by Laura Ruby
So Finn turned down the lane to Petey’s house, expecting to see the Dog That Sleeps in the Lane, but it seemed that the Dog also had other business, because the lane was empty. When he got to Petey’s house, he forced himself not to stop at her window, not to knock, not to whisper her name as he trudged through her backyard, past the hives with the bees humming so low Finn barely heard them at all.
He passed by the Corderos’ house and, after some time, entered the graveyard. The ghosts that he and Petey had seen or imagined on their rides were sleeping, perhaps, and Finn had the graveyard to himself. He wound around the rows of graves, hands brushing against the cool, rough stones. Strangely, he wasn’t afraid, but he wasn’t hopeful either, which felt much worse. A willow tree, branches caressing the tops of the mausoleums, anchored one corner of the yard, and Finn sat beneath it, just for a few minutes, just to watch and see, just to get off his feet. He thought he heard a soft, collective sigh when he collapsed into the grass, but when he looked up, looked out over the gravestones, he was still alone. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes later, his leg was stiff, the backside of his jeans damp from the grass, and the graveyard hadn’t revealed itself to be anything more than a graveyard. All of a sudden, he felt stupid. Roza wasn’t a ghost. If she was—he squeezed his fists against the possibility—she was beyond his help.
He hauled himself off the ground and walked back to the main road. A tired half hour later, he could see his own house, the roof of the barn canting as if leaning a bent elbow on a dark line of cloud. Maybe Petey was right and there was something magical about it. Roza had turned up there, the horse had turned up there. Sean could turn up there, too, but Finn needn’t have worried; the house was dark. Stranger still, the barn was empty—no mare, no goat either.
“Night?” Finn whispered. “Chew?” Their smells were strong, musk and hay and dung, but it was as if someone had just carted the animals off, leaving the mess for someone else. Finn scratched for the flashlight Sean kept by the door, but the light was weak and yellow, casting the barn in sepia. As in the graveyard, Finn wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. He felt around the edges of the barn, wincing at the splinters, searching for . . . for what? A slat of wood that wasn’t actually wood? A trapdoor? A curtain behind which stood the wizard of Oz? What in the hell was he doing? The gaps weren’t in the town, the gaps were in him, the gaps were in his eyes and in his brain and in his soul—he wasn’t built right. He could not be trusted.
Something twined about his ankles and he jumped, fell over into a rather fragrant pile of feed. A soft mrrrow calmed him. “Calamity?”
The cat climbed onto his chest, and despite the pain of his bruises, he didn’t push her away. “I’ve kept you alive, that’s something, I guess. How are the kids?” He stroked her back and she purred, and slid her cheek against his cheek, and kneaded his flesh. Then she stopped, standing at attention, ears cocked.
“What do you hear?” he asked. “You look like Miguel when he talks about the corn running around. He says the scarecrows—”
—weren’t made to scare the crows, they were made to scare the corn.
The corn.
He hugged the cat, who uttered a surprised mew, and released her with a rushed “Bye, kitty.” He got to his feet and half ran, half shambled out of the barn. He didn’t even think about which direction to go, he let his feet take him to the nearest cornfield, any cornfield. He’d already plunged into the yellowing, crisping plants, dying plants, he’d already stumbled forward several dozen yards, when he began to feel stupid again, wrong again, worried again. But the corn whispered, here, here, here, so he kept running, crashing through the plants, not certain where he was going or what he was doing but trusting—not himself, but the plants that had always sung to him, the plants that had always made him feel safe.
