Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2014: A Tor.Com Original

by Various Authors

  Really, he thought. But then the widow walked into a brightly colored beam of stained-glass sunlight, and he felt his heart lift and his cheeks flush and his breathing quicken and thin. There are people, he thought, who are easy to love. And that is that.

  Mrs. Sorensen had done a beautiful job with the flowers, creating arrangements at each window in perfect, dioramic scenes. In the window depicting the story of the child Jesus and the clay birds that he magicked into feathers and wings and flight, for example, her figure of Jesus was composed of corn husk, ivy, and dried rose petals. The clay birds she had made with homemade dough and affixed to warbled bits of wire. The birds bobbed and weaved unsteadily, as though only just learning how to spread their wings. And her rendition of Daniel in the lion’s den was so harrowing in its realism, so brutally present, that people had to avert their eyes. She had even made a diorama of the day she and her husband met—a man with a broken leg at the bottom of a gully in the middle of a flowery forest; a woman with a broken heart wandering alone, happening by, and binding his wounds. And how real they were! The visceral pain on his face, the sorrow hanging over her body like a cloud. The quickening of the heart at that first, tender touch. This is how love can begin—an act of kindness.

  The men in the congregation stared for a long time at that display. They shook their heads and muttered, “Lucky bastard.”

  Father Laurence, in his vestments, intoned the mass with all of the feeling he could muster, his face weighted somberly with the loss of a man cut down too soon. (Though not, it should be noted, with any actual grief. After all, the priest hardly knew the man. No one did. Still, fifty-eight is too young to die. Assuming Mr. Sorensen was fifty-eight. In truth, the priest had no idea.) Mrs. Sorensen sat in the front row, straight backed, her delicate face composed, her head floating atop her neck as though it were being pulled upward by a string. She held her chin at a slight tilt to the left. She made eye contact with the priest and gave an encouraging smile.

  It is difficult, he realized later, to give a homily when there is a raccoon in the church. And a very large dog. And a cat. Though he couldn’t see them—they had made themselves scarce before the parishioners arrived—he still knew they were there. And it unnerved him.

  The white mice squirmed in Mrs. Sorensen’s pocket. They peeked and retreated again and again. Father Laurence tripped on his words. He forgot what he was going to say. He forgot Mr. Sorensen’s name. He remembered the large, damp eyes of the buck outside. Did he want to come in? Father Laurence wondered. And then: Don’t be ridiculous. Deer don’t go to church! But neither, he reasoned with himself, did raccoons. But there was one here somewhere, wasn’t there? So.

  Father Laurence mumbled and wandered. He started singing the wrong song. The organist grumbled in his direction. The Insufferable Sisters, who never missed a funeral if they could help it, sat in the back and twittered. They held their programs over their faces and peered over the rim of the paper with hard, glittering eyes. Father Laurence found himself singing “Oh God, Your Creatures Fill the Earth,” though it was not on the program and the organist was unable to play the accompaniment.

  “Your creatures live in every land,” he sang lustily. “They fill the sky and sea. Oh Lord you give us your command, To love them tenderly.”

  Mrs. Sorensen closed her eyes and smiled. And outside, a hawk opened its throat and screeched—the lingering note landing in harmony with the final bar.

  That was October.

  * * *

  Father Laurence did not visit the widow right away. He’d wait, he thought. Let her grieve. The last thing she needed was an old duffer hanging around her kitchen. Besides, he knew that the Insufferable Sisters and their allies on the Improvement League and the Quilters Alliance and the Friends of the Library and the Homebound Helpers would be, even now, fluttering toward that house, descending like a cloud.

  In the meantime, the entire town buzzed with the news of the recent Sasquatch sightings—only here and there, and not entirely credible, but the fact of the sightings at all was significant. There hadn’t been any in the entire county for the last thirty years— not since one was reported standing outside of the only hotel in town for hours and hours on a cold November night.

  People still talked about it.

