They have taken your book away. They say it is gibberish. But I know all the secrets now.
Sometimes I laugh and laugh.
But I like the white hands that crawl around my bed at night like two spiders. They laugh with me.
Please write or come.
With all my heart,
John.
Flat Diane
Daniel Abraham
Daniel Abraham (1969–) is an American author who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His first short story, ‘Mixing Rebecca’, was published by Ann VanderMeer in The Silver Web in 1996. Since then his short stories have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. The disturbing novelette ‘Flat Diane’ (2004) reprinted here was nominated for the Nebula Award and won the International Horror Guild Award in 2005. Abraham has also been nominated for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. He is primarily known for his fantasy series such as the Long Price Quartet, which features a world where poets use magic in a struggle for power. However, his early short fiction made powerful use of surrealism and horror.
His hands didn’t tremble as he traced his daughter. She lay on the kitchen floor, pressing her back against the long, wide, white paper he’d brought, her small movements translated into soft scratching sounds where the cut end tried to curl down into the floor. His pen moved along the horizons of her body – here, where her wrist widened, and then each finger; down her side; rounding the ball of her feet like the passage around the Cape of Good Hope; up to where her wide shorts made it clear this wasn’t a work of pornography; then back down the other leg and around. When he came to her spilling hair, he traced its silhouette rather than remain strictly against her skin. He wanted it to look like her, and Diane had thick, curly, gorgeous hair just like her mother had.
‘Just almost done, sweetie,’ he said when she started to shift and fidget. She quieted until the pen tip touched the point where it had started, the circle closed. As he sat back, she jumped up to see. The shape was imperfect – the legs ended in awkward Thalidomide bulbs, the hair obscured the long oval face, the lines of the tile were clear where the pen had jumped.
Still.
‘Okay,’ Ian said. ‘Now let’s just put this on here, and then…’
‘I want to write it,’ Diane said.
Diane was eight, and penmanship was new to her and a thing of pride. Ian reached up to the table, took down a wooden ruler with a sharp metal edge, and drew lines for his daughter to follow. He handed her the pen and she hunched over.
‘Okay, sweetie. Write this. Ready?’
She nodded, her hair spilling into her face. She pushed it away impatiently, a gesture of her mother’s. Candice, who pushed a lot of things away impatiently.
‘Hi,’ Ian said, slowly, giving his daughter time to follow. ‘I’m Flat Diane. My real girl, Diane Bursen, sent me out to travel for her. I can’t write because I’m only paper. Would you please send her a picture of us, so she can see where I am and what adventures (Ian stopped here to spell the word out) I’m having?’
Ian had to draw more lines on the other side of Flat Diane for the mailing address, but Diane waited and then filled that out too, only forgetting the zip code.
Together, they rolled Flat Diane thin and put her in a mailing tube, capped the end with a white plastic lid and sealed it with tape.
‘Can we send Flat Diane to see Mommy?’
He could feel his reaction at the corners of his mouth. Diane’s face fell even before he spoke, her lower lip out, her brown eyes hard. Ian stroked her hair.
‘We will, sweetheart. Just as soon as she’s ready to let us know where we can mail things to her, we will.’
Diane jerked away, stomped off to the living room and turned on the TV, sulking. Ian addressed the package to his mother in Scotland, since it seemed unlikely that either of them would be able to afford a transatlantic vacation anytime soon. When the evening news came on with its roster of rapes and killings, he turned off the set, escorted his protesting daughter through her evening rituals, tucked her into bed and then went to his room and lay sleepless until after midnight.
The photograph shows his mother, smiling. Her face is broader than he remembered it, the hair a uniform grey but not yet white. She holds Flat Diane up, and behind them the half-remembered streets of Glasgow.
There is writing on the back in blue pen and a familiar hand:
Flat Diane arrived yesterday. I’m taking her to my favorite teahouse this afternoon. It was designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh – one of the best architects ever to come out of Glasgow, and the scones are lovely. Tomorrow, we are going to work together. My love to Ian and the real Diane.
Mother Bursen.
Diane was elated, and Ian was both pleased that the plan was working and saddened to realize how rare his daughter’s elation had become. She had insisted that the picture go with her to school, and while she promised that she would care for it, Ian was anxious for it. It was precious, irreplaceable, and therefore fragile.
After work, he went to collect her from her friend Kit’s house, anxiety for the picture still in the back of his mind.
‘Today,’ Kit’s father Tohiro reported as they drank their ritual cup of coffee, ‘everything was Scotland. How the people talk in Scotland. How the tea is made in Scotland. Whether you have to share tables at restaurants in Scotland. Diane has become the expert in everything.’
‘It’s my mother. She sent a picture.’
‘I saw. She told us about the…what? The drawing? Flat Diane? It’s a good idea.’
‘It gives her something to look forward to. And I wanted her to know how many people there are looking out for her. I haven’t much family in the States. And with her mother gone…’
A cascade of thumps announced the girls as they came down the stairs. Diane stalked into the kitchen, her brows furrowed, hair curled around her head like a stormcloud. She went to her father, arms extended in demand, and he lifted her familiar weight to his lap.