It took a second for him to register the cold and the damp leaching into his sneakers. He kept walking, slipping on rocks here and there, righting himself, slipping again, walking, walking, walking. He had just begun to question his own sanity in a serious way when he noticed the stream carved into the plants. Waterways used to channel runoff from the fields. He followed the channel as it got wider and wider, cutting a little more deeply into the earth, and the water deeper, first splashing up around his ankles, then his knees. Soon, he was wading through the water, the current sucking at his legs, pulling him forward. The water was waist level, then chest level; he couldn’t see over the banks of the stream, the river. His feet no longer scraped the rocks on the bottom, and the current lifted him, carried him. The water churned and rushed and sucked and tossed him, and strange yellow eyes watched him from the sky and from the tall banks, and black shapes writhed under the surface of the river and brushed and bumped against his body—ridges of bone, sandpaper skin, the brief press of teeth that tasted, tested. He would have screamed if he could have, but he was too busy trying to breathe. He was sure he saw a boat, and a skull-faced man glaring from the prow, but then he was past it. The water surged forward, powerful as spring rapids. His foot kicked a rock, his knee hit another, and he was running along the bottom as he tried to keep pace with the rushing water, and ran, and stumbled, and ran some more, and then it was not the water sucking at him, it was the wind whipping, and the cold air chilling him and the leaves grasping at him and the plants whispering here, here, here, and he opened his eyes, which he must have screwed shut, and saw he was in a river no more, he was in the middle of a field, the plants reaching upward, alive alive. He stopped running and slowed to a walk. He moved through the field, the plants turning from corn to wheat to thick grasses back to corn. The sky overhead brightened, and turned from black to blue, like the healing of a bruise. He pushed through the plants until he stepped out onto a road. A dusty cutaway road that seemed, simply, to end, as if it had been sliced off by a scythe.
“Wait,” said Finn, to himself. “This is Bone—”
A crow landed in front of him, flapped its glossy wings.
“—Gap,” Finn finished.
“Coward!” said the crow.
“Not today,” Finn told it. He stood in the middle of the road, looked one way, then the other. An engine rumbled and a truck appeared in the middle distance. Finn stepped back into the corn to watch it go by. There was another truck, and another, and another. A fleet of trucks with monster wheels, followed by other kinds of trucks—food trucks, vans, carnival rides on eighteen-wheelers. The fair wasn’t supposed to be held until August, but this wasn’t the same town he knew, it couldn’t be. The plants were too green, the sky too blue, the road too black, like a scar knifed into the landscape.
“Where am I?” Finn asked the crow. “Where am I really?”
The crow cackled and took off after the noisy parade of trucks, circling overheard as if daring Finn to follow. He dared, running as fast as he could with his injured leg. By the time he reached the fairgrounds, the parking lot was packed and the fair was already in full swing, as if time had condensed, collapsed, and only seconds were needed to set up the coasters and games.
“Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me,” Finn said, as he barreled through the throngs of people, thousands of people, more people than he’d ever seen at the fair, or anywhere in his life. The streets of Chicago couldn’t have held more faces, the faces of strangers, bobbing like flowers in a breeze, each one indistinguishable from the next. Was Roza hidden somewhere at this fair? And if she was, how would he ever find her, when the fair seemed to stretch out for miles and miles and miles, bigger and wider and denser than any city, when there were so many people, when his lungs squeezed and would not let him breathe? He searched for the familiar, for Miguel’s long arms, for Petey’s angry bee face, for Sean the giant, for a chorus line of wishbones, but if the Rudes were here, he couldn’t see them.
“I can find you,” Finn said, to himself, to Roza, to everyone here, whoever they were. “I can.”
A woman glanced his way. “I am Roza,” she said, with a Polish accent.
; Finn stared at her, stared at the green eyes and the inky hair and the bright smile. “No you’re not,” said Finn. He shouldered the woman aside and plowed through the streams of people.
“I am Roza,” said another woman.
“I am Roza.”
“I am Roza.”
“I am Roza.”
“No,” said Finn. “No, and no and no.” He waved off a clown selling cotton candy and a mime pushing against an imaginary wind and a pimpled teenager braying, “Three ring tosses wins you a prize for your girlfriend. Do you have a girl? Where’s your girl? Where’s your girl?”
“She’s her own girl,” said Finn.
