by Brit Jones
As she rubbed her eyes, trying to get them to focus, a small hand touched her arm.
“Mom?”
Her eyes snapped open. It was Cecilia. Sepia-toned Cecilia. But Cecilia.
Sophie grabbed her daughter, pulled her to her chest, closed her eyes and squeezed hard. As though she could squish Cecilia into her, mesh together as one. Then she heard, “Mommy,” and felt Monica press up against her side. Sophie looped one arm around Monica. Tears falling down her cheeks. A relieved sensation oozing through her body. She didn’t care where they were. They were together. She’d found her babies.
Cecilia and Monica pulled away, and Sophie stooped to see them at eye level. She combed Monica’s shoulder-length hair with one hand, stroked Cecilia’s cheek with the other.
“Are you girls all right?” Sophie asked, her eyes sliding from Monica to Cecilia.
They both nodded. Flat expressions, baffled eyes. She gave them each another quick, solid hug, and then turned around and touched the dark corner she’d passed through. It was firm. No softness. No cold. No needy hands. She glanced at the girls who were standing still as statues in their summer dresses, watching her. “Is the whole house like this? This color, I mean.”
Again, they nodded.
“What about outside?”
“We can’t go outside,” Cecilia said. “The doors don’t work. But—” She broke off when Monica nudged her.
“But what?” Sophie asked.
The girls stared at her, fighting back words seemingly eager to leap off their tongues.
“Girls?”
No answer.
“Girls?”
As the girls spoke to one another with their eyes the way only twins can, Sophie heard soft footfalls coming up the stairs that lead to Carlos’s office. She turned and saw Aurora stride into the attic. She was wearing a floor-length skirt and short-sleeve button-up. Her long grey hair in a tight bun, arms stiff at her sides—the same way she’d looked and walked whether outside inspecting lemon trees or cooking in the kitchen. Her favorite cat Thomas (Tom-Tom) strutted beside her on three feet. Still missing the paw on his front right leg—the same shriveled paw that Aurora wore on a string around her neck, hidden under her clothing.
Sophie’s legs turned to flimsy matchsticks at the sight.
“Come here girls,” Aurora said. “Give Abuela a hug.”
The girls’ eyes flitted from the ground to their mom a few times before they hurried over to Aurora and wrapped their arms around her.
Sophie braced herself against the wall with her hand. Sepia Aurora—Dead Aurora— eyed her with the dreadful pleasure.
“Get away from them,” Sophie said, so faint she barely heard herself. “Get away from them.” Louder this time.
“What, dear?” Aurora asked.
Sophie steadied herself, pushed away from the wall, fisted her hands and locked her knees. “Get away from them!”
A broad grin spread across Aurora’s face. The Bitch Grin. The one she’d given Sophie anytime Carlos’s back was turned. Anytime the girls had taken her side over Sophie’s. The Bitch Grin. The one she’d flashed even in her waning days when the cancer was devouring her insides, when Sophie was forced by Carlos to live at the house and tend to her every need. The one she flashed after each cussing she gave Sophie, each slap, each thrown plate of food.
Sophie stormed toward Aurora and jerked the girls back, gripping their arms much harder than intended. “Don’t touch my girls!”
Monica and Cecilia ran toward the dark corner that Sophie had come through. Their eyes full of hurt—hurt only a mom’s disapproval can conjure. Cecilia rubbed her arm.
“I’m sorry,” Sophie said. “I didn’t mean to grab you so hard. But she— ”
“It’ll be okay, girls,” Aurora butted in.
Sophie thrust an accusatory finger in Aurora’s face. “Don’t you ever tell my girls it’ll be okay. I tell them when it’s okay. You have no right.”
Holding Sophie’s gaze, Aurora slightly cocked her head and angled her brows in a gesture of pity—the kind of pity shown to a clueless simpleton. Then she looked over at the girls and smiled. A sincere smile this time. “You did a great job, girls. You can go now. Tell your dad I’m proud of him, and that he hasn’t lost his touch.”
