The Shadows Behind

by Kristi Petersen Schoonover

  Well, not today.

  Today, I’m making a decision.

  Tear it down.

  She gets as far as the door and rests her hand on the knob. “You were always so timid and afraid, I never had to worry about you leaving. Like all the others did.”

  I stand there, waiting for her to say more.

  She approaches me, sets her hands on Perry, and gives him a tug.

  I don’t budge and clutch him tighter.

  She gives me a desperate look. “Margie, I . . . I’ve done all of this for you! For us!”

  It’s like I’m standing outside of my body when I say it: “There is no us.”

  “I just don’t understand!”

  “There is. No. Us.” I turn and look at her. She was so beautiful to me once. Before that, she had the face of an angel, someone I’d trust with my life, someone I could always run to when my heart got broken. But now, she looks hard, angular, and—not pretty anymore. She’s not pretty. All I see is the ugliness that she made choices for people that should have made their own—even if it was on the fish’s genuine advice.

  I stand there and wait for her to say more.

  “Well.”

  Silence. Just the sound of her panicked—yes, panicked!—breathing.

  She opens the door and walks out, slams it behind her.

  Suddenly, I’m not afraid to be alone. I can do this. I can move back into my house—not only repaired, but completely refurbished—or I can just sell the damn thing, get out of here, and never have to deal with Juliane or anyone again.

  Where would I go?

  House mouse perfect fun, says the fish.

  Of course!

  Disney World.

  And it will be just the way it was supposed to have been planned. Starting over again. Starting from where the whole disaster element came into my life, and picking up fresh.

  I behold the hideous wrinkled thing. “What do you think?”

  I’d swear he winks at me. Fifty-nine over, it says.

  “That’s right, Perry!” I say. “It’s over.”

  And I realize, repairs completely finished or not, that I want to go home.

  I put the fish in his box and do just that.

  ~~**~~

  I open my front door and, despite the fact that the living room still needs some work and there’s a film of construction dust over just about everything, nothing feels like it’s changed.

  In the sunroom, I see the pillow where Juliane left it; on the stairs, I feel that magical kiss. In the kitchen, I taste the post-break-up shots of Patrón—in fact, miraculously, it seems like there’s still half a bottle on the wicker bar.

  But I’m different. It all seems so distant now, like it’s not my life, and I feel strong.

  “It’s just you and me, Perry,” I say aloud.

  There’s a knock at the door, and I jump.

  I set Perry, in his box, on the mantel.

  On my porch stands a slight young woman a few inches shorter than me, her hair the color of leather. She takes a step back when I open the door, almost as though she’s unsure about disturbing me. “I’m . . . I’m sorry.” Her voice is rich and low, like one of those exotic beauties in a 1930s adventure film. “I . . . I’m Marilyn. Your neighbor.”

  So this is what she looks like! Her eyes are the blue of peacock feathers—I know they must be contacts, but it would be wonderful if they were real—and she has a long, thin face and a nose that turns up slightly.

  She runs a hand through her hair. “I’m sorry to bother you, but . . . I just got home, I’ve been away for several months, and . . . a friend of mine said your packages tend to get delivered to my house, and so I was hoping maybe this one time you got mine.”

  It takes me a second to realize the friend she’s referring to is Suzanne. Suzanne was the only one who’d supposedly met her who would know that.

  I suddenly wonder if Suzanne broke up with me for reasons other than what she’d cited.

  “So, I was wondering if you got any.”

  The smell of late June tiger lilies wafts through the house.

  “It’s really important,” she says.

  Yes, yes it is. I will always know what’s coming down the road apiece. I will never have anxiety again.

  Awkward moment. A car passes by.

  Less than one over, Perry says.

  She tilts her head a little to the left. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  Forty-five.

  The blue eyes I once thought so heavenly now pierce through me.

  She blinks. “You don’t hear that.”

  “I have . . . I’ve got . . . Netflix on upstairs.”

  Twenty-three.

  “Really?”

  My nerves kick in. I try not to stutter and say the first thing that pops into my head—what the hell was that movie Juliane and I watched? “Yes. Yes—Mascots.”

  “Mascots?”

  “Yeah—it’s—” Who the hell directed that? “It’s—you know, the guy who did Waiting for Guffman? This one’s about sports team mascots. Competing for trophies.”

