I used to go to thrift stores with my friends. We’d take the train into Boston, and go to The Garment District, which is this huge vintage clothing warehouse. Everything is arranged by color, and somehow that makes all of the clothes beautiful. It’s kind of like if you went through the wardrobe in the Narnia books, only instead of finding Aslan and the White Witch and horrible Eustace, you found this magic clothing world–instead of talking animals, there were feather boas and wedding dresses and bowling shoes, and paisley shirts and Doc Martens and everything hung up on racks so that first you have black dresses, all together, like the world’s largest indoor funeral, and then blue dresses–all the blues you can imagine–and then red dresses and so on. Pink-reds and orangey reds and purple-reds and exit-light reds and candy reds. Sometimes I would close my eyes and Natasha and Natalie and Jake would drag me over to a rack, and rub a dress against my hand. "Guess what color this is."

We had this theory that you could learn how to tell, just by feeling, what color something was. For example, if you’re sitting on a lawn, you can tell what color green the grass is, with your eyes closed, depending on how silky-rubbery it feels. With clothing, stretchy velvet stuff always feels red when your eyes are closed, even if it’s not red. Natasha was always best at guessing colors, but Natasha is also best at cheating at games and not getting caught.

One time we were looking through kid’s t-shirts and we found a Muppets t-shirt that had belonged to Natalie in third grade. We knew it belonged to her, because it still had her name inside, where her mother had written it in permanent marker, when Natalie went to summer camp. Jake bought it back for her, because he was the only one who had money that weekend. He was the only one who had a job.

Maybe you’re wondering what a guy like Jake is doing in The Garment District with a bunch of girls. The thing about Jake is that he always has a good time, no matter what he’s doing. He likes everything, and he likes everyone, but he likes me best of all. Wherever he is now, I bet he’s having a great time and wondering when I’m going to show up. I’m always running late. But he knows that.

We had this theory that things have life cycles, the way that people do. The life cycle of wedding dresses and feather boas and t-shirts and shoes and handbags involves the Garment District. If clothes are good, or even if they’re bad in an interesting way, the Garment District is where they go when they die. You can tell that they’re dead, because of the way that they smell. When you buy them, and wash them, and start wearing them again, and they start to smell like you, that’s when they reincarnate. But the point is, if you’re looking for a particular thing, you just have to keep looking for it. You have to look hard.

Down in the basement at the Garment Factory they sell clothing and beat-up suitcases and teacups by the pound. You can get eight pounds worth of prom dresses–a slinky black dress, a poufy lavender dress, a swirly pink dress, a silvery, starry lame dress so fine you could pass it through a key ring– for eight dollars. I go there every week, hunting for Grandmother Zofia’s faery handbag.

The faery handbag: It’s huge and black and kind of hairy. Even when your eyes are closed, it feels black. As black as black ever gets, like if you touch it, your hand might get stuck in it, like tar or black quicksand or when you stretch out your hand at night, to turn on a light, but all you feel is darkness.

Fairies live inside it. I know what that sounds like, but it’s true.

Grandmother Zofia said it was a family heirloom. She said that it was over two hundred years old. She said that when she died, I had to look after it. Be its guardian. She said that it would be my responsibility.

I said that it didn’t look that old, and that they didn’t have handbag two hundred years ago, but that just made her cross. She said, "So then tell me, Genevieve, darling, where do you think old ladies used to put their reading glasses and their heart medicine and their knitting needles?"

I know that no one is going to believe any of this. That’s okay. If I thought you would, then I couldn’t tell you. Promise me that you won’t believe a word. That’s what Zofia used to say to me when she told me stories. At the funeral, my mother said, half-laughing and half-crying, that her mother was the world’s best liar. I think she thought maybe Zofia wasn’t really dead. But I went up to Zofia’s coffin, and I looked her right in the eyes. They were closed. The funeral parlor had made her up with blue eyeshadow, and blue eyeliner. She looked like she was going to be a news anchor on Fox television, instead of dead. It was creepy and it made me even sadder than I already was. But I didn’t let that distract me.

"Okay, Zofia," I whispered. "I know you’re dead, but this is important. You know exactly how important this is. Where’s the handbag? What did you do with it? How do I find it? What am I supposed to do now?"

Of course she didn’t say a word. She just lay there, this little smile on her face, as if she thought the whole thing–death, blue eyeshadow, Jake, the handbag, faeries, Scrabble, Baldeziwurlekistan, all of it–was a joke. She always did have a weird sense of humor. That’s why she and Jake got along so well.

I grew up in a house next door to the house where my mother lived when she was a little girl. Her mother, Zofia Swink, my grandmother, babysat me while my mother and father were at work.

Zofia never looked like a grandmother. She had long black hair which she wore up in little, braided, spiky towers and plaits. She had large blue eyes. She was taller than my father. She looked like a spy or ballerina or a lady pirate or a rock star. She acted like one too. For example, she never drove anywhere. She rode a bike. It drove my mother crazy. "Why can’t you act your age?" she’d say, and Zofia would just laugh.

Zofia and I played Scrabble all the time. Zofia always won, even though her English wasn’t all that great, because we’d decided that she was allowed to use Baldeziwurleki vocabulary. Baldeziwurlekistan is where Zofia was born, over two hundred years ago. That’s what Zofia said. (My grandmother claimed to be over two hundred years old. Or maybe even older. Sometimes she claimed that she’d even met Ghenghis Khan. He was much shorter than her. I probably don’t have time to tell that story.) Baldeziwurlekistan is also an incredibly valuable word in Scrabble points, even though it doesn’t exactly fit on the board. Zofia put it down the first time we played. I was feeling pretty good because I’d gotten forty-one points for "zippery" on my turn.

Zofia kept rearranging her letters on her tray. Then she looked over at me, as if daring me to stop her, and put down "eziwurlekistan", after "bald." She used "delicious," "zippery," "wishes," "kismet", and "needle," and made "to" into "toe". "Baldeziwurlekistan" went all the way across the board and then trailed off down the righthand side.

I started laughing.

"I used up all my letters," Zofia said. She licked her pencil and started adding up points.

"That’s not a word," I said. "Baldeziwurlekistan is not a word. Besides, you can’t do that. You can’t put an eighteen letter word on a board that’s fifteen squares across."

"Why not? It’s a country," Zofia said. "It’s where I was born, little darling."

"Challenge," I said. I went and got the dictionary and looked it up. "There’s no such place."

"Of course there isn’t nowadays," Zofia said. "It wasn’t a very big place, even when it was a place. But you’ve heard of Samarkand, and Uzbekistan and the Silk Road and Ghenghis Khan. Haven’t I told you about meeting Ghenghis Khan?"

I looked up Samarkand. "Okay," I said. "Samarkand is a real place. A real word. But Baldeziwurlekistan isn’t."

"They call it something else now," Zofia said. "But I think it’s important to remember where we come from. I think it’s only fair that I get to use Baldeziwurleki words. Your English is so much better than me. Promise me something, mouthful of dumpling, a small, small thing. You’ll remember its real name. Baldeziwurlekistan. Now when I add it up, I get three hundred and sixty-eight points. Could that be right?"

If you called the faery handbag by its right name, it would be something like "orzipanikanikcz," which means the "bag of skin where the world lives," only Zofia never spelled that word the same way twice. She said you had to spell it a little differently each time. You never wanted to spell it exactly the right way, because that would be dangerous.

I called it the faery handbag because I put "faery" down on the Scrabble board once. Zofia said that you spelled it with an "i," not an "e". She looked it up in the dictionary, and lost a turn.

Zofia said that in Baldeziwurlekistan they used a board and tiles for divination, prognostication, and sometimes even just for fun. She said it was a little like playing Scrabble. That’s probably why she turned out to be so good at Scrabble. The Baldeziwurlekistanians used their tiles and board to communicate with the people who lived under the hill. The people who lived under the hill knew the future. The Baldeziwurlekistanians gave them fermented milk and honey, and the young women of the village used to go and lie out on the hill and sleep under the stars. Apparently the people under the hill were pretty cute. The important thing was that you never went down into the hill and spent the night there, no matter how cute the guy from under the hill was. If you did, even if you only spent a single night under the hill, when you came out again a hundred years might have passed. "Remember that," Zofia said to me. "It doesn’t matter how cute a guy is. If he wants you to come back to his place, it isn’t a good idea. It’s okay to fool around, but don’t spend the night."

Every once in a while, a woman from under the hill would marry a man from the village, even though it never ended well. The problem was that the women under the hill were terrible cooks. They couldn’t get used to the way time worked in the village, which meant that supper always got burnt, or else it wasn’t cooked long enough. But they couldn’t stand to be criticized. It hurt their feelings. If their village husband complained, or even if he looked like he wanted to complain, that was it. The woman from under the hill went back to her home, and even if her husband went and begged and pleaded and apologized, it might be three years or thirty years or a few generations before she came back out.

Even the best, happiest marriages between the Baldeziwurlekistanians and the people under the hill fell apart when the children got old enough to complain about dinner. But everyone in the village had some hill blood in them.

"It’s in you," Zofia said, and kissed me on the nose. "Passed down from my grandmother and her mother. It’s why we’re so beautiful."

When Zofia was nineteen, the shaman-priestess in her village threw the tiles and discovered that something bad was going to happen. A raiding party was coming. There was no point in fighting them. They would burn down everyone’s houses and take the young men and women for slaves. And it was even worse than that. There was going to be an earthquake as well, which was bad news because usually, when raiders showed up, the village went down under the hill for a night and when they came out again the raiders would have been gone for months or decades or even a hundred years. But this earthquake was going to split the hill right open.

The people under the hill were in trouble. Their home would be destroyed, and they would be doomed to roam the face of the earth, weeping and lamenting their fate until the sun blew out and the sky cracked and the seas boiled and the people dried up and turned to dust and blew away. So the shaman-priestess went and divined some more, and the people under the hill told her to kill a black dog and skin it and use the skin to make a purse big enough to hold a chicken, an egg, and a cooking pot. So she did, and then the people under the hill made the inside of the purse big enough to hold all of the village and all of the people under the hill and mountains and forests and seas and rivers and lakes and orchards and a sky and stars and spirits and fabulous monsters and sirens and dragons and dryads and mermaids and beasties and all the little gods that the Baldeziwurlekistanians and the people under the hill worshipped.

"Your purse is made out of dog skin?" I said. "That’s disgusting!"

"Little dear pet," Zofia said, looking wistful, "Dog is delicious. To Baldeziwurlekistanians, dog is a delicacy."

Before the raiding party arrived, the village packed up all of their belongings and moved into the handbag. The clasp was made out of bone. If you opened it one way, then it was just a purse big enough to hold a chicken and an egg and a clay cooking pot, or else a pair of reading glasses and a library book and a pillbox. If you opened the clasp another way, then you found yourself in a little boat floating at the mouth of a river. On either side of you was forest, where the Baldeziwurlekistanian villagers and the people under the hill made their new settlement.

