Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Maurin snorted. "Friends? The bridge between Bondye and man, friends like you play games with?"

  "Maybe they're not your friends," I snapped, "unbelievable as that might seem to such a personable guy like yourself."

  Zoë, tch, Millie clucked, Tell him this: Ki c'est ki parle yé krwoi yé toujou pli intèligen, mais yé pa myé.

  I stumbled over the strange words, and Millie had to prompt me a couple times. But when I was done, the smug look left Maurin's face.

  "I am chastised," he said. "Who am I to deny your claim upon the loa?"

  The change was nice, but I felt like the kid from the short bus who never gets anyone's jokes.

  "Millie told me to say that. I don't know what it means."

  "It was a reminder, ti bokor, that once I found how others lorded their knowledge over me infuriating, and the wisest of us is he who accepts that he knows nothing. I beg your pardon."

  Except now I felt guilty for my outburst. "I didn't mean to get snarky. I should be thanking you for fetching me out of that mess yesterday."

  He shrugged. "Dèriyin. The loa all but dragged me to where you were beset."

  "So you can hear my voices, too? Then how come Millie didn't tell you whatever it was herself?"

  "Non. My mistress was as you, one who's ashe be so strong she hear the loa speak. Mais I must rely on charms and portents. Still, it was easy to rouse the fear of bébés and set a gris-gris on the skinny girl."

  Skinny girl? Oh, Kyana. "What's 'setting a gris-gris'?"

  He cocked his head. "En piti mal. Those who dare harm one the loa protect must be reminded of the power of voodoo."

  "Voodoo?" I frowned. "Wait, you put a voodoo curse on Kyana?"

  "Wè. Ekskizé-moi, you prefer to punish her yourself?"

  "I don't believe in curses. Or voodoo."

  He stared at me as though I'd sprouted an extra pair of arms and turned blue.

  "It's all psychological effects, self-fulfilling prophecies and stuff. I'm no voodoo witch--"

  "Bokor."

  "Whatever. I don't want the kids at school thinking I'm this bokor thing."

  "Pourkwa? Then they are afraid to give insult. Fear be a bokor's mantle."

  "I don't want to be feared. Don't you get it? I don't want to be the fruitcake kid who hears voices, and you better believe I don't want to be the freak who does voodoo."

  He smiled. "Too late, I think. Else why they try so hard and so determined to hurt you?"

  "Because they're assholes."

  He clicked his tongue. "Non. Because they sense the ashe, the power in you, and it frightens them."

  I had an unhappy thought. "Does this--" I showed him the finger horns Michelle had pointed at me. "--mean something in your voodoo-land?"

  Maurin nodded. "A child's charm to ward away evil. They have brandished it at you? Ti bokor, surely you comprehend the truth?"

  "Quit calling me that!"

  "Then what shall I call you?"

  "What's wrong with my name?"

  "Mais I do not know it."

  "Oh." Oops. "I'm Zoë."

  "Enchanté." He turned and set off for the chapel. His legs were longer than mine, and I had to trot to catch up.

  Inside, a few white-washed pews led to an altar with candlesticks and a statue of Christ in repose behind glass. Above it, a wooden shrine featured Saint Roch (I assumed), holding up the hem of his robe to display a red wound on his thigh. I touched my own gauze-taped cut in sympathy.

  To top off the bizarre, a fenced-in niche to the side had plaster body parts arrayed on display--hands and feet dangling from hooks, faces hung up like pictures, a pair of eyeballs on a plate, and even a big, brown brain atop a ledge.

  I shuddered. "What is that about?"

  Maurin kneeled before the altar, crossing himself like any good Catholic schoolboy. "Saint Roch, the patron saint of miraculous cures. Those be ex-votos from the healed. Tradition say to make in plaster the afflicted member and offer it as thanks."

  "Macabre much?"

  "C'est tradition." Maurin rose and tugged a thin bone from one of his dreadlocks. It was small, frail-looking, maybe a rat femur or a pigeon's wing. "You have tô instrument?"

  With misgivings, I pulled out Dad's flute and handed it over. Maurin set the flute and the bone sliver side by side on the altar.

  "What compensation I expect for my services, mon chè?"

  "I don't have much money--"

  He waved his hand. "Bokor do not trade in such currency, bokor to bokor."

  "I told you, I'm not a bokor."

  "As you like. Still, money will not pay here."

