” I said to her.
She ignored me. She was working hard at getting her right shoulder as clean as possible.
“C’mere, let me make sure you aren’t hurt.”
Instead, she stayed where she was and calmly waited for me to come to her. I scooped her up and examined her as best I could. She seemed OK, but suppose that thing’s claws were poisonous? She might have a light scratch that looked like nothing until the poison worked its way into her body. Crap. “I’m going to have to take you home,” I told her. Last place I wanted to go.
Butter yowled something scornful-sounding.
“Yeah, yeah, thank you,” I replied. “Thank you very much for saving my life. There. Happy now?”
For answer, she fought free of my arms and jumped down to the ground.
“Fine,” I said. I pointed in the general direction of Abby’s place. “Go home on your own then.”
She glared at me. She yawned, stretched, turned her back on me and pounced on a small yellow maple leaf that was blowing by at street level. She chased it, doing her catly best to look as though she weren’t obeying my order. I called after her, “And don’t you dare tell Abs where I am!” She pretended she hadn’t heard me.
Brie peered around the corner. “You talking to someone?” He looked in the direction I’d been yelling.
My hands were trembling. Aftershock was setting in. Two haint attacks in a matter of days! What was up with that?
Brie came over. “Were you talking to that cat?”
“Kinda,” I said sheepishly. “I know her. She’s my sister’s cat. She’s always following me. C’mon, help me find her. I need to take her back to Abby.”
But Butter was nowhere to be seen. Bloody cat. “Let’s just go back,” I said to Brie. “She’s probably home already. I’ll call Abby to make sure.”
Brie and I took the workbench up. Climbing the stairs with the heavy weight made my head throb. But we were done. My bed had gone against one wall, the box with my sole pillow and my sheets—only two sets of them—on top of it. My clothes and shoes were in five garbage bags piled onto the bed. My nightstand. Three boxes of books. Two boxes, spilling open, that held my tools. My Dremel in its hard black plastic case. My workbench. And five boxes of assorted junk. It still looked empty in there. I didn’t even have dishes. With an Oof! Brie put his end of the bench down onto the floor. “Ouch!” He pulled his hand away and sucked at the base of his thumb.
“What happened?”
Scowling a little, he looked at his hand. “No biggie. Caught it on the corner of the bench. Barely a scratch.”
“I’m so sorry. Maybe I have a Band-Aid somewhere around here…” I looked for my purse.
“Really, it’s no thing. But what the hell was in those last five boxes?”
“Materials. I make altered art.”
“Whosie what now?”
“Altered art. I turn other people’s junk into pretty things. Well, I think they’re pretty, anyhow. Sometimes I make them into windups.”
“No kidding! Got anything in there that you’ve made?”
“I’ll show you later. Gotta take the van back.”
He was giving the room the once-over. “So,” he said, “When’d they let you out of the nunnery?”
“I know. I’ve never lived on my own before.”
“For real? You sound like one of those chicks who go straight from Daddy’s house to living with a husband.”
“No!” I blushed. “I mean, that’s not the plan. I’ve been living with a re—a friend, is all. Most of the furniture is hers.”
“A girlfriend?” he asked carefully.
“No. At least, not in the I-date-women sense of the word. I told you, remember? With my sister.”
He nodded. “Right, you did. I can be a little spaced for a couple of days after a show.”
All right. So we’d established that I was neither a gold digger nor a lesbian.
“Who’re these little girls?” he asked, pointing to the image glued onto cardboard that I’d rested on the bed for the time being.
“They were singers. They were called Millie Christine, as though they were one person. But they were two separate people, born joined together.”
“Wow.” He stared at the black-and-white photograph of the two teenage black girls dressed in beautiful Victorian gowns, each with a ruffle of black lace at the throat. They stood proudly, apparently back to back, in their pretty dresses and black buttoned boots. “I didn’t notice it before, but that’s just one big skirt for the two of them, right?”
I nodded. “One dress with two bodices.”
“They’re pretty. How come you have a picture of them?”
“It’s just a photo I like,” I replied. Because weaker Millie could lift her legs off the ground and the stronger Christine would carry her, I thought. Because Christine was like me, except she, like her sister, could sing. “They were born in the nineteenth century. They were slaves all their lives.”
“No shit. From Canada?”
I shook my head. “From the US. But they were friends with Anna Swan.”
“Who?”
“Canadian giantess. She used to be on exhibit with the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Millie and Christine were bridesmaids at her wedding. I have some other pics somewhere in one of these boxes. I’ll show them to you when I find them.”
“All of Christine and Millie?”
