by Paula Guran
I’ll sleep, eventually. All of high school is a process of forgiving Oona for moments like this, but we’re not even sure it’s Oona who’s the problem. Maybe me and Trev are the problem. Maybe we just love someone who’s crazy. That happens. Me and Trev sit in the car listening to Nine Inch Nails, a pile of Oona’s clothes in the passenger seat.
“I hope this gets better sometime,” says Trev.
“Which ‘this’ do you mean?” I ask him.
“All this.”
“Everything?”
“It’s never getting better, is it?”
“It might.”
We look at Oona’s clothes. They’re still there, even if Oona is gone. Later they tell us that somebody slipped LSD in the punch, but they never figure out who it was.
Two
We’re seven. Oona’s on the ground in the middle of the trailer park, surrounded by window blinds not usually opened. The trailers face inwards around a central core where there’s nothing planted. I sometimes find bits of old toys here, little things in the ground. There’s not much to recommend it beyond the fact that it’s an open space no one wants to deal with, and so it’s available. We play here like crazy. This is where I learned to do a backflip. This is where my neighbor taught me to square dance, and where I learned to identify birdcalls. It’s a piece of dirt but it’s my dirt.
I brought Trevor and Oona here, showing off my powers. Oona’s not allowed to do anything. Her parents live in a different part of town where there are driveways. My mom, when Oona says her last name, is impressed and also not. “I’ve heard about your dad,” she says.
Oona’s yellow dress is spread on the ground. She doesn’t care about it, and I’m desperate to be like her. She already trampled it at the swimming pool. It’s still wet. My own T-shirt is nothing nice. It came from Salvation Army, but the thought that dirt on it might become permanent is always a thing in my household, my mom crying over stains. Oona’s dress seems to ask for the dirt of the world. This dirt especially likes it. It’s all over her in a minute.
We’re playing a game. I learned it from my friend who has a trampoline at her house. Not a friend, really, but a birthday party I got invited to because everyone did. Someone’s mom had rules. In the original version, a person sits curled in a ball, eyes shut in the center of the trampoline, and the rest of the party bounces around her, chanting the words to the game.
Deadgirl, deadgirl come alive, come alive at the count of five. One, two, three, four, five.
The dead girl bounces up and keeps her eyes shut while she jumps around trying to grab someone. You try to keep the dead girl from getting you.
We eat cheese sandwiches, and I teach the game to Trevor and Oona. No trampoline here, but it can be done in dirt. I’m dead first. I curl up, and Oona and Trev run in circles around me, singing out the words to the game. I’m smelling the ground, hot and dry, and under that something chemical that burns my nose. I stand up blind, and start hunting for them. It only takes me a second to grab Trevor because he can’t stop giggling.
“Dead girl,” he says weakly because he’s laughing too hard to talk.
“You must be bad at hide and seek,” says Oona.
Then Trevor’s dead, and he can’t get either of us because we’re better at it than he is. Oona’s moving fast and I keep looking at her, and finally I’m looking at her so hard she turns around and says, “What?” and then stumbles and cuts her knee on something.
I see something, a firefly, maybe, a bright flare, and then it’s gone, right into the wound, but it disappears. Maybe it wasn’t there. She dabs at her knee, which is bloody.
“Ow,” she says. “Sharp.”
I catch a glimpse of something that looks like an old knife and feel the dirt where she fell for whatever cut her, but there’s nothing.
Trevor grabs her. “Dead Girl,” he shouts, triumphant.
I see a glint just for a second, the firefly, maybe, but not from outside Oona. Her eyes are almost all black, and then they aren’t. I see them glow, a brightness, and then black again. I could yell for a grown-up but they’re not home.
She licks her finger. She shuts her eyes and curls up. “I’m dead,” she says. “So now you get to be alive.”
She might need a Band-Aid. From where I’m standing, I’m seeing blood soaking into the dirt, but Oona waves her hand. Her eyes are still shut.
“Run around,” she insists.
We do. I keep looking at that blood. The dirt is wet. I feel like I see something crawling up out of it. I feel like I see the firefly under Oona’s skin, making its way somewhere. Oona seems pale, but she also seems like it doesn’t hurt. There’s a clacking sound, and I don’t know where it’s coming from. Like wings rattling against one another. I look up. Nothing.
