by Daniel Kraus
The grip, however, changed. Marvin’s fingers laced through his son’s hair and drove his skull into the meteorite. Ry heard a crystalline crunch. For an instant his eyes were pressed to the rock’s labyrinth and he was lost in its folds, then Marvin’s arms plunged Ry’s head underwater. His entry into liquid was like a slap to naked baby flesh; his eyes, already open, adjusted to the dim brown world. Each time he whipped his head to find air it struck the rock, expelling a glittering fog of sediment. He was total, pure awareness, especially in those seconds before blackout: Marvin’s screams, smeared by fluid; the noise melody of his mother wailing and making her way down the bank; and a third voice right there in his head, deep and steady, having been fed on the vitamins of stars.
“—WORTHLESS—”
(rarer than gold, frankincense, myrrh)
“—BETRAYED—”
(beloved)
“—SEND YOU TO HELL—”
(heaven awaits)
“—FOREVER—”
(and ever, amen)
11 HRS., 54 MINS. AFTER IMPACT
Night crept across her skin like wet cement. It was pleasantly cold, pleasantly heavy, even as it threatened to fix both legs into a statue position. Sarah kept her legs turning, though, because those were her brother’s instructions. She hugged her elbows, being careful of her throbbing palm, and wished that she were wearing her long underwear instead of her nightgown. Long undies made her look like a baby, but they were a heck of a lot warmer.
It was scary how darkness bore down from all sides, but also electrifying. If only she felt better so that she could fully appreciate it. She thought, as she often did, of Ry’s journey through Black Glade, accomplished when he had been but a year younger than she was now, and as usual she felt two burns: one of pride, and one of fear that she would never measure up to such greatness. Every year at school kids came up to her and asked if Ry Burke was her brother. She used to relish the attention, but now she dodged it. At some point in her life, she would have to take the risks that would define her.
Sarah peered across the field to the north. Far away was Black Glade’s grasping horizon. Maybe she wouldn’t cut through those particular woods, but why not another shortcut? Rescuing her brother and mother was a lot more helpful than pretending to see imaginary bears, and it would reap a greater reward than any tooth-fairy payout. Future schoolmates, when whispering about brave deeds, might mention Sarah Burke, too.
She stopped walking. Her defenseless soles stung from the gravel. Dead ahead—west—was the way to the Stricklands’. Technically, though, the Crowleys were closer. Ry had sent her along the simplest—not the quickest—route, and she felt a little affronted. Especially after the way she’d dodged those power lines and dealt with what was happening between Sniggety and Phinny. She’d earned the right to make her own decisions.
Sarah aligned herself with the waning moon. If she was right, the Crowley farm was a straight trip through this cornfield, over a hill of soy, and down into a dandelion-filled valley that Sarah had always envied. There were scads of Crowleys, seven or eight of them, including daughters older than Ry and younger than Sarah, and as she took her first step into the ditch she imagined being in their company, not the littlest or the biggest but just one of the gang, with fine and varied examples of womanhood everywhere she looked.
The yellow stalks lapped her skin like cold, dry tongues. Even in their post-harvest state the plants outstretched her, and within seconds she lost her sense of direction. That was okay—just follow the row. For a time the only sounds were the rustling of leaves and her whispered counting of paces, but after a while she noticed the stray chirping of one or two birds. That was a good sign and she brightened her step. This trip should take no more than half an hour.
Soon she came to an area where a number of stalks had been flattened. Her pause was brief. Someone had been here before her and that was another good sign, because if it had been one of the Crowleys then she must be close to their farm. Sarah smiled. She couldn’t wait to see their faces when she showed up at their door. Those Burke kids, they were capable of anything.