He’d said Christine’s name first. Another point in his favour. “Nah. Of Chang and Eng, of the Biddenden Maids, and a few more. All conjoined twins, pre–twentieth century.”
“Conjoined? That’s like Siamese twins, right?”
“Yeah. They just don’t call them that any
more.”
“You got a thing for freaks?”
Now I wasn’t liking him so much. “I guess you could say that. Listen, you’d better go.”
“Wait. Did I say something wrong? Your voice got way frosty all of a sudden.”
“It’s just that… well, it’s like a white person calling us niggers, right? Some of us might say that word about ourselves, but white folks had better be careful how they say it.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. But it’s not like I said it to anyone’s face.”
“You said it to me.”
He stared at me for a beat or two, and then his eyes went wide with comprehension. “No way! You mean, you and your sister…?”
I nodded. “Way. They separated us, though.”
“Christ, and now you think I’m a jerk.”
“Little bit, yeah.” I chuckled at his stricken look. “Which just makes you claypick—human. Don’t sweat it.” I could finally display my collection openly. Abby thought it was morbid. One by one I took the framed pictures out of the box and put them on the bed. “Radica and Doodica, India, nineteenth century. Rosa and Josepha Blažek, Bohemia, twentieth century. No, wait; they were the nineteenth century. Daisy and Violet Hilton, UK, early twentieth century. Giacomo and Giovanni Batista Tocci, Italy, nineteenth century. Ritta and Christina Parodi, nineteenth century, Sardinia. Eliza and Mary Chulkhurst, the Biddenden Maids, England, twelfth century. Blanche Dumas, nineteenth century, Martinique. Technically, hers wasn’t a case of conjoined twins; she had a parasitic twin.”
“That sounds creepy.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. It’s when someone is born with part of another body attached to them.”
“How is that not twins?”
“The second body is incomplete and, as far as we know, unaware. They’re often born without heads.”
He made a face.
“Oh, it gets stranger. Blanche Dumas’s twin took the form of a fully formed extra vagina and two tiny extra breasts fused onto Blanche just above her own coochie. Girlfriend was doubly talented, and she loved using what she had. There’s even a rumour that she made it with this guy”—I pointed to the picture of Juan Baptista dos Santos—“and you can see why she might have been curious about him.”
Brie boggled at the image of the famed “Man with Two Swords.” “Holy…”
“I know, right? Ah. Here it is!” I’d reached the bottom of the box, where I’d put my favourite T-shirt to help protect the glass in the picture frames. I pulled the black T-shirt out of the box and shook it open. “This is the pièce de résistance!” I turned the shirt so that he could see what was on the front of it. On it were five small words: “What Would Millie-Christine Do?” Below that, a line drawing of the image of Millie and Christine that I’d first showed him. He burst out laughing.
“You like it? My sister gave it to me on our twentieth birthday.”
“You are something else, you know that?”
“I gotta tell you, I do know that.” I checked the time on my cell. “Shit. Gotta go return this van.”
“OK. You like beer, right?”
“Yeah, why?”
He smiled. “See you when you get back.”
When I dashed into the rental place, the woman behind the counter smiled at me. “Just under the wire! A couple minutes more, and I’d be charging a heftier fee on this card.”
I gave her back the keys, and she started filling out the paperwork. Now I just had to work out how to get hold of Abby’s next credit card statement before she did, so she wouldn’t see the charge on it. That was going to be tricky with me living somewhere else. “All done?” I asked the woman.
“Yup, we just have to do a once-over of the van, make sure you brought it back in the same condition you left it, and then you’re all squared away”—she looked down at her forms”—Abby.”
I clattered up the Cheerful Rest stairway and into my unit. Oh, damn; Butter! Was she OK? I called Abby.
“What?” She sounded right cranky. This was not going to go well.
“Is Butter there?”
“Yeah, she came home about an hour ago. Why?”
“No reason. Is she all right?”
“Did something happen to her?”
“Maybe, I don’t know.” I didn’t want Abby to know I’d had another haint attack so soon. I thought quickly. “Um, I was at a convenience store, buying a chocolate bar, and when I came out, there she was, following me. You need to get her to stop doing that.”
“Just tell me what happened to her, please.”
Lessee, another cat? A raccoon? No, that’d mean rabies shots. I didn’t hate the dang cat enough to put it through that kind of pain. “A flowerpot fell on her. From a stand outside the convenience store. Some guy jostled the stand as he went by, and the pot was right at the edge. He didn’t even notice what he’d done.”
“Oh my God! Was she hurt?”
