Aickman's Heirs

by Simon Strantzas

  ***

  I gave myself an education at Rosewood College. I learned that Seven Minutes in Heaven was not, in fact, a kind of freeze tag, because it was not, in fact, the length of time it took for a dead soul to reach God. I learned that boys would lie to you about hitchhiking across the Pampas to get you to sleep with them, and I learned they probably wouldn’t call. I learned that I had no memory of several headliner incidents that took place the year I turned six—not the three-hundred-person Chinese passenger aircraft that was mistakenly shot down over Lake Dover a hundred miles from where I grew up, not the earthquake that killed sixty in Canada, not the Great Northeastern Chemical Disaster that saw a pesticide gas cloud submerge Manfield and then float westward toward Hartbury—and that I actually had no memory of kindergarten at all.

  My parents couldn’t help me. I would call and they would grunt and hum and rummage through the kitchen drawers; when they got anxious, they needed to fix things. My mother remembered so many of my little childhood calamities—how I once tied our puppy Violet to my Radio Flyer and made her pull me “like a hearse”—but she didn’t remember much from the year that Manfield gave up the ghost. So I tried to forget that I’d ever forgotten anything by drinking, making sure I met enough new people at each party that I’d be invited to another. I’d eventually cycle through everything and everyone, throw up in every floor’s bathroom, memorize every vintage poster for every French and Italian liqueur on every dorm room wall.

  I had hoped to get along with my freshman year roommate, a poker-faced redhead named Georgina Hanssen who was also from a small town, but Georgina was not the bonding type. She lived and breathed only anthropology. She had pictures of herself holding spears in Africa and monkeys in Asia, and eventually the truth came out that her parents had been missionaries, and she had been raised Mennonite. Sometimes she ate dinner with me in the white-walled cafeteria, and we would take turns insulting the slop that passed for food, but she didn’t give me any ways in, and at night she would turn down hall parties to hunch over her weird yellow books and munch her mother’s homemade granola bars. One morning I woke up drunk, half-in half-off my bed, and found her staring at me like a feral animal, like she was seeing me for the first time. “What are you reading,” I asked, the only question that could start a conversation with her.

  “A History of Forgotten Christianity,” she said. Her finger scratched an itch on the open page. “For Professor Kettle’s class. I’m on the chapter about cults of universal resurrection.” She paused, then started reading. “Cults of universal resurrection have experienced cyclical fortunes throughout American history, typically reaching peak popularity during periods of economic depression. An estimated three hundred and fifty such communities have been documented across the Northeastern region. They are commonly found in small towns with high mortality rates due to exposure to natural disasters, poor medicine, and unsafe industrial conditions.”

  Something slithered around my shoulders. “So?”

  Georgina took a deep breath. “Cult-followers believed that God had bestowed upon them the power to return the dead to life. When an untimely death occurred in the community, church pastors and town elders would quickly perform a ritual to prevent the soul from leaving the dead person’s body, holding it in a state of “limbo” until the more elaborate resurrection ritual—often involving a simulated burial and rebirth—could be performed. Although resurrection rituals varied, all cults of universal resurrection held the dung beetle—famously worshipped by ancient Egyptians for similar reasons—in high symbolic standing, as the insect’s eggs emerge from a ball of its waste. Rather than Christ the divine worm, cultists worshipped Christ…”

  “Christ the divine scarab,” I finished. Yes, I had learned that line in Sunday school, along with God bestows the gift of life unto those who have faith, and yes, we hung scarabs on our Christmas tree, but only as a reminder that God was all-giving and we were His life-possessing children, and I had no idea what that had to do with bringing people back from the fucking dead.

  “So? What happened to them?”

  “During the Great Evangelical Revival, they were mostly pressured to convert to mainstream Christianity.” A fingernail scraped a page. Something tore inside me. “Mostly.”