  The moon was full and the winds raged. The Sasquatch slipped in and out of shadow. It raised its long arms toward the topmost windows, tilted its head back, and opened its throat. The mournful sound it made—part howl, part moan, part long, sad song—is something that people in town still whispered about, now thirty years later. It was the longest time anyone could ever remember a Sasquatch standing in one place. Normally, they were slippery things. Elusive. A flash at the corner of the eye. But here it stood, bold as brass, spilling its guts to whoever would listen. Unfortunately, no one spoke Sasquatch, so no one knew what it was so upset about.

  It was, if Father Laurence remembered correctly, Mr. and Mrs. Sorensen’s wedding night.

  Sasquatch sightings were fairly common back then, but they ceased after the hotel incident. It was like they all just up and disappeared. No one mentioned it right away—it’s not like the Sasquatch put a notice in the paper. But after a while people noticed the Sasquatch were gone—just gone.

  And now, apparently, they were back. Or, at least one was, anyway.

  Barney Korman said he saw one picking its way across the north end of the bog, right outside the wildlife preserve. Ernesta Koonig said there was a huge, shaggy something helping itself to the best crop of Cortland apples that her orchard had ever produced. Bernie Larsen said he saw one running off with one of his lambs. There were stick structures on Cassandra Gordon’s hunting land. And the ghostly sound of tree knocking at night.

  Eimon Lomas stopped by and asked if there was any ecclesiastic precedence allowing for the baptism of a Bigfoot.

  Father Laurence said no.

  “Seems a shame, though, don’t it?” asked Eimon, running his tongue over his remaining teeth.

  “Never thought about it before,” Father Laurence said. But that was a lie, and he knew it. Agnes Sorensen—before she was married—had asked him the exact same question, thirty years earlier.

  And his answer then had made her cry.

  * * *

  On Halloween, Father Laurence, in an effort to avoid the Parish Council and their incessant harping on the subject of holidays—godless or otherwise—and to avoid the flurry of their phone calls and visits and Post-it notes and emails and faxes and, once, horrifyingly, an intervention (“Is it the costumes, Father,” the eldest of the sisters had asked pointedly, “or the unsupervised visits from children that makes you so unwilling to take a stand on the effects of Satanism through Halloween worship?” They folded their hands and waited. “Or perhaps,” the youngest added, “it’s a sugar addiction.”), Father Laurence decided to pay Mrs. Sorensen a visit.

  Three weeks had passed, after all, since the death of her husband, and the widow’s freezer and pantry were surely stocked with the remains of the frozen casseroles, and lasagnas, and brown-up rolls, and mason jars filled with homemade chili and chicken soup and wild rice stew and beef consommé. Surely the bustle and cheeping of the flocks of women who descend upon houses of tragedy had by now migrated away, leaving the lovely Mrs. Sorensen alone, and quiet, and in need of company.

  Besides. Wild rice stew (especially if it came from the Larson home) didn’t sound half-bad on a cold Halloween night.

  The Sorensen farm—once the largest tract in the county—was nothing more than a hobby farm now. Mr. Sorensen had neither the aptitude nor the inclination for farming, so his wife had convinced him to cede his birthright to the Nature Conservancy, retaining a bit of acreage to allow her to maintain a good-sized orchard and berry farm. Mrs. Sorensen ran a small business in which she made small-batch hard ciders, berry wines, and fine jams. Father Laurence couldn’t imagine that her income could sustain her for long, but perhaps Mr. Sorensen had been well insured.

&nb
sp; He knocked on the door.

  The house erupted with animal sounds. Wet noses pressed at the window and sharp claws worried at the door. The house barked, screeched, groaned, hissed, snuffled, and whined. Father Laurence took a step backward. An owl peered through the transom window, its pale gold eyes unblinking. The priest cleared his throat.

  “Mrs. Sorensen?”

  A throaty gurgle from indoors.

  “Agnes?”

  Father Laurence had known Agnes Sorensen since her girlhood (her last name was Dryleesker then)—she was the little girl down the road, with a large, arthritic goose under one arm and a bull snake curled around the other. He would see her playing in front of her house at the end of the dead-end street when he came home for the summers during seminary.