If you opened the handbag the wrong way, though, you found yourself in a dark land that smelled like blood. That’s where the guardian of the purse (the dog whose skin had been been sewn into a purse) lived. The guardian had no skin. Its howl made blood come out of your ears and nose. It tore apart anyone who turned the clasp in the opposite direction and opened the purse in the wrong way.

"Here is the wrong way to open the handbag," Zofia said. She twisted the clasp, showing me how she did it. She opened the mouth of the purse, but not very wide and held it up to me. "Go ahead, darling, and listen for a second."

I put my head near the handbag, but not too near. I didn’t hear anything. "I don’t hear anything," I said.

"The poor dog is probably asleep," Zofia said. "Even nightmares have to sleep now and then."

After he got expelled, everybody at school called Jake Houdini instead of Jake. Everybody except for me. I’ll explain why, but you have to be patient. It’s hard work telling everything in the right order.

Jake is smarter and also taller than most of our teachers. Not quite as tall as me. We’ve known each other since third grade. Jake has always been in love with me. He says he was in love with me even before third grade, even before we ever met. It took me a while to fall in love with Jake.

In third grade, Jake knew everything already, except how to make friends. He used to follow me around all day long. It made me so mad that I kicked him in the knee. When that didn’t work, I threw his backpack out of the window of the school bus. That didn’t work either, but the next year Jake took some tests and the school decided that he could skip fourth and fifth grade. Even I felt sorry for Jake then. Sixth grade didn’t work out. When the sixth graders wouldn’t stop flushing his head down the toilet, he went out and caught a skunk and set it loose in the boy’s locker room.

The school was going to suspend him for the rest of the year, but instead Jake took two years off while his mother home-schooled him. He learned Latin and Hebrew and Greek, how to write sestinas, how to make sushi, how to play bridge, and even how to knit. He learned fencing and ballroom dancing. He worked in a soup kitchen and made a Super Eight movie about Civil War reenactors who play extreme croquet in full costume instead of firing off cannons. He started learning how to play guitar. He even wrote a novel. I’ve never read it–he says it was awful.

When he came back two years later, because his mother had cancer for the first time, the school put him back with our year, in seventh grade. He was still way too smart, but he was finally smart enough to figure out how to fit in. Plus he was good at soccer and he was really cute. Did I mention that he played guitar? Every girl in school had a crush on Jake, but he used to come home after school with me and play Scrabble with Zofia and ask her about Baldeziwurlekistan.

Jake’s mom was named Cynthia. She collected ceramic frogs and knock-knock jokes. When we were in ninth grade, she had cancer again. When she died, Jake smashed all of her frogs. That was the first funeral I ever went to. A few months later, Jake’s father asked Jake’s fencing teacher out on a date. They got married right after the school expelled Jake for his AP project on Houdini. That was the first wedding I ever went to. Jake and I stole a bottle of wine and drank it, and I threw up in the swimming pool at the country club. Jake threw up all over my shoes.

So, anyway, the village and the people under the hill lived happily every after for a few weeks in the handbag, which they had tied around a rock in a dry well which the people under the hill had determined would survive the earthquake. But some of the Baldeziwurlekistanians wanted to come out again and see what was going on in the world. Zofia was one of them. It had been summer when they went into the bag, but when they came out again, and climbed out of the well, snow was falling and their village was ruins and crumbly old rubble. They walked through the snow, Zofia carrying the handbag, until they came to another village, one that they’d never seen before. Everyone in that village was packing up their belongings and leaving, which gave Zofia and her friends a bad feeling. It seemed to be just the same as when they went into the handbag.

They followed the refugees, who seemed to know where they were going, and finally everyone came to a city. Zofia had ever seen such a place. There were trains and electric lights and movie theaters, and there were people shooting each other. Bombs were falling. A war going on. Most of the villagers decided to climb right back inside the handbag, but Zofia volunteered to stay in the world and look after the handbag. She had fallen in love with movies and silk stockings and with a young man, a Russian deserter.

Zofia and the Russian deserter married and had many adventures and finally came to America, where my mother was born. Now and then Zofia would consult the tiles and talk to the people who lived in the handbag and they would tell her how best to avoid trouble and how she and her husband could make some money. Every now and then one of the Baldeziwurlekistanians, or one of the people from under the hill came out of the handbag and wanted to go grocery shopping, or to a movie or an amusement park to ride on roller coasters, or to the library.

The more advice Zofia gave her husband, the more money they made. Her husband became curious about Zofia’s handbag, because he could see that there was something odd about it, but Zofia told him to mind his own business. He began to spy on Zofia, and saw that strange men and women were coming in and out of the house. He became convinced that either Zofia was a spy for the Communists, or maybe that she was having affairs. They fought and he drank more and more, and finally he threw away her divination tiles. "Russians make bad husbands," Zofia told me. Finally, one night while Zofia was sleeping, her husband opened the bone clasp and climbed inside the handbag.

"I thought he’d left me," Zofia said. "For almost twenty years I thought he’d left me and your mother and taken off for California. Not that I minded. I was tired of being married and cooking dinners and cleaning house for someone else. It’s better to cook what I want to eat, and clean up when I decide to clean up. It was harder on your mother, not having a father. That was the part that I minded most.

"Then it turned out that he hadn’t run away after all. He’d spent one night in the handbag and then come out again twenty years later, exactly as handsome as I remembered, and enough time had passed that I had forgiven him all the quarrels. We made up and it was all very romantic and then when we had another fight the next morning, he went and kissed your mother, who had slept right through his visit, on the cheek, and then he climbed right back inside the handbag. I didn’t see him again for another twenty years. The last time he showed up, we went to see "Star Wars" and he liked it so much that he went back inside the handbag to tell everyone else about it. In a couple of years they’ll all show up and want to see it on video and all of the sequels too."

"Tell them not to bother with the prequels," I said.

The thing about Zofia and libraries is that she’s always losing library books. She says that she hasn’t lost them, and in fact that they aren’t even overdue, really. It’s just that even one week inside the faery handbag is a lot longer in library-world time. So what is she supposed to do about it? The librarians all hate Zofia. She’s banned from using any of the branches in our area. When I was eight, she got me to go to the library for her and check out a bunch of biographies and science books and some Georgette Heyer romance novels. My mother was livid when she found out, but it was too late. Zofia had already misplaced most of them.

It’s really hard to write about somebody as if they’re really dead. I still think Zofia must be sitting in her living room, in her house, watching some old horror movie, dropping popcorn into her handbag. She’s waiting for me to come over and play Scrabble.

Nobody is ever going to return those library books now.

My mother used to come home from work and roll her eyes. "Have you been telling them your fairy stories?" she’d say. "Genevieve, your grandmother is a horrible liar."

Zofia would fold up the Scrabble board and shrug at me and Jake. "I’m a wonderful liar," she’d say. "I’m the best liar in the world. Promise me you won’t believe a single word."

But she wouldn’t tell the story of the faery handbag to Jake. Only the old Baldeziwurlekistanian folktales and fairytales about the people under the hill. She told him about how she and her husband made it all the way across Europe, hiding in haystacks and in barns, and how once, when her husband went off to find food, a farmer found her hiding in his chicken coop and tried to rape her. But she opened up the faery handbag in the way she showed me, and the dog came out and ate the farmer and all his chickens too.

She was teaching Jake and me how to curse in Baldeziwurleki. I also know how to say I love you, but I’m not going to ever say it to anyone again, except to Jake, when I find him.

When I was eight, I believed everything Zofia told me. By the time I was thirteen, I didn’t believe a single word. When I was fifteen, I saw a man come out of her house and get on Zofia’s three-speed bicycle and ride down the street. His clothes looked funny. He was a lot younger than my mother and father, and even though I’d never seen him before, he was familiar. I followed him on my bike, all the way to the grocery store. I waited just past the checkout lanes while he bought peanut butter, Jack Daniels, half a dozen instant cameras, and at least sixty packs of Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, three bags of Hershey’s kisses, a handful of Milky Way bars and other stuff from the rack of checkout candy. While the checkout clerk was helping him bag up all of that chocolate, he looked up and saw me. "Genevieve?" he said. "That’s your name, right?"

I turned and ran out of the store. He grabbed up the bags and ran after me. I don’t even think he got his change back. I was still running away, and then one of the straps on my flip flops popped out of the sole, the way they do, and that made me really angry so I just stopped. I turned around.

"Who are you?" I said.

But I already knew. He looked like he could have been my mom’s younger brother. He was really cute. I could see why Zofia had fallen in love with him.

His name was Rustan. Zofia told my parents that he was an expert in Baldeziwurlekistanian folklore who would be staying with her for a few days. She brought him over for dinner. Jake was there too, and I could tell that Jake knew something was up. Everybody except my dad knew something was going on.

"You mean Baldeziwurlekistan is a real place?" my mother asked Rustan. "My mother is telling the truth?"

I could see that Rustan was having a hard time with that one. He obviously wanted to say that his wife was a horrible liar, but then where would he be? Then he couldn’t be the person that he was supposed to be.

There were probably a lot of things that he wanted to say. What he said was, "This is really good pizza."

Rustan took a lot of pictures at dinner. The next day I went with him to get the pictures developed. He’d brought back some film with him, with pictures he’d taken inside the faery handbag, but those didn’t come out well. Maybe the film was too old. We got doubles of the pictures from dinner so that I could have some too. There’s a great picture of Jake, sitting outside on the porch. He’s laughing, and he has his hand up to his mouth, like he’s going to catch the laugh. I have that picture up on my computer, and also up on my wall over my bed.

I bought a Cadbury Cream Egg for Rustan. Then we shook hands and he kissed me once on each cheek. "Give one of those kisses to your mother," he said, and I thought about how the next time I saw him, I might be Zofia’s age, and he would only be a few days older. The next time I saw him, Zofia would be dead. Jake and I might have kids. That was too weird.

I know Rustan tried to get Zofia to go with him, to live in the handbag, but she wouldn’t.

"It makes me dizzy in there," she used to tell me. "And they don’t have movie theaters. And I have to look after your mother and you. Maybe when you’re old enough to look after the handbag, I’ll poke my head inside, just long enough for a little visit."

I didn’t fall in love with Jake because he was smart. I’m pretty smart myself. I know that smart doesn’t mean nice, or even mean that you have a lot of common sense. Look at all the trouble smart people get themselves into.

I didn’t fall in love with Jake because he could make maki rolls and had a black belt in fencing, or whatever it is that you get if you’re good in fencing. I didn’t fall in love with Jake because he plays guitar. He’s a better soccer player than he is a guitar player.