“Roza is mine,” a voice buzzed. Finn whipped around, scanning the endless waving, twisting bodies, a vast sea of faces, searching for the pocket of stillness. There, there, right there, next to a man on a unicycle juggling swords. Finn charged forward, but the crowd surged with him, pushing him and dragging him at the same time. He punched and kicked his way to the juggling man, but by the time he got there, the pocket of stillness had been swallowed up by the undulating crowd.
The juggling man dropped his bowling pins and grinned with graying teeth. “You will never find her.”
Finn shoved the juggler off the unicycle and snatched up one of his swords. He pointed the sword at the juggler. “Tell me where she is.”
The juggler only grinned wider. “You should be more careful when you handle snakes.”
The sword in Finn’s hands writhed and he dropped it to the ground, where it twitched like a cornstalk in the wind and slithered into a nearby tent. Finn dove into the tent after it, landing on his elbows, pain ringing up to his shoulders. Inside the tent it was dark and hushed. He rose up onto his knees and found himself face-to-face with a young man with black hair.
“Who are you?” Finn said.
The young man said, “Don’t you know?”
Finn scrambled to his feet. It didn’t matter who the young man was. He passed the young man and was cut off again by another young man, also with black hair.
“Get out of my way!” Finn said.
“Get out of your own way,” said this young man.
Finn shouldered the young man aside but slipped when his shoulder hit not flesh, but a slick surface, and he spilled to the dirt. He reached up and touched glass. The young man in front of him also put up a hand.
A mirror.
“The House of Mirrors,” said Finn. “Cute.”
His reflection laughed at him. “Who the hell are you supposed to be?”
“Shut up,” said Finn, hauling himself back to his feet. He kept his eyes on the ground, searching for the snake, and not on the dozens of young men appearing in mirror after mirror after mirror, the young men who would not shut up, whose voices washed over him like the voices of the people of Bone Gap, except they all had the same voice, his voice, the voice inside his head that chattered at him and would never let him sleep.
“You are a joke.”
“You are a freak.”
“Your mother left you.”
“Your brother hates you.”
“Petey doesn’t trust you.”
“Nobody believes you.”
“You couldn’t save Roza.”
“You can’t save her now.”
“You couldn’t recognize her . . .”
“ . . . if her life depended on it.”
“. . . and it does,
it does,
it does . . .”
Finn lowered his head and crashed into the next mirror, knocking it over, sending it into the mirror behind, and the next, like a series of dominoes, the last mirror ripping a hole in the tent on one side. He scooped up a shard of mirror and held it in his palm like a knife. He stepped through the tear in the tent, once again carried along by a current of people.
“You won’t find her,” said a little girl with ice cream melting all over her hand.
“You’ll never find her,” said a little boy with a giant stuffed bear.
“You’ll never find her,” said a woman with a bright pink mohawk.
“I bet I can,” Finn said. “Do you hear me, wherever you are? I bet I can see her better than you can!”
The crowd stopped moving, turned toward him in unison. His hand tightened around the makeshift knife until he felt the edges bite into his skin. Warm blood dripped.
A voice hummed in his ear. “Put that away before the people get hungry.”
“What?’
The man, the Scare Crow, tall and still, stood beside him. Without thinking, Finn thrust the mirror shard at him, but the Scare Crow didn’t move; he was that still, that fearless, that invincible. “You’re only hurting yourself. Besides, the citizens like blood, don’t they? They smell it.”
The familiar rage rattled Finn’s bones, but rage would not help him now. He slipped the glass into his back pocket, wiped his palm on his jeans. “I bet I can find her.”
“Interesting,” said the man. “I’ve never understood why people choose to do the things that are hardest for them. You’ve heard of the Tilt-A-Whirl?”
Finn didn’t even have time to say “Yes” when the world around him began to spin, faces blurring one into the next, the tents and trucks and people tilting on an axis until the ground and the sky switched places: the earth above him, white cloud beneath. Worse than the spinning, the nauseating flip of earth and sky, was what happened to the people. They now hung all around him, unseeing, unconscious, as if their feet were stuck fast to the ground over his head, arms and hair dangling, bodies swaying like animals hooked in a slaughterhouse before their throats were cut.