  “An odd family,” his mother used to say with a definitive shake of her head. “And that girl is the oddest of them all.”

  Laurence didn’t think so then, and he certainly didn’t think so now.

  Agnes, in her knee socks and mary janes, in her A-line dresses that her mother had made from old curtains and her pigtails pale as stars, simply had an affinity for animals. In the old barn in their backyard, she housed the creatures that she had found, as well as those that had traveled long distances just to be near her. A hedgehog with a missing foot, a blind weasel, a six-legged frog, a neurotic wren, a dog whose eardrums had popped like balloons when he wandered too near a TNT explosion on his owner’s farm. She once came home with a wolf cub, but her father wouldn’t allow her to keep it. She had animals waiting for her by the back door each morning, animals who would accompany her on her way to school, animals who helped her with her chores, animals who sat on her lap as she did her homework, and animals who curled up on her bed when she slept.

  But then she got married. To Mr. Sorensen—good man, and kind. And he needed her. But he was allergic. So their house was empty.

  Mr. Sorensen was also, Father Laurence learned from the confessional booth, infertile.

  Agnes only came to Confession once a year, and she rarely spoke during her time in the booth. Most of the time she would sit, sigh, and breathe in the dark. The booth was anonymous in theory, but Mrs. Sorensen had a smell about her—crushed herbs and apple cider and pinesap and grass—that he could identify from across the room. Her silence was profound, and nuanced. Like the silence of a pine forest on a windless, summer day. It creaked and rustled. It warmed the blood. Father Laurence would find himself fingering his collar—now terribly tight—and mopping his brow with his hands.

  He worried for Mrs. Sorensen. She was young and vibrant and terribly alive. And yet. She seemed in stasis to him somehow. She didn’t seem to age. She had none of the spark she had had as a child. It was as though her soul was hibernating.

  There was a time, maybe fifteen years ago, when Mrs. Sorensen had closed the door of the booth behind her and sat for ten minutes in the dark while the priest waited. Finally, she spoke in the darkness. Not a prayer. Indeed, Father Laurence didn’t know what it was.

  “When a female wolverine is ready to breed,” Mrs. Sorensen said in the faceless dark, “she spends weeks tracking down potential mates, and weeks separating the candidates. She stalks her unknowing suitors, monitoring their habits, assessing their skills as hunters and trackers. Evaluating their abilities in a fight—do they prefer the tooth or the claw? Are they brave to the point of stupidity? Do they run when danger is imminent? Do they push themselves to greatness?”

  Father Laurence cleared his throat. “Have you forgotten the prayer, my child,” he said, his voice a timid whine.

  Mrs. Sorensen ignored him. “She does not do this for protection or need. Her mate will be useful for all of two minutes. Then she will never see him again. He will not protect his brood or defend his lover. He will be chosen, hired, used. He will not be loved. His entire purpose is to produce an offspring that will eventually leave its mother; she needs a child that will live.”

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” prompted Father Laurence. “That’s how people usually—”

  “Now, in the case of a black bear, when the female becomes aware of the new life in her womb, she makes special consideration to the construction of the den. She is at risk, and she knows it. Pheromones announcing her condition leak from every pore. Her footsteps reek pregnant. Her urine blinks like road signs. Her fertility hangs around her body like a cloud.”

  “Agnes—”

  “When she digs her den, she moves over a ton of rock and soil. She designs it specially to provide a small mouth that she can stopper up with her back if she needs to.”

  “Agnes—”

  “She will grow in the dark, and birth in the dark, and suckle her babies in the feminine funk of that tiny space—smelling of mother and baby, and sweat and blood, and milk and breathing and warm earth—hiding under the thick protection of snow.” Her voice caught. She hiccupped.

  “Agnes—”

  “I thought I was anonymous.”

  “And you are. I call all my confessionals Agnes.”

  She laughed in the dark.

  “I am asleep, Father. I have been asleep for—ever so long. My arms are weak and my breasts are dry and there is a cold dark space within me that smells of nothing.” She sat still for a moment or two. Then: “I love my husband.”

  “I know, child,” he whispered.

  “I love him desperately.”