Those were the reasons why I went out on a date with Jake. That, and because he asked me. He asked if I wanted to go see a movie, and I asked if I could bring my grandmother and Natalie and Natasha. He said sure and so all five of us sat and watched "Bring It On" and every once in a while Zofia dropped a couple of milk duds or some popcorn into her purse. I don’t know if she was feeding the dog, or if she’d opened the purse the right way, and was throwing food at her husband.

I fell in love with Jake because he told stupid knock-knock jokes to Natalie, and told Natasha that he liked her jeans. I fell in love with Jake when he took me and Zofia home. He walked her up to her front door and then he walked me up to mine. I fell in love with Jake when he didn’t try to kiss me. The thing is, I was nervous about the whole kissing thing. Most guys think that they’re better at it than they really are. Not that I think I’m a real genius at kissing either, but I don’t think kissing should be a competitive sport. It isn’t tennis.

Natalie and Natasha and I used to practice kissing with each other. Not that we like each other that way, but just for practice. We got pretty good at it. We could see why kissing was supposed to be fun.

But Jake didn’t try to kiss me. Instead he just gave me this really big hug. He put his face in my hair and he sighed. We stood there like that, and then finally I said, "What are you doing?"

"I just wanted to smell your hair," he said.

"Oh," I said. That made me feel weird, but in a good way. I put my nose up to his hair, which is brown and curly, and I smelled it. We stood there and smelled each other’s hair, and I felt so good. I felt so happy.

Jake said into my hair, "Do you know that actor John Cusack?"

I said, "Yeah. One of Zofia’s favorite movies is ‘Better Off Dead.’ We watch it all the time."

"So he likes to go up to women and smell their armpits."

"Gross!" I said. "That’s such a lie! What are you doing now? That tickles."

"I’m smelling your ear," Jake said.

Jake’s hair smelled like iced tea with honey in it, after all the ice has melted.

Kissing Jake is like kissing Natalie or Natasha, except that it isn’t just for fun. It feels like something there isn’t a word for in Scrabble.

The deal with Houdini is that Jake got interested in him during Advanced Placement American History. He and I were both put in tenth grade history. We were doing biography projects. I was studying Joseph McCarthy. My grandmother had all sorts of stories about McCarthy. She hated him for what he did to Hollywood.

Jake didn’t turn in his project–instead he told everyone in our AP class except for Mr. Streep (we call him Meryl) to meet him at the gym on Saturday. When we showed up, Jake reenacted one of Houdini’s escapes with a laundry bag, handcuffs, a gym locker, bicycle chains, and the school’s swimming pool. It took him three and a half minutes to get free, and this guy named Roger took a bunch of photos and then put the photos online. One of the photos ended up in the Boston Globe, and Jake got expelled. The really ironic thing was that while his mom was in the hospital, Jake had applied to M.I.T. He did it for his mom. He thought that way she’d have to stay alive. She was so excited about M.I.T. A couple of days after he’d been expelled, right after the wedding, while his dad and the fencing instructor were in Bermuda, he got an acceptance letter in the mail and a phone call from this guy in the admissions office who explained why they had to withdraw the acceptance.

My mother wanted to know why I let Jake wrap himself up in bicycle chains and then watched while Peter and Michael pushed him into the deep end of the school pool. I said that Jake had a backup plan. Ten more seconds and we were all going to jump into the pool and open the locker and get him out of there. I was crying when I said that. Even before he got in the locker, I knew how stupid Jake was being. Afterwards, he promised me that he’d never do anything like that again.

That was when I told him about Zofia’s husband, Rustan, and about Zofia’s handbag. How stupid am I?

So I guess you can figure out what happened next. The problem is that Jake believed me about the handbag. We spent a lot of time over at Zofia’s, playing Scrabble. Zofia never let the faery handbag out of her sight. She even took it with her when she went to the bathroom. I think she even slept with it under her pillow.

I didn’t tell her that I’d said anything to Jake. I wouldn’t ever have told anybody else about it. Not Natasha. Not even Natalie, who is the most responsible person in all of the world. Now, of course, if the handbag turns up and Jake still hasn’t come back, I’ll have to tell Natalie. Somebody has to keep an eye on the stupid thing while I go find Jake.

What worries me is that maybe one of the Baldeziwurlekistanians or one of the people under the hill or maybe even Rustan popped out of the handbag to run an errand and got worried when Zofia wasn’t there. Maybe they’ll come looking for her and bring it back. Maybe they know I’m supposed to look after it now. Or maybe they took it and hid it somewhere. Maybe someone turned it in at the lost-and-found at the library and that stupid librarian called the F.B.I. Maybe scientists at the Pentagon are examining the handbag right now. Testing it. If Jake comes out, they’ll think he’s a spy or a superweapon or an alien or something. They’re not going to just let him go.

Everyone thinks Jake ran away, except for my mother, who is convinced that he was trying out another Houdini escape and is probably lying at the bottom of a lake somewhere. She hasn’t said that to me, but I can see her thinking it. She keeps making cookies for me.

What happened is that Jake said, "Can I see that for just a second?"

He said it so casually that I think he caught Zofia off guard. She was reaching into the purse for her wallet. We were standing in the lobby of the movie theater on a Monday morning. Jake was behind the snack counter. He’d gotten a job there. He was wearing this stupid red paper hat and some kind of apron-bib thing. He was supposed to ask us if we wanted to supersize our drinks.

He reached over the counter and took Zofia’s handbag right out of her hand. He closed it and then he opened it again. I think he opened it the right way. I don’t think he ended up in the dark place. He said to me and Zofia, "I’ll be right back." And then he wasn’t there anymore. It was just me and Zofia and the handbag, lying there on the counter where he’d dropped it.

If I’d been fast enough, I think I could have followed him. But Zofia had been guardian of the faery handbag for a lot longer. She snatched the bag back and glared at me. "He’s a very bad boy," she said. She was absolutely furious. "You’re better off without him, Genevieve, I think."

"Give me the handbag," I said. "I have to go get him."

"It isn’t a toy, Genevieve," she said. "It isn’t a game. This isn’t Scrabble. He comes back when he comes back. If he comes back."

"Give me the handbag," I said. "Or I’ll take it from you."

She held the handbag up high over her head, so that I couldn’t reach it. I hate people who are taller than me. "What are you going to do now," Zofia said. "Are you going to knock me down? Are you going to steal the handbag? Are you going to go away and leave me here to explain to your parents where you’ve gone? Are you going to say goodbye to your friends? When you come out again, they will have gone to college. They’ll have jobs and babies and houses and they won’t even recognize you. Your mother will be an old woman and I will be dead."

"I don’t care," I said. I sat down on the sticky red carpet in the lobby and started to cry. Someone wearing a little metal name tag came over and asked if we were okay. His name was Missy. Or maybe he was wearing someone else’s tag.

"We’re fine," Zofia said. "My granddaughter has the flu."

She took my hand and pulled me up. She put her arm around me and we walked out of the theater. We never even got to see the stupid movie. We never even got to see another movie together. I don’t ever want to go see another movie. The problem is, I don’t want to see unhappy endings. And I don’t know if I believe in the happy ones.

"I have a plan," Zofia said. "I will go find Jake. You will stay here and look after the handbag."

"You won’t come back either," I said. I cried even harder. Or if you do, I’ll be like a hundred years old and Jake will still be sixteen."

"Everything will be okay," Zofia said. I wish I could tell you how beautiful she looked right then. It didn’t matter if she was lying or if she actually knew that everything was going to be okay. The important thing was how she looked when she said it. She said, with absolute certainty, or maybe with all the skill of a very skillful liar, "My plan will work. First we go to the library, though. One of the people under the hill just brought back an Agatha Christie mystery, and I need to return it."

"We’re going to the library?" I said. "Why don’t we just go home and play Scrabble for a while." You probably think I was just being sarcastic here, and I was being sarcastic. But Zofia gave me a sharp look. She knew that if I was being sarcastic that my brain was working again. She knew that I knew she was stalling for time. She knew that I was coming up with my own plan, which was a lot like Zofia’s plan, except that I was the one who went into the handbag. How was the part I was working on.

"We could do that," she said. "Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves."

"Can we please just hurry?" I said.

Zofia just looked at me. "Genevieve, we have plenty of time. If you’re going to look after the handbag, you have to remember that. You have to be patient. Can you be patient?"

"I can try," I told her. I’m trying, Zofia. I’m trying really hard. But it isn’t fair. Jake is off having adventures and talking to talking animals, and who knows, learning how to fly and some beautiful three thousand year old girl from under the hill is teaching him how to speak fluent Baldeziwurleki. I bet she lives in a house that runs around on chicken legs, and she tells Jake that she’d love to hear him play something on the guitar. Maybe you’ll kiss her, Jake, because she’s put a spell on you. But whatever you do, don’t go up into her house. Don’t fall asleep in her bed. Come back soon, Jake, and bring the handbag with you.

I hate those movies, those books, where some guy gets to go off and have adventures and meanwhile the girl has to stay home and wait. I’m a feminist. I subscribe to Bust magazine, and I watch Buffy reruns. I don’t believe in that kind of shit.

We hadn’t been in the library for five minutes before Zofia picked up a biography of Carl Sagan and dropped it in her purse. She was definitely stalling for time. She was trying to come up with a plan that would counteract the plan that she knew I was planning. I wondered what she thought I was planning. It was probably much better than anything I’d come up with.

"Don’t do that!" I said.

"Don’t worry," Zofia said. "Nobody was watching."

"I don’t care if nobody saw! What if Jake’s sitting there in the boat, or what if he was coming back and you just dropped it on his head!"

"It doesn’t work that way," Zofia said. Then she said, "It would serve him right, anyway."

That was when the librarian came up to us. She had a nametag on as well. I was so sick of people and their stupid nametags. I’m not even going to tell you what her name was. "I saw that," the librarian said.

"Saw what?" Zofia said. She smiled down at the librarian, like she was Queen of the Library, and the librarian were a petitioner.

The librarian stared hard at her. "I know you," she said, almost sounding awed, like she was a weekend birdwatcher who just seen Bigfoot. "We have your picture on the office wall. You’re Ms. Swinks. You aren’t allowed to check out books here."

"That’s ridiculous," Zofia said. She was at least two feet taller than the librarian. I felt a bit sorry for the librarian. After all, Zofia had just stolen a seven-day book. She probably wouldn’t return it for a hundred years. My mother has always made it clear that it’s my job to protect other people from Zofia. I guess I was Zofia’s guardian before I became the guardian of the handbag.

The librarian reached up and grabbed Zofia’s handbag. She was small but she was strong. She jerked the handbag and Zofia stumbled and fell back against a work desk. I couldn’t believe it. Everyone except for me was getting a look at Zofia’s handbag. What kind of guardian was I going to be?