Aurora raised her thin hand into the air and snapped, and the darkness in the corner behind Cecilia and Monica began to fluctuate, bend, soften. Two hands materialized, growing out of the blackness. Cecilia took one, Monica the other. They laced their free hands together, gave their mom a curt glance, and then shuffled into the wall.
Sophie’s vision wobbled, followed by her stomach. No. The girls. Her babies.
What the…did they…practice…no…
She stumbled to the corner, but it was too late. The wall was already hard. Solid. There. “Cecilia? Monica?” she hollered.
She turned her ear to the wall, listening.
“Abuela said we did great, Daddy,” Monica said.
“So do we get our prize?” Cecilia added.
“Of course,” Carlos said. “Let’s go.”
The girls whooped and clapped, and within seconds, their cheering faded away. Far away.
Gone.
Sophie collapsed onto the floor in an awkward twist, howling and wailing like a cat in heat. Like her warm insides were being ripped out.
“Oh, you’ll like it here,” Aurora said, rubbing her hands together with glee. She walked slowly over to Sophie, jerked her upright by the hair, and covered her mouth and nose with a cold hand that smelled like cat piss. “How does it feel, whore? Not being able to breathe.”
Sophie struggled to cry out, to break free, but Aurora’s strength was inhuman, unnatural.
“When you shoved that spoon full of apple sauce and Oxycontin down my throat and pressed that pillow to my face the last time you were here,” Aurora said. “You did me the biggest favor of my life. You bound me to this house. And,” That Bitch Grin, “you created a link that will bond us forever.” She closed her eyes, hissed something in Spanish, then opened them. “Had you not killed me, I would’ve slipped deep into the spirit world, and I never would’ve been able to save my granddaughters from you.”
Sophie’s lights were going out. Lack of oxygen. Overwhelming sense of dread and panic. An assault of heartbreak and betrayal. Her legs buckled, and Aurora let her fall to the ground.
“Get up,” Aurora demanded a moment later, kicking at Sophie’s ribs. “You’re fine. It’s not like you can really die here.”
The Case of Yuri Zaystev
S.L. Edwards
Days were measured in piling snow, lives in black-rotting cells and time in final breaths. The white-washed landscape was the endless world. To walk there, in that featureless and terrible place, was to take a step toward heaven or hell. To stay there was to consign fate to the primal elements that were both God and Devil. The tundra existed before man walked, before reptiles crawled on the ocean floor, and would be there when the sun blots out and the earth becomes silent.
The only refuge from the cold, unchanging place was even worse than the vast frozen desert. Death was written into the architecture of the outpost before the endless night-world, a prison where men were sent to rot and disappear in fog and ice. It was more secret than Kolyma, built in a place where no men had ever visited before. Here, spit froze before it fell to the ground, while blood turned solid in two months time. Deprived of food and sunlight, men became slower and slower until they ceased to move at all.
Then, comrade Yuri Zaystev would have his job to do.
Yuri would drive the bodies of overworked and starved corpses into the frozen wasteland. Breath coming out as steam and no matter how hard he tried, feet numbing from cold, he would dump the bodies from the bed of his truck to form a pile in the snow. There was no need to bury corpses or hide transgressions against human life. The tundra winds would claim the human refuse, wrap it back into its cold folds and hide the bodies far away from human eyes and me
mory. Wiping itself clean the tundra would revert back to the untouched state it had always been in. There would be no records. The men condemned to this eternal exile had been marked dead before they even marched through the overbearing graveyard gates of the prison.
He had never found bodies or tracks in the tundra.
It was sunless, the night sky hung over Yuri as he listened to the desperate hum of a coughing motor. Through his foggy cab window Yuri could see the countless stars and heavenly bodies watching him, shining more brightly and more beautifully than they did anywhere else in the world. The only joy in his work was being with the quiet sky. Gone was the nervousness of Moscow, the fear of being called a dissident or traitor by some hungry neighbor. Gone was the fear of his mother being taken away, of joining his father in some death-camp on some other island of the Gulag Archipelago. Out there, alone, he could breathe freely and easily despite the frigid air that choked out all other life.