  Sixteen.

  “They must be at the part where they’re doing countdowns for the routines or something.” I glance down at my feet, then back at her. “It’s a great movie. You should watch it.”

  Marilyn is quiet.

  Perry says nothing further.

  Marilyn looks away, perhaps at the rose bush alongside my driveway. “It’ll drive you crazy, you know. At first, you’ll think it’s the most amazing gift, that you know things, good, bad, indifferent.” She turns and stares intently back at me. “Until it tells you something you really don’t want to hear, so you ignore it.”

  There is another uncomfortable silence. Then, she sighs. “Well, okay then. If you see a package show up, would you let me know?”

  I nod. “Absolutely. Sure.”

  I close the door. Through a sidelight, I watch her make her way down the porch, her batik skirt that seems a little too long for her billowing with each step.

  In the silence, the fish whispers the clearest message it’s ever uttered.

  Give me back.

  An excerpt from

  the upcoming novella

  Tidings

  By Kristi Petersen Schoonover

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the sunburnt Iowa cornfield, dead crows stretched from the tips of Reese’s Old Gringos to a dilapidated barn at the edge of the horizon. She could have believed it was a gloss of licorice if it weren’t for the smell, like skunk and rancid chopped meat; between that and the sweat snailing down her belly into the waistline of her skirt, it wasn’t easy to quell the rising tide of ill.

  “So.” Her ex-husband, Mason, let the word hang in the breeze like an empty noose.

  She couldn’t blame his apprehension. Her inexplicable, partly psychic gift of interpreting bird language had put a wedge between them seventeen years ago, but at the moment, it had brought them back together. In the wake of flocks of birds dropping out of the sky on an almost daily basis—even WHISPers, the event reporting system, was overwhelmed—Mason could no longer be the USGS’s senior ornithologist, reassuring the media, “This means nothing.” We don’t think what it means is good news, he’d told her. You understand the birds. You can tell us what’s happening.

  There was nothing to say, and there was everything to say.

  He shoved his hands in the pockets of his cargo shorts. “This is the magnitude of what we’ve been seeing. They’re all this bad.”

  Nausea hit her, hard, but she refused to buckle.

  “Reese?”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “You okay?”

  The shrilling of the year’s just-emerged cicada brood drilled through her. “Yes.”

  “Do you feel anything?”

  “Incredibly sad. Overwhelmed.” She brushed a sweat-dampened curl from her forehead. “Jesus.”

  “No.” He turned to face her. “D
o you feel anything? Can you hear them?”

  She was held by his eyes; deep and full of trust, so different from the days when he hadn’t believed her, when he’d thought she was insane, when he’d been embarrassed by her going to people’s houses and helping them solve their bird infestation problems. “I can only hear them if they’re alive, Mason. Did you forget that?”

  He held her gaze for a moment, then looked down at his work boots and back out at the field. “I’ve forgotten a lot of things.”

  There was an uncomfortable weight between them, and a hot wind whipped scorched grit into her eyes and did little to cool her down. Despite the cicadas, she could sense something out there: a whisper, a hish, a rustling. “I think there’s a couple that survived the fall.”

  He looked at her. “You kidding?”

  “No. There’s one, maybe two. They’d be on top—they landed on those that fell before them.” It made her sick to say it. “Like a cushion.”

  “So what are they saying?”

  “I need to find them, Mason. I need to find at least one and hold it in my hands. It’s too weak for me to hear.”

  Another leaden moment between them, and she could feel her heart pulsing in her ears. He kicked at the sand and a cloud of brown silt drifted toward the truck. “I’ll see if I can find some sticks.” He turned and walked parallel to a line of skeletal cornstalks.

  “No, no.” She rolled open the flap on her messenger bag. “We’re good, I have medical gloves—”

  “I’m not getting that close to them. You use the gloves. I’ll use a stick, thanks.”

  “Would you want someone poking at you with a stick?”

  He stopped and glared at her, and after a few moments she saw resignation in his eyes. He held out his hand. “Fine. Gimmie.”

  She passed him a pair of blue latex gloves and contemplated the first step, which would render her calf-deep in avian corpses. An apple-sized yellow bird with a black head hit her shoulder and plummeted to the ground.

  An eastern goldfinch.

