But cats are different. Larger, smarter, hunting only for food. Well-fed cats will sometimes bring small gifts, guts of unidentifiable rodents, carcass cleaved, chewed, left behind. Oh, the organs are the prize. As a child, the girl kept a cat she loved. The cat slept for hours curled by her belly, even in the sweet heat of July, back when the damp around the girl’s hairline was temporary. Cat fur stuck to her: the animal couldn’t help it, had to shed. In sleep, the cat protected the girl from rabbit-fiends. Even after the fire, she could only sleep with the cat in place, no matter the season.
If you looked at that cat’s eyes, you would see their perfect grass-green hue, the color of spring that the Easter Bunny could only approximate. Cats are the real resurrection.
Sometimes the girl thought she was a cat. In particular, that cat; its grey fluff became the girl’s covering. How can I not recall the cat’s name? The girl would look in the mirror and see green eyes peer back, strange because could a cat stand on hind legs to look in that glass? Was a cat so tall? I suppose so. Or so it appeared to the girl, at intervals, when she was two, three, five, seven. During those raw, nearly indivisible years.
After she became seven was the fire. Which was not the rabbit’s fault. Unless it was.
Fire the color of blood, blood the color of life. But that’s a lie. Have you noticed? Fire is not the color of blood. Fire is several colors, and blood is just one: bump-bump, bump-bump, bump-bump. Fire is trickier. Fire tricks. It licks at the tendrils of a house, tantalizing, and the girl could not look away, and that fire stole green from her, her green eyes, her green soul, all the green shoots out back in the field, that fire and those damn rabbits took it all, masticated it. Chewed, chewed, and spit or shit it out, green gone, so all that’s left is one color of red, bump-bump, bump-bump, bump-bump.
Why this trinity? Why always three? Rabbit, cat, girl.
###
I need a breeze, but there’s only a cruel ring of sweat around my hairline. You might not notice at first, but come closer, see that tiny river? It’s made of drip, so small and thin it erodes my skin, its darkness possibly mistaken for un-dyed roots in need of a perk-up. A trip to the beauty parlor would not be bad. The girl’s mother used to go there—before she left home—and the girl went along, carrying the burden of rabbit. A trip to the beauty parlor for me would not be bad. Not for obvious reasons like vanity, but because I would be touched. To be touched, with the speed and energy of upwell that makes those lilies of the valley stretch greenly up through dead ground, slowly showing first their green bubbles, and then green becomes white, bubbles become tumors of perfume. Tender bells, baby hats. Didn’t the girl’s grandmother smell like those flowers, or am I recalling her painted porcelain vase, small enough for a child’s clumsy handful of the green shoots and their pearly baubles? Or was it her mother who smelled so sweet? So sickening? Or was it the girl herself?
Children used to sing this song in spring. The girl used to sing this song, in spring:
White coral bells upon a slender stalk,
Lilies of the valley deck my garden walk.
Oh, don’t you wish
That you could hear them ring?
That will happen only when the fairies sing!
How lovely the lilies of the valley are, dead, brown-edged, drooping in the vase, the stem-slope curvier than when fresh, somehow more truly themselves, more graceful as they relax, tender bells now browning, baby hats tumbling off.
Years since I’ve considered such frills, but now the girl’s grandmother’s vase-full trembles here. To see another human, to pay the human to touch my hand, clean and varnish the nails, let the tips dry, then apply warm water—Yes! Even in this heat!—to my scalp, massage sweetsoap. Oh for the shushing of hair full of lather, that luxury. Do I still have hair? If I could find a mirror, I would explore that question, seek evidence, assemble my thoughts and muscles so I could step toward the glass and see what she could see.
The girl’s mother left long before the fire. I’m still relieved about this, though the girl had her heartbreak at the time. And after she left, the girl’s father was no softer. Her mother was never happy in this house. No one liked to clean, but the job fell to her, and the windows were hateful work. Once a year, usually in spring, her mother would take vinegar and tell the girl to get a pile of dusty gazettes, discarded words good for something, home to many spiders or possible spiders (those faint grey creatures that the girl wasn’t sure if she had actually seen would dance slow and pale across the stack of papers).