Mostly she wondered if Esther Crowley would be there. She liked Esther, not because Esther had ever been especially nice to her but because she was dauntless and quick-tongued and big-breasted and made up her eyes with unparalleled artistry—and best of all she was still young enough for Sarah to exercise her own aspirations. Ry hated when Sarah teased him about Esther, and Sarah felt bad about that. But she knew—she knew—that Esther was exactly what her brother needed. Ry was not a normal boy. Sarah would know that even if kids at school weren’t constantly saying it. But a girlfriend, a bold one, who’d show him that there was more to life than the mazes he’d made in his mind, would work magic.
The row she was following got uglier. Stalks were smashed in great volume and furrows had been kicked through the dirt. Goose bumps erupted across her arms and neck but she told herself it was just a nighttime chill. Esther—she concentrated on Esther.
They had nearly had sex, Ry and Esther. Everyone knew this. Sarah herself had found out from Tina, one of Esther’s little sisters, who relayed the whole upsetting tale one morning on the bus. Tina’s references to anatomy and maneuvers were cryptic to Sarah, but one thing was for sure: Ry had failed tragically in his quest for romance. Sarah had sat silent for the rest of the bus ride, hands folded atop her Holly Hobbie lunch box, knowing that she should think less of Esther for spreading this story but instead resolving to redouble her efforts in bringing the two teens together. One day Ry, too, would have the confidence to gossip about sex like it was no big deal. If that meant he had to become a little meaner, a little shallower, well, then—
Sarah stopped with such abruptness that her torso pitched. She grasped a cornstalk for stabilization, but it had no weight and snapped in two. One of her knees hit the dirt and her lips curled in disgust because she had almost touched it, this dead animal strewn across the path in front of her. It was probably a squirrel, though the pulped mass of fur and skin rendered it beyond identification. A much larger animal had been here and done this. In fact the bigger animal probably beat down this very path. Sarah told herself to keep moving and sidestepped the carnage.
Her courageous mood was spoiled. She was frightened now and that was unfair; tears welled and she tried to outrun them. Her arms were spread wide to help with balance and all at once she became aware of a slickness across her fingers. Without stopping she checked her palm and discovered a dark splotch, and she wondered if her burn had blistered. But there, on the stalks, was more of it.
The moonlight was sheepish but Sarah knew blood when she saw it. Now it wasn’t Esther that she wanted, it was Mr. Crowley, any adult. For a crazed second she even wished to see her father with that rusty old shotgun. More than anything she wanted to turn back without looking at what came next, but she knew very well that she didn’t possess that kind of discipline.
Blood was everywhere—sparkling from corn silk, winking from purple mud, gleaming in beads strung across spider-webs. Crumpled in the center of it all was a corpse, the body heaped like bonfire wood awaiting the match. Next thing Sarah knew, she was inching closer, her naked toes picking through the surrounding viscera as if they were every bit as dangerous as live wires, until she was at an angle where she could see the man’s face. Even before that moment details were sinking in, items of clothing she recognized. Those shoes that belonged to her brother, how unspeakably horrible to find them, of all places, here.
It was Jeremiah. He was dead; she’d never seen anything deader. She made the positive ID from the clothes Jo Beth had gifted him and from those malformed hands, not from his face, because his face was only partially there, having been ripped off along with the uppermost part of his head. Sarah realized with a sick, cold sensation that the twist of flesh she had encountered earlier in the corn had not been a squirrel at all.
18 HRS., 35 MINS. AFTER IMPACT
Jesus Christ was eight feet tall. Ry
did not recall this fact from years of bone-dry sermons or the Sunday school storybooks with their depictions of interchangeable men in slovenly robes. But Jesus Christ filled the bathtub in which he stood, the bumps of his rubber hair smearing the ceiling mold. The hair was painted brown, though much of it had flaked off, revealing an underlayer the dull-gray color of exposed brains. Similar patches of gray poked through elsewhere: two spots like nipples upon his pink chest; a palm dot like an extra stigmata; and, worst of all, along his kneeless legs, chipped paint like leprous welts. Ry knew that it was his carelessness that had done this to Jesus Christ. He remembered knotting the long limbs to his belt as he fled through Black Glade. He parted his numb lips to apologize.
