by Gwen Benaway
“Something happened,” she croaked.
When I opened the door, I couldn’t see them at first but then in the light I saw the sores on her lips. And her neck…shit. SHIT. She was allergic. The chances are usually so small this almost never happens and allergies to Cranaloxin are really rare in these areas anyway and I didn’t…
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. There was fear behind her eyes. The sores were purple and green and cracked and oozing a liquid that smelled sweet but in a poisonous, disturbing kind of way. I imagined her feeling good about her future when she’d left last night. I gave her numbing ointment and a different kind of antibiotic and told her what had happened. “I can’t work like this,” she croaked. There was something happening to her throat too. The sores would go down but the Sarania would come back soon if this was her reaction to the medicine. I didn’t know if she’d be okay after that. I didn’t ask her for payment and she didn’t offer. I told her Sarania was still relatively new, other revivers coming through town soon might have a better idea than I did.
I spent the rest of my days in town doing research, finding the couple other revivers I could. No one knew why there were more growing allergies to Cranaloxin, but there was a better thing on the market these days that hadn’t had problems yet. I picked some up before I left town. I got some to the woman through one of the others—I didn’t think she’d trust me and I wouldn’t blame her. Nobody else came to see me before I left.
I was raised by a large family. Our thing was fruit. We were good at spotting it, drying it, preserving it, spicing it. (I hate fruit.) But I did like walking and trading, which from a certain point of view isn’t too different from what I do now. My family and I didn’t get along. When they found out I was to become a reviver—well, I mean, it wouldn’t have really mattered what they thought since all revivers live on their own, since all revivers grow from boys to women. But it was kind of the end anyway. After I had done my apprenticeship and taken off, travelling for the first time with no company, it felt like I was moving in another world. It felt like I could have walked all the way up mountains and lived in snow.
I thought about my family today, walking away from the factory town, through the forest, to the city. For the first time in a while I thought about them. I didn’t miss them. I wondered what their lives were like. I was also glad I couldn’t know. I’m not stupid.
It takes a week to get to Martanas—it’s one of the biggest cities on the continent, yet it’s in the middle of a forest. (I don’t know either.) It was a backwater just a few decades ago, but it grew too fast—logging, weirdos, people pushed out of the factory towns and the capital. Revivers are needed there. I’ve been many times; I like it there. It’s one of the few places I know exactly where I stay; a young guy with a very tall and very narrow hotel building rents out a room for me on the ground every time so people can see me, and he still has an old-fashioned hotel bar that somehow never gets hit for violating curfew. I’ll be there for a few weeks, then move on. I like being there.
But then suddenly, a day away from getting there, in the thick of the forest, I came to a clearing.
A person was rooted in this clearing, off of the centre.
Literally rooted. As in attached to their body were roots that came from the ground. Some of them were just wrapped around the person’s limbs but some of them seemed to be attached attached, as if by a surgeon. The person was moving around in what roughly looked to be a medium-sized circle of weak, flimsy grass, maybe twenty feet in diameter. The circle seemed to exist from being the de facto area where the person could walk. It was a circle of the smallest footpaths.
As I came closer, I could see that the roots coming from the ground were at all angles, and at one spot in the circle the ground seemed to be made up solely of roots, as if there was a way to travel through them and down under the earth. It was all one of the strangest things I’d ever seen.
The person waved. “Hello! Are you in trouble?” they asked.
“No!” I was confused. “Aren’t you?
“Not even a little bit!” they said. “Are you going on to Martanas or are you looking to rest a while? I like giving directions and I like visitors.”
I won’t tell you whether they were a boy or a girl or something else, though they did tell me, privately, eventually, that they fell into one of the first two categories. It also turned out that unbeknownst to them they were in a small bit of trouble—a knee infection. I saw it right away. They didn’t even know. An easy fix with a week of antibiotics I gave to them in exchange for what was probably the best gin I’ve ever tasted. And when I took out my gear, the kind that would make no one say “awake,” they clapped their hands naturally and unquestionably and we lay down together and talked for a very long time.
