Across the Spectrum

by Nagle, Pati

  He bristled. “You don’t know that for sure. And yes, I am American—what of it? Why shouldn’t I want to go home?”

  She waved at the harbor. “I am not stopping you.”

  ∞

  That night, she heard him sobbing in his bedroom, long after she’d gone to her own. “Mom . . . oh, Mom . . . ”

  So that was it: he missed his mommy. And he’d fixated on Beth, in some sort of perverse mother-complex way. She snorted to herself. “More like a grandmother.”

  But the next morning he was at her again. She had to shout at him again to get him to stop. He stormed out without eating breakfast, and spent the day somewhere else. Down at the water, if she was any judge.

  He returned at twilight, calm, not mentioning where he’d been. She offered him a glass of gin, and they sat on the veranda, drinking together.

  After two drinks, he said, “I found a boat. I think it could make it across the ocean. And it’s got a full tank of gas. So I know I could find more.”

  “I’m not leaving,” she said, without turning her head. The sun glimmered red on the water as it sank. “I hate America. And I forbade you to speak of this.” She set her glass down, got up, and went inside.

  She walked all the way to her bedroom, then through it into her small private bath. Of course she didn’t use it as a bathroom any more—the septic tank was overfull, and there was nobody to call to come clean it out—but it had other uses. She opened the medicine cabinet, first looking, then rummaging, then yanking everything out. But they weren’t there.

  He’d not only stolen the email from her bedroom. He’d also raided her stash of narcotics, carefully hoarded from James’s final illness.

  Beth stood before the ransacked medicine cabinet, shaking with anger. She had to make him leave. He was not like Christos—he was worse, far worse. Bad enough that he would harangue her, try to control her. But that he should steal from her—that he should steal drugs from her—a man who had already gone to prison for drugs—oh, this was not good. A man whose life she’d saved.

  “Not good,” she whispered.

  She felt a prickle on the back of her neck and wheeled around. He was standing in the doorway of the small bathroom. She hadn’t even heard him come in.

  He was pale, and shaking. Now that she knew, she recognized the signs easily. He must have taken several pills, and then two—at least two—glasses of gin on top of that. “Beth,” he started, taking a step towards her. The name was a bit slurred, the consonants softer than they should be.

  “Get out of here,” she said.

  He took another step, and now he was right in front of her. He reached up and took her shoulders in his hands, hard, and shook her. It hurt. She pushed back against his chest, trying to twist out of his grip, but he was decades younger than she, and very strong. “We . . . have . . . to . . . go,” he said, staring at her even as he rattled her thin bones. His eyes were too liquid, too glossy. “I’ll make you go.”

  She pushed harder, and he abruptly let go, staggering back and bumping into the wall behind him. He didn’t seem to notice. “You’re drunk,” she said. “Go and lie down. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

  He looked at her, wary. “You mean it? We’ll talk about it?”

  She shrugged, resisting the urge to rub her throbbing shoulders. “You are in no condition to talk now.”

  He kept staring at her, then turned and went to his own bedroom. She stood in the bathroom a long time, shaking, listening as he fell onto his bed. He was snoring within a few minutes. Only then did she pull her shirt open and examine the bruises, peering into the mirror. He’d crushed her shoulders so hard she could almost see the imprint of his fingerprints.

  Beth re-buttoned her shirt and left the bathroom. She knew what she had to do.

  ∞

  She stood over his bed as he snored. He looked so helpless and frail, lying there. Almost innocent. Though she’d never had children, sometimes she could understand the appeal. Having someone to love, someone to take care of . . . Of course, she’d had James for that.

  Tyler was somebody’s son. His mother and father had loved him and raised him, and had let him go, had watched as he had flown the nest. He’d flown far—all the way across the world, where he’d gotten in trouble and caught up in the terrible things that humanity had done to itself. Maybe he’d deserved better. Maybe not. Who knew anymore?

  But it was too late now. There was no better to be had, and if he was going to refuse to understand that, there was nothing she could do about it.