“Sorrow not, child.” Resonant yet gentle, the voice came from everywhere at once. “I am resurrected.”
An ache fit over Ry’s head like a helmet, and he judged it not as the flare of injury but as the sensation of the saved. He took a moment to get his bearings. The bathroom air was foggy and dimly lit. He was crumpled at the front end of the empty but humid tub, one leg tossed over the edge, his head resting just beneath the faucet. Realizing this, he braced, expecting water, the continuation of his drowning.
“Thou remember the last words I spoketh?” The oval head titled but there was no emotion in the line-dash mouth or white-dot eyes. Steam gave rise to perspiration upon the rudimentary features and the moisture fell like taciturn tears. “I toldest thou that we would grow up. Have we not?”
“Yes,” Ry said. “Oh, yes.”
“Gentle Furrington is here too. He missed thou greatly.”
“I missed … both of you, I—”
“And we thou.”
“But what about …” Ry’s mouth hung open. “Am I going to see—”
“Hush,” Jesus Christ said. “We shall not call upon that one. His is the world of Revelations.”
Like a series of still photos, events began to fill in the blanks of Ry’s memory: his father, the gun, the crater, his sister’s escape. Rather than being left to smother in the mud, he had been deposited in this tub, but he was quick to remind himself that such a lucky break did not mean that he was out of danger.
He gave Jesus Christ an important look. “We have to be careful. We need to—”
“Son.” His father’s voice was as brilliant as orchestral music compared with the soft sighs of the shower conversation. “Time to get up.”
Ry craned his neck and found Marvin no more than an arm’s length away, cloaked in steam, hunched over a sink whistling with hot water. Resting behind the knobs of hot and cold was the Winchester, bejeweled with moisture. The mirror, cloudy and drizzled, concealed Marvin’s face, and he was shirtless—his torso an unsightly knot of prison muscles—and he held in one hand a razor. Ry recognized it as his own and lifted a hand from the slimy floor of the tub to touch his face. The pimple alongside his nose was the only variation from the smoothness.
The razor rattled against porcelain. Marvin used no cream but put the blade directly to cheek. Ry looked away and saw, next to the shotgun, the foot-long shard that had broken free of the meteorite, its dazzling topography magnified by tense little beads of water. Marvin’s hand strayed and caressed its countless edges. He lifted the fingertips to his nose, where he sniffed; to his lips, where he daubed whatever slick magic he had wiped from the shard’s surface; to his tongue, which licked at the fingers like a child goes after runners of ice cream.
“We can’t see, we can’t work.” The razor repositioned itself, the blade cutting across cheekbone. “We can’t work, why, then, we’ll just wait for dawn. I’m not happy about what you did, son, but I can’t do anything about it. That’s a lesson in itself: You make the best of what you’ve got. I’ve been wanting a go at a shave anyway. Maybe some supper. We’ll have another chance, you and I, you bet your life. And soon. Dawn comes early this time a year.”
“Let me take him.” Jo Beth’s voice came from the bathroom doorway. “I don’t want to hear him choking again.”
“Father-son time, Jo. You have to respect it.”
“He swallowed too much.… Can’t you just let me have him?”
Marvin rotated the blade in the stream of water. “Women will worry, son, but don’t hold that against them. Their fate is not their own. Worry is understandable. When it becomes too much, well, you nip it in the bud.”
Jo Beth inhaled. But she held her words.
Ry was riveted by familiar notes from his childhood: the wet rip of hair removal, the ting of cheap metal to porcelain sink, the gurgle of water thickened with hair, his father’s luxuriant sigh.
“Most fellows consider shaving as a chore. That’s the wrong way to look at it. Think of it instead as one of life’s sustaining rituals. There’s so many on a farm. There’s the alarm clock; there’s chickens; there’s things to be done before sunrise, before the rain, before winter. Same thing here. It’s a task to be done before things go too far. It also answers everyone’s first question: Can you operate on the schedule of manhood? Yes. We can. It is a ritual we love.”