  "Then what do you want? 'Cause I'm not doing the promising you my firstborn thing."

  Maurin lifted his eyes from the bones. "There is only one thing I want. Tô kèr, your heart."

  I took a step back. "My heart? As in 'you have my heart, you are my sunshine'? Or like 'give me the heart of Snow White still beating in a box?'"

  "Still beating? Wè. Box? Non."

  I edged another step away and wondered how loud I'd have to scream for someone to hear me.

  "You misunderstand. I do not wish you harm."

  "I kind of need my heart to live."

  "Au contraire, you are bokor, favored of the loa. Without tô kèr, if you wish it, you will cease to age or sicken."

  "I'm thinking it's more like I'll keel over and bleed to death."

  "Non, on my honor. I show you." Maurin pulled his shirt over his head, displaying wiry muscles and a seamed patch of skin on his chest in the shape of an "X." He also revealed the hilt of a big Bowie knife tucked into the belt strap of a blue fanny pack. So not reassuring.

  He brushed a handful of white powder, courtesy the fanny pack, over his chest and drew the knife. As I watched, he inserted its point into the center of the "X" and peeled back a corner of skin, neat as could be, like folding origami.

  The absence of blood or ucky bits didn't matter much. I totally lost it.

  I bolted from the shrine. Maurin didn't come chasing after, but I still didn't stop until I clattered onto Gran's yellow porch. I collapsed on the steps, panting and wheezing. My nerve came straggling back as my lungs shifted out of overdrive.

  "What were you guys thinking?" I shouted. "Sending me into that place to chat with some psycho who collects hearts?"

  Hearts are overrated, Rufus said.

  "Not a compelling argument from a disembodied voice!"

  Maurin is honorable, Uncle Grim said. You were in no danger.

  "Me and you gotta have a talk about what you consider 'danger,' Uncle Grim, 'cause guy with a big knife wanting to cut out my heart, that pretty much defines it in my book."

  Silence.

  "Well?"

  If I'd had crickets in my head, they'd be chirping.

  "You're giving me the silent treatment? Fine. You know, sometimes you guys are total shits."

  I stood, reached for my house key, and got another nasty to top off the day's pile of them. I'd left backpack, keys, and Dad's flute with Saint Roch.

  "That's great. Absolutely fantastic." I plunked myself back down and fumed. Mom wouldn't be home for hours. I had plenty of time to hate myself, uninterrupted, for losing Dad's flute.

  I sat, scowling at my feet, and mulled over the idea of going back to Campo Santo. The part of me squicked out at Maurin opening his chest screamed "no way!" But even though I was mad at Uncle Grim, I put a lot of stock in his claim of Maurin's honor. Really, a guy poking himself with a knife wasn't the same thing as trying to stab me with one. Still crazy, though.

  When the hating me part got louder than the squicked part, I set off for the cemetery, a good deal slower than I'd departed it.

  Movement 3:

  I heard the music before I got to the gates. Rich, airy, and bright, wings and water played on a bone flute. It spilled a chain of memories like avalanching dominoes: summer vacations in the cabin by Wood Lake, Dad serenading the water as he drifted in an aluminum rowboat, the fishing rod
he never baited trailing in its wake. Dad's music belonged there, at harmony with birdsong and sky. But the last few years it had played to the white walls of a hospital room as often as not. Sterile contrast to the lake, I saw Dad sitting with pillows mounded at his back, eyes shut in concentration as he blew into the polished bone. He told me the music couldn't be forced out, that it had to be released, like the flute was a door. But the key was air, and Dad kept having less to spare, until he didn't even have enough to get him through the day, much less any leftover to unlock the gudi's music.

  It was stupid, but for a minute, standing outside the cemetery gates, I thought it was Dad playing. Even as I sprinted to the chapel, racing to get there before the music stopped, I knew it couldn't be. He was dead, and dead people don't play flutes. Yet I couldn't shake that awful longing, the kind where you know, just know what you want isn't possible, but you can't help hoping anyway.

  The music ended a second before I burst in, a stitch zinging my side.

  The shrine was deserted. Just me, Jesus in a fish tank, and old Saint Roch hiking up his hem. Dad's flute lay on the altar, my pack beside it.