"Genevieve," Zofia said. She held my hand very tightly, and I looked at her. She looked wobbly and pale. She said, "I feel very bad about all of this. Tell your mother I said so."

Then she said one last thing, but I think it was in Baldeziwurleki.

The librarian said, "I saw you put a book in here. Right here." She opened the handbag and peered inside. Out of the handbag came a long, lonely, ferocious, utterly hopeless scream of rage. I don’t ever want to hear that noise again. Everyone in the library looked up. The librarian made a choking noise and threw Zofia’s handbag away from her. A little trickle of blood came out of her nose and a drop fell on the floor. What I thought at first was that it was just plain luck that the handbag was closed when it landed. Later on I was trying to figure out what Zofia said. My Baldeziwurleki isn’t very good, but I think she was saying something like "Figures. Stupid librarian. I have to go take care of that damn dog." So maybe that’s what happened. Maybe Zofia sent part of herself in there with the skinless dog. Maybe she fought it and won and closed the handbag. Maybe she made friends with it. I mean, she used to feed it popcorn at the movies. Maybe she’s still in there.

What happened in the library was Zofia sighed a little and closed her eyes. I helped her sit down in a chair, but I don’t think she was really there any more. I rode with her in the ambulance, when the ambulance finally showed up, and I swear I didn’t even think about the handbag until my mother showed up. I didn’t say a word. I just left her there in the hospital with Zofia, who was on a respirator, and I ran all the way back to the library. But it was closed. So I ran all the way back again, to the hospital, but you already know what happened, right? Zofia died. I hate writing that. My tall, funny, beautiful, book-stealing, Scrabble-playing, story-telling grandmother died.

But you never met her. You’re probably wondering about the handbag. What happened to it. I put up signs all over town, like Zofia’s handbag was some kind of lost dog, but nobody ever called.

So that’s the story so far. Not that I expect you to believe any of it. Last night Natalie and Natasha came over and we played Scrabble. They don’t really like Scrabble, but they feel like it’s their job to cheer me up. I won. After they went home, I flipped all the tiles upside-down and then I started picking them up in groups of seven. I tried to ask a question, but it was hard to pick just one. The words I got weren’t so great either, so I decided that they weren’t English words. They were Baldeziwurleki words.

Once I decided that, everything became perfectly clear. First I put down "kirif" which means "happy news", and then I got a "b," an "o," an "l," an "e," a "f," another "i," an "s," and a "z." So then I could make "kirif" into "bolekirifisz," which could mean "the happy result of a combination of diligent effort and patience."

I would find the faery handbag. The tiles said so. I would work the clasp and go into the handbag and have my own adventures and would rescue Jake. Hardly any time would have gone by before we came back out of the handbag. Maybe I’d even make friends with that poor dog and get to say goodbye, for real, to Zofia. Rustan would show up again and be really sorry that he’d missed Zofia’s funeral and this time he would be brave enough to tell my mother the whole story. He would tell her that he was her father. Not that she would believe him. Not that you should believe this story. Promise me that you won’t believe a word.

###

"The Faery Handbag" was also collected in Kelly Link’s second collection, Magic for Beginners.

The little creek behind my trailer in Kentucky is called Frankum Branch. I had to go to the courthouse to find that out. Nobody around here thought it had a name. But all the little creeks and branches in the world have names, even if nobody remembers them, or remembers which Frankum they’re named after.

I wanted to know the name when I was planning the trip back to Paris. That’s Paris as in Bourbon kings, not Paris as in Bourbon County. I was writing out my route and Frankum Branch was Step One. I couldn’t afford to fly, so I was going by boat. I didn’t have a boat, so I was going to build one.

I was drinking a lot of wine just then.

I saved the corks.

Before I decided to go back to Paris, I considered using the bottles to build some sort of roadside tourist attraction. I looked into it a little bit, but the math defeated me very quickly. You remember how I am with math.

A boat though-a boat built out of corks-that turned out to be easy. All you need is a roll or two of cheesecloth and some thread and a needle and of course a whole lot of corks. I put it together in a long afternoon in the field behind the trailer.

None of the bottles, full or empty, would break on the corks, so I never did christen it. I’d be happy to hear your suggestions for a name, though, you were always good at that.

The neighbors had that party, set up the game to name their new kitten. Calliope, you suggested, and nobody else even came close. You didn’t go to the party, though. I carried over the note you’d written.

Frankum Branch, that’s a pretty good name. Even if I couldn’t track the provenance, I know there are Frankums around here, know they’ve been here for a long time. Probably a particular Frankum, sure, but here’s a case where ignorance is kind of liberating. Since I don’t know-since nobody knows, not even the people at the courthouse-it could have been a man or a woman, an old lady or a little boy. It could be named for all the Frankums.

The boat behaved at first. It rolled down the hill and settled into the branch, stretching out long because the stream bed is so narrow. It waited for me to throw my bags in and to clamber in myself, and then I headed downstream.

I only moved at the speed the water moved. I only went as fast as the world would carry me.

How far is my trailer from Sulfur Creek? See, that’s a more interesting question than it might seem. There are so many ways to measure it.

If I walk out my front door and follow Creek Bend Drive to the end of my landlord’s farm, down into the bottom and across Frankum, up another hill and then back down to where the blacktop turns to gravel, it’s about two miles. That’s the closest place, I think. Where the road breaks up into gravel is where Frankum Branch flows into Sulfur Creek.

But there are other ways I can go. I can walk through the fields, cross the branch on rocks at a narrow place, climb through some woods. I think it might only be about a mile and a half, that way.

Then there are crows. “As the crow flies.” Do you think that means that crows are supposed to fly in straight lines? Maybe they used to. I watch crows, and I don’t think I’d trust them to give me advice on distance. I don’t think I trust crows or creeks either on much of anything, except to be themselves.

Finally, there’s time. Nobody ever gives distances in miles anymore, but it’s not because they’ve switched to metric. They measure how far it is from here to there with their watches, not their odometers.

That place, that confluence of water and roads both? It’s about two miles from my trailer, it’s about a mile and half, it’s about an hour if you take Frankum Branch in a boat made out of corks.

So then I was on Sulfur Creek, which is broader than Frankum. The boat rounded itself up into a little doughnut. I smelled the water in the creek and I tasted it, searching for rotten eggs, I guess, or hell.

The sulfur must have washed away, though. Sometimes that happens, things wash away and only the names are left.

My hometown-the town I lived closest to growing up and the one I live closest to again-it’s an island, maybe. At the edge of town, you have to cross a bridge over Russell Creek. At every edge of town. Every road leading in and out passes over Russell Creek.

When I was younger, I thought that meant that the creek flowed in a circle. I’d seen illustrations of the Styx in my mythology books.

It’s not, of course. The creek and the town are neither of them circles, and the roads don’t lead out in perfect radials along the cardinal directions, something else I used to believe.

What’s the difference between a creek and a river? Length, just length. Nothing about how much water flows through it, nothing about breadth or depth. In Kentucky, if a rivulet you can step across is at least a hundred miles long, then it’s a river. Russell Creek is ninety-nine miles long. Maybe it’s the longest creek in the world.

When I floated out onto it, I started thinking that maybe I should have dug a trench somewhere at the headwaters or made a long oxbow in a bottom. Maybe instead of building the boat I should have lengthened Russell Creek. But then it would just be a short river.

Russell Creek flows around the town, and beneath the bluffs that line one side of my family’s farm, and then winds, winds, winds through the county to the Green River.

The Green River pretty much named itself.

The Green is deep and swift above the first locks and dams, then shallow and tamed below. Floating through the impounded lake at the county line, the boat began to misbehave. It didn’t want to leave town, after all.

It bunched up in a tight little sphere. I bounced on the top, netting my nylon bags filled with wine bottles and this notebook and a corkscrew into the cheesecloth so they wouldn’t drop down and disturb the muskies. Then the boat stretched out, became narrower and narrower, longer and longer, so it almost looked like it was floating forward.

But I could tell it wasn’t really moving, so I tried to paddle for a while with my hands. I kept getting pushed back by the wakes of fishing boats headed for the state dock. When I gave up, exhausted, the boat finally shuddered or shrugged and drifted on through the spillway, through the dam.

I don’t know the motive force of the boat. Its motivation is a mystery to me.

You have to keep an eye on that boat.

Then it was a John Prine song for four hundred miles.

Here’s a true story. The Commonwealth of Kentucky owns the Ohio River, or used to. We still own most of it. But then counties along the south bank started charging property taxes to the Hoosiers and the Buckeyes who built docks off the north shore. The Hoosiers and the Buckeyes got their states to sue ours and theirs won, a little bit. Now the Commonwealth owns the Ohio River except for a strip one hundred yards wide along the upper bank. The Supreme Court of the United States decided that.

Those counties shouldn’t have tried to charge the taxes. They should have known what would happen.

There doesn’t seem to be much point in owning most of a river.

These are things I saw along the Ohio River.

Below Henderson, where the Green gets muddied into the brown, I saw the carcass of a cow, bloated and rotting, floating in the shallows outside the main current. The boat shied away from it even though I was curious to see what kind of cow it was.

At Owensboro, the water became as clear as air, and I felt like I was flying for a little while. The bed of the Ohio is smooth and broad at Owensboro, unsullied by anything but giant catfish and a submerged Volvo P-1800 in perfect condition.

Ralph Stanley was playing a concert on the waterfront at Paducah. This time I didn’t mind the boat’s dawdling.

At Cairo, I floated onto the Mississippi.

Cairo is pronounced “Cairo.”

Mark Twain’s mother was born in my hometown. She was married in the front room of the big brick house at the corner of Fortune and Guardian. Mark Twain was conceived there. No, Samuel Clemens was conceived there. I think Mark Twain was conceived in San Francisco.

Doesn’t Mississippi mean “Father of Waters”? That’s a great name, in the original and in the translation and in the parlance.

You could make a career on that, I think. “Father of Waters.” If I’d made that up, I would have lorded it over all the other namers for the rest of my life. I would never have named another river.

So, past New Orleans, the first place I was tempted to stop (but didn’t), and into the Gulf of Mexico. The discharge of the father forced me all the way to the Gulf Stream, and it’s easy to cross an ocean when the currents are doing all the work.

The boat was showing a little bit of wear, though. I had to drink more wine and patch a few places with the corks.

It was around then, south of Iceland maybe, north of the Azores, that it occurred to me that I could have used all those bottles to make a boat instead of the corks. It might have been sturdier and I could probably have found some waterproof glue. I think you would have thought of that at the beginning.

But me, I was south of Iceland, very wet and cold, before I hit my forehead with the heel of my palm.

“Bottles!” I said.