Finn’s stomach lurched, and he fought to keep from getting sick. The world stopped spinning, but earth and sky were still flipped, the bodies still dangling. “Put them back!”
“They don’t mind.”
“If I find her, then you have to let her go.”
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
“Hmmm. Perhaps you’re right. I’ll accept your wager. But tell me, what do you want with her? You can’t even see yourself. You’ll never be able to appreciate beauty like hers.”
“What would you know about beauty?”
“This story won’t end the way you expect it to.”
“Maybe it won’t end the way you expect it to, either.”
“You’d best begin. There are a lot of people here. This could take a while. Maybe forever.” The Scare Crow backed away from Finn, vanishing into the tangle of bodies like an eel retreats into a bed of river weed.
Finn slowly turned in a circle, taking in the immensity of his task. How could he do this? He couldn’t even recognize himself right side up. How was he to recognize anyone else upside down?
He dug his fingernails into his wounded hand. No. He would do this. He had to. But they all looked the same. Or did they? Bees looked the same, and he had picked out the queen not because of her special stripes or even her size but because of the purposeful way she moved. She might be the only one fighting. But maybe Roza wouldn’t be able to move either, maybe she was as docile and unknowing as the rest. He closed his eyes and tried to picture her, but her features jumbled in his head, everyone’s and no one’s. He opened his eyes and let his vision go slack and loose the way he had back at Petey’s house. He walked slowly, carefully among the dangling bodies, touching one after the other, observing the pitch and sway of their arms and hair and hands, saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry as he did so, because it was his fault, because he was sorry, and because this could take forever, and forever was a very long time.
Petey
CROWS
IN HER FAVORITE NOVEL, A BROKENHEARTED BOY BURNS everything his ex-girlfriend ever gave him, including a photo of her as a child. But Petey had no childhood pictures to burn. All she had were the images burned on her brain and the sensations burned into her skin, and how did you erase those? Stuff yourself in the freezer? Move to the Arctic? Turn yourself inside out and scrub them off in the shower?
She pulled out a folded piece of paper she was using as a bookmark, unfolded it, smoothed it on the bed. It was a poem called “Essay.”
Describe the shorts that changed your life.
Moonlight on skin, warm under fingers.
The color red: why or why not?
Not. Her eyes are black as stingers.
Her mother peeked into Petey’s doorway. “You’re awfully mopey this morning. What’s up?”
Petey crumpled the paper, closed the novel. “Nothing.”
“Didn’t Finn visit last night? I thought he was here every night.”
Images burned in her brain, a flush burned in her cheeks. “How did you know?”
Her mother smiled. “I look stupid to you?”
“No,” Petey said.
“I hope the two of you are being careful.”
The flush turned nuclear, scorching her flesh. “There’s no such thing as careful.”
Her mother frowned, took a step into the room. “Petey, do you have something you want to tell me?”
Write a story that includes a new pair of loafers, the Washington Monument, and a spork.
I’d rather tell you about a new horse, a forest of glass, and a long good night.
Petey plucked at the old blanket on the end of her bed, the one that she’d brought outside and laid by the fire, the one on which she and Finn had been together. She loved this blanket. She hated this blanket. “I’m not pregnant or diseased or anything like that, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I wasn’t,” her mother said. “What I’m asking is, are you all right?”
Was she? She had been so sure. Sure that Finn was face blind and that it explained everything, including his feelings for her. Sure that it meant that his feelings were broken somehow, the way his ability to recognize faces was broken. She had read that it was incurable, but what if, one day, they learned how to fix it? What if Finn saw her and saw how hideous she was? He knew already what other people thought of her. He’d heard what they said. And he’d changed his mind about being seen with her in public, he’d wanted to tuck her in the back of the café like a dirty secret. So, what if he started looking at her the way so many other people did, with a mixture of fascination and confusion and repulsion? She wouldn’t be able to stand it.