by Tim Curran
Bria opened her mouth to say something, but she closed it just as fast. There were no words to convey what she was feeling, the odd commingling of fear and guilt and distress. And…hunger.
Sady walked to the door. She stood facing it for some moments, then craned her head around. “I’m glad you’re back. I really am.”
“I’m glad to be back, too.”
Sady made a sound that was somewhere between a hysterical laugh and a short, sharp shriek. “No, you’re not. You hate it here. But you came back because you didn’t have a choice. I understand the sacrifice. It sucks, but what can you do? The neighborhood’s been waiting for you. It’s just like you remembered it.”
With that, she let herself out, closing the door quietly behind her.
For the longest time, Bria just sat there on the bed, emotions running riot inside of her. Sady. She’d always been weird; that was the plain fact of the matter. She rarely had friends and when she did, they didn’t hang around long because she always managed to say something or do something that sent them away. She was hard to figure, harder to know, and nearly impossible to get close to. Regardless of the situation, Sady always managed to say something slightly off that creeped out people.
The age difference made things hard, and Sady herself made it even harder. Bria ended up dragging her everywhere with her and not by choice. And every time, Sady acted weird, staring at Bria’s friends or giggling for no reason and, invariably, one of them would say, Is there something wrong with her, Bree? And that was the question of the ages. Sady would be silent for the most part, but now and again she’d say something off the wall like “I think that man over there is watching me” or “It feels sometimes like I’m not even real.” Wiggy, strange things like that. One time, after Sady had spent a good twenty minutes outside Hot Topic staring at Autumn Geroy, she had said, “What would you do if your mother died?” Coming from anyone else, it would have been simply a stupid, callous thing to say; coming from Sady, it was frightening. After that, Autumn would only chum around with Bria if Sady was not around. Which was never.
Sady was always spying on Bria, watching her like some nefarious, devious fifth columnist gathering information. She liked to watch Aiden, too. She particularly liked to watch them when they were together.
Bria supposed, in a way, that she had hated Sady. Hated her for scaring away her friends and being freaky and even for having no social circle of her own. Then, she’d see Sady, her eyes filled with hurt, and she’d feel guilty. And in her guilt, she’d try to get closer to her sister and when she did that, Sady would pull that much farther away.
It was frustrating.
She stretched out on the bed, deciding she would think no more. She felt sleepy right way.
Before she zonked out, she texted Aiden to keep him in the loop. When she was done, she smiled and then frowned.
What she needed was a nap before the next match. The Bieb grinned down at her with capped teeth.
“Go fuck yourself,” Bria said, turning away and closing her eyes.
In her dreams, nightmares lurked, each one precipitated by the dirt-streaked face and burning black eyes of Sady, her voice rustling like autumn leaves, “You hate it here. But you came back because you didn’t have a choice. I understand the sacrifice. It sucks, but what can you do? The neighborhood’s been waiting for you.”
Outside her window, the world of Birch Street followed its well-gouged rut blankly, as if hoping something might happen to change it all.
20
High above Birch Street, something was happening, something inexplicable and utterly frightening. All those lead-gray clouds were gathering now, converging into a single chaotic mass, covering the blue sky in a sooty, fuming blanket that looked very much like some immense moth-eaten shroud. As people stood out in their backyards or leaned on porch railings, staring up, up, they saw whatever it was up there form a sort of Archimedean spiral that rotated slowly counterclockwise, throwing out forks of lightning.
Below, it felt heavy and sodden, the air cool yet the breeze unpleasantly hot. Dozens of people witnessed this atmospheric anomaly, but not a one of them thought to grab a still shot or a video with their phones or tablets. Whatever the nature of the thing might be, it held them, transfixed them so that they could think of nothing but its movement. They followed it with their eyes, their thoughts spiraling inside their minds in a similar fashion.
21
Downstairs, Alice pulled the shades in the kitchen after first peering out the window and making sure no one was watching her. She wasn’t necessarily paranoid (no more so than anyone, she figured), but she did not trust people. They always had their own agendas, regardless of what they said to your face.
Once she was certain she was alone and there was no chance that Bria would come bounding down the stairs to discover mother’s little secret—oh, how she would have loved that—Alice took two valiums and washed them down with three fingers of Grey Goose.
Ah, better. Much better.
She hid her bottle away, pulled the shades up, and stared out into the world of Birch Street. She watched her neighbors going about their business and it made her scowl. She wasn’t sure why. Today, for some strange reason, just the sight of them filled her with loathing.
As she realized this, the flesh at the back of her neck began to crawl. She turned around quickly. There was no one in the kitchen and no one out in the yard that she could see, yet she was certain someone was watching her.
The feeling was there, then gone.
She leaned against the counter, seemingly waiting for something. She did not know what. Her insides felt tense and knotted. Her stomach rolled over on itself. Was it Bria? Was that it? Was having her back in the house creating this level of tension and disruption?
As Alice stood there, feeling the vodka burning in her stomach and a curious combination of guilt, anger, and dread in her mind, she remembered Bria as a teenager: secretive, scheming, cynical, uppity. An abrasive beast that violated every edict of the house, constantly challenging her, contradicting and criticizing, always on the lookout for a fight and knowing exactly which buttons to push to get one.
