Imaginarium 3

by Sandra Kasturi, Helen Marshall (ed) (v5. 0) (epub)

  Then she does turn, dropping her hand from the top rail to the sun-warmed wood, almost touching yours. And she’s as real and solid as you.

  “Hey,” she says, and smiles.

  Nothing changes. She isn’t real. She can’t be. Because girls like her don’t smile at you. They frown, and they’re suddenly very busy, always with somewhere else to be when you’re around.

  This girl smiles at you. So she must be a ghost, even though the sunlight catches the fine down on her legs and turns it crystalline. You know it’s a lie. The hair brushing her shoulders, the shadow in the hollow of her throat, the peach-fuzz lobes of her un-pierced ears, and the scab on her left knee—these are all a skin stretched over the truth of her. She is a hungry ghost, and she will devour your soul.

  And you decide that’s okay, too.

  She tells you a name that isn’t hers. You give her one in return. The water murmurs, and you talk about nothing. Time stretches to infinity.

  Maybe, just maybe, her fingers brush yours when she finally stands up to leave.

  “Will I see you again?” you say, hoping your voice isn’t too full of need.

  She doesn’t answer, but her teeth flash bright in a nice, even row.

  And so your summer begins.

  The first murder occurred on a Tuesday. Or rather, it was discovered on a Tuesday, but the body had been cooling over two weeks, based on the flies buzzing over the sticky blood, and the discarded pupa cases nestled in the once-warm cavities.

  Crime of passion. Scratches, bruises, evidence of a struggle, but none of a break-in. Spouses—one dead, one fled.

  On a Thursday, the missing spouse turns up two counties over. A confession ensues.

  Outside the county Sheriff’s Office, the boy from the bridge leans against sun-warmed brick, and smiles. He chews bubblegum, shattering-hard, packaged flat in wax paper with trading cards. Collectors throw away the gum, keep cards. Not him. He savours the dusty-blandness, the unyielding material worked by teeth and tongue until it bends to his will. He throws the cards away, precisely because he knows they will be collectors’ items one day.

  He listens through an impossible thickness of brick, plaster, and glass to the blubbered admission of guilt. There are tears; he can smell them, even over the cooked-hot pavement crusted with shoe-flattened filth. It smells of summer.

  Sweat and stress and a tipping point—all the ingredients he needs. A beery night, a whispered word, a suggestion of infidelity. A death born of rage. This is the way it’s always been. His finger, the feather, the insubstantial straw snapping the camel’s spine.

  The boy pushes away from the wall. Struts, hands shoved deep in too-tight, acid-washed pockets. Hair, slicked-back. He might have a comb tucked into one pocket, or a pack of cigarettes rolled in one white sleeve, depending on the slant of light that catches him.

  He commands the sidewalk. Dogs, children, old men, fall into step behind him. Old women tsk from the safety of their porches. Young girls, well, it’s best not to say what they do.

  He heads west, strolling past scrub-weed and abandoned lots to the fullness of wild fields, cuts left to the creek.

  He shucks shoes, wades in, and lays a hand against the massive boulder splitting the water. It is graffiti-strewn, perfect for sunbathing. Perfect for other things, too.

  The boy chooses a sharp-edged stone from the current, and makes a single mark on the boulder’s side—a white line on the grey.

  His summer has just begun.

  This is what the world tells us about girls: They are always hungry.

  They are cruel.

  They will suck out your soul, and leave a dead, dry husk behind.

  They will laugh at your pain.

  That’s why we stitch up their mouths with black thread. We cut out their eyes, and replace them with stones to stay safe from their tears.

  This is what the world tells us about boys: they are hungry, too.

  They grab food with both hands, stuff it in their mouths, careless of what they eat, never bothering to chew.

  They are too loud.

  They break everything around them, without even noticing it is there.

  That’s why we catch them by the tail, so they won’t turn around and bite. That’s why we cut off their heads, fill their mouths with dirt, and bury them at the crossroads. That’s why we burn their hearts, because unlike girls, we know they’ll never feel a thing.