  I swallowed back the tightness in my throat and the stinging pressure behind my eyes, same as I had at Dad's funeral. Stupid to cry then, stupider to cry now. I wasn't going to be one of those losers who get weepy whenever they hear a certain song or eat bleu cheese or something dopy like that.

  I picked up the gudi. It was like it had never seen yesterday--no cracks or chips--good as new. A shard of bone lay beside it, Maurin's rat femur or pigeon's wing. A break ran through the shard, like a tiny person had stomped on it. Insight or intuition, I knew the bone had taken the injury Dad's flute had suffered. Magic. Voodoo magic.

  Why had Maurin fixed the flute without his pay?

  I almost put it down. Would taking it home be the same as agreeing to have my heart carved out?

  I wanted to ask Uncle Grim, but I wasn't so sure he, any of them, were on the Zoë-keeps-her-heart wagon. Then again, maybe I was the one riding the wrong wagon. If voodoo worked, if what Maurin said was true, I'd be better off without a heart. Maybe if I'd known how to do voodoo back in Chicago, I could've removed Dad's heart before it made him so sick. What if some bokor had suggested to Dad what Maurin had asked from me? Would he still be alive?

  "Take it. I will not stop you."

  Maurin stood at the entrance. At this rate, he wouldn't need to cut my heart out; he could just scare it out of me.

  "Do you gotta sneak up on a person like that?" I yelled.

  "Mo chagren. Aprè my mistress removed mô kèr, the still-quiet in here," Maurin touched his chest, "taught me to be still-quiet out here." He spread his fingers to the air.

  "Just shuffle your feet or something, okay?"

  "Pou toi." Maurin made a show of stomping his feet as he sat on a white-washed bench. He slumped, head lolling and eyes half-closed. The change in him was dramatic. Did it take so much out of a person to do voodoo?

  "Why are you here still?" His voice was low and tired. "I demand no fee. Va. Take what is yours and go."

  A few minutes ago, I would've been out the door faster than he could've said "boo." But Maurin looked like he could barely hold his head up, much less go Ted Bundy on me.

  "What do you want my heart for?"

  He lifted a hand over his eyes. "Pourkwa? Why you want to know?"

  "When you tell a girl you want to cut her heart out, it sort of makes her curious as to your intentions."

  "Bien." He let his hand drop. "Today, I have been in my mistress's service for dépi cent ans--"

  "What?"

  "One-hundred years."

  I wanted to blame the translation or call B.S., but the resignation in Maurin's tone left no doubt.

  "A powerful bokor, she," he continued. "I asked of her a voodoo spell, but she would consent only if I made compact to serve as en apprentice and give her mô ker. One-hundred years and she return it. It is so I may learn the craft, you see? So I do not age or die."

  "Or run away," I said under my breath.

  Maurin heard me. "Mais I have no wish to leave her. She is not cruel, and she show me how to parlay avek the loa."

  "What happened?"

  "Katre-vint-diss set ans, ninety-seven years, I serve her. But the storms and floods, the worst this city has seen. She die, and I am alone."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Mèsi bien. Mais I cannot grieve for her, to my regret."

  "Why?"

  "She hid mô kèr. I am a bokor, wè, but I need a heart to grieve."

  "No, I mean why do you want to? Grieve for her, that is. Boohooing and carrying on doesn't change anything. It won't bring her back."

  "Ti bokor, grief is how we fill the emptiness when those we care for depart. It is the last tribute we give to our cherished ones."

  "I suppose." Maybe an emo meltdown wasn't the worst thing a person could do at a funeral. But I didn't buy that it helped anything. If I'd dissolved like Mom had, then there would've been no one to take care of her. How pathetic that would've been, both of us bawling our eyes out beside Dad's plastic-stiff body in the casket. Better that one of us, that I had stayed strong.

  "Too, it reminds the watching emissaries of Bondye," he continued, "that even we bokor regard this world's gifts as precious. Without mô kèr, without my grief, I am not whole. So I search for it."

  "I suppose you didn't find it."

  "Non. I search and search. I ask the loa, beg them, command them, but non. Worse, they tell me at la compact's finish, if I have no kèr, I shall die. For en apprentice who kill his bokor is an evil thing. And why, otherwise, would she not return mô heart?"

  "But she died by accident. It wasn't your fault."

  "Wè."

  "And you want my heart why?"

  "Only la kèr of a true bokor will satisfy the compact. I believed, I hoped when the loa called me to you, for surely I may find mô kèr in another cent ans--" Maurin shook his head. "Mais, non."