They fascinated the girl; these frail ghosts spanned this world and the next, their intention only to find a safe place to hide, sometimes tiptoeing—do spiders have toes?—onward toward the heat register, the hereafter. How could the girl fear them? They feared her. Their tender wisp legs like her grandmother’s china, not meant for everyday use.
Once a year she saw or imagined those spiders.
Cleaning the windows, the girl’s mother used her uncommon words, dark words, things like, “damn Godforsaken hovel.” The girl didn’t comprehend her mother’s anger. It felt like a cold thing, an icebox, hidden in her all the time, kept up in the cabinet of her heart, always visible but only released for special occasions, like windows. The girl always wondered why the mother left and left her here. Her father wondered, too. He didn’t save his foulness for special occasions. After her mother left, those words became their everyday dishes. The girl cooked the gruel, but her father provided the anger, the hatred.
After the fire and everything happened, the girl’s father moved on to the next town, maybe looking for his wife, maybe for some next woman to ruin with child. I had a lot of time to think. Plenty of quiet. If a man is unhappy, so will his woman be. Maybe that works the other way, too, and maybe it’s impossible to untangle certain kinds of unhappiness. Maybe it’s really just who has the fortitude to stay. I am still sorting out why I stayed here. I guess that’s part of the point of my telling you this story. It is sometimes important to sit on the back stoop, to name as many dead cats as I can recall, to wish someone had written down their names, marked places where they remained. Now just lacy bones. If that. Sometimes I consider going back there, as I look out at the high brown weeds, years of (ignored, unintentional, accidental) crop, mingling with unruined new green points; that’s life still trying, grass, still stretching toward something good, the sun. I sometimes think I’ll dig up bones, see if the girl’s good child-mind returns to distinguish one skeleton from another. Would the shape of a skull illuminate whether it belonged to the cat Heliotrope or the cat John? But it was that first cat, with unrecalled name, the one the girl loved best. If I could see better and find those cat bones, I would begin to understand some things.
Like the fire. I don’t know how it started. The father was who-knows-where; the girl was sleeping, dreaming that the cat was curled as usual, and it wasn’t the burning smell that woke the girl, not smoke, but the cat’s absence. For the cat had died and been buried a year before, and only returned and curled in dreams. The dream cat had awakened with the real fire’s swirly smoke, and had escaped to wherever dream cats go. Like the Cheshire Cat, as Alice knew, these cats have secret places, but the girl had only a bed, and when she woke, she coughed and choked. Blind, she tried to find the stairs, but all their wood was melting in that color of fire that isn’t blood, the licking color of speed and heat and then as even the lilies of the valley singed outside, it all tumbled forward, as things always do.
###
I gather the energy to scratch open those wounds. My feet look like they could walk, they’re still there, blister-free. They look strong. No shoes, but I don’t think it will hurt. I’ve been barefoot before. I step carefully, but there is no way to protect feet from some grass, some burrs, some splinters; the skin has got to yield. Staying on the porch is safe, but what has safety ever given me? So out I go.
The feet work, and I think about the cats, their colors, as I step past the end of the back walkpath, into the grass,
where cats used to leave the girl vole guts, past the shed where she found the unburned rabbit, past chipping paint snowing down in sheets the size of small papers, perhaps the size of a notice you’d see posted on a board in town, Saturday dance, a house, foreclosing.
“I’ll dance tonight, wear holes in my shoes, till I am the one that she loves the best,” I sing, lines from a song I used to know, but can’t remember more now, and can’t really hear myself singing. Like I said, in this story, there will be gaps.
It takes years to walk back to the field. Past the stubborn apple tree, arms cradling nothing now. Past the black walnut where the girl used to collect those green bombs, smelling of earth and salt. When she was young, not yet four, she fingernailed into a green hull, found dark inky wood, a walnut hidden inside that pungent package, and tried to hide it from her father. He hated walnuts, their smell, their existence, but he never cut down the tree. I think he liked to curse at it, liked having that tall, helpless enemy. It’s blurry but I walk past it now, stepping on something round that feels like memory.