‘I want to go home now,’ she said. ‘Kit’s a butthead.’
Ian grimaced an apology. Tohiro smiled – amused, weary – and sipped his coffee.
‘Okay, sweetie. Go get your coat, okay?’
‘I don’t want my coat.’
‘Diane.’
His tone was warning enough. She got down and, looking over her shoulder once in anger at the betrayal of insisting on her coat, vanished again. Ian sighed.
‘She’s just tired,’ Tohiro said. ‘Kit’s the same way.’
They drove home through a rising fog. Though it made Ian nervous, driving when he couldn’t quite make out what was coming, Diane only chattered on, stringing together the events of her day with and after and after and. No matter if no two facts led one to another – they were what she had to say, and he listened half from weariness and half from love.
An accident of timers turned the lights on just as they pulled into the driveway, as if someone were there to greet them. There was nothing in the mailbox from Flat Diane. Or from Candice.
‘Daddy?’
Ian snapped to, as if coming awake. Diane held the screen door open, frowning at him impatiently. He couldn’t say how long she’d been there, how long he’d fallen into dim reverie.
‘Sorry, sweetie,’ he said, pulling keys from his pocket. ‘Just got lost in the fog a minute.’
Diane turned, looking out at the risen grey. His daughter narrowed her eyes, looking out into nothing.
‘I like the fog,’ she said, delivering the pronouncement with the weight of law. ‘It smells like Scotland.’
And for a moment, it did.
The photograph isn’t really a photograph but a color printout from an old printer, the ink shinier than the paper it stains. On it Flat Diane is unfurled between a smiling couple. The man is thick, wide-lipped, greying at the temple. He wears a yellow polo shirt and makes a thumbs-up with the hand that isn’t supporting Flat Diane. The woman is smaller, thinner. Her smile is pinched. She only looks like her
brother Ian around the eyes and in the tilt of her nose.
Behind them is a simple living room, the light buttery yellow and somehow dirty.
The bottom of the page carries a message typed as part of the same document:
Dear Ian and Diane,
Flat Diane is here with us in Dallas. She’s just in time for Valentine’s day. She’s coming out to our special dinner with us tonight at Carmine’s Bistro – Italian food. Yum!
Hope everything’s good with you. See you soon. Much love.
Aunt Harriet and Uncle Bobby.
In two weeks, Diane would be nine. It was a foreign thought. So little time seemed to have passed since her last birthday until he realized that Candice hadn’t quite left then. This, now, was his first birthday as both of her parents. He had demanded the day off, and his manager had acquiesced. He had arranged with the school to take her out for the day. A movie, a day with him, and a party that night with all her friends. Kit’s parents Anna and Tohiro were helping to drive them all.
He knew he was overcompensating. He hoped it would be enough, and not only for her. There was a loneliness in him that also had to be appeased. Over the course of months, the traces of his wife – still his wife, still only separated – had begun to erode. The last of her special toothpaste used up; the pillows no longer smelling of her hair; the foods that only she ate spoiled and thrown away. In their place were the toys Diane didn’t put away, the homework left half-done on the table, the sugared breakfast cereals too sweet for Ian to enjoy except as candy.
But Diane’s things were all part his – hers to enjoy, and his to shepherd. Nothing had to be put away unless he said it did, nothing had to be finished unless he insisted, nothing was too sweet, too empty, too bad for you to be dinner except that Ian – big bad unreasonable mean Daddy – said no. Daddy who, after all, couldn’t even keep a wife.
It was Friday, and Kit was sleeping over. The girls were in the back – in Diane’s room – playing video games. Ian sat on the couch with a beer sweating itself slick in his hand while a news magazine show told of a child drowned in the bathtub by his mother. The place smelled of order-out pizza and the toy perfume from the beauty salon toys that Kit brought over; costume jewelry spread out on the carpet, glittering and abandoned.
Ian’s thoughts were pleasantly vague – the dim interest in the tragedy playing out on the television, the nagging knowledge that he would have to pretend to make the girls go to sleep soon (they would stay up anyway), the usual pleasure of a week’s work ended. Kit’s shriek bolted him half across the house before his mind quite understood what the sound had been.
In the bedroom, the tableau. Kit sat inelegantly on the floor, her hand to her cheek, her nose bloody. The controllers for the game box splayed out, black plastic tentacles abandoned on the carpet; the electric music still looping. And Diane, her hand still in a fist, but her eyes wide and horrified.
‘What in Christ’s name is going on in here?’ Ian demanded.
‘Sh…she hit me,’ Kit began, her voice rising as the tears began. ‘I didn’t do anything and she just hit me.’
‘Diane?’
His daughter blinked and her gaze flickered at her friend, as if looking for support. And then her own eyes filled.
‘It was my turn,’ Diane said, defensively.
‘So you hit her?’
‘I was mad.’
‘I’m going home!’ Kit howled and bolted for the bathroom. Ian paused for a half second, then scowled and went after the girl leaving Diane behind. Kit was in the bathroom, trying to staunch the blood with her hand. Ian helped her, sitting her on the toilet with her head tipped back, a wad of tissue pressed to her lip. The bleeding wasn’t bad; it stopped quickly. There was no blood on the girl’s clothes. When he was sure it wouldn’t start again, he wetted a washcloth and wiped Kit’s face gently, the blood pinking the terrycloth.