  It is all true, and every word is a lie. Don’t believe anything anyone tells you about ghosts or devils.

  The second time you see her, you think: This can’t be real.

  Because it’s too perfect. It’s the Fourth of July, and you’re at yet another bend in the creek. (With her, it’s always water.)

  The grass is dry, but it remembers rain. The creek—angry here—smells of mud, death, and time. Things have drowned here. Things have been swept away and forgotten. Things sink, and sometimes they rise. But you take the water for granted; you always have.

  A bonfire leaps high, smelling of meat and burnt sugar and wood. There are fireworks, fractured light captured and doubled, each boom-crack echoing your heartbeat, and reverberating in your bones.

  You are surrounded by people you see every day. They live behind counters in the local stores; they line porches, and spit tobacco; they drive the bus carrying you to school. Except tonight, they are strangers. Tonight they are demons. And in a world of strangers and demons, you latch onto the only girl you’ve never seen before. The only one you know for sure isn’t real.

  She is solid and warm. The fireworks stain her with cathedral window colours. She smiles, and her teeth turn crimson, emerald, and gold. She is fierce and wild, too hard to hold. But you take her hand.

  She leans her head on your shoulder. Her hair tickles your skin, and you smell her above and beyond the campfire, which is black powder and pine needles. She smells of soap and smoke, but also of water, of deep and sunken things. It’s a creek smell, and breathing it is drowning, but you do it just the same. You think: This is love.

  It’s the Fourth of July, but this is where summer begins.

  There’s a story they tell in Lesser Creek about a girl who drowned. She had just turned fifteen, or seventeen, or twenty-one.

  Just shy of fifteen, she was sad all the time, without ever knowing why. There was nothing wrong with her, other than being fifteen—a world of tragedy in its own right.

  The girl was hungry constantly, and never full. When she simply couldn’t stand it anymore, she went down to the creek, filled her pockets with stones, and lay in the deepest part of the water with her eyes open until she drowned.

  If you go to just the right spot, where the water is the coldest and your feet don’t quite touch, you’ll hear her. It’s hard to be still, treading water, but if you hold your breath, make your limbs only a fish-belly flash in slow motion, never rippling the surface, she’ll whisper your name.

  These woods are full of ghosts.

  Near twenty-one, she was a farmer’s daughter. She got in the family way, and her parents locked her up, and forced her to carry the child to term. Maybe the baby was stillborn, and maybe she delivered it screaming, bloody, and alive. Either way, she ran away the night it came.

  She ran to the trestle bridge, and threw the baby off just as a train went howling past. Who can say which wailed louder, the baby or the train? Overcome by guilt, she threw herself after the child. Her body rolled down the slope, and the creek carried it away.

  If you stand at the very centre of the bridge and drop a penny, when it lands, you’ll hear a baby cry. Except sometimes it’s the lonely mourn of a train vanishing toward the horizon. And sometimes it’s a girl, just shy of twenty-one, weeping for her sins.

  At seventeen, she was murdered. Her killer cut out her eyes, and replaced them with smooth stones. He stitched up her lips with black thread, and left her in the shallowest part of the
creek where the water barely covered her.

  The stories say her killer was a drifter, or the devil himself. They say he confessed the same day the murder was done, screaming it all over the town square. When everyone came to see what all the fuss was about, he wept, inconsolable.

  He cut her eyes out, because she wouldn’t stop looking at him. He sewed her lips shut, because she wouldn’t stop whispering his name. They hanged him just the same.

  All of these stories are true. Every one of them is a lie.

  The girls of Lesser Creek leave flowers for the hungry ghost at the water’s edge, and burn candles in her nameless name. The boys bring pretty toys, and line them up all in a row. The old women bake oat cakes, sweetened with blood, and the old men mumble prayers. Each brings their hopes and fears, and such desperate love.

  No matter what they bring, the ghost is hungry still.