“Where you come from?” they said.
“I just left the factory towns, but—”
“You’re a factory girl! So you’re a factory girl striking out for the big city, looking to make it rich. You’re finding all the wrong places in love—”
“No!” I laughed. “I grew up a fruit trader. I’m not from anywhere. And I’m a reviver.”
They paused. “Which explains,” they said with a dawning alacrity, “why you just fixed my knee.”
They had this mix of perception and spaciness. It was perfect enough to be in a cartoon. And then we dissolved, and we both fell asleep together, our bodies curved and fitted easily even with the roots.
When I woke up it was night and all I could see were tree branches in front of stars. And the smell, the smell of the stranger’s body. I lay there awake for hours. Literally hours. (I don’t mean to be overly dramatic, the mix of the drink and the gear helped. I did not want to move; it was pleasant.) I lay there until dawn filtered through the trees and the stranger woke with the birds. You know how people say they either believe or they don’t in love at first sight? Or falling for someone or knowing? I believe in that, just not with any sense of instant-ness. I think it takes maybe a few days to a couple weeks. That’s how long it takes to know. I’ve believed that since I was young and still do.
I bring this up to underline: At the moment they awoke, I didn’t want to leave, maybe ever, but I didn’t know for sure.
You’re still here, they said in my mind, and shifted and pressed themselves against me.
Yes, I said.
Usually everyone leaves in the morning, they responded.
I should get going, I said. But I said should so desperately, like I could feel it in my mouth.
You should, said the stranger. In the next twelve hours at least. I like hanging out with you but the roots will only give you about a full day before they decide you’re staying. It takes a while for them to connect but you don’t want to try to stop it once it’s started, trust me. I studied the stranger’s suddenly quaking face and I realized they were older than I’d thought.
What happened to you? I said, and they curved their fingers around mine.
I made a choice, they said. I decided I wanted to stay here. I don’t regret it, they said, though I wasn’t unquestionably sure I believed them. But another person, they went on, came here once, some years after I’d settled. A woman. And she decided she wanted to stay too. For a few days. But she ended up regretting it and tried to leave. She succeeded in the end, but it was horrific. It broke my heart.
The sun was up. I said, Can I come back and see you? And they said, Well you can certainly say that. No one has. And I said How are you happy like this? And they didn’t respond. The universe collapsed in the time they just lay there, smiling, not responding.
And then no one would ever know that I was once a reviver, no one will ever know this is what I did, who I was, what I chose to be. I would never fail a person in pain again. That’s the honest truth. I just never would. A stranger will come through this path and simply see a woman intertwined with a person. Wait!
How can I even think about this? Martanas is overpopulated! I’m needed there! (We’re needed there, revivers, we.) Though—there are other revivers, that’s just the thing. They make fewer mistakes than me. I could finally take care of myself. Self-care. I can’t even keep my eyes out for a simple set of fucking allergies! And this person, the stranger, they’ll get old soon. They’ll need a reviver too, won’t they? How could my skills really atrophy that much? Is it truth or legend? Do you lose it or is it always there? How bad could it be? And no one has to know what’s happened to me. No one. No one. No one.
Perisher
Crystal Frasier
“Er starb,” Fuchs stated flatly. He died. It was the most obvious thing in the world, as Aggie was crouching over the body of Joey Maduro. The bruises across his neck suggested a good throttling as the cause of death. She didn’t need a ghost to see that the short Cuban expat—pallid, dry, and reeking like sugary shit—had died, so she didn’t bother with more than a cold stare in way of response. Their working relationship had all the trappings of a 50-year marriage: pointless words traded and important context left silent.
Aggie muttered her Lord’s prayer as she reached a hand between the dead man’s shirt buttons and pulled away his undershirt. She couldn’t see whatever of Joey still lingered, but the tingle on the back of her neck told her something of the local braggart refused to move on. The flesh was cool, even in the muggy, late morning heat. He’d been dead long enough that last night’s chill had time to work its way throughout his body, but not so long that the stink made her vomit this close up.