  I did feel bad for him. Being smacked by fate like that counted as a seriously raw deal. I knew how that felt better than most. "For what spell did you sell yourself for a hundred years?"

  He closed his eyes. "For en fii, a girl I loved. She suffered zyé yè malad. When the darkness depart, she thanks Saint Roch for the miracle."

  I remembered the plaster eyeballs on the plate.

  "Her joy is enough. I am content." He sighed. I waited, but he didn't speak again.

  "Maurin?" I crept closer. Grayness rimmed his eyes and mouth. I'd seen that ashen look before. For a half-second, I couldn't remember where, and then I could: on Dad's face, in the hospital, when they'd hooked him up to that machine--the tube down his throat so he couldn't talk, the mask and medical tape holding the rig in place. My insides twisted into a leaden knot. The last time I'd ever see Dad, and I'd gone wiggity. Worse, that afternoon when Mom brought up going back to the hospital to visit him, I'd put her off. That's why we hadn't been there when Dad died. My selfishness and weakness. My fault he'd been alone.

  I couldn't abandon Maurin. I wouldn't.

  He was so still. Nervous, I shook him. He wasn't breathing. I checked for a heartbeat, a pulse. Nothing. But he didn't have a heart, right? So he wouldn't have either of those.

  Maurin's life is forfeit to the compact, Millie said.

  Through my spiking panic, a thread of relief. At least they were talking to me again.

  "But that's dumb, Millie. He has to die just because his bokor didn't tell him where she stashed his heart before hurricane season?"

  What do you care? Rufus asked. Not like you know the guy from spit.

  "He fixed Dad's flute."

  So?

  "So he didn't have to. It's not like he knows me from spit."

  I tugged up Maurin's shirt and grabbed the hilt of the knife. Unzipping his fanny pack, I found it filled with Ziploc baggies of powder: black, yellow, white, and red. If I hadn't known better, I would've thought he was a dealer.

  I d
umped a handful of the white stuff over the "X" on his chest. Yanking off my own shirt, I pushed aside my embarrassment--inappropriate and useless--and dusted myself in the general vicinity of my heart.

  My skin went numb, but I hesitated. We haven't gotten to the heart in Biology yet. Did bokor training include anatomy lessons? This could be really, really bad.

  It wasn't like I was doing surgery for real, right? It was voodoo magic ... which I didn't believe in. Maybe I was schizo. Only one way to find out. I pointed the knife at my chest and took a deep breath.

  Stop!

  The triple wallop of Uncle Grim, Millie, and Rufus all shouting at the same time made me drop the knife.

  I clapped my hands to my head. "Ow. Keep that up and for my next trick, I'll pull an aneurism out of my hat. I thought you wanted me to give him my heart."

  You must have a vessel, Uncle Grim said. To spill the emptiness into.

  "That makes sense." I shook my head. "That was sarcasm, by the way."

  Like the bone and the gudi, Millie said.

  "Oh. 'Cept where am I going to get a--" I stared at the ex-voto niche for all of two blinks. Slamming open the protective grill, I found feet, hands, a pair of leg braces, and there, next to a plaster ear, a heart. I snatched it from its hook--it was so light, definitely hollow--and brought it over.

  "I got the vessel. Now what?"

  Fill it, Uncle Grim said.

  "Can we quit with the esoteric, already? Fill it with what? Chewing gum? Paper clips?"

  Dummy. Fill it with heart, Rufus said.

  "You guys suck. You know that, right?" I picked up the knife. "If any of you have something useful to say, now would be the time."

  What good's a heart if it can be broken? Rufus sing-songed.

  Your heart's in the right place, Millie said.

  Definitely a heartfelt gesture, Uncle Grim agreed.

  I scowled. "You call sappy metaphors useful? If this voodoo bugaboo is figurative, how come Maurin's got a big X-marks-the-spot on his chest?"

  Seems to me you've got your heart set on being foolish, Uncle Grim said.

  Leaves me heavy hearted, Rufus chimed in.

  "Why can't you guys tell me straight what I need to do?"

  We are.

  We are.

  We are.

  "You are not!" Tears of frustration stung my eyes. "I don't know what to do. I haven't known anything since Dad died. Why did he have to die? Why won't any of you tell me?" I blinked, the tears overflowing in a cascade down my face.