We circle her, and Trevor starts chanting. “Dead girl, dead girl, come alive.”
I join him. “Come alive at the count of five.”
Now together: “One.” Oona’s face is turned toward the ground, and her shoulders are hunched inside her yellow dress.
“Two,” and the sky has thunderheads. Oona’s totally still. I want to start laughing, but I don’t.
“Three,” and a dog’s barking. The last light’s on Oona now from the sun coming down, and I hear a screen door slap itself against a doorframe like a mosquito killed on a thigh.
“Four,” and Trevor’s jigging high-kneed behind Oona and then around in front of her. She’s still as a statue, and for a second that’s what she is, a marble girl, hard-skinned and smooth and waxy as a plum. There’s a smell, an oven smell, and then a cold smell, a dark blue-green smell, and I feel my bladder give.
Trevor doesn’t notice. He’s swooping and bouncing and Oona doesn’t notice either, because she’s getting up.
“Five,” Trevor shouts, but Oona’s already off the ground. Not Oona. Someone else, unfolding like a newborn calf, awkward arms and knees all folded up. Red hair to her waist. Ragged yellow dress. Pale speckled skin and wide eyes. I look at the ground. Oona’s gone.
“Dead girl,” the lady says, and looks at me. Her lips are parched. She’s filthy. She raises her hand to her mouth and coughs, and I’m stuck in front of her as she gags on bugs. The whole world’s full of bugs suddenly, all kinds, and I don’t know where they’re coming from, but I can see them coming out of the sky and up from the dirt too, all in rows and then in a rush as quick and glittering as water. Beetles and moths and lightning.
“Where’s Oona?” I ask the lady, but she doesn’t answer me. In the sky around us, something’s ripping like nylon stockings, running down from the center of the dark. Brightness rolling casually from behind the black. Holes all around us. Lightning bugs disappearing into them, a blink, a blink.
I feel her hands on me, on my shoulders, and she’s looking down at me as her head rips off her shoulders and falls. I’m a basket. I’m a hoop. I put my hands up to cover my face, and I catch her crown of braids. One of my fingers sticks in her mouth and I feel her teeth in my skin. Another in the corner of her eye, and I feel it give, swishing wet, a ripeness.
“Oona!” I’m screaming, and I’m holding this dead thing, and I move my hands, trying to drop it, but I can feel her skull. I can feel her jawbone and the sockets of her eyes, and she’s dead.
I look at the ground and it’s covered in a carpet of dying lightning bugs.
The head in my hands says something, but she can’t even talk. Her tongue is thick and garbled, and my hand is in her mouth, and when she looks up at me, I see one of her eyes is missing. I can’t move. I can’t scream anymore. The sky is ripping open. I see ambulance lights and someone on a motorcycle. I see a fishhook gleaming. I see a pile of bodies. I’m seeing all these things and also I see my own skinned knees in front of me, and my mom is nowhere.
A dark hole in a pale face, a mouth around my hand, bugs crawling out the corners, dirt everywhere, and blood, and then it’s done. There’s a flash of light brighter than the bugs.
Trevor’s sta
nding behind me with a flashlight, and all the screen doors are opening, and Oona’s on the ground in front of me, a flickering image at first, fetal position, dress torn, and all around her this woman, a bigger version, who looks at me, her eyes screaming, glowing, and then she’s gone.
“Don’t,” she says, but she’s not saying it to me. The sky zips itself like the back of a dress.
Oona sits up. She looks at us and at my mom and at all the parents in the circle, who wonder why I screamed. I look down at my hand. I wipe it on my T-shirt.
“Do I come alive now?” she says and laughs. “You look weird.”
There’s a stripe of red on my buffalo T-shirt. There are teeth marks in my finger. When I go to bed, I find dead lightning bugs in my shoes. Everyone says we have a big imagination. Oona doesn’t say anything.
We didn’t really know her, and now we don’t really know her more. We’re invited to her birthday. She turns another age. We’re invited to all her birthdays. Her dad doesn’t notice us. We ride in fancy cars. We get bikes. We eat hamburgers. Oona never shows up in school pictures. Oona never shows up on videos. Sometimes I see the lady outside the school, waiting, but if I look at her, she’s gone.