“So what’s your ghost say?” The client hovered ten feet off, pointedly looking about Aggie and the earthly remains of Joey with the same general disgust.
He says he’s an asshole, Aggie thought as Fuchs’s angrily mimed smoking. She stood up slowly and pulled a half-burned cigarette from her case before lighting it up and taking a shallow draw. The stink of human rot and cigarette took her back to the trenches, and part of her always wondered if that’s what Fuchs saw in them—if they transported him back to the last moment before he died just like it transported her back to her first moment as a killer. The blood-spattered front of his German uniform heaved slowly, in and out, and the agitation melted away. If nothing else, their little ritual added a moment of cheap drama to clients’ lives.
“He says your brother died early last evening.” She gestured at the body with the ember in her fingers.
Estelle Maduro spat the same curses Aggie’s mother had carried to Ybor from the island. “I know he’s dead! Where’s the money he left me?” His pockets held fifty-five cents—which Aggie was kind enough to pocket so as not to burden the mourning sister—and a scrap of paper with “Marcell. Balls. Tues 10:00 PM” scrawled in a small, neat hand. Looking back from Thursday morning, Aggie hoped Joey had enjoyed the meet-up.
“We’re working on that part.” She moved the cigarette to her lips again but stopped short just as Fuchs began to brace himself for another vicarious breath. Making sure he watched, she deliberately tapped it out on her case. “An arbeiten gehst.” The ghost winced at her abuse of his mother tongue, but reluctantly turned to the body himself and gestured as if helping the man to his feet.
“He’s a kraut?”
“First German I killed, back in France,” Aggie confirmed. Only one I killed, she did not specify. Most perishers knew what they were young, embraced it. It might have been shameful once upon a time, but since the War Between the States and the boom of mediums after, most girls like her understood themselves young, got themselves castrated before the first hair sprouted on their chins. They were surrounded by love, and the first close brush with death was a treasured soul—a grandparent or tragic lover or sibling. A perisher with a pretty face and a close bond with her spirit could make twenty, twenty-five dollars a day off mourning widows and squabbling families. Aggie Cruz hadn’t accepted who she was until she’d found herself submerged in the all-male environment of the U.S. Army, and her first brush with death upon that realization was to put a bullet through another soldier. Fuchs hated her and she him, and they made five dollars a day for their mutual loathing.
“Er kann keine Duetsch.” Fuchs couldn’t—or wouldn’t—learn any English or Spanish post-mortem—the lingua francas of the Florida gulf coast—and so his utility in the American south was limited. Aggie managed the best she could with a pidgin of trench slang, Fuch’s own evocative mumblings, and a pilfered library copy of George J. Adler’s A German and English Dictionary. They managed the best they could by way of pantomime. It was a better way of speaking to the dead than most people could manage, she reminded herself.
“Geld!” She rubbed her thumb against her forefinger. Her spirit shot her a rude gesture and returned to his work, clearly hoping that one day they’d stumble across the body of a fellow German and his worth, at long last, would be vindicated.
While her partner worked, Aggie took in the awkward silence as Estelle’s gaze burned holes through her makeup—the kind of glare she knew too well. Breathers were all too accepting of her kind when they were pretty, with coifed hair and tidy makeup and expensive clothes. People liked to see the elegance they thought they deserved reflected back at them, and when they looked at Aggie they could only see the messes they were. Faded old tea dress patched at the seams, practical shoes tacked with cardboard soles—no one would look at the perisher of Ybor City and forget there was a depression on; she all but screamed it in their face, and they hated her for it. Her broad shoulders, strong hands, and square jaw did nothing to ease that discomfort, even though half the women in her neighbourhood shared the same features.
Estelle wasn’t any better off than she was—patched clothes and worn shoes—even if her dress fit like her body wasn’t a funhouse mirror of what the tailor had expected. She couldn’t afford better than Aggie. Hell, she probably couldn’t afford Aggie without the cash she swears her brother bragged about.