  What she wanted to say, the priest knew, was “I love him, but…” But she didn’t. She said nothing else. After another moment’s silence, she opened the door, stepped into the light, and vanished.

  * * *

  Father Laurence had no doubt that Agnes Sorensen had loved her husband, and that she missed him. They had been married for thirty years, after all. She had cared for him and tended to him every day. His death was sudden. And certainly one must grieve in one’s own way. Still, the sheer number of animals in the house was a cause for concern. The list of possible psychiatric disorders alone was nearly endless.

  The priest walked out to the apple barn but no one was there. Just the impossibly sweet smell of cider. It nearly knocked Father Laurence to his knees. He closed his eyes, and remembered picking apples with one of the girls at school when he was a child—sticky fingers, sticky mouths, sticky necks, and sticky trousers. He was eleven then, maybe. Or twelve. He remembered her long hair and her black eyes, and the way they fell from the lowest tree branch—a tangle of arms and legs and torsos. The crush of grass underneath. Her freckles next to his eyelashes, his front tooth chipping against hers (after all those years, the chip was still there), the smell of her breath like honey and wine and growing wheat. So strong was this memory, and so radically pleasant, that Father Laurence felt weak, and shivery. There was a cot in the barn—he didn’t know what it was there for—and he lay upon it.

  It smelled of woodland musk and pine. It was covered in hair.

  He slept instantly. In his dream he was barefoot and lanky and young. He was on the prowl. He was hungry. He was longing for something that he could not name. Something that had no words (or perhaps he had no words; or perhaps words no longer existed). He was full of juice and vigor and hope. He was watching Agnes Sorensen through a curtain of green, green leaves. She carried a heaping basket of apples. A checkered shirt. Apple-stained dungarees. A bandana covering her hair. Wellington boots up to her knees, each footfall sinking deep into the warm, sweet mud.

  * * *

  When Father Laurence woke, it was fully dark. (Was someone watching? Surely not.) He got up off the cot, brushed the hair from his coat and trousers. His body ached and he felt curiously empty—as though he had been somehow scooped out. He walked out into the moonlit yard. Mrs. Sorensen wasn’t in the barn. She wasn’t in the yard. She wasn’t in the house either. (Was that a shape in the bushes? Were those eyes? Heavens, what am I thinking?) The house had been emptied of its animal sounds, and emptied of its light and smell and being. It was quiet. He knocked. No one answered. He walked over
to the car.

  There were footprints, he saw, in the mud next to the driveway. Wellington boots sunk deep into the mud and dried along the edges. And another set, just alongside. Bare feet—a man’s, presumably. But very, very large.

  * * *

  Thanksgiving passed with several invitations to take the celebratory meal with neighbors or former coworkers or friends, who would have welcomed Mrs. Sorensen with open arms, but these were all denied.

  She said simply that she would enjoy the quiet. But surely that made no sense! There was no one on earth quieter than Mr. Sorensen. The man hardly spoke.

  And so her neighbors carved their turkeys and their hams, they sliced pie and drank to one another’s health, but their minds wandered to the pretty widow with hair like starlight, her straight back, her slim skirts and smart belts and her crisp footsteps when she walked. People remembered her lingering smell—the forest and the blooming meadow and some kind of animal musk. Something that clung to the nose and pricked at the skin and set the mouth watering. And they masked their longing with another helping of yams.

  (The three sisters on the Parish Council, on the other hand, didn’t see what the big fuss was about. They always thought she was plain.)

  Randall Jergen—not the worst drunkard in town, but well on his way to becoming so—claimed that, when he stumbled by the Sorensen house by mistake, he saw the widow seated at the head of the well-laid table, heaped to the point of breaking with boiled potatoes and candied squash and roasted vegetables of every type and description, with each chair filled, not with relatives or friends or even acquaintances, but with animals. He said there were two dogs, one raccoon, one porcupine, one lynx, and an odd-looking bear sitting opposite the pretty widow. A bear who grasped its wine goblet and held it aloft to the smiling Mrs. Sorensen, who raised her own glass in response.