Sometimes I pull the book from under my bed, the one full of dead girls, pictures of them in their fancy silk dresses, but I don’t look at it. I just pull out the library check-out card, and then I put it back in. My name isn’t even on it. Nobody knows I have it. Nobody knows anything.
I don’t think it was my fault.
I think it was my fault.
One
The window explodes behind Trevor, and I watch it happen. A swarm of insects filling the bar so there’s nothing to it but wings, and all of them on fire, glowing with captured sunlight.
The little girl steps over the sill. The bottoms of her feet are black. She’s been walking dead for thirty years, and beside her I see another Oona, and another still, this one old, all of them walking through that window.
Trevor turns. I look at his neck. There’s a piece of glass in his skin. I lift my hand, wondering at the piece of glass in my arm, and blood around it, pulsing out calmly to a beat. I see myself from the wrong angle, and then I see Trev from the wrong angle. I see dirt below me, me pitching into it, downward.
We’re surrounded. All the Oonas are in the bar with us, and there’s something about them, the way their hair is braided, the way they hang for a moment by their necks and then tilt forward under the blade, the way we’re everywhere at once, an execution on a hillside somewhere, Oona’s head shaved, a basket to catch it, and an execution in a prison somewhere, Oona’s head hooded, and an execution on a street somewhere, a little Oona and a car slamming its brakes on, a grave full of beetles, a little Oona in a Victorian dress, a little Oona made of light, her whole body glowing and then dark, glowing and then dark.
Trev and I are on the floor in a landscape of glass and both of us on our knees.
“Who’d we bring back?” I ask him, because we tangled time back then, thirty years ago, and the Oona that was with us that day is not the Oona we’ve ever seen again. I’ve known it and Trev’s known it too, and now we’re going to die knowing it. We’ve seen her sometimes, glimpses of the original, but she’s wired together with something else, an Oona full of centuries worth of dead girls, all held in one body, all moving at once. I’ve tried to puzzle it out: thirty years of antennae and wings, thirty years of insects crossing centuries, flying fast. No one would listen to me when I tried to talk about it. I stopped trying. I thought I might end up shouting, trying to tell strangers. No one ever believed that something came up out of the dirt. No one ever believed she was a nest full of spirits, and I tried not to believe it either.
I try to be ready to go. I try to be ready to skip back in time, to die over and over, to be whatever it is Oona needs me to be.
Trev’s looking over my shoulder at her.
“Who’s your executioner?” says Oona from behind me. “You catch your own head in a basket and spend the rest of time carrying it around with you. You get murdered in Mexico and dropped into the dirt and no one ever finds you. You get beheaded for being a witch in Massachusetts. You walk through a jungle with a basket on your head. You fill a basket with bugs. You die in a pit in Indonesia, shot for selling them to the highest bidder because the beetles all contained god and you blackmarketed them.” She pauses. “I did that one time. Maybe that’s how this started.”
She leans over me. “You shake hands with your lover before you leave her. How about you, Zellie? You used to love me. Do you still love me?”
She coughs. A lightning bug on her tongue.
This Oona’s not the little girl Oona, but the ancient Oona, her body full of bright, her eyes dark.
“Where is she?” I ask. Trev’s choking and a little bit of blood is coming out of the corner of his mouth.
“There’s no Oona left,” she says. “We filled her up.”
But there’s a flash in those eyes, a thirty-year-old circle of dirt. The ancient Oona looks at me, her head tilted, black wings running down her cheeks. The thirty-seven-year-old Oona looks at me too, and at Trev. She leans forward and picks him up. She blows into his mouth, and in her breath appears a black butterfly. Trev gulps.
“Oona?” Trev asks. “Are you in there? I’ll take the rest of them.”
“Let’s go home, Oona,” I say. “Dead girl, dead girl,” I say, and I struggle to my feet. “Come alive.”
There’s a blurry motion and for a bending moment, there are nine of us in the room, three children, three adults, three old people tilting to our graves.