“Can’t you just talk to Joey? Make him tell me where he hid the money?” Estelle’s face wasn’t that of a woman who’d lost a brother; she wore the face of a woman afraid she’d lose her apartment. Aggie saw the same look every morning when she shaved.
“Be a damn sight easier, if I could.” Aggie crouched back down to the body and dug into his pockets. Wallet but no keys, which told her either Maduro was the sort of trusting soul who left his doors unlocked, or else whoever killed him was looking for the same bills Estelle wanted. And people who left their doors unlocked tended to die at home, not in alleys behind rathole bars. She tossed the wallet to Estelle. “I get one seat open, and right now Fuchs is squatting in it. And even if he wasn’t, I’d have to give a damn about your brother dying. He’d have to be someone to me and not—” She hesitated, considering her words.
“And not some shifty little punk who gets drunk, hits on everyone’s girl, and get himself throttled behind a bar?”
Aggie nodded. “He’s still here. He wants to say something. I just can’t hear him. Fuchs can. Usually that’s good enough.” It was rarely good enough, but for five dollars a day she was willing to offer some false comfort.
Fuchs and mimed his smoking with a more defined swagger than earlier. A smirk curled the cracked edges of his lips in that way that made Aggie wonder if he’d been a handsome man when he was more than ether and bitter memories. She pulled the matchbook from Joey’s pocket—Bar de Estanza—and tucked her gum away inside before producing the cigarette once more and letting her pet soldier feel it burn inside her lungs. He rubbed a hand on his pants leg—what would be his hands and what would be his pants, were he a man of flesh and cloth—and otherwise stood eerily still while he took in the reward.
“Er wiederholt einfach immer ‘Jason Prapunker.’”
“Jason?”
“Mörder,” he confirmed.
“Your brother know anyone named Jason? Maybe Joseph,” Aggie took a broad stab.
�
��In this town,” Estelle scoffed. “Maybe twenty other Joes.”
“Anyone named Prapunker?”
Estelle shook her head slowly, with that unconscious lip curl that betrayed she was actually thinking about the question instead of responding by rote.
“Er sagt, jemand anderes hat das geld.” Someone else has the cash, she translated bit by bit.
“Wie heißen?” Asking for a name was probably the only thing she could reliably do in German. Fuchs mimed another smoke and she returned her own silent evaluation of his usefulness today. He grumbled too garbled and fast for Aggie to follow, but profanity was the soul of their relationship and she could recognize the message if not the text.
“Stubborn fuck.” Aggie looked back to the client and the familiar wash of confusion and anger that comes with being audience to half a conversation. “We maybe got something. Stop by my office tomorrow, noon. I’ll tell you what we found.”
Estelle eyed her, then scanned the empty space like she was looking out for the ghosts in the room. Fuchs shuffled obligingly into her line of sight—a little ritual he found endlessly amusing in his twilight state. She parted with an indistinct noise and nod, enough to acknowledge what she’d heard but certainly not enough that Aggie could mistake it for manners.
Aggie kicked Joey’s stiff leg, then lit up the last short length of cigarette. The cops would clean him up if his sister wasn’t willing to see to it. She certainly wasn’t paid enough to care about what luggage the spirits left behind. She took a short puff and Fuchs winced as she butchered the language. “Wo leben das Mann?”
The mailbox out front read “Russo,” while the bungalow itself announced “bachelor.” Committed bachelor, if the garden could be trusted. Aggie plucked a sweet pea blossom and hung it in her hair; if Marcell Russo stunk half as bad as Muduro, she’d need it.
Clean lines and unadorned surfaces on all the furniture—new and modern—suggested a side job beyond Marcell Russo’s hours pouring drinks. She’d taken the time to ask around prior to trekking south to La Pacha, and all it told her was Marcell Russo poured drinks and wasn’t particularly well-liked; the Italians hated him for being half-Cuban and the Cubans hated him for being half-Italian. Aggie tried not to take that personally; too many people in this town were halfway between two worlds for her to bond with each one, she told herself. Not without crushing her soul.