  She raised the knife, leaning over him to reach the far side of his neck. In book 8 of The Caged Sword series, A Clutch of Posies, Marleena finds she must murder the Lord of Terror, using only a dull kitchen knife. In her fear and hesitation, she botches the job at first, and he awakens and threatens her, but in a stroke of luck, as he is leaping onto her, the knife nicks his jugular and he dies. Then all the Sisters are freed, and the land rejoices.

  Tyler’s white, exposed neck was surprisingly tough at first, despite Beth’s knife being as sharp as it could be. She remembered slaughtering the goats, and pushed harder. When she thought of it as butchering meat, it came easily. She even knew to step back so as not to get soaked with his blood.

  The covers, of course—that was another story. Tyler’s blood spurted at first, another rush with every beat of his heart. Impossible to believe there could be so much; but the goats had been even worse. Soon it ebbed out more slowly, flowing down his body as he twitched, gurgled, and stilled. It spread across the white cotton coverlet, pooling and sinking in, threading fanlike out along the folds of the fabric. Beth watched it for a long time, unmoving, and finally turned to go.

  She shut the door of the guest bedroom behind her, turning the latch that would keep it fast. The corpse would smell at first, but she knew that in this hot, dry climate, it would soon desiccate, even mummify. In any event, she could put a towel under the door if she had to. She wouldn’t need that room any time soon.

  She walked down the hall to the kitchen, washed the knife, and laid it on the counter to dry. Then, she went to her bookshelf and pulled down the final book in her series: Alone at Heart.

  Night fell as Elizabeth Barnett sat on the veranda with a tumbler of warm gin, the book unopened beside her, and waited for her world to finish ending.

  Climbing to the Moon

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  I like “Climbing to the Moon” because in writing it I enjoyed using verb tenses, riskily, as a means of moving through time in a complex, non-linear way, even of seeing time for a moment not as a forward movement but as a whole—or as a dream.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Little Aby will help her build the fire, running down from the dunes, his curly head like a thistledown-puff against the long gold light in the west. “Let’s get the fire laid before it gets dark, Aby!” she’ll say, and the child, eager to do grown-up work, to be her partner, to build the beautiful, dangerous fire against the fall of night, will say, “I’ll get the wood!” and be off like an erratic, fuzzy-feathered arrow. He will search, stoop, and gather, rush back dropping bits of driftwood, dump his tiny load, and be off again. She will gather methodically. There are plenty of useful pieces of driftwood near the big, half-buried, half-burned log she has chosen as backlog and windbreak. Once she has her woodpile, she will begin to lean sticks up against the charred monster, over the hollow where she has arranged a tight-crumpled sheet of newspaper and bits of fine kindling. It won’t be a big blaze. Huge, flaring bonfires that roar and volley out sparks are frightening to Aby, and to her too. It will be a small, bright, clear fire in this vast, clear, bright evening.

  Aby will come up breathless with a “very big log”—a branch three feet long at least, and so heavy he has to drag it. She will praise the wood and the woodsman. Kneeling, putting her bare arm round his thin shoulders, she’ll say, “Aby, love, look,” and they’ll look into the west.

  “That’s where the sun was,” Aby w
ill say, pointing to the center source of the immense, pale-pink rays of light that fan out, barely visible, in the far air suffused with gold above the sea.

  “And that’s the shadow of the earth.” She will look up at the blue dimness that has risen from the mountains in the east to the top of the sky, just over them.

  “Yeah!” says Aby, delighted with it all, and wriggles free. “Look, there’s a even bigger log!” And he’s off.

  “When you come back we’ll light the fire,” she calls, feeling for the matches in her pocket. She sits down on the warm sand to watch the great rosy shafts of light shorten down and down into the darkening horizon. The breakers are quiet and regular, six or seven lines of them. Their huge noise all up and down the beach masks all lesser sounds except the rare cries of gulls flying late. No one else has a fire on the beach tonight. No one is walking down by the waterline.