The French, in naming rivers and cities and forests and Greek sandwich shops, have the advantage of being French speakers. I only know how to say “I don’t speak French” in French, but I say it with perfect pronunciation and a great deal of confidence. Nobody in France ever believed me. Sometimes even I didn’t believe me.

So, I don’t know what Seine means, and I’m actually a little bit unsure of the pronunciation. I kept my mouth shut through Le Havre, past Rouen.

France was the first place along the trip that other people noticed the boat. The French love boats. I know what you think about that kind of sweeping comment. It’s true though, in all it’s implications. All French people love all boats, even ones made out of corks. They might not like them, all of them, all of the time. But love, sure.

Do you remember when we were on a boat on the Seine together? Cold fog, ancient walls, tinny loudspeakers repeating everything in French, English, German, Japanese?

Do you remember the other boat? The Zodiac moored under the Pont au Double, lashed against the wall below Notre Dame?

A man stood in the boat, leaning back, pulling a bright blue nylon rope. People started watching him instead of the church. What was he pulling out of the water? What was the light rising up from below?

It was another man, a man in a red wetsuit, with yellow tanks strapped to his back, climbing the rope against the current.

Do you remember that?

They were still there.

They waved me over.

We have underground rivers in Kentucky, too. The Echo is famous, in the caves. If I’d thought of it at the time, I would have tried to coax the boat into the caves when I floated past them, tried to spot some eyeless fish.

In Paris, the underground river is the Biévre. It enters the Seine right across from Notre Dame. But then it leaves it again. It’s just a river crossing through another one, not joining it.

I told the man on the boat that I didn’t speak French, in French. He shrugged. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he didn’t speak French either. He just pointed at the diver in the water, so I slipped over the side, into the Seine. My boat seemed glad to be rid of me.

The diver took me by the hand and led me down. Down a very long way. He tied himself to a grating in the side of the stones that formed the channel there and showed me how he’d bent the bars wide enough for someone not wearing air tanks to slip through.

So I did. I slipped through.

Then up and out of the Seine, or it might have been the Bivre. I could have been in the secret river the whole time. Up and into a dank passage. I’ve been in dank passages in Paris before, but never any with so few bones.

No skulls and thighs stacked along the walls here, just a dark stone hallway. I followed it and followed it and came to a junction, a place to choose. Left or right.

You remember my sense of direction. You wouldn’t have been surprised to know that I knew where I was: at the center of the Ile de la Cité.

Left was north, then, and I knew that it would take me beneath the police headquarters and up to Sainte-Chapelle, which Louis IX built to store the organs of Jesus after he’d bought them from of one of the great salesmen of the thirteenth century. Right was south, to Notre Dame, where signs remind the pickpockets that God’s eyes are on them.

Notre Dame or Sainte-Chapelle. The lady or the heart.

I stood there.

I am standing there still.

Other than the signs saying that God is particularly aware of petty larceny there, I only remember one thing from inside Notre Dame.

You were so disgusted when we heard the woman with the Maine accent say, “They’re praying. I didn’t think this was a working church.”

There were jugglers outside. I didn’t think it was a working church either. I didn’t tell you that.

When we went to Sainte-Chapelle together, we didn’t go to look for the heart of Jesus. There was a concert, a half-dozen stringed instruments in a candlelit cavern of stained glass. Bach? I don’t remember.

What I remember was leaving, walking out of the cathedral and into the rain. The line was slow because we had to pass through checkpoints in the Justice Ministry, which surrounds the church. Gendarmes with Uzis below and gargoyles with scythes high above.

I tracked a stream of rainwater from the mouth of a gargoyle to the pavement. I leaned out, turned my head up, opened my mouth. I told you that I didn’t know what it tasted like. Like limestone, a little. I said limestone or ash, soot or smog.

You smiled and said, “It tastes like gargoyles.”

You said that from my description. You didn’t catch the rain on your tongue.

A long way to come to choose between places I’ve already been. A long way to come to choose anything at all.

I wonder if I can turn around.

I wonder if I can find my way back to the boat.

I wonder if it’s still there.

O

Trampoline
Bittersweet Creek by Christopher Rowe
“Sally Harpe”
Christopher Rowe interview

I. Naturalistic Narrative

Cheap pens. My marriage is not going to survive this. Not the pens — I bought the pens because no pen is safe when Mark is around; his backpack is a black hole for pens — so I bought this package of cheap pens, one of which doesn’t work (although rather than throw it away, I stuck it back in the pen jar, which is stupid), and two of them don’t click right when you try to make the point come out and then go back. It’s good to have them, though, because I’m manning the phone. Tim, my husband, is out combing the Buckeye Trail in the National Park with volunteers, looking for my nine-year-old stepson, Mark. Mark has been missing for twenty-two hours. One minute he was with them, the next minute he wasn’t. I am worried about Mark. I am sure that if he is dead, I will feel terrible. I wish I liked him better. I wish I’d let him take some of these pens. Not that Tim will ever find out that I told Mark he couldn’t have any of these pens.

The phone rings. It’s Mark’s mother, Tina. “Hello?” she says, “hello, Amelia? Hello?” Her voice is thick with medication and tears. Tina is a manic-depressive and lives in Texas.

“Hi, Tina,” I say. “No word yet.”

“Oh God,” Tina says.

Get off the line, I think. But I can’t throw Mark’s mother off the phone.

“Was he wearing his jacket?” she asks. She has asked that every time she’s called. As if sheever noticed whether or not he had his jacket on.

“He did,” I say, soothing. “He’s a smart kid.”

“He could have just turned his ankle,” she says. “They’ll find him.” I offered this scenario a couple of hours ago, but she’s forgotten I suggested it, and she thinks she is comforting me. I allow myself to sound comforted. She says she’ll call back in an hour. I’m convinced he is drowned. I can see it; the glimmer of his white hands and face in the metallic water. I can’t say it to anyone.

What will happen to my marriage? When a child dies, divorce is pretty common. Two people locked in their grief, unable to connect. But I won’t grieve like Tim, and some part of me will be relieved. I’m honest with myself about this. The secret in our marriage will slowly reveal itself. He will learn that I didn’t love Mark, and how can you love someone who didn’t love your only son?

When I married Tim, Mark was only six. He was the child of a dysfunctional marriage. He was prone to angry outbursts. He was resentful. All they had were plastic glasses, and I bought cheap glass tumblers, but Mark didn’t like them. He wanted “their” glasses. I made the dinners, and I hated the lime green plastic cups. I wanted to sit at a nice table.

It was a classic stepfamily drama. It’s in the books. I compromised. I used the ghastly plates from his mother, the ones with country geese on them, but insisted on the glass tumblers. It was our family table, I explained. A mix of old and new, like our family. Mark hated everything I cooked. I used the same canned sloppy joe mix that his father had always used, and Mark sat at the table, a blond boy who was small for his age, crying silently into his sandwich. He hated sloppy joes.

His father couldn’t stand to hear him cry that he was hungry. I sat on the bed in the master bedroom. Maybe I should have given in. It was hard to decide. He was six years old, and he didn’t have a bedtime, didn’t dress himself for school in the morning. He lay on the floor crying while I put his socks on. I made his father put him in bed at nine each night. Before we’d married, Mark had terrible headaches, so terrible that his father had taken him to the hospital and they’d done CAT scans. After we got married and we started eating at a regular time and he had a bedtime, the headaches disappeared.

I should have given in on the green glasses. But why should I have had to eat at an ugly table, when he had taken all the joy out of the dinner anyway? When it was always a screaming battle? What was I supposed to do? When was it important that he have his own things, and when was it important that he not get his own way?

The phone doesn’t ring. That’s good, because when it does, it will be Tina.

When they say they have found his body, I will comfort Tim. I’ll just comfort him with my hands. I’ll just be there. Not talking. Just there. Like something out of Jane Eyre. Actually, I’ll get impatient, because I finally have him to myself and yet Mark will have him. You can’t compete with the dead. I always thought that if we were married long enough, eventually we would get that time that people without children get when they are first married. We’ll be fifty-year-old newlyweds going out to see a movie on a whim and not worrying about child care.

I can’t think about any of it.

This is the last moment of my marriage. Or maybe my marriage is already gone.

I have the sudden urge to get up and go out and get in my little beat-up eight-year-old Honda that I bought with my own money, and drive. I took the freeway to my first job, working in an amusement park for the summer when I was sixteen. I hated the job, and I hated to be home. I used to get on the freeway headed north and think that I could just keep going, up to Detroit, across to Windsor, Ontario and up to Quebec, where I would get a job at a fast food place and learn to speak French.

The doorbell rings. It’s Annette, the neighbor down the street. I like Annette, although I have always suspected that she disapproved of Mark and, therefore, of Tim and me as parents. Annette has two daughters, and when we all moved onto the street her daughters were five and seven while Mark was eight. Mark and the boys next door run around in hunter camouflage playing war and spying in windows.

She sits and has a cup of tea. Annette is a working mother. Here in the suburbs there are working mothers and there are housewives and there is me. I’m an architectural landscaper, and I work out of my home.

“Funny that Tim is the one out wandering the wilderness,” I say to Annette.

“Yeah?” Annette says.

“Well,” I say, “Tim hates the outdoors, hates yard work, hates plants.” Tim is an engineer. Computers are his landscapes.

She laughs a little for me. “You’re holding up really well, you know that?” she says.

Of course I’m holding up well. If her daughter was out there, Annette would be devastated. If Tim had disappeared, I would be incoherent. I wish I was incoherent about Mark.

The phone rings. I pick it up, expecting to hear Tina saying, “Amelia?”

“Amelia?” says a man’s voice.

“Yes?” I say, only realizing afterward that it’s Tim.

“We found him,” he says. “He’s okay. A little bit of hypothermia and a little dehydrated. We’re going into the clinic to have him checked. Can you meet me there?”

Tim sounds normal.

I start to cry when I hang up the phone, because I’m terrified.

2. Exposition

An eight-legged essay is a Chinese form. It consists of eight parts, each of which presents an example from an earlier classic. Together, the parts are seen as the argument. The conclusion is assumed to be apparent to the reader. It is implicit rather than explicit. It’s not better or worse than argument and conclusion, it’s different. It is more like a story. This is not an eight-legged essay. If it were, I would use examples from the classic literature. Once upon a time there was a girl named Cinderella. Once upon a time there was a girl named Snow White.

We enter into all major relationships with no real clue of where we are going: marriage, birth, friendship. We carry maps we believe are true: our parents’ relationship, what it says in the baby books, the landscape of our own childhood. These maps are approximate at best, dangerously misleading at worst. Dysfunctional families breed dysfunctional families. Abuse is handed down from generation to generation. That this is the stuff of 12-Step programs and talk shows doesn’t make it any less true or any less profound.