Ice crunched under his tires as he went farther into the Arctic Circle. Being in a vehicle created the sensation of false warmth, something he could not even dredge up from a flask of Vodka. The alcohol hit his stomach like gasoline and made him moan in discomfort. There was a difference between burning and heat. Cold could burn. The Vodka had been a bad idea, but monotony was the eternal enemy of the Gulag-grave digger.
He stopped his truck.
This spot was as good as any other.
The moon was brilliant, but in the featureless landscape the light did little for Yuri. He huffed, leaving the cab of his truck and bracing for the beastly winter that lived only in the Arctic Circle. He laughed, cursed and left the cab. His boots met the snow and beneath his many layers of fur and fat, his skeleton felt a chill that no amount of tendon or blood could stop.
In the tundra, he was no longer the young foot soldier. He was not the hero of Stalingrad, the boy who read to his little sister on her deathbed, or the young man who stood quietly by and said nothing when they took away his father while his mother howled. He was not culpable for what he was under the latitudes of the true north, not out there. Under the moonlight and the watchful eyes of Heaven, Yuri Zaystev was only flesh and bone.
The truck was large, given the amount of passengers he was ferrying that night. Recently, the camp had opened its mouth even wider to gluttonous portions of useless flesh. Whereas before there had been a trickle of people, now there was a torrential flow of traitors and criminals. Starvation was spreading from man to man; prisoners were now walking skeletons that did not have the will or strength to strangle each other for food as they did in warmer parts of Siberia. Yuri guessed he probably had twenty “people” in the back of his truck.
As he went to open the bed, Yuri had a drunken, evil thought. Part of him envied these men, who would be given a burial unlike any other. They died in this place, so far away from man and so close to God. In the tundra it was far too cold for their bodies to decay. If they were not eaten by polar bears, the winds would be kind to them and strip them of their skin until their bones were as white and gleaming as snow. When they became cracked-bone dust, they would be indistinguishable from the endless world around them.
They would become part of something much bigger than themselves.
He swung open the canvas-covered cab.
The thoughts came slowly. Yuri looked dumbly at the empty bed of the truck, expecting to blink back the bodies that were supposed to be there. The alcohol felt like it had been harshly sucked from his blood into his intestines, leaving him nauseous. Still in front of the gigantic, empty coffin-truck, he swallowed, completely sobered.
There weren’t any bumps, no way for the bodies to be jostled out. He breathed heavily, remembering that he and Fyodor had loaded the corpses into the truck meticulously, carefully with the sacred silence of broken men. He laughed stupidly, remembering that they had first taken off the clothes of each corpse so that the worn garments could be recycled and given to a lucky few in the horde of new misfortunate prisoners. They had found food, knives, silverware in the pockets of rags and tatters.
He touched his forehead, covered though it was, and looked around him. There was nothing, not in the whole world.
He ran back to his cab, stumbling and struggling for the radio between gulping, wet breaths. Finding it, he removed his glove into the biting-knife cold and pushed the black button to speak.
“This is Private First-Class Yuri Zaystev. I am without cargo. Has something happened?”
He kept the radio on, ready for the voice of the Gulag to hiss back. The little red eye blinked, and blinked, and blinked. Static sparked, crackled and flared. A noise came through, something like a trumpet filled with water gurgled out of the speaker. Yuri remembered thundering mortars and flaring grenades and the noise rose to a shattering crescendo. It seemed as if there was one incoherent, inhuman voice that spoke along with the gibberish of the radio static. He could hear it crying as he pressed his hands to his covered ears to protect himself from the unwelcome, unwholesome sound. The speaker cracked, and once again silence reigned supreme.
He looked outside nervously. The black outside was absolute, unintelligible and without answer. Everything was still; even the stars had stopped shining and maintained a constant, somehow feebler light. There was no sound of weather, faint or otherwise. For a ponderous moment Yuri gained a new understanding of the word “quiet.” It was more dreadful than screaming, moaning or pleas for help. It was far more unsettling and haunting to be perfectly and pristinely clean of noise, than to hear a man speak through a bloody mouth and confess to crimes both horrendous and false.