  The second murder comes late July. In-between, there are a string of assaults, a petty theft, one count of grand larceny, and a host of undocumented sins.

  The boy follows the hoof-paw-shoe-hewn path through the branches to cross the shallow water near every day. He can do that, no matter what the stories say. The wavelets glitter bright, wash sweat and grime from his skin. His toes grip slick stones, and he never falls.

  He makes another mark on the boulder’s side. They multiply like rabbits, like flies. They turn the grey stone dense and arcane. There is power here not found in the other graffiti. And the stone itself is rife with meaning, too—stolen kisses, secrets trysts. Oaths are sworn here, fated for breaking. It is all his doing. Or so the oath-breakers and kiss-stealers say. He drove them to it; it’s what devils are for.

  He has a tally of at least a dozen-dozen, and it is only July. The girl’s space is empty.

  He watches her, sometimes, courting her soul slow, taking her time. She is hungry; the boy sees it in her eyes. But sometimes she smiles.

  And when she does, he realizes his belly is empty, too.

  The marks on the stone don’t fill him like they should.

  Once upon a time, he was a musician. Once upon a time, he was good at cards. He was driven out of town, beaten with a stick, hung at midnight. His heart has burned countless times. He has tricked and been tricked, loved the wrong man and the wrong woman. It is always the same in the end.

  Once upon a time, he walked the rails. Once upon a time, a canvas strap bit his shoulder, soaking sweat, gaining dirt. Walking, he ran. He trusted wrong, sleeping in open box cars, warming his hands by vagrant fires. He gave too much of himself away. He swapped stories, and accidentally told the truth.

  He found himself dead, spit dirt from a shallow grave, and walked again.

  He jumps on stumps, and has a quick hand. Dice and cards always fall his way.

  Even though the marks crowding the stone aren’t as triumphant as they should be, the boy makes another one, and drops the sharp stone. The creek vanishes it, a card up a magician’s sleeve.

  This is what the boy and the girl both know, even when they made their deal: It isn’t fair. They have been given roles to play—ghost and devil, hungry to the very end.

  The summer ticks past, far too slow.

  There’s a story they tell about the time the devil came to Lesser Creek. The townspeople chased him all along the rails. They caught him, and killed him, cut off his head and buried it upside down. They drove a spike through the ground to make sure he couldn’t pick it up again.

  But will-o-wisps still drift under the trestle bridge in the dead-black of night, the devil’s own lanterns, leading the damned to the water’s edge. And if you walk along the ties at midnight and count thirteen from the moment you pass under the bridge, you’ll hear the devil breathing behind you. If you take one step back, you’ll find the twelfth tie missing and he will reach up and drag you down to hell.

  The first time the devil came to Lesser Creek, he was just a boy, no more than seventeen. He committed a crime, or maybe folks just didn’t like the way he looked at them. Maybe the summer was too hot, and tempers were too short.

  Even though he looked just like an ordinary boy, they pulled up rail spikes, and nailed them right back down through his feet and his hands. When they came back after three days, the body was gone.

  No one brings flowers or blood-sweetened cakes to the old rail line. When old women pass, they spit, and old men still drive an iron spike between the twelfth and thirteenth ties on moonless nights to this very day.

  It is a lonely place.

  When the devil came to Lesser Creek the second time, he made a deal with a drifter who dared to skim stones along the steel rails just to hear them sing. If the man brought the devil twenty souls by summer’s end, his own would be spared, no matter how he sinned.

  It was a mass-murder summer. A fire and brimstone summer. Preachers thundered through the churches of Lesser Creek, damnation heavy on their tongues. The air clotted thick; wasps drowned in sweat, humming between the pews and banging their heads against the stained glass. Birds fell from trees, hearts baked within the delicate cages of their bones.

  All the fans stopped turning. Ice cream sizzled before it could touch the cone. Soda went flat in every fountain. Cold water forgot to flow, except in the creek where no one dared go. Wives beat their husbands; fathers cursed their daughters. Boys burst into tears for no reason, and kicked their dogs.