  She crouched down to tend to it, but then something hit her back, knocking the breath from her lungs. Next came a hit to her head, plowing her over on her side onto the bed of bodies. She felt the sickly crunch of their wing bones and heard Mason yelling before suddenly he had her arm and she was being hauled—her feet barely touching the ground—behind him, back to the truck. It was raining birds and leaving marks that would become bruises and something sharp scored a hot streak down her cheek—

  He shoved her in the truck and leapt in after her, slammed the door behind him, and gathered her underneath him as the bodies fell with the metallic clonk of hailstones. She inhaled and closed her eyes, comforted by that familiar Devil’s Holiday tobacco and sailcloth smell of his and his breath on the back of her neck.

  One last ka-thunk and it was over.

  Silence for several moments; even the cicadas sang nothing.

  Mason let go and sat up straight, brushing himself off. “Instinct. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” She was ashamed to admit she missed what he felt like, so she said nothing.

  “Your cheek,” he said.

  She blinked, not understanding. He took her hand and set it against her face, where she now recognized a searing sensation.

  Her fingers came away covered in blood.

  He produced a grimy souvenir washcloth—Don’t mess with Texas—from the door pocket and handed it to her. “We need to get you sewn up, I think.” He reached for the ignition and they hauled onto the two-lane road.

  She felt a thrumming at her thigh, and at first she thought it was the ridiculously loud engine. There was something else, though, a faint pa-chip-chip-chip per-chick-a-ree, and the thrumming grew stronger, into a pounding. She peered into her still-open messenger bag. There was a puffball of a goldfinch inside, and she was alive. “Oh my God.”

  “What?”

  She reached in carefully and picked it up. Its wing was injured, and the bird was angry enough to snap its little beak at Reese, but she couldn’t hear it over the engine. “It’s one of the birds. Pull over.”

  “We need to get that looked at.”

  “Pull over. You wanted your answers. You’re not going to get them if you don’t stop the car.”

  He seemed to only go faster.

  “Do it on the way.”

  “I can’t hear it over your fucking engine! Pull over, dammit!”

  He glanced at her, then back at the road for a long moment. Finally, he slowed down and pulled off the pavement into a dirt shoulder peppered with brown shrubs.

  He turned off the truck.

  The bird’s feathers felt like warm silk pajamas, the goldfinch’s heartbeat thready beneath Reese’s thumb. Crows represented the crossing of souls to the underworld, and finches of any kind represented an awakening to nature. When Reese looked into the finch’s eyes, it stopped snapping its beak, and Reese heard its soul say what she was sure the world wasn’t going to want to hear.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Heather, Meghan, and Nanette: you waste no time refilling my creative goblet when there are only drops left. Thank you!

  I owe so much to the Crow’s Nest Writer’s Group—Lauren Baratz-Logsted, Greg Logsted, Jackie Logsted, Andrea Schicke-Hirsch, Lauren Simpson, Rob Mayette, and Bob Gulian—for making the stories in this book possible. The hours you spent lovingly critiquing these pieces made them what they are today.

  A shout-out goes to my childhood friend Kristina Hals, who spent her time reading through a large portion of my body of work to help me decide what should be included in this collection. Thank you, and may our summers by Candlewood Lake never end.

  I’m grateful, also, to Stacey Longo. Who knew one afternoon selling books together at a Zombie Walk for Hunger would last forever? It’s been eight adventurous years of acceptances and rejections, parties and illnesses, write-a-holic retreats and escapist trips. I wouldn’t trade a minute of it and I couldn’t imagine life without you. Long live Kipling.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kristi Petersen Schoonover has recently made peace with her most frightening shadows, although she still sleeps with the lights on.

  She is the author of the collection Skeletons in the Swimmin' Hole: Tales from Haunted Disney World, the novel Bad Apple, the novelette This Poisoned Ground, and the novella “Splendid Chyna,” which appears in The Terror Project’s Three on a Match.

  She curated the Ink Stains anthology Volume 7, served as co-editor for Read Short Fiction, and was the recipient of three Norman Mailer Writers Colony winter residencies.

  She studied under Daniel Pearlman at the University of Rhode Island and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College.

  She serves as co-host of the Dark Discussions podcast, and lives in the Connecticut woods with her housemate, Charles, her husband, Nathan, and two cats. Follow her adventures at kristipetersenschoonover.com.