Alice trembled with the memory.
She could remember catching Bria up in the attic, drawing skeletons on the walls with white chalk, scratching verses of morbid poetry beneath them. When Alice confronted her, Bria said skeletons were beautiful, that once you peeled away all the ugly flesh, there was stark white beauty beneathgleaming, angular, streamlined bones and sardonic grinning skulls. All humans were beautiful inside, she’d maintained, once they were divorced of the ugliness outside. By then, of course, she was already ill, drawing her strength not from food but from Aiden who was under her spell, mystified and adoring, incapable of intervening or disagreeing with anything she said or did.
Sighing, Alice got out the Grey Goose and indulged in another taste.
I worry about her all the time. That’s the truth. I can’t tell her that because she wouldn’t believe me. She’d roll her eyes. She doesn’t know how I suffer. I care, I worry, I fret. I’ve seen her edging towards death and I don’t want to see it again. I only want to steer her straight before her hormones and youthful lack of common sense destroy her. But she doesn’t think that’s love. She thinks it’s control.
Alice’s cell rang.
She nearly leapt from her skin. She answered it. It was Margie Blowers. She had been expecting this call and dreading it.
“Well, how’s it going?” Margie asked.
“Not good. She’s like a stranger.”
“You poor thing.”
Alice sighed yet again. “I’ve lost her. I know I have. As if I haven’t lost enough.”
“Please, dear, don’t think about all that.”
“I feel like I’ve done everything for her, yet she marches right in here ten feet tall and starts mouthing off.” Alice’s voice cracked. “It’s almost unbearable.”
“Do you w
ant me to try and talk to her?”
“No, it would only make things worse.”
Here Alice hesitated. Did she dare mention the awful things Bria said about Polly? No, no, there were some things you did not air in public, even with your best friend.
“I’m here for you anytime.”
“I know.”
In the background, Alice heard Margie cooing to Bigsby, her little dog. It incensed her.
She swallowed. “I don’t understand any of it. I never have. It’s…it’s like when she turned fourteen she started racing towards something and I don’t know what it is. Maybe I don’t want to know what it is.”
“Of course. They reach a certain age and it’s hard to know what’s in their heads.”
It was true, all too true.
“Polly’s coming home,” Margie announced. “I just found out. She’s bringing her new boyfriend with her. It should be interesting.”
Alice raised an eyebrow. “Are you concerned?”
“Just nervous. I trust Polly, of course. She’s a good girl and that’s the way I raised her. It’s just me, I guess.”
Alice felt everything inside her turn like a screw. Don’t you think I raised my daughter to be good? Don’t you think we all try, you insufferable bitch? She had to press her lips tightly together. She didn’t want to alienate Margie.
“Anyway, they should be here this afternoon so I’m cleaning like crazy.”
“Oh, your house is spotless.”
“Still…”
She prattled on and Alice found that she was not listening. In fact, she found that she couldn’t listen. Nothing Margie said seemed to be of the least bit of interest to her and, worse, none of it made a lick of sense. It was just a rabble of noise.
Despite the vodka and pills, Alice was still tense.
Waiting, she thought. What is it I’m waiting for?
She did not know, only that it was coming. She could feel its nearness.
There was a thudding sound from the back porch. Several things thumped off the roof. She looked out the window and more objects landed in the grass. What the hell? They were reddish, like apples, but from the way they glistened on the lawn, she could see that they were certainly not apples.
“Margie…hang on. Something’s happening over here.”
She set the phone down and went to the screen door that looked out onto the back porch. Her first instinct was that some rotten kids were pummeling the house with something, but deep inside, she honestly did not believe this.
She looked through the screen.
There was nothing, nothing at all.
Yes, there was.
There was a smell. A rich, juicy odor that wafted in and surrounded her, filling her, seeming to own her in some subtle way that was beyond her simple comprehension at that moment. She pressed her nose against the screen until it actually hurt. But the odor…dear God, that savory odor…it would not be denied. It wanted her atoms to pass through the screen and become part of it.
It was the smell of meat.
She knew that much. Meat that was cut thick like a T-bone and well-marbled like a ribeye, still pink with blood. In her mind, there were images of steaks in bloodstained butcher’s paper from when she was a child.
It will be cold, she told herself. Cold and well-seasoned.
With trembling hands, she opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. And there it was. On the second step—a juicy shank of meat that looked very much like a cut of filet mignon.
Her mouth watered.
She sat on the step and just looked at it, unsure what she was feeling or what she was really thinking. There were other pieces of meat in the yard and, judging by what she’d heard, there were probably several on the roof. Which meant they all must have fallen from the sky.
Which was insane.
She thought she heard a light step in the grass. There was nothing there. Yet, for a moment, just a moment, there was an odd shadow that seemed to pull away.
It looks delicious, doesn’t it, Mum? a voice said in her head and although she knew it was impossible, she was certain it belonged to Bria, little Bria, her angel. I think you should bite into it. It will give you strength to deal with the imposter upstairs. Taste it, Mama. You know how I love you and I would never, ever steer you wrong.