I grab Trev’s hand, and Trev grabs mine, and another mine, and another Trev takes another me. We ring around the Oonas and the room fills with light, with glowing and dark, with blurring motion.
Trevor leans in. He’s a broken man in bad shape and he doesn’t give a fuck about fear. He kisses Oona, and the room bends. I lean in. I kiss another Oona, the old Oona before me, and the floor tilts. The little ones stand together in the center of us all, children, smaller than I remember being. We’re both kissing blurs.
“Dead girl, dead girl, come alive,” I say into the ancient Oona’s mouth.
“Five, four, three, two . . . ” Trev says into the little Oona’s ear. We are both the dead in the picture, but we’ve been good as dead since we fell in love with someone who wasn’t living. We have nothing to lose.
“One,” we say together.
I see my executioner, and I see us all weeping for a loved one. I see a basket, and I see myself in it, my own head, my own hands. I see an Oona, naked and dead, and beneath her body a litter of shining insects carrying her over the forest floor, moving their treasure to a mound of dirt. I see an Oona swarmed by tiny gods, all with their wings humming, their mandibles clacking. I see a living, breathing Oona in our arms.
Someone flies into me, and someone flies into Trevor, filling us with the dead. Our bellies, our bodies. We carry the lost. We share the burden.
But on the floor, there’s a circle of dirt. And curled in it is Oona, asleep, like a volcano erupting, like a yellow iris blooming, her hands full of old knives, rusted with centuries of exposure to the elements.
She opens her eyes.
“When did we get so old?” she says, and outside it’s bright, and gold, and summer.
Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the young adult fantasy novel Magonia, the dark fantasy/alt-history novel Queen of Kings, and the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes. She co-edited the New York Times-bestselling anthology Unnatural Creatures, benefitting 826DC, with Neil Gaiman. With Kat Howard, she is the author of the novella The End of the Sentence—one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014. Her Nebula and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated short fiction has recently appeared in Lightspeed, Uncanny, Nightmare, Tor.com, Shimmer, Apex, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Subterranean Online, The Toast, and more. She is anthologized in Wastelands 2, Glitter & Mayhem, The Lowest Heaven, The Book of the Dea
d, and several “year’s best” compilations. Her nonfiction has been published and covered in places ranging from the New York Times to Harvard’s Nieman Storyboard.
Death is like a movie star: he can’t just tell you his real name. He has to go incognito . . .
Death and the Girl from Pi Delta Zeta
Helen Marshall
Carissa first sees Death at the Panhellenic Graffiti mixer where he is circled by the guys from Sigma Rho. They can’t seem to help crowding him even though they clearly don’t want to be near him. She has gone with several of the Sig-Rho boys. All of them have. But she has never gone with anyone like Death before.
Death is wearing a black track jacket, with a black T-shirt on beneath and faded black jeans. Carissa, like all the other girls, is wearing a pink cashmere sweater with the letters Pi Delta Zeta embroidered in darker pink and a white cotton tank top. She is also carrying a marker. The boys from Sig-Rho have already begun to make use of the marker to write things around her breasts and stomach and neck, things like Sig-Rho 4Evr and Love your body and Kevin likes it with mittens on.
The guy with the black T-shirt and black jeans doesn’t call himself Death though. This is what he says:
“Hi,” says Death. “My name is David.”
“Hi,” says Carissa. She wants to say more but Logan Frees has grabbed her in a big, meaty, underarm embrace so that he can write Occupy my crotch on the small of her back, except he is drunk so it comes out as Occupy my crouch, which doesn’t make any sense.
It is only later that Marelaine points him out to her.
“There,” says Marelaine. “On the couch. That’s Death.”
“Oh,” says Carissa. “He said his name was David. How do you know that’s really Death?”
“Death is like a movie star: he can’t just tell you his real name. He has to go incognito. But you can tell anyway.” Marelaine punctuates this with a sniff. Marelaine is the former Miss Texas Polestar. Her talents include trick-shooting, world change through bake sales, and getting what she wants. She has mastered the sniff. She has also mastered the pony-tail flip, the high-gloss lipstick pout, and the cross-body cleavage thrust. Only Sydney, from the third floor, has a better cross-body cleave thrust.