The map of stepparenting is one of the worst, because it is based on a lie. The lie is that you will be mom or you will be dad. If you’ve got custody of the child, you’re going to raise it. You’ll be there, or you won’t. Either I mother Mark and pack his lunches, go over his homework with him, drive him to and from Boy Scouts, and tell him to eat his carrots, or I’m neglecting him. After all, Mark needs to eat his carrots. He needs someone to take his homework seriously. He needs to be told to get his shoes on, it’s time for the bus. He needs to be told not to say “shit” in front of his grandmother and his teachers.

But he already has a mother, and I’m not his mother, and I never will be. He knows it, I know it. Stepmothers don’t represent good things for children. Mark could not have his father and mother back together without somehow getting me out of the picture. It meant that he would have to accept a stranger whom he didn’t know and maybe wouldn’t really like into his home. It meant he was nearly powerless.

That is the first evil thing I did.

The second evil thing that stepparents do is take part of a parent away. Imagine this, you’re married, and your spouse suddenly decides to bring someone else into the household, without asking you. You’re forced to accommodate. Your spouse pays attention to the Other, and while they are paying attention to the Other, they are not paying attention to you. Imagine the Other was able to make rules. In marriages it’s called bigamy, and it’s illegal.

At the hospital, the parking garage is a maze. I follow arrows to the stairs and down past the walkway to the front entrance, which is nearly inaccessible from the street. The walkway is planted with geraniums paid for by the hospital auxiliary, and the center of the front drive is an abstract statue surrounded by the ubiquitous mass of daylilies, Stella d’Oro. The building front is all angles, and the entrance is a revolving door. How do they get wheelchairs out a revolving door? But angled so that people like me won’t see it right away is a huge sliding door for accessibility.

The elevators are nowhere near the receptionist. I am trying to decide how to compose my face. I can’t manage joyous. Relieved? I am relieved, but I’m not, too. Mark doesn’t handle stress very well, even by nine-year-old standards. Things are going to be difficult after this. We’ll get calls from the teacher about his behavior at school. I pass a Wendy’s (in a hospital? But then it seems like a pretty good idea) and the gift shop and turn left at the elevators.

Mark isn’t in a hospital room; he’s asleep in some sort of examining room in a curtained-off bed. Tim is sitting on the edge of the bed wearing his baseball cap that says “Roswell Institute for UFO Studies.” I bought him that as a joke.

“He’s okay,” Tim whispers. “We can take him home whenever.”

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“I’m okay,” Tim says. “Are you okay?”

I say I’m fine, and we float becalmed in a sea of “okays.”

We hug. Tim is six feet tall.

“I think in some ways you were more worried than I was,” Tim says. “I know you care a lot for him. I think more than you know.”

I smile a lie.

Mark is sleeping like a much younger child, abandoned to exhaustion. His mouth is open slightly, and he has one fist curled next to his cheek. Tim picks him up, and he stirs to rest on Tim’s shoulder but doesn’t wake.

We walk through the lobby; the happy family, the family that brushed disaster and escaped.

3. Fairy Tales — Beauty and the Beast

Before Mark gets lost, we are living in another town. We are both employed by the same firm. I am studying architectural landscaping. The firm that employs us is a large company that sells many different products: detergents and diapers and potato chips.

In March they call our division together and say that the company will be restructuring, but that they don’t intend to lay anyone off. As we walk out of the cafeteria where the meeting has been, Tim says, “That means layoffs for sure.” I laugh, and he starts calling headhunters.

They lay one hundred and fifty people off four months later. They ask some of us to stay during the transition and offer Tim and me positions as contractors with a rather lucrative bonus for staying until December 31.

Tim finds another job in September, and moves four hours away.

After Tim has gone, on Fridays Mark and I go out for pizza. Mark is seven. We go to a pizza place where the middle part of the restaurant is shaped like the leaning tower of Pisa except that it’s only three stories tall. It’s called Tower Pizza, and the pizza is mediocre but they have a special children’s room where they play videos of Disney movies on a large screen TV.

It is snowing, so it must be November or so. The video is of Beauty and the Beast.

“This sucks,” Mark says. “They always show this one. I hate this one.”

“Do you want to sit in the regular part of the restaurant?” I ask.

“No,” Mark says. “This is okay.”

He wants a Mountain Dew because it has the most caffeine. “Caffeine is cool,” he says. “When’s Dad coming home?”

“Late tonight,” I say. “First pizza, then we’ll get a video, and you can take it home and watch it, and we’ll wait for your dad.”

“I wish Dad were here now,” Mark says.

“So do I,” I say. “How was school?”

“I hate school,” Mark says.

“Did you have gym today?” I try to ask specific questions that will elicit a positive response. “How was school” is a tactical mistake, and I know it as soon as I’ve said it.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m not hungry.”

If I take him home, he’ll be hungry five minutes after we get in the car, and nothing I have at home will be what he wanted. What he really wants is his dad, of course. “Just have some pizza,” I say. “You’ll be hungry once you taste it.”

He doesn’t answer. He’s watching the little broken teacup dance around. “Can I go over by the TV?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say.

I read my book while he watches TV, and when the pizza comes I call him. Pepperoni pizza. I don’t really like pepperoni pizza, but it’s the only kind that Mark eats.

“How much do I have to eat?” he asks.

“Two pieces,” I say.

He sighs theatrically.

After pizza we stop and get a Christmas movie about a character named Ernest. We had seen the first Ernest movie, the Ernest Halloween movie, and the movie that involved the giant cannon and the hidden treasure. Ernest is terminally stupid, and this is supposed to be funny. At least Ernest is an adult, and there aren’t the usual clueless parents in this one.

“Will you watch it with me?” Mark asks.

“Okay,” I say. I sit with him and read my book and wish I could go to bed. By Friday I’m so tired I can’t think. Tim will get home about eleven. It’s seven thirty. I have three and a half hours, and then he’ll be in charge.

“Can I have some popcorn?” Mark asks.

“You just had pizza,” I say.

“I’m hungry,” his voice rises.

“No,” I say. “If you were hungry, you should have eaten more pizza.”

“I wasn’t hungry then,” he says, “but now I’m hungry.”

“Why is food always a battle with you?” I say because I’m tired.

Mark starts to cry.

I slap the tape in the VCR and go upstairs. I sit on the bed. I think about going downstairs and saying I’m sorry. I think about smacking him.

The phone rings, and I run for it. It’s Tim.

“Amelia?” he says.

“Where are you?” I say. He should be about halfway home.

“I’m not even out of town yet. My car broke down,” he says. “I’m at a BP on Route 16. You remember the Big Boy where we had breakfast? It’s right there. I had to stand on the highway for half an hour. It’s snowing like a son of a bitch.”

“Can they fix it?”

“Amelia,” he says, exasperated, “it’s almost eight, and there isn’t a mechanic here. I have to call a tow truck and get it towed to a garage and then see. I can’t get home tonight.”

You left me. You left me here with your child. “Okay,” I say. “Will you tell Mark?” Otherwise he will blame me. Seven year olds blame the messenger.

“Sure,” he says, resigned.

“Mark?” I call. No answer, although I can hear Ernest on the TV. “Mark?” After a moment I say to Tim, “Hold on,” and I go downstairs. Mark is sitting on the couch, deaf to the world. “Mark!” I say loudly.

He starts. “What!”

“Your dad is on the phone.”

He jumps off the couch and runs for the kitchen phone calling, “Dadddyyyy!” It is artificial. It is the behavior of a child raised on sitcoms. It sets my teeth on edge.

I go back upstairs and hang up the extension.

Mark is sobbing when I come back downstairs. He hands me the phone and runs and throws himself face down on the couch.

“Amelia?” Tim says. He sounds tired. He is standing out in the cold; he doesn’t know how much the car is going to cost him. I’ve been a shit, of course. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says.

“Okay,” I say.

I go in and I rub Mark’s back. After a while he turns his tear-stained face toward the TV and watches, and I go back to my book.

Saturday morning I sit on the steps while he tells me about the car. The phone cord is stretched from the kitchen to the foyer.

In a tiny, whining little girl voice, I say, “You have to come home.” Mark is watching cartoons, and I don’t want him to hear me crying. “You have to come home.”

“I can’t,” he says. “The car won’t be fixed until late today, if at all today.”

“Can’t you rent a car?”

He hasn’t thought of that. “I don’t know,” he says.

“You have to come home,” I say. I whisper. I can’t think of anything else to say. Who am I? Who is this insipid woman whose voice is coming out of my mouth, begging, sobbing?

“I’ll come home,” he says. “I’ll call you back.”

When he comes home, I can’t talk to him. I’m afraid that if I open my mouth, toads and beetles and worms will pour out, and I will say something. Something irrevocable.

Mark has been lying on the couch. At one point he was screaming because he said he wanted his daddy and he wanted him right now, but his father was only about halfway home. Well, only about halfway to our home. His daddy doesn’t live here anymore. The house is up for sale. We will leave at the end of December.

I wanted to tell Mark that if it wasn’t for me, his daddy wouldn’t have come home this weekend at all. But I don’t say anything. I close my mouth so that no ugly thing will come out.

I am good. I am trying hard to be good.

4. Correspondence

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Friehoff,

Mark is a bright child, fully capable of doing the assigned work. He is often a charming child. He has quite a sense of humor. However, he has poor impulse control, does not stay in his seat, talks out inappropriately in class, and hits other children when he is frustrated. His grades reflect his inability to control himself.

He has been referred for screening through the guidance office, however, I don’t think that Mark suffers from hyperactivity or ADD. He is maturing emotionally and physically more slowly than he is intellectually. Children mature at different rates, and this isn’t cause for alarm.

Please call me to set up an appointment. I’m best reached between12:15 and 12:50 or after school…

5. Authorial Intrusion

It is important to note that this story is a story of particulars. Most stepchildren live with their mother, so the situation in this story is unusual, although not unique. There are three common reasons why a court will grant full custody to the father, and these are: 1) abandonment by the biological mother; 2) significant and documented mental instability in the mother; or 3) a history of substance abuse in the mother.

The greatest threat to stepchildren is the adult partner of the biological parent. Boyfriends account for a large proportion of child abuse. I would cite the source on this, but I read it inMcCall’s or Better Homes and Gardens while I was waiting at the HMO to have my prescription filled, and I didn’t feel right taking the magazine. Stepmothers account for a significant proportion of child abuse cases, too, I’m sure.

What isn’t documented is the affect on the child of living with someone who does not physically abuse or neglect them, who is apparently a decent, caring parent, who goes through all the forms of parenthood without ever really feeling what a parent feels. This is not abuse, it is just fate. If anyone is at fault, it is the adult, but how do you force something you don’t feel? What is the duty of the adult? What is the duty of the child?