  ***

  I left school after my freshman year. There didn’t seem to be much point in staying. I went into the city, because I couldn’t go home—not to that town full of the walking dead. Not to Pastor Joel and whatever he had done to us on the night of the gas leak. Not to my parents. Before I burned their pictures I would search their frozen smiles for some sign, some hollowness, some fakery, some deadness in their eyes. Depending on how much time I’d spent with Brother Whiskey and Sister Vodka, I sometimes found it, sometimes didn’t. Regardless, I took their money—I had to, what with the economy and the price of liquor. They sent me Christmas cards with green-and-gold scarabs on them, and on the off chance that they had the right address I burned those cards along with a lock of my poisoned bleached hair, because Lily Twining said she was a witch and that was how you severed family ties. “Doesn’t purify your blood, though,” Lily warned me, cigarette jammed between her teeth. “Believe me, I’ve tried.”

  When I was twenty-three my Aunt Rose, wife to Uncle Ben the asshole, died of a stroke. My parents picked me up at the bus station with glassy eyes and the old red pick-up, and oh how I longed to slide back into a gentler, dumber time when I could simply be their daughter, Amanda Stone, twenty-three years old. It did not work. Memento mori. I remembered.

  Things had changed in Hartbury. My favorite Italian restaurant on Church Street had gone out of business, replaced by a plasma donation center. Everyone looked like ghouls, the skeletons that we all should have turned to grinning through their sagging skin. And a new dog—a black and white spaniel—came bounding off the porch. “Where’s Violet?” I asked.

  “Violet died last year,” said my mother, without a hint of sadness in her voice.

  “Life is cheap,” I replied, rubbing New Dog behind its ears.

  My parents didn’t know what was happening to me. They were frightened by my tattoos: a black outline of my sternum where Miss Lucy poked me, followed by three black ribs on each side. They were worried about Brother Whiskey and Sister Vodka, not realizing that those two had seen me through a lot of darkness. They were embarrassed by how I behaved at Aunt Rose’s funeral. They didn’t understand why Pastor Joel’s numb routine of o death where is thy sting and o grave where is thy victory made me hysterical with terror and laughter. I went to Manfield on my final night in town, and took New Dog with me—like Violet, this mutt had immediately adopted me, apparently willing to overlook the question of whether or not I was undead. I said I was going to see a friend, as in hello darkness my old friend, and my mother asked if I was going to see Allie Felici and her new baby. “Sure,” I said, and slammed the screen door.

  Manfield looked beaten-up. Windows had been broken into, storefronts had been tagged with unimaginative graffiti—a reversed pentagram here, a FOREVER LOVE there. Another car with an unfamiliar set of self-indulgent high school stickers was already parked at the mouth of the main street, and it didn’t take me and New Dog long to find the occupants trudging along in the half-light, posing for pictures while making stretched-out corpse-faces. We crept behind at a safe distance, New Dog and I, just close enough to hear the sharp edges of words.

  “You hear about that other town that got hit with the same stuff, except nobody died?”

  “Why? They closed their windows?”

  “No, joker. Look, my mom was a 911 operator. They got so many calls from Hartbury that she thought the whole town was toast, just like Manfield. But when the rescue workers got there, freaking Hartbury just closed up and told them to go home, said everything was fine.”

  At Aunt Ruth’s funeral, my father told me that I had no respect for the life this town gave me. I said that he had no respect for death. I said that if he respected life so much t
hen why didn’t he just dig up Aunt Ruth and bring her back? His face collapsed like a withered orange. “Aunt Ruth was ready to go,” he said. I flailed out of his grasp like a wildcat. I ran to the parking lot over the graves of strangers who had decided to stay dead, under the watchful eye of the great green stained-glass scarab in the window of the church. But I am a scarab, and no man.

  ***

  It sounds romantic when you first hear it: seven minutes in heaven, seven minutes for your soul to board its tiny interstellar ship and set the coordinates for God. Seven minutes for you to change your mind. But that time is spent in nothing but the dark. The empty. Just like underneath Manfield’s carefully preserved skin, behind the Ram’s Head Tavern sign forever creaking in the wind, there’s nothing but gas masks and body bags.