Alice looked around again because that voice sounded like it was spoken right into her ear. She nearly expected to see little Bria there.
But there was nothing.
Nothing but the meat.
The piece on the step was the only one that really interested her. It sat there, glistening with juices, almost daring her to bite it. She reached out and prodded it with her nail. It gave just so. A droplet of blood ran down her finger to her first knuckle and she licked it off without hesitation.
God.
It was as if she’d never tasted anything before, never truly used her taste buds. Now they erupted in her mouth. The flavor of the juice created a surging endorphin whirlpool in her head that made sweet-smelling sweat run from her pores and saliva course down her chin. She cried out with a sort of orgasmic delight as urine ran down the inside of her leg.
She seized the meat and bit into it. It was unbelievably tender and her teeth sank into it like fangs, tearing off a dripping pink strip. She worked it with her molars, crushing it, forcing the savory juice from it that bathed her taste buds in ecstasy. Grunting low in her throat, she tore at the meat like a beast, ripping it apart, fat smeared over her lips, blood sprayed up onto her cheekbone.
This was the moment when Alice was born for the second time.
She could feel the life inside her—heart pounding, blood flowing, skin tingling with tactile stimuli. Up until this point, her existence had been dismal black and white, but now it was Technicolor, it was 3-D. Her mind was blazing with neon and she thought, I…I am an organism and I exist beneath this skin. As her jaws worked the meat, her muscles bunched and her tendons stretched, her nerve endings jangling happily and it felt as if her eyes were truly open for the first time in her life.
She finished off the meat, swallowing the last bite and licking the juices from her fingers. Giddy, almost drunken from it, she began to crave more right away. She wasn’t necessarily hungry, but she wanted to confirm that what just happened was reality and not hallucination.
In the grass. There’s meat in the grass.
Alice did not walk to it, she sprang like an animal, like a lion onto a gazelle. She moved with a muscular fluidity she had not known since she was twenty. She landed in the grass on her hands and knees, snatching up the first piece of meat she found and devouring it.
It took her out of her head yet again.
Everything she knew seemed to blow from her ears. It was as if, before the meat, her cerebral cortex had been wrapped securely in Saran Wrap and now it had been peeled free. She felt the randy organism beneath her skin again. Oh, how it longed to jump and leap and run and dance wild in the yard!
She stood up, the meat still hanging from her mouth. Looking around, she was seeing, really seeing the world as she had never seen it before. Dragonflies and cabbage moths winged about the garden. Flowers bloomed. Shoots budded. Leaves and stems and branches grew.
The world was a living thing and she was part of it, finally, really part of it.
She looked down at the meat in the yard.
It was her meat.
And she needed to protect it.
22
From the attic window above, Sady watched Alice with leering, satisfied eyes as if finally, ultimately the thing she had waited so long for had come to pass. She pressed her face against the dusty windowpane and her lips peeled back from her teeth. It was not a smile exactly any more than the predatory grin of a cat is a smile, but more a risus sardonicus, a death grin, all gums and teeth with no emotion behind it.
Alice didn’t see her; she was lost in worlds far distant.
As she tasted th
e meat, licked it and bit it, filling herself with its charms, Sady began to swing back and forth in front of the attic window like a pendulum…or a corpse dangling from a noose.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t Sady at all.
23
As Donny Falconi rambled on endlessly, Mr. Hammerberg began to smell something funny. Not in what Donny was saying (though some of that was certainly suspect), but in the actual physical sense. It seemed to waft out of nowhere—an odd odor that at first was repugnant like flies on carrion and then gradually became a smell that was even more unnatural: spiced beef.
Couldn’t be. Must be in my head.
This was what Mr. Hammerberg told himself, but he was hardly convinced because that curious odor grew stronger and stronger. By God, that’s spiced beef! He’d only smelled it once before and that was many years ago when Donna and he had visited her cousins in Ireland for Christmas. Salt beef slow-cured with spices, then roasted.
Standing there, leaning on the fence as Donny rambled on and on about investment opportunities, he could smell that delicious beef, the cinnamon and cloves and ginger.
“Just look at the world today,” Donny said. “What have we got out there? We’ve got an ongoing debt crisis, global unrest, negative interest rates, and a president whose policies are strictly Looney Tunes. Big money trades are sketchy. People are yanking their money out of stocks and bonds and sinking it into gold and other precious metals. Big mistake. Bottom’s going to drop out of that in a big way. You know it, I know it. It ain’t the world it used to be. Our shit-fer-brain politicians are throwing around tariffs like rice at a fucking wedding. And now, the Europeans and Asians are throwing ’em right back at us, strangling us at our own game…”
God, he could go on.
Mr. Hammerberg was barely listening.
He was smelling that spiced beef, which seemed to be of unknown origin, and staring blankly at Donny, noticing that there were tiny red welts on his face as if he was on the verge of heatstroke. His eyes were glassy. And—get this—he was fucking drooling, like maybe he could smell the meat, too, and it was driving him crazy.