The razor rattled. Ry thought he could hear individual hairs hit the sink.
“Jesus Christ, it feels good.”
Ry looked to Jesus Christ at the mention of his name. The towering rubber figure did not move. Beads of water worked their way down his luminous body.
“They’re not real enthusiastic about handing out razors in prison. Shaving’s not a ritual they appreciate and, believe me, they have plenty of rituals of their own. Except theirs don’t make a man, no sir. Theirs pull the manhood out of you like deboning a fish. Until all that’s left is the worst of impulses. Things you want to possess, people you want to hurt, women you want to have forceful intercourse with. No good. None of these feelings serve you any damn good at all. But I won’t sugarcoat it. Bad impulses can be useful if you can hang on to yourself, your true self. They can act as cheap fuel for an engine that wants to quit. You think we’re miles apart, son, but it isn’t so. We’re closer than you think.”
The razor glided right past extended jugulars, a jutting Adam’s apple, the final patch of matted neck fur. Steam rolled in torpid clouds like a manifestation of Marvin’s wisdom allowed to fatten in a way not permitted in nearly a decade.
Marvin placed the blade to his forehead, right at the hairline.
“Oh, no,” Jo Beth said. “No, don’t.”
“It feels,” Marvin breathed, “like spring.”
The razor went back. A long strip of fur peeled off and plopped to the sink like a dead rodent. The bulb above the mirror shone off the segment of newly exposed scalp. Ry thought it must be nearly impossible to shave a head with a safety razor; though, on the other hand, no one wielded a blade like Marvin Burke. Back and forth it went—shick, shick, shick—and great volumes of hair were sliced away, much of it floating like bugs in the heavy fog. Ry blinked his father’s hair from his lashes and spat it from his lips. Only the dagger of meteorite went unaffected—black strands jitterbugged inches away like shavings of magnetized metal.
Marvin’s interlocked back muscles fattened as he twisted around. The pink, puckered scar on his neck where Scowler had drilled for blood was now hideously revealed. Before Ry could look away light splashed off his father’s skull, so expertly shorn that it gleamed like a balloon. His chest hair was thick and matted with blood over his heart, and upon his flushed face was a surprise that should have been predictable: a mustache, thick and soaking. He held up the dripping razor.
“Your turn,” he said. “Up and at ’em.”
Ry turned to the figure hiding in the shadow of the shower curtain.
“What do I do?” Ry whispered.
Jesus Christ said nothing but twisted to the side, becoming a helix. The action made sense to Ry: Turn the other cheek. He nodded enthusiastically and gripped the edge of the tub. He could and would turn his cheek, both of them quite literally, if that’s what Marvin wanted.
“Thank you, Jesus,” he said.
Marvin’s mustache crawled upward. “You speaking to someone?”
“It’s his friends,” Jo Beth said.
Ry, halfway to his feet, threw a harassed look at his mother, who still hovered at the bathroom door, her skin like parchment. She gave him a glance that suggested she knew what she was doing. Ry doubted that viscerally—the Unnamed Three were to remain unnamed, especially by their murderess.
Marvin’s eyes traveled from wife to son. “Friends? How’s that?”
Jo Beth nodded so vigorously the hot clouds in the bathroom eddied. “Imaginary friends. Toys. Things he had as a boy.” She lifted a palm attached to a weary, dead-weight arm. “It’s what I was saying earlier. He’s not okay. He’s been damaged—as a child. And now today, everything’s that’s happened today? At least let him go lie down.”
Horror crawled across his skin. How long had his mother felt this way? Who else shared her opinion? Did Sarah follow him around only because her mother insisted upon it? Maybe Jo Beth even paid Sarah for her pretend devotion? God knows Sarah would do anything for money. Or Esther Crowley—what about her? Had their sexual encounter been intended as no more than what kids called a mercy fuck?