  When she first hears the drumming she thinks it is a helicopter, a Coast Guard patrol, and looks south for the black dot in the air; but her eye catches the movement nearer, down by the breakers, as she hears the drum-drum-drum of hooves on hard sand. The horse is at full gallop, the rider leans lightly forward, riding bareback—Beautiful! the double silhouette black against shining sand, the wild rhythm, the courage to ride at a gallop bareback! On to the north they go, fading into the dusk and the faint mist that hovers over the meeting of the water and the land. Oh, what a sight! She wishes he would come back, the centaur galloping between sea and sand, between daylight and the dark. And soon from the north comes the drum-drum-drum more felt than heard, and horse and rider take shape in the low mist, cantering now, lightly, easily. They slow and turn a little, and dropping into a walk come up across the sand to her. They halt. The horse raises his head and shakes it. He wears only a rope bridle with a single rein. “I saw you lighting the fire,” the rider says.

  She stands up; she puts her hand out to the horse, a dark bay with a blaze that gleams white in the twilight. She strokes the soft nose and reaches up to scratch under the sweaty forelock and around the roots of the big, delicate, flicking ears. The rider smiles. He vaults down from the horse’s back. Like a cowboy, he simply drops the rein, and the horse nickers once and stands quiet. Oh, she knows this cowboy, this centaur, this bareback rider. “Where have you been riding?” she asks, and he answers, “Along the seacoast of Bohemia,” smiling.

  The fire has just caught. She adds a stout, barky branch which flares up at once. They sit down, one on each side, each seeing the other’s face across the quivering flames, which seem to darken the twilight and draw it in around them.

  “No,” she says, “not Bohemia. Hungary. You’ve been riding with the Magyars again.”

  “All across the steppes,” he says in his laughing voice, soft and resonant. “With the warrior hordes. Coming to loot the West.”

  “And the women follow along behind with the children and the colts and the tents and the beds . . .”

  “They light the fires. And the men turn around and come back to the fires.”

  “And my man comes around to my side of the fire,” she says, and he does: a quiet movement, a warmth along her side, a warm arm round her shoulders. She turns to him and comes into his arms. The dark head bends to her: a long kiss, longer, deeper. Firelight webs rainbows in her lashes. The sand is warm and soft, a dark bed, an endless bed, its rumpled sheets the breakers glimmering.

  Sleepy, she looks straight up into the shadow of the world and sees Vega, the star always at the top of the summer night. The linchpin, the keystone, the white thumbtack that holds the whole sky up. Oh, hello, she murmurs to the star. The spangle of the Milky Way is not yet visible, only the four stars of the Swan burning faint in the turquoise-cobalt sky.

  The sand is still warm from the long day’s sunlight, but not really soft. After a while you always remember, when you lie on it, that sand is stone. She sits up and gazes into the fire, then builds it up, adding a couple of long branches that can be shoved in farther as they burn, keeping it steady. Twigs flare up bright for a moment. Looking down the beach, now nearly dark, a faint blur of mist still hovering over the breakers, she imagines how the fire must look from down there at the waterline: a warm star, flickering, earthy. She wants to see it. She gets up, stretches, and walks slowly down to the wet sand. She does not look back till her bare feet feel the cold of the water. Then she turns and gazes at the fire up under the dunes.

  It is very small, a little trembling brightness in the vast blur of dark blue-grey that has taken away the mountains. There is no other brightness but the stars. She shivers and runs, runs straight back up the sand, back to her fire, back to its warmth where two women sit in silence, one on each side, gazing into the flames. Their tanned, lined faces are lit ruddy and deeply shadowed. She sits down between them, a little breathless, her back to the sea.

  “How’s the water?” one of them asks, and she says only, “Brrr!”

  “When was it we went to the beach at Santa Cruz?” the older woman asks the younger, who answers, “Right after the war. Wasn’t it? I remember complaining about picnics with no hard-boiled eggs.”

  “Spam. Terrible stuff. Salted grease, think of it! She was just a baby. Three, maybe?”

  “More like five?”

  Their voices have always been quiet, never final. There is always a leaving open, a possibility of question.