I think I see the girl’s father, but he’d be so old now. It’s a younger man I see, wearing a low hat, brim shielding his face, bending over and picking up something round, a ball, and here comes a child to him, speaking in child talk; I hear the notes but not the words. The man hands the ball to the child, who takes it and runs off. The ball is lots bigger but the same hue as that walnut-green, before it, like everything else, blackens toward decay.
You’d think I’d be there by now but it is a while more before I reach the field. My feet are slow, barely move. Sometimes that’s how things work. When I get there, I suspect I’m turned the wrong way, or perhaps I’m looking at the wrong field. It is darker than I remember, but that could be my eyes, as eyes work slowly sometimes, like feet, and other earthly parts.
I get no feel, cannot locate the cat bodies, so I decide to increase the surface of possibility; that is, I decide to lie down. Maybe if more of my body touches the ground, I’ll hear something. A few years later I am lying down and it feels good.
There are ways of conjuring things, I’ve heard, ways of bringing things back. I don’t know if this can be done with cats, but people, yes. The man with the hat is there again; his child looks taller now, or is it just the angle of my body on the ground? The man looks taller too, but adult people don’t usually grow like that, people not being cornstalks. There are cornstalks farther back in the field, odd if it’s still spring, but I think the stalks are on fire, because I smell that walnut salt smell, which is often an indication. And then I hear a soft meow, and I know if I move three inches to the left, my belly will be directly above the first cat’s remains, the corpus of that blessed protector. I wonder if she can smell the fire too, but it barely matters now that I’ve found her. You never knew her name, but I did.
Several years later, I begin to dig.
Nadia Bulkin
VIOLET IS THE COLOR OF YOUR ENERGY
Abigail Gardner née Cuzak was sitting on the bathroom floor, thinking about the relationship that mice in mazes have with death, when a many-splendored light shot down from the stars like a touch of divine Providence. Abigail hurried to the bathroom window above the toilet, but just as she put her fingers on the smudge-stained glass, a loud noise—not an explosion, more like a diver’s plunge—burst from the field and pushed her back onto her heels. The impact tripped the perimeter lights; she could see shockwaves rippling the corn. But there was no smoke, no fire, only the faintest tint of red-blue-purple now rapidly melting into night.
She heard Nate throw off the covers, muttering, “What the fuck?” And then, sharper, “Abby!”
The two of them rushed downstairs, a shadow of the team they had once been when they were first trying to forge a life together out of the money they’d saved in college, him at the chem lab, her at the campus store. “I bet it’s our buddy Pierce,” Nate muttered, barreling through the kitchen, running into a chair in the dark. If it hurt, he didn’t show it. “He probably cooked up some radio-controlled boondoggle to mess with the crop. Probably aiming for the sprinklers. Or just trying to nuclear-waste the whole damn thing.”
Abigail did not think that sounded much like him. Ambrose might have enjoyed eating up the little farms around him, counting up his tripling acres with a glass of whiskey, but he hated parlor tricks; didn’t think he needed to lower himself to sabotage. She said nothing to Nate. It was better to let him cling to that bone if it kept him occupied.
Nate had his gun. Abigail had a fireplace poker. Her farm cats were skulking by the flower pots, making low scratchy howls at something in the corn. Abigail followed him to the front as quietly as possible, her bare feet curling around dry stalks and kernels and poisoned insect corpses, but she had the feeling they would not find what Nate was looking for. They would not find any ruddy farmhand with a twistable neck, nor a small broken remote-controlled drone. Nate would periodically shush her and veer in a new direction, but Abigail knew there was no life out there. The field was so quiet, she could hear the cats’ growling. Though the air sure smelled strange—pungent and tart with a hint of curdled sweetness. It prickled her skin.
Between the rows, Nate turned and whispered, “There’s no one here.”