In the Gulag, people had been killed for less than failing in their duty to the State. Yuri recalled (suddenly Yuri again and not the mechanical flesh-and-bone creature that soullessly deposited humans into the cold wastes) that he and other soldiers had cruelly stripped another, prettier officer and put him in a prison uniform for bragging about his lovers. No one in high command had said a word when they saw the man, suddenly quartered with the enemies of the state, screaming at them that he was a good and loyal communist. They did not bat an eyebrow, nor even acknowledge his presence. It had only been a week before the pretty, experienced former officer was a corpse to be ferried in Yuri’s truck, and Yuri had no particular mirth or glee when he dumped the body alongside the other prisoners in a sacrificial pile.
Now Yuri wanted to go back and die at the barrel of the gun rather than at the canine fangs of frostbite. He would rather become part of the unspeakable corpse foundation than be alone in the tundra. He gulped, started his truck and began to steer back towards the prison.
It was easy enough to navigate his return when he went on his grave-runs. He was not careless; he did not drive for hours or ever put himself in danger of running out of gas. He had no delusions; no one would look for him if he did not come back. A notice may be sent out, his face sent to various train stations and an execution order placed on his name in case he turned up anywhere he shouldn’t, but no rescue party would be sent. More effort was put into the creation rather than recovery of corpses, and every hand was needed in the prisons.
This night, however, the frantic attempt to escape back south seemed to go on forever. He went for hours, looking desperately outside as the lights of the stars and moon became dimmer and the landscape began to glow like cadaverous, phosphorous fungus. Tonight there was something unusual in the snow, which became increasingly incandescent and bright as the night went darker and darker. The cab of the car became smaller with every moment, and beneath his layers of wool and fur Yuri could feel the damp chill of sweat sliding over him.
Something in him was about to explode. There was a sort of premonition and hyper-awareness that crawled along the wrinkles of his brain and whispered that something horrible was about to extend its claws into his bleeding heart. His teeth clamored as he heard a frantic throbbing not in his heart but in his head, veins pumping blood to his brain in an attempt to make him superhumanly alert.
Then
the world went wrong.
There was a moment of deafening noise, the roar of a gigantic monster out in the darkness that rocked the car and sent Yuri into shocks of spinal tremors. The wind began to pick up and howl; slamming sheets of glowing snows against the truck. There was a scream in the wind, the oscillating cry of a cat with human lips being skinned with a rusted knife. Yuri panicked, about to scream Orthodox prayers that he had not uttered since he was a child. He cried out for his father when a shadow smashed against the windshield.
The glass cracked and shattered, as reality broke apart for a moment. The truck sputtered, cranked, and exploded into smoke in front of him. He could not see the thick fog that choked him, but felt the exhaust and smoke pour like poison into his lungs. He could taste the fire. Panic swelled up in him as he thrust the door of the truck open, ignoring any wounds he may have suffered in the crash. It did not occur to Yuri that in the tundra there was nothing to crash into.
The fatal frigid air was on him again.
He cried out, but the silence was gone, and could not hear himself over the pitch of the wind. The car was making a rattling noise, whining and squeaking like a little bird. Through the wind he could detect only the faintest hint of smoke. Blinking and near the point of nature-induced blindness, Yuri walked towards the front of his truck, aware that at any point it could explode. Any attempt on his part to understand or rationalize what had happened would calm him. Perhaps with a clearer mind, he could fix his vehicle and get back to the prison.
He tripped, falling face-forward onto the hard ice.
He was on top of something, something large and…warm. With a herculean effort, Yuri pushed himself off of the ice floor and shifted himself to crouch over the object that had tripped him. The ice was fighting him at every turn, the snow picking up more speed as its glowing white surface came to engulf the night. Yet it was because of this unnatural, strange snow-light that Yuri could clearly see the cause of his fall, but was unwilling to accept it at first.