Diane haunted the doorway, her dark eyes profound with confusion and regret.
‘I want to go home,’ Kit said when he had finished. Her small mouth was pressed thin. Ian felt his heart bind. If Diane lost Kit, he’d loose Tohiro and Anna. It was a fleeting thought, and he was ashamed of it the moment it struck him.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you there. But first I think Diane owes you an apology.’
Diane was weeping openly, the tears gathering on her chin. Kit turned to her, and Ian crossed his arms.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ Diane said. ‘It’s just that when people get mad, they hit each other sometimes.’
‘Diane, what are you thinking? Where did you get an idea like that?’
‘Uncle Bobby does, when he’s mad. He hits Aunt Harriet all the time.’
Ian felt his lips press thin.
‘Really. And have you seen him hit her? Diane, have you seen Bobby hit anyone, ever?’
Diane frowned, thinking, trying to remember something. The failure emptied her.
‘No.’
‘Did anyone tell you a story about Bobby hitting Harriet?’
Again the pause, and confusion deep as stone.
‘No.’
‘And?’
Diane stared at him, her mouth half open, her eyes lost.
‘I think the words we’re looking for are “I’m sorry,”’ Ian said. It was the way his father would have said it.
‘I’m sorry, Kitty. I’m sorry. I thought…’ and Diane shook her head, held out her hands, palms up in a shrug that broke his heart. ‘I’m sorry, Kitty. I won’t do it again ever, I swear. Don’t go home, okay?’
Kit, sullen, scowled at the white and blue tile at her feet.
‘Please?’ Diane said. He could hear in the softness of her voice how much the word had cost. He paused, hoping that Kit would relent, that she would simply take the blow and accept it, that she would believe that Diane would never do it again.
‘’Kay,’ Kit said. Ian’s relief was palpable, and he saw it in Diane. His daughter ran over grabbed her friend’s hand, pulled her out, back to the room. Ian looked in on them. Diane was showering Kit with affection, flattering her shamelessly, letting her play as many times as she cared to. Diane was showing her belly. And it worked. Kit came back from the edge, and they were best friends again.
He put them both to bed, making them promise unconvincingly not to stay up talking, then went through the house, checking that the doors and windows were all locked, turning off the lights. He ended in the living room, in the overstuffed chair he’d brought from his home when he and Candice first became lovers. The cushions knew the shape of his back. Sitting under a single lamp that was the only light in the house, he closed his eyes for a moment and drank in silence. The book he was reading – a police procedural set in New Orleans – lay closed on his knee. His body was too tired to rest yet, his mind spun too fast by Diane and his isolation and the endless stretch of working at his desk. When he finally did open his book, the story of grotesque murder and alluring voodoo queens was a relief.
Diane walked in on bare feet just as he was preparing to dog-ear the page, check the girls, and crawl into bed. She crossed the room, walking past the pool of light and receding for a moment into the darkness before coming back to him. In her hand was the scrapbook he’d set aside for Flat Diane. Without speaking, she crawled onto his lap, opened the book with a creak of plastic and cheap glued spine, and took out the page they’d just gotten. His sister, her husband. The meaty hand and sausage-thick thumb. His sister’s pinched smile. The filthy light.
‘I don’t want this one in here,’ Diane said, handing it to him. Her voice was small, frightened. ‘I don’t like Uncle Bobby.’
‘Okay, sweetie,’ he said, taking it from her.
She leaned against him now, her arms pressed into her chest, her knees drawn up. He put his arms around her and rocked gently until they were both near to sleep.
It was the moment, looking back, that he would say he understood what Flat Diane had become.
There are over a dozen photographs
in the book now, but this latest addition commands its own page. In it, Candice is sitting at a simple wooden table. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail that even where it is bound is thick as her forearm. Her eyes slant down at the corners, but her skin is the same tone as Diane’s, the oval face clearly the product of the same blood. There is a spider fern hanging above her. The impression is of melancholy and calm and tremendous intimacy. It is not clear who operated the camera.
Flat Diane is in the chair beside her, folded as if she were sitting with her mother. A small, cartoon heart has been added to the paper, though it is not clear by whom.
The real Diane has outstripped her shadow – taller, thinner, more awkward about the knees and elbows. This silhouette is already the artifact of a girl who has moved on, but this is not obvious from the picture. In the scrapbook, the only sign of change is a bend on one corner of Flat Diane’s wide paper, a design drawn in the white space over the outlined left shoulder, and the lock of white hair across Candice’s forehead.
The letter reads:
Diane –
Flat Diane arrived yesterday. I have to tell you she makes me miss you. You can see she’s here with me in my apartment.
I love you very much, Diane. I know that it can’t seem like it right now, but please believe me when I say it’s true. There is no one in the world more important to me than you are. And I hope that, when your father and I have worked out the paths our souls need to take, we can be together again. Whatever happens, I will always be your mother.
It is signed Candice Calvino, her maiden name.
The other letter is not in the scrapbook. It reads:
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 217