  “I remember we had a fire on the beach, against a driftlog, like this. We sat so late. Yes, it was then, because I remember thinking, no war out there, and it was hard to believe, after so long, that it was just the sea out there again. We were talking. She’d been asleep for ages. Curled up on the blanket. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, she said, ‘Mama, will it go on forever?’ Do you remember that? I never knew if she was awake or dreaming.”

  “We’d been trying to remember names of constellations. I remember. She must have been half awake; she was looking at the fire. ‘Will it go on forever?’ And you said yes. ‘Yes, it will.’ And she settled down again perfectly satisfied.”

  “Did I? Did I really? I’d forgotten . . .” They laughed quietly, little soft grunting laughs. She looked from one face to the other: a good deal alike, though one was webbed and cragged and the other still full, with a soft underlip. The deepest eyes glinted in the firelight.

  “Oh,” she said, “oh but it didn’t—it doesn’t—does it?”

  They looked at her, four tiny warm fires glinting and trembling in their eyes. Did they laugh? They were smiling. Outside the circle of the firelight a man spoke briefly and a woman answered him. “How about another piece of wood?” one of the men said, and she looked at her fire and decided it was time for the piece she had been saving, the massive trunk-end of a large branch, perfectly dry. She laid it with care in the bright center where it would catch fast and burn hot. Sparks flew up into the air that was now quite dark. All the stars hung over the fire, over the sea. The path of the Galaxy whitened the quiet water far out beyond the breakers. Now and then a flash of light broke across the sand: luminous water, tiny sea-beings, sea-fireflies. The mist was gone, the dark was clear. The company of the stars shone brighter than the brief gleams among the breakers.

  The fire creaked and crackled, and the damp core of a log hissed and sang. They all sat or lay near the flames as the night grew cooler, her people, some talking softly, others stargazing or sleeping. Aby had long been asleep, curled up on the blanket beside her. She pulled the blanket back over his bare legs. He wriggled and made a protest in his dream. “There,” she murmured. “It will. Yes, it will, love.” Up in the dunes one of the horses snorted. The sound of the sea was low and long and deep, a huge roar up and down the edge of the land, too large to listen to for long. Sometimes a warmer breath of wind moved seaward, smelling of soil and summer, and a few sparks flew out on it for a moment.

  She got up at last, stiff. She slowly covered over the embers with cold sand. When that was done, she climbed the dunes alone in starlight towards the moon, which had not risen
yet.

  The Cornfield

  P.G. Nagle

  This story is a favorite of mine for multiple reasons. It’s about a secondary character in my Far Western Civil War series, Matt Russell, an older brother of main character Jamie Russell. Matt joins the Confederate army early on, arousing Jamie’s jealousy. The story was read by a master class of writers, most of whom loved it. One thought it was awful, because he couldn’t accept the idea of a Confederate as the protagonist of a story. In his mind, that was just wrong. The instructors commented that when a writer gets that strong a reaction, she knows she’s done something right.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  I was in plenty of fights and shot at plenty of Yankees, but if I ever killed one before Sharpsburg I never really knew it. You can fire at the enemy all day long and some will fall, but when you are in a line of battle it’s hard to know if it was your ball that did the job.

  Many a time I stood in line with Jim Callaghan and Bill Piper and Bill Lessing and every other Bill in the Tom Green Rifles, and we’d all fire a volley and each of us claim to have dropped a bluecoat. It was a game we played, bragging after the fight who got the most hits, and I guess we believed it but we didn’t honestly know, at least Jimmy and Bill and I didn’t.

  We got a hint of the truth in the bayonet charges we made at Gaines’s Mill and again at South Mountain just two days before Sharpsburg, because then we could see the terrified faces of the Yankee skirmishers as they fled before our steel. But me and Jimmy and Bill never got a poke at them.

  We didn’t discover then what it was to take a man’s life, face to face, gazes locked and the both of you trying in earnest to kill one another. I truly believe none of us knew what it was to kill before we got to the edge of the Cornfield.

  It was ripe, that corn, but we never picked it. We’d been eating nothing but green corn and apples for so long we were sick of the stuff—it had literally made every soldier in the Texas Brigade sick—and not a man touched an ear as we passed along the south edge of the field the night of the 16th September, 1862.