Sip

by Brian Allen Carr

Bale hung his head, all his energy dripping invisibly from his disheveled Mohawk, draining out like woe.

  But then, miraculously, Jessup returned.

  Cut the Ropes

  Mira hugged Jessup and Rondell when they unlocked the cell door, the stink of this embrace impossible to convey with words, but you could almost hold the way it smelled, all that traveling and discomfort. Could regard it like coinage.

  “You can show us the machine?” Jessup said.

  “Yeah,” said Mira. “Just hang on.” She crossed the room, reached out and pulled the machete free from Doc’s face and held it—old blood dried against it like wax, Doc’s eyes open, staring at some point beyond any true place.

  “Now hold the fuck on,” said Jessup. “We did y’all a solid,” he said. So much fear in his voice Mira could’ve sharpened the machete against it. “We’ve saved you from in that cell.” Dead Clover lay bled out there, his nudity going bloat.

  Mira was confused until she realized the weapon she held. “No,” she said. She rolled her eyes. “Bale, turn around.”

  Bale did, eyeing Jessup as he turned. “Fucking pussy,” Bale said to Jessup, and Mira cut the rope from his wrists and Bale shook his hands and stretched and thought about taking fists to Jessup’s ribs.

  But Mira grabbed Jessup by a hand, led him and his father outside into the day’s harsh sun. The machine was covered by its tarp. She untied a cord at the base of it and pulled the thing free. The legs and arms dangled from their hooks, rocking gently with the inertia of their reveal. “Have at it,” she said, and Jessup helped his father to the shade on the sand, and he slurped up a bit of it and rolled off into a deep slumber and Jessup smiled goofily down at him, pawed his silver wisps of hair.

  Mira and Bale went back inside the jail. Murk’s blood had gone back to red. He slumped on the ground in the mess of it.

  “We should bury him,” Bale said. “I think that was the word.”

  “No,” said Mira.

  “It was something like that,” Bale said. “Digging holes for the dead. Covering ’em with dirt.”

  “That’s the right word. I’m just not burying him.” She touched Murk’s butchered up hair. “Some other time, maybe. But right now, he can stay this way.” Mira leaned down and claimed her Dutch oven. “A world with two suns,” she said to Murk. She frowned up at Bale. “It’s time to go home.”

  Home

  “That was Jessup?” Mira said.

  “Yes.”

  “And that was Jessup’s dad?”

  “It was.”

  “And the redhead is dead.”

  “And the comet came and went.”

  They moved across the same terrain that they’d traversed to get to the Town of Lost Souls, but they stayed silent for the most part, passing the landscape with contemplative eyes.

  Mira carried her Dutch oven in front of her like some wounded thing, and the lid rattled metallically.

  They came to Mira’s home the next morning, and it looked the same as it always did—a shaggy thing hunkered back in the camouflage of ancient tree limbs—but there were a few additions. A lifeless chicken rested in the yard, its feathers yellowed out with death, kicked free by whatever, the wings sprawled in skeletal fashion, plumules drifting in the morning light, clung up on grass blades like frosting. Beside that bird, a young nanny goat with no shadow wandered bleating odd noises, stepping spasmodically, kicking chicken feathers.

  As they approached, they saw Mira’s mother in her chair, her feet propped on the ancient TV, deeply asleep, drool dangling from her bottom lip, shiny like candy.

  Mira chucked her pot, and it banged on the lawn, and her mother slept through it, so Mira walked to her. “Wake up,” Mira said. She shifted her weight. “Wake up!” But still her mother slept.

  Mira shook her. Grabbed her by her shoulders and rocked her hard back and forth until her mother’s eyes opened, shocked and red. “Mira,” she said. “You’re home.”

  “How’d you get by, Mom? How’d you sleep?”

  “What?”

  “Without me here to hunt you shadows?”

  “I don’t . . .”

  Mira lifted her mother and dragged her toward the goat pen, her mother’s feet kicking dirt as she dragged her, and Mira called to Bale. “Get me a goat.” The world sped up.

  “What?” Bale said.

  “Get me a fucking goat, Bale. From the pen. If you want to live here you have to help me. So get me a fucking goat.” Mira’s voice full the way oceans are full.

  Bale ran off to the goat pen and struggled back a goat that brayed and fought him.

  Mira looked down at her mother, at her chalky face and victim-thick eyes. “You’re gonna suck this goat shadow off the ground and I’m gonna watch you suck it and that’s the way it’s gonna be from now on and it’s gonna be fair and I won’t hear you say otherwise.”

  Her mother’s mouth dropped into some peculiar configuration and her eyes seemed spat into. “What I ever do to you?”

  “Nothing, Mom. You didn’t do shit. And Joe Clover didn’t either. And Murk didn’t get shot. And Bale’s brother’s not dead. Because everything’s fair. So tell yourself whatever you need to hear, but make it fair just like everything else. Make up some story or some God to help you understand it, and believe it, because once you’re done making it fair, I’m gonna watch you suck that goat shadow and then we’re never going to talk about it again. It’ll just be a thing you do. Every day before sunset. We’ll get you a bed out by the pen, and that’s where you’ll sleep, or we’ll figure out some better way, but I’m not hunting shadow for you ever again.”

  Mira’s mother was almost offended by the goat Bale restrained and she made to cough up her mantra, “It’s not . . .”

  But Mira just screamed, “Make it fair!” And she lowered her face so close to her mother’s it seemed she might bite her eyes. “Is it fair?” Mira asked, and the few inches between them seemed to fill with imaginary sparks of Mira’s hatred.

  Sometimes the space between two things can only be measured with emotions.

  A language was invented then.

  In Mira’s eyes.

  It lived just long enough to convey one message then disappeared from all creation.

  “Is it fair?” Mira asked again, her eyes now calmed.

  Her mother hesitated, but lowered her face. Toward the shadow. And started sucking it up. Swallowed so much the goat panicked, snorted shrill, but just before the whole shadow was gone, Mira pulled her mother away, let her lay back and fall asleep in the grass, and Bale let the goat free and it stumbled around confused.

  Bale rubbed his forearms where the cuffs of his shirtsleeves reached and started to laugh.

  “What’s funny?” said Mira.

  “Jessup,” Bale said. “We didn’t tell him the redhead was dead.”

  Mira walked to Bale and they stood and were quiet and Bale put his arm around her.

  There was a sleep-deprived goat, bleating, stumbling queerly. There was a worn-out woman passed out in the morning grass. There was a boy holding a girl, and the girl didn’t cast shadow. But other than that, everything seemed just fine.

  Acknowledgments

  Sip wouldn’t be possible without the work of Roy Sorensen. My dear friend Cameron Pierce. My amazing agent, Bill Clegg. And my phenomenal family. Also my editor, Mark Doten—who is a godsend and a genius—and everyone else at SOHO. Especially Kevin “Bird Shirt” Murphy (who I’ve never met but known forever), Rachel Kowal, Abby Koski, and Bronwen Hruska.

 

 

 
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