  And the drifter came, and the drifter went, and bodies piled like leaves in his wake. No one could ever say if it he did the killing, or not. But every man, woman, and child in town swore up and down they heard laughter echoing along the train tracks, and it was the devil’s very own.

  The next time you see her, you know she is a ghost, because she kisses you. And girls like her don’t kiss you.

  You are sitting side by side, hand in hand, by the creek, always by the creek. Her feet are next to yours, relaxed where yours are tense. Your footprints sink into the mud. Hers are ephemeral, and disappear.

  You grip her hand too tight, and sweat gathers between your palms. Planted in the dirt, feet in the current, you look toward the rock snagging the centre of the stream. Graffiti scores it. It is a magical, mystical thing; a totem centering all the summer days in danger of flying off the edge of the world.

  How un-solid these liminal years of your life are. At any moment, at every moment, you are in danger of losing cohesion. The rock in the centre of the stream is eternal. It says X was here, and that is real—tribal and shamanistic. Written in stone it can’t be denied. If you vanish, the rock will remain, a record of your being.

  Here and now, she kisses you, and it grounds you, too. It is the culmination of a summer’s worth of desire. It is the inevitable consequence of bridges and fireworks and the muddy banks of creeks. It is the only outcome of frog-song and bug-drone, and all the other milestones of the season.

  And she says, or doesn’t say, but you hear, “All I want is one little piece of your soul. It won’t hurt, not yet. You won’t even know it’s gone until much later. One day, you’ll wake up, not in love with me anymore, old, and looking back on your life, and wonder where that part of you went. It’ll sting for a moment, and you’ll move on. Is that so bad?”

  Her fingers lace yours, and the whole time she looks at the water, not you.

  She says, “I’ll fill you up with me, so you’ll never know anything is missing.”

  She pauses so you think she regrets what comes next. It’s what you’ve always known was coming since you saw her on the bridge.

  She is a hungry ghost.

  Here and now, you love her for her pity. You pity her for her love. It isn’t fair. And so you forgive her, because you’ve been hungry, too.

  She says, “Before you agree understand that if you give me that piece of your soul, it’s mine forever. That’s how love works. It consumes you. The moment it ends, you can’t see past it to a day down the road when you won’t be split open and ble
eding for the whole world to see. In the wound, you can’t see the scar, or even the scab. Memories and hindsight belong to the future. This is here, this is now.”

  You know how this will end. You have always known how this will end.

  You hold her hand, tighter than you’ve held anyone’s hand before, and you agree. You give her your soul.

  The summer seems very short now. You have so little time.

  A third murder rolls around mid-August, but it holds no joy. The boy is winning by default. He longs for a reversal, a revolt, a turn of fortune. He longs for a trick to grab him by the tail.

  He never asked for this, no more than she did. He is a ghost, and she is a devil. The woods have always been haunted, and so have they.

  Vandalism. Arson. A near-murder that doesn’t quite take. He whispers temptation. He pours jealousy, hate, venom, all into willing ears. In the end, he’s powerless. So is she. They only take what the world gives them.

  He makes another mark, drops the stone in the water. The creek chills him. He wades to shore, wishing the summer would end.

  She tells you it is over.

  She told you; she is telling you; she will always be telling you. And. It. Is.

  Welts rise on your skin. Psychological, but so real.

  Of course, it had to happen this way. Nobody loves you, ever loved you, ever will. And part of you knows, bitter, that you are being oh so dramatic, so you laugh. But you cry, too. She warned you, told you what she was doing as she did it, but you handed your soul over anyway, because you wanted it so goddamned bad.

  Even though, deep down, you know, godfuckingdamnit, you will never be good enough to be loved. Someone else will always win, always be better than you. You will always be hungry, while everyone else is full.

  So you walk the trestle bridge, where you can just see the water. You think about the summer, all the people who died, lied, cheated, and stole. The whole fucking town is going to shit, but what do you care? And what would they care if you jumped right now?