  The world was changing, very fast. I had stolen food out of children’s mouths, helped a man I loved pilfer from plague corpses, thanked God I wasn’t pregnant because I didn’t want a calcified stone baby at the bottom of my stomach. I’d seen a lot of skeletons, but only on a cross-country bus in the dead of summer did my own return to me—howling, ushered in by smoke. Its bones were just as coarse as I remembered, but its agony was so much deeper, that much richer. My skeleton had grown up. That time, I let it win. I unclenched my fists and let go. I let God.

  I woke up when we stopped to let new passengers barter their way on in exchange for gas. Outside my window, one man was beating another to death for whatever the dead man had in his bag—soldiers who couldn’t have been older than fifteen ran off the survivor, the killer. I might have tried to see what I could salvage from the dead one, as ghouls go after corpses, but was interrupted by an old man on the other side of the aisle with rotting teeth and a black fedora. He called me young lady, though I felt like I’d lived forever, and asked where I was from.

  It was a question I hated answering. Sometimes I named the state. Sometimes I lied. Sometimes I said something crazy—“outer space” or “hell” or “beyond.” That time I told the truth. Memento mori—the skeleton made me. I told him about Hartbury, about the harvest festival. I told him about Seven Minutes in Heaven. I told him about playing dead—laying frozen in time in a bed of fallen leaves, waiting for someone to pluck you back to life.

  “Can I tell you a secret? I died there.” The shadows of nearly all my bones were tattooed across my body—I wanted to command the world to pay witness to my death. “I’ve died.”

  The old man grinned and wiggled deeper into his suit, as if he and I and every other loser on that bus were buckled into a fantastic Stairway to Heaven. “Join the club, living dead girl.”

  ***

  The third time I went to Manfield, I was thirty-four. I walked, because my sponsor was big on cold night walks with a backpack filled with stones, to symbolize the burdens we all carry in our Pilgrim’s Progress. I was alone, save for the county dogs that smiled at me with bloody gums as they trotted up and down the cracked remains of the interstate. New Dog, whose name turned out to be Buttons, had been hit by a car on Highway 51. I invited my parents, but they frowned sadly and wondered why on Earth I’d want to go. “That’s a dead town,” they said.

  How strange I must have always seemed to them. They must have spent my life blaming themselves for my choices, wondering why I wasn’t more like sweet little Jennifer Trudeau, who had her head wrenched off in a freak accident with an ice cream truck. Seven minutes in heaven can’t undo that kind of fatality. “It’s peaceful there,” I said.

  So it was. There was a stillness in Manfield that you couldn’t find in Hartbury, because when the blanket of death came for us we kicked it off and were left naked and shivering in the world. But in Manfield there was grass carpeting what had once been the sidewalk, vines crawling up Ram’s Head Tavern, rabbits nesting in the seats of long-gone drivers. Rehab always stressed peace in our time—there are some dragons you must appease, my sponsor said, because there’s no fighting them. And truth’s one such dragon.

  A new flock of teenagers had landed in Manfield. Two girls, three boys, all on crippled bicycles whose parts had been cannibalized for the war effort. I hid behind a termite-eaten column as they wobbled past.

  “You know this place is haunted. My older brother knew a guy who went up here on a dare and saw a ghost… a girl with a dog. One of them red-eyed demon hellhounds.” In hiding, I smiled. Buttons was going to live forever. “I think that guy got deployed.” As had Brandon Beck, his perfect hair shorn down to the scalp before he left for the front. The town used to hold candlelight vigils for his never-recovered body, before his parents passed and so many others followed in his footsteps. “I think he’s dead.”

  Everyone was dead; everyone was alive. A fighter jet roared overhead, right on time for its appointment with the grim reaper. The teenagers stopped their pedaling to watch the angel pass and I took the occasion to run silent and deep, head down, fire in the belly.

  Infestations

  Michael Cisco

  It is a bright day, May second. Picturesque white clouds. A helicopter hovers somewhere in the blue sky. They hear it, but they don’t see it. They look out the window at the street. A dog barks, the shrill, panicked cry of a small dog. Across the street, they are at work, putting the small housefront there in order with rakes and hoses. A car pulls up in front of the house next door.