She could have told him so, but Nate had to know for himself before he’d turn around. Had to go all the way to the state border before he admitted that maybe he had missed the turn for Salt Creek Road. That was just his way. He liked being careful; she liked that about him. “Maybe it was something on the road,” she said, so he would let them get back to the house. The thought of the road and the real world beyond the gravel driveway had reminded her that the children were alone. She had dreams about them growing up that way—little feral masters of the house, sunken and sullen and riding the dogs like wolves. “Maybe somebody blew his tire.”
Nate seemed to be chewing the whole interior of his mouth. “That wasn’t a tire, Abby.”
“You can look again in the daytime,” she tried.
“I’m gonna call up that son of a bitch Pierce in the daytime is what I’m gonna do,” said Nate. “Teach him if he thinks he can intimidate me.”
When they slunk back to the house, the boys were standing on the porch, the dogs at their heels. Zeke was trying to project his authority with his Little League baseball bat; Merrill was wiping his eyes. Teddy asked if a comet had crashed, and Nate gave him a little push to the head and said, “Don’t get too excited.” Underneath the porch, the cats’ diamond eyes were shining.
###
Their harvest was surprisingly healthy that summer—bigger and greener than any others since they moved out of their south Lincoln bungalow three years ago and decided to make a more wholesome life in the country. Nate didn’t have the nutrient content analysis back yet, but when he took bites off the blond-haired cob he said he knew. Abigail thought it tasted off—sour, like the air in the field since the crash that wasn’t a crash—but Nate said it needed processing, and when was the last time she won any farming awards? Well, he was right about that.
And it was good to see Nate happy. She had never allowed herself to doubt him—before she married him she had asked herself, do I trust this man to lead this family? and she had decided the answer was yes, come hell or tarnation—but it was still good to get good news.
“What kind of Frankenstein corn are you growing now, Gardner,” said Ambrose Pierce when they ran into him outside Horwell’s general store, sipping a Dr. Pepper. “I thought you were all about that hippie organic tofu living and here you are pumping your crop with steroids.”
“You’re the only one growing Frankenstein GMO corn,” Nate said, puffing out his chest. “Some of us haven’t forgotten what it means to be a real farmer, growing real food for a real family.” Ambrose wasn’t married. Nate had suggested he was gay, but he was not. “Guess you Big Ag types wouldn’t recognize real corn if it rose up and kicked you in the ass.”
Ambrose made a guffawing sound. “Aren�
��t you from Omaha?”
Nate shifted the bags in his hand and went to the truck and didn’t answer. But Ambrose caught Abigail by the wrist before she could follow, and said to her, “Abby, something’s off about that corn. I don’t like it. I don’t know what he’s been doing but you gotta get that shit cleared by the FDA.” A good wife would have stiffly told him he was just jealous, just sorry that he couldn’t quite yet eat up Nate’s land, but she must not have been a good wife. Nate unlocked the doors and shouted, “Abby! Let’s go!” The “go” had a punchy desperation to it, probably because that was the moment he saw Ambrose touching her hand.
So Nate was already in a bad mood when they started the drive home. Zeke and Teddy had been late meeting them at the truck, and Merrill had knocked down a chocolate display at Horwell’s. Abigail understood. They were restless children. Sure, they had all the bicycling down country lanes that they could want, all the smashing of rotten pumpkins, but they needed people. They needed to look at things that weren’t stalks or clouds. Teddy especially. She could see the look in his eyes getting pounded in deeper all the time: the look of a cornered animal.
“Did you get that nutrient analysis back?” Abigail asked, and she really shouldn’t have.
Nate, chewing on a thumbnail, widened his eyes. “What?”
“For the corn.”
“Why would you ask me that?”
A welt of worry in Abigail’s stomach became a full-on ulcer as she searched the horizon—just corn and trees and ditch and road—for something that would answer Nate’s question to his satisfaction. “I just was wondering.” No, that wasn’t good enough. The ache didn’t stop.
“Did Pierce tell you to say that? Back at Horwell’s? Huh?”
Her mouth was opening and closing, but only breath was coming out. She heard something constrict in Nate’s ribs and he suddenly ripped the steering wheel to the right, pulling the truck to the shoulder of the road. She knew the boys were holding their breath so she felt the need, then, to make some noise of protest on their behalf.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three Page 2