“I don’t know. I tried to get a look at her to see, but she ran away. I’ve been hunting for her all this time. I’m glad she made it back home! You might want to, you know, check her out.”
“I’ll do that right away.” She’d seen my room, I could tell. There was no mistaking the defensive sullenness in her voice.
“ ’Cause if she has a cut on her anywhere, it could get infected.” I was babbling.
“Your room’s empty.”
“Yeah, well, I meant to call you about that before this.”
“At first I tried to convince myself that an exceptionally tidy and considerate troupe of thieves had inexplicably removed everything from only one room of the house. The one that had almost nothing of value in it.”
“You don’t need to be so sarcastic about it.”
“I knew it had to be thieves, because my very own dear sister would never just sneak all her stuff out of her home when I wasn’t around and leave me not even so much as a note.”
“Abby, I’m—”
“No, she’s far too mature for those kind of high jinks. And she’d never, ever think of doing such a thing the day before our father’s funeral!”
Her voice was rising. Not good. I replied, “But it’s not. Not really. You heard what Uncle said; that wasn’t Dad.”
“Are you really so heartless?” My ears rang with the mojo-powered oomph she’d put into those terminal sibilants. “Didn’t it look like Dad lying in that hospital bed to you?”
“Abs, watch it with your voice. Remember that time you punctured my eardrum?”
“Answer me! Didn’t it?”
“Yes, I guess.” I held my cell away from my ear and frantically clicked the volume control down.
“Did it make you grieve at all to see even his discarded body lying there?”
“Of course I’m grieving!”
“He’s still gone, Makeda! And now so are you, and you didn’t even leave me your address!” I heard her loud and clear. I dropped the phone onto my bed and covered my ears, but much of the sound was still getting through. “Gods above!” she shouted, her volume powering higher on each word. “Sometimes you make me so mad I could just—!”
There was a crackling sound, then my phone went silent. Cautiously, I picked it up. I talked into it, holding it well away from my ear. “Abs?”
Nothing. My phone was fine, but she’d blown hers out. On average, she had to get a new phone two or three times a year. At least she’d saved me from having to finish the conversation. Phew. I plumped myself down onto my bed and waited for my ears to stop ringing. I knew this wasn’t going to be the end of it. Abby didn’t give up so easily. Maybe she’d be calmer when I saw her at the funeral tomorrow. It really was for the best. She would get that eventually.
I surveyed my new domain. My stuff looked lost in the huge space. I’d never had this much room to myself before! I set about opening boxes and finding places to put things. I needed some shelves. I’d noticed some scrap wood out back. Maybe I could use it to make some.
And where were my sheets? I wanted to make my bed. I co
uldn’t remember where I’d packed them, so I opened a box at random. Inside was a sproingy mess of partially knitted yarn, puce in colour. Puke was more like it. A few weeks ago I’d gotten it into my head to teach myself to knit. I was trying to live within my means, and the yarn had been cheap in the local thrift store. It was good quality, too; some kind of fancy wool, like camel hair, or yak underbelly, or some damned thing.
I dragged the mass of it out of the box. The ball of yarn to which it was attached shook loose, hit the floor, bounced, and rolled a few feet. Along with it fell two fat knitting needles that landed on the floor with a gentle clinking sound. I held up the already-knitted part. It was supposed to have been an afghan, maybe for Dad. I hadn’t decided. Man, was it ever hideous. I’d given up on the pattern directions when I got bored going round and round in the same raised herringbone in itchy puce wool with flecks of yellow in it. Whoever’d thought to put those two colours together was only slightly less insane than I’d been for buying the yarn in the first place. And there we had it; Makeda dis-completes yet another project.
The afghan flopped, its far edge hitting my feet. Sucker was big. And, now that I looked at it, almost done. Why’d I stopped? But that was me all over. What was the last thing I’d ever seen through to the end?
I was out of yarn anyway. Fucker was heavy, too. The yarn had been thicker than the pattern called for, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, right?
It would only take maybe another half hour to finish the thing, and a few ounces of yarn. But no way was I going to spend money on a hobby right now.
I scoped out my stuff. Stacks of tumbling cardboard boxes, crap spilling out of them; the arm of a sweater here, a wodge of paper shopping bags there. I heard the skittering in the walls again. I would need to get big plastic tubs with lids for keeping my stuff from being made into mouse nests. A nature deity’s daughter had to be unsentimental when it came to pests, or our house would have been nothing but a big mound of mouse shit and cockroach eggs from all the little critters that wanted to get close to Dad. To my mental list of need-to-gets I added some mouse traps to bait with smears of peanut butter. Plus some peanut butter. A trip to the nearest grocery store was in order.
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