6. Choices

Tim calls home from work at four. Mark gets off the bus at three thirty. “Hi Sweetie,” Tim says. “How is everything?”

“Okay,” I say. “Mark got a two.” Mark gets a note every day at school rating his behavior on a five-point scale from poor to excellent! Two is one notch above poor. Call it fair.

“What did you say?” Tim asks.

“Just the usual. You know, ‘What happened? Are you sure it’s all Keith’s fault? Did you have anything to do with it? Is there anything you could have done to keep it from happening?’ That stuff.”

Tim sighs on the other end of the phone. “What’s he doing now?”

“He’s supposed to be doing his homework,” I say. “I think he’s playing with the cat.”

“Oh. Let me talk to him.”

“Mark!” I call down the stairs. No answer. There never is. “Mark? Your dad’s on the phone.” I listen for a long moment. Just about the time I decide he hasn’t heard me, Mark picks up and breathes, “Hello?”

I hang the phone up gently. I sit on the bed beside the upstairs phone and wonder what they are saying. I smooth the wrinkles out of the crimson bedspread. I want to tell Tim about the school open house, and if I don’t tell him now, I’ll forget to tell him tonight. I’d forgotten every evening all last week.

I pick up the phone, and Tim is saying, “…and don’t upset Amelia.”

“Okay,” Mark breathes, as if this is a familiar litany.

“Tim?” I say.

“Amelia,” he says. “Okay Mark, hang up.”

“I wanted to tell you about the open house Thursday.”

“Mark,” Tim says, “hang up.” I hear the strain in his voice.

“Okay.” Mark hangs up with a clatter.

I chatter about the open house, about how I keep forgetting to tell him. Tim promises to be home in time. “I’ll pick up Mark and then we’ll get some fast food and go to the open house.”

“I’ll go with you,” I say.

“If you want,” Tim says. “You don’t have to go.”

“It’s okay,” I say.

“You really don’t have to,” Tim says. “He’s my kid.” Before he finishes, I hear someone say something in the background, his manager, probably irritated that Tim is spending time on personal phone calls. Tim cups his hand over the receiver and says something. “Gotta go,” he says to me.

“Okay,” I say. I stay on the phone after he has hung up, listening for a moment to the empty air.

7. Pillow Talk

At open houses you don’t get to talk to the teachers. You just sit with a bunch of other parents, and the teacher tells you all what school is like. In a month there will be parent-teacher conferences. Tim grimly writes down the dates for the open house in his organizer. I suspect it will be a familiar experience. “Mark is a very bright boy, but he has trouble staying in his seat. Did you know he cries very easily?”

Mark likes the novelty of having us at school. “Do you want to see the gym?” He leads us purposefully through the low-ceilinged halls. The hallways always seemed so big when I was a child. He takes us to the art room. He likes art. He has a papier-mache fish on the wall. It is huge and blue and green, with an open mouth and a surprised expression. A big, glorious fish.

“It’s great,” I say. “It’s really neat.”

Mark is bouncing on his toes, not appearing to have heard me.

Tim says, “Mark! Stand still!”

I touch Tim’s arm. “It’s okay,” I say. “He’s not bothering anything.”

That’s who Mark is, and maybe we should ease up on him a bit. Asking him to be still is asking him to do something he’s wired wrongly for.

I will try, I promise myself, to give Mark spaces where he can vibrate a little.

At home that night Tim, and I crawl into bed. We haven’t made love in a month, and I don’t suggest it now.

“Do you mind if I watch the weather?” Tim asks.

I turn on my side with my back to him and try to sleep. The news flickers when I close my eyes, like flames. Like…something. I don’t know what. I want to cry.

“Do you ever feel pulled?” I ask.

“Is this a talk?” Tim says. It’s a joke between us. He says the worst words a wife can utter are, “Oh Tim, we have to talk.”

“Do you feel pulled between making me happy and making Mark happy?”

“Sometimes,” he says.

“Are you afraid of me?” I ask.

“Afraid of you?” Tim says. He laughs.

“Not that way,” I say. “I mean, afraid about how I’ll act with Mark. Afraid I’ll be mad at him or something.”

Tim is silent for a moment. Finally he says, “I’m afraid you’ll get so tired of my rotten kid you’ll run away.”

I am thinking that I cannot live like this. I cannot be the one that everyone fears. I am thinking that if I leave, Mark will have been abandoned again. I am thinking that I am coming to understand Mark, like tonight, at the school, in ways that Tim cannot. And Mark needs that.

I am thinking I am trapped.

Think of it like a prison sentence, I tell myself. In nine years, Mark will be eighteen and he’ll be gone.

I despise myself.

8. Perspectives

We are meeting with a counselor, as a family. It’s Tim’s idea, based on the teacher’s note about Mark possibly being an ADD child. It seems to me that ADD is a description of personality. The therapist is a woman named Karen Poletta. I like her; she’s middle-aged and a little overweight. Professional with kids without being a kind of mother figure. I like her gray hair: straight, smooth, and shining. I like the way she looks right at me.

By the year 2010, there will be more stepfamilies than, than, what is the right word, natural families? Nuclear families? Normal families? It’s a vaguely comforting thought. I can imagine an army of us, stepmothers, marching across the country. Not marching: creeping. I can’t imagine us marching.

I am saying some of my concerns. “I don’t trust myself,” I am saying. “I don’t trust my reactions.” Tim is watching me. Karen Poletta is watching me. This is a session without Mark, who is at my mother’s. I look at the bookshelf with the Legos and the puppets. Family counseling. I’m glad she hasn’t had Mark do anything with puppets. “I don’t know if I’m being too strict, if I’m just getting mad. I don’t know if, for example, I’m letting him stay out too late in the evening because I don’t want him around because it’s quieter when he’s not around. So I try to see what the other parents do, and do what they do.”

Karen Poletta looks thoughtful. “How is that different from a biological parent?” she asks. “Particularly when you have a child like Mark, who is a difficult child. You’re not the only parent of a difficult child who wants some relief. I think some of the things that you think are because you are a stepmother are stepmother issues, but some of them are just parent issues.”

It’s not, I think, it’s not the same. I don’t love him. I don’t like him.

Karen Poletta is talking about how much better off Mark is with us than with his mother. That sometimes things aren’t perfect, but they are good enough. That Mark has a safe and stable home.

But suddenly, I’m not sure. What if it is the same, some of it? Parent issues?

There’s air in the room, and I realize I am taking deep breaths. Big, gulping breaths.

“But he needs a mother,” I say, interrupting.

“And he doesn’t have one,” the therapist says. “But he has a father and a stepmother.”

It is what we have.

O

Mothers & Other Monsters
Trampoline
More stories

20 stories: 140,000 words. But are they any good?

Decide for yourself:

Stories:

Richard Butner

Greer Gilman

Maureen McHugh

Christopher Rowe

Rosalind Palermo Stevenson

Interviews

O

One day Roy Barlowe and his dad walked up the hill to Townie Harpe’s old place. Townie’s widow, Miss Erskine, was sitting on a cane bottom chair on the porch, fooling with some clothes.

Roy didn’t know whether she was sewing or quilting or doing some kind of mending. He never paid much attention to that kind of work. Still, if the mother knew those ways then it followed that the daughter would.

He saw that his dad had removed his hat and Roy wanted to kick himself for forgetting to do that himself. They’d gone over it again one last time on the walk up from their place, just down the river, and here he was, already messing up.

Nothing for it but to start. “Afternoon, Miss Erskine,” Roy said. It came out kind of fast.

The worn down little woman peered out at them. “Are those Barlowes out there? And cleaned up? I guess I missed church this morning, because I didn’t even know it was Sunday.”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s me, Roy Barlowe, here with my dad. He made me — we came up here so I could talk to you some.” His dad had told him to act like everything was his idea, and he’d told him too not to mind anything the woman would say since most of it would be nonsense. But Roy added, “And you didn’t miss church. It’s just now Friday.”

“Friday,” said Miss Erskine. “Friday and a clear day and summertime. I had it all right. And you are Barlowes, but you ain’t out chopping or hoeing or ploughing. Is there somebody dead?

Roy turned his hat around and around in his hands for a minute. He looked at his dad, but just got a glare and a “go on” motion. He wished he was back in one of the fields, where he spent most of his time. Finally, he said, “We came up here so I could talk to you some.”

Miss Erskine dropped her sewing into her lap. She was easy to tire. She had a wrecked body, wrecked from all those babies, Roy’s daddy said, though only her Sally had made it up past four years old. She was ruined for any kind of work and even talking to a boy made her brow grow damp and her breath come in little shallow sips. She sat quiet for a minute.

When she finally did speak, she looked past Roy. She spoke straight to his dad. “Is it that late, already?”

Mr. Barlowe cleared his throat. “I guess it is, Erskine.”

“You want to tie my little child up to this wool headed boy and get all of Townie’s fields with her.”

Roy took a little step back from the old woman — he couldn’t help but think of her as old from the way she looked, even though he had two sisters older than her — and watched her slump back against the house and breathe hard after she spoke up.

He could tell that his dad still wanted him to do the talking, so he skipped to the very end. “Look here, Miss Erskine, our places join up all the way from the road to the river. Ain’t nothing but fence line keeps them apart and y’all have let that get blown down a lot of the way. Sally is a strong girl and she’s got up to where she could get married. And I’m up to where I could get married, too.”

Roy didn’t know what the woman was thinking, didn’t know that she was wondering if old Noah Harpe had sent her Townie up Bittersweet Creek in his Sunday suit this same way twenty-four years ago. She’d been fourteen and never seen a man she wasn’t kin to when her mama had packed her up on the back of the wagon, both of them crying. Then it was babies and cooking and tobacco and none of the babies amounting to nothing until sweet Sally, the twelfth, when Erskine was twenty-four.

Ten years older than Sally was now.

Roy’s dad knew some of that, though, and spoke up again. “The boy’s right, Erskine. And even if he hadn’t made up his own mind about it — ” Miss Erskine rolled her eyes but Mr. Barlowe kept talking. “Even if he hadn’t made up his mind, we done worked this all out a long time ago. Don’t tell me you don’t remember. I stood right here and talked this out with you and Townie before he went to his rest. There was some promises made about us taking care of this place and it’s past time we kept them. And you made a promise, too.”

Roy looked away from his two elders, out over the little valley below them. The fields were wild with weeds, even some young trees. No crops in them and no cattle. The little plot of garden was the only untangled place he could see.

When he looked back, he saw that Miss Erskine was looking over at the fields, too. She picked up her sewing and said, “I remember.” His dad seemed to think that decided something and put on his hat.

Roy put on his own as she said, “Y’all go on before the sun gets low and the girl heads home from the river.”

#

Sally wasn’t at the river, though. She was on the stony bluff where Willow Ridge shoots up from the north bank. She was walking along a mud track, barefoot, her arms full of wildflowers.