  A woman comes around the corner and then pauses to check the note she carries in her free hand. Then she scans the front of the nearest building, exposing an unusual, mature face, at once attractive and haggard. She walks uncertainly up the block for a few doors, then turns and crosses the street, brought up short by a car that pivots smartly around the corner the moment she steps off the curb. Now she is across the street, entering the larger brownstone apartment building there with the note held up in her hand like a ticket. Their gaze follows her inside, appraisingly.

  Over the city, then at the airport, she thought, “So I am back.”

  The plane comes in low, and she can see the East River, river of disappearances. In the streets of Manhattan, they look up, eyes seeking her out in her seat in the plane as it soars overhead. She disembarks from the plane, from the airport, her drawn face tense, hurrying her step, although she has no reason to hurry, no one is supposed to be waiting for her anymore. They watch as she hurries past. She feels eyes on her. Through the baggage claim, and the picket of men in suits holding signs that say “Robinson Family” or “Anne Bright.” They call after her, offering her a ride into town.

  She doesn’t want to be spoken to, she wants to be invisible. She insists she is not pretty or noticeable. She is tired from her flight and dreads being forced to speak or to listen, having to learn the contours of some face or other, however briefly, and she feels diaphanous and gigantic, blown up to many times her correct size, too big to hide and too flimsy to put up any resistance.

  Across the city, along its streets, resentful faces look her a moment in the eye and say, “I never left. I never stopped watching for you, knowing your face is mine ... mine ... mine ...”

  She has not been to New York for almost ten years. Her mother had uncharacteristically hemmed and hawed before asking her if she would be willing to go back; Miriam had been a close friend of both her parents since before she was born—her namesake—a friendship that lasted decades and remained firm across long distances, and Miriam had no family to call her own. Without intending to, her mother made it sound as if Miriam were still lying dead in her apartment, rotting unheeded on the purple carpet, while now and then a new prospective tenant, pressing a handkerchief to his face, trampled the yielding invisibility of her corpse while touring the rooms. No one else was available; her mother was still recovering from knee surgery, and her father had her mother to take care of and retirement coming.

  “Someone has to pack up Miriam’s apartment,” her mother had said.

  With his customary thoroughness, her father had drawn up an exhaustive list of all necessary tasks, with numbered steps, but in her ima
gination she conceived of her task exclusively as having to do with Miriam’s apartment. She was going to New York to scrub away Miriam’s traces, so that Miriam’s possessions could also be buried and the spell of home could be broken, all in obedience to an obscure, commercial necessity.

  She had not seen Miriam often when she lived in the city herself. Her work had naturally kept her busy, but she tended to exaggerate her commitments where Miriam was concerned. She told herself it was because she couldn’t stand to confront vivid memories of home, believing that she could manage the city only by stiffening herself in a way that meant shutting out those memories, and hesitantly praised herself for being self-aware, but now she had to admit she’d been lying, that Miriam was boring, and, frankly, very nearly an ugly woman. This was not a thought she could bring herself to formulate honestly, but she could not think of Miriam without a pang of aversion, not so much for her appearance as for the awkwardness involved in knowing someone as plain as that and a latent pain of contrast. Miriam was short, flat, all lines and angles, except for her fleshy nose and cheeks. Her hair was not a bad color, but it was thin, falling lifelessly around her ears and halting in an unkempt fringe above her shoulders; from time to time she would turn up unexpectedly with an elaborate hair-do, a variation on artificial curls, which turned her hair into a bizarre glossy mass of unrecognizable material. She either didn’t know or care how ridiculous this made her look, which was to her credit somehow. Miriam was always ready to shower her with affection, to forgive her everything, and she seemed especially to rejoice in her namesake’s beauty. The face she turned up in her childhood pictures, for all the goofy expressions and crazy teeth, was never delicate, but showed a kind of animal vitality, sometimes dreamy, sometimes bright. She grew into a Junoesque young woman, solid and delicate, innocently humiliating Miriam.