They bury in the backwoods in that country. Bottom land is too fertile to waste on the dead. The cemeteries are all up in the hills, under the poplars, and the ground in them is choked with roots and rocks.

Sally picked her way past Burtons and Sapps and Barlowes to the little cluster of Harpe markers at the back of the graveyard. The first three were just dark slabs of limestone, already melting away. These hadn’t lived long enough even to get names, so she didn’t know whether it was brothers or sisters of hers she lay flowers for.

Then one with some writing on it. She knew what it said so she didn’t have to puzzle over it like most of the written down words she came across. It said “Townsend Harpe, Jr. Beloved of the Lord 1881-1884.“

Then two more with no names, then one stone with four, all girls who died within a few days of each other. The same crude slashes of letters that had named her oldest brother named these sisters Mary, Naomi, Angela, Carolina. A fever took them, her mother had told her once.

All these and a half dozen more clustered around the big marker, the one for her daddy. Sally had traced it out once, the year she went to school. It was the first thing she had learned to read. “Townsend Harpe, Sr. Blessed Husband & Father & Charles His Son.“

When her mother had still had breath in her to tell Sally stories, Erskine had told the tale of that stone. Townie — and Sally could just remember the big man, she’d been about four when he died — had carried his last boy up to the ridge to bury him. He’d gone by himself, Erskine was too weak from the birth. “It must have been his heart give out on him,” her mama had said. “Digging in that froze up ground.”

Sally was laying the last of her flowers across the stone when she heard a whistle, something like a bird call. She laughed. “Is that supposed to be a blue jay that’s got its beak busted up, Joel Cornett? Cause that’s the only bird I can think of that might sound anything like that.”

A sandy haired boy, about her age, trotted into the graveyard, grinning. “Ain’t all of us spend our time listening to birds and talking back at them, girl.”

“I don’t know what you do spend your time on, then. Cornetts sure don’t work any.” She was already running by the time she said the last word.

And so he chased her, like he had all summer.

Down off the ridge, along an old logging road cut out of the side of the hill that was split its whole length by gullies and washes. She ran down the track, leaping the ditches and swinging around the saplings that thrust up from the red ground, the boy right behind her.

When they came into the bottom she cut off the road and down into a creek bed. She slowed. The soles of her feet were hard with calluses this late in the summer, but the creek gravel was still harder running than the road. Joel closed the gap a little, splashing in and out of the water, watching for the banks of clay where he could move faster so long as he didn’t slip.

Just above the junction of creek and river, and the deep pool where Sally had stretched the trot lines she’d come out to check, was a clearing filled with ferns. She let him catch her there, like she had the past three or four times they’d raced.

He hooked his arm around her waist and they rolled down, laughing. She let him kiss her some, sharp and hot and fast, like sparks cracking out of a green log on a fire. but she kept an arm across her chest, where she knew his hands would be coaxing at her.

“Come on, Sally,” he said, and she laughed again because he had the same whine in his voice that pups had sometimes. “Come on, it’s alright. It’s alright now.”

Then she pulled away from him because he was moving his whole body up against her and it scared her when he did that, when his breath got shallow and he kept saying the same thing over and over. “You leave it alone, Joel,” and hadn’t she saidthat over and over? “There’s things that’s left to married people.”

Joel leaned back, then grinned at her. “Well then let’s get married, Sally. If me and you are going to get married then it’s alright. That makes it alright.”

Sally sat up and looked at him. She worked her jaw up and down and felt her eyes open up wide, felt them start to glisten. “You ask me right,” she said.

Joel grinned wider. He scrambled up onto his knees. “Sally Harpe, will you marry me?” Then he flopped back down beside her.

Sally nodded. “Uh-huh. Yes.” She couldn’t stop crying but she was happy. She guessed that the stunned, tingly feeling was a kind of happy. Joel lay her back down, but she shook her head and turned from him again.

“It’s alright, I said, Sally,” he said, frustrated, that note in his voice again. But Sally kept shaking her head.

“No, Joel, we have to wait. That’s the way and don’t tell me Cornetts do it different because I ain’t no Cornett yet.”

She started to stand up and was surprised that Joel didn’t try to keep her down. He just settled back like he was thinking. He said, “Well, there’s some things people that’s promised can do, I guess. If they’re promised.”

Sally knew about promises. Her mama had a whole pack of stories about what happened to people who broke them. She beetled her honey-colored eyebrows. “What are you talking about now?”

“Here, Sally, here.” And this time when he leaned to kiss her he didn’t try to snake over her, but took her hand instead. And kissed her and whispered to her and moved her hand down.

She breathed along the same as he did. Her arm was trembling a little, tensed up, but she moved her hand where he guided her, how he guided her. And he kissed her and whispered to her, his whispers ragged now.

He stayed laid down after, even when she stood up and went splashing around in the creek, bathing her hands. Sally felt solemn and quiet, but Joel laughed again. “It’s alright, Sally.”

Sally didn’t feel like looking at him, but she bobbed her head up and down and said, “Because we’re promised. That’s right, isn’t it, Joel?”

“Don’t you doubt it,” he said, finally getting to his feet. “And I know all them haunt stories your mama tells you talk about promises, don’t they? I guess I’d better keep this one, hadn’t I?”

Sally looked at him sharp. “We’d both better, Joel Cornett.”

Joel started to laugh, but didn’t. He pointed up through the trees. “You better get your fish and head to the house.”

Sally looked at the sun herself and saw that he was right. She trotted up for a quick kiss on the cheek before she ran down the creek.

#

Her mama didn’t say anything about the time when Sally bustled into the kitchen. Sally counted that odd but kept still about it, just pulled down the cleaning knife from the peg where it hung by a leather cord. While she cut the heads off the catfish Erskine warmed up a pot of beans and mixed corn meal with water and black pepper.

When Erskine finally did speak, Sally felt her heart jump up in her throat. Erskine said, “You’re about old enough to get married now, I guess.”

“Mama?” Sally thought she must have heard wrong. Could things work out that easy?

“Roy Barlowe is old enough to look after his own place now, especially since all his gang of brothers live right down there and can help him. I’ll move down into your little room and you two can take mine and your daddy’s.”

Sally stopped filleting the catfish. “Roy Barlowe?” She didn’t understand.

“His daddy will need him until they finish stripping the tobacco, though. That’ll give us time to see about a dress and all that business.”

It had been a long time since Erskine had talked to her so much at a stretch. She kept filling in the places where Sally would have said something if her throat hadn’t felt frozen up. She said, “You’ve known the Barlowes all your life, you’ve got that much.”

Erskine took the knife from Sally’s fingers and sliced a long piece of the fish, soft and white. That was usually Sally’s job. Her mother dropped the piece into the batter and spooned lard into the cast iron skillet. It spat at her, and still Sally couldn’t talk.

The fish went into the pan and while they fried, Sally slumped down onto the bench beside the oak table. Erskine steadied herself against the table and said “It’s done, honey. You’ll get used to it. You don’t even have to leave your house like I did. And those Barlowes have been good neighbors to us.”

The fish started smoking and Erskine turned back to the stove so she almost didn’t hear Sally say “I can’t.”

Erskine moved the fish onto a pair of wooden plates. “I know you don’t think so, honey, but you’ll be alright. I’ll still be right here in the house.”

But Sally shook her head. “I’m sorry, Mama. I can’t. I’m not going to marry Roy Barlowe.”

Erskine drew up. “It’s done, Sally. You’ve been promised. It’s done.”

“I didn’t promise to marry that boy!” Sally was crying now, trembling.

“Don’t carry on, girl. You been promised to him a long time. Your daddy worked it out with Mr. Barlowe before he passed. They’ll take good care of us, Sally. You’re promised.”

Sally stood, suddenly, and grabbed the knife from where it lay on the stove. She said, “I can’t keep that promise, Mama. I’d use this on myself before I did.”

Erskine moved faster than Sally had seen her in a long time. She slapped the back of Sally’s hand and sent the knife flying away. “Girl, fourteen is old enough to marry and it ought to be old enough to not talk that kind of foolishness. You remember what happens to girls that can’t keep their promises before they go.”

Sally screamed at her mother, defying her, “I don’t believe those tales anymore!”

Erskine took Sally’s wrist and sat her back down on the bench. “Oh, you don’t, do you? Too big to believe in the Lonesome Girls? I suppose you don’t wonder why the birds the old Crow Man sends to steal corn for his supper don’t eat it themselves, then. I suppose you don’t still walk out of that graveyard you’re always stealing off to backwards when you get caught up there in the rain.”

Sally didn’t say anything, just stared at the floor.

“Girl, my mama told me about those girls, and she had it from her mama and on back like that. Your granny was a Christian woman and kept the commandments. She knew what walked this old world.

“You want to stay caught in the clay instead of rising up to be with the saints? Because you will be. You’ll stay in your cold grave if you break this promise.

“Those girls might look as pretty and white as the moon but they’re the damned of the earth, Sally. They claw out of their coffins and dance when they can, they catch fool men when they can, but they’re as tormented as if they was in the Lake of Fire.

“And they’re cut off, girl. Cut off for eternity from the love of the Lord. You don’t want that, do you? Do you?”

Sally shook her head.

#

But Sally Harpe was fourteen, and the tobacco had just been put up to cure so there were weeks and weeks until stripping time. There was time to sneak off to the woods, time to whisper and laugh, yet. Time and time.

Time to get bold and listen to Joel Cornett talk big about running off to Bowling Green or Lexington, or even Louisville. Time to watch the leaves turn and feel the wind get chill and then it was time to give thanks.

Time for all the souls in that country to gather and to give thanks, to break bread, to bring out the fiddle and the pipe, to dance and leap before the Lord as the preachers excused it.

So it was this bold Sally that bundled Miss Erskine up onto the wagon seat and guided their old mare down to the Stone’s Camp meeting house. Such a crowd was there already that she had to park the wagon in the road and hobble the horse in the parsonage yard.

Erskine was getting on more poorly since the weather turned colder, so they’d eaten at home and only driven down to listen to the music and watch the dancing.

Sally hoped to do more than watch. She was flushed with excitement, looking around at all the people. She barely even nodded when a Barlowe woman said, “Roy’s gone off to get a deer for us to roast, Sally. Isn’t that fine?

Joel was already out there, cutting up with his Cornett cousins, boys even rougher than him. He ran across the stamped down yard and leapt, tumbled over the middle bonfire, the biggest one. If he heard the music he wasn’t minding it, he moved out of step with all the couples reeling around him.

They’d pulled some pews out into the yard and Sally found a spot on one for her mother. Erskine moved to make a place for Sally, her Sally who was gone when she looked up.

Sally heard her name being called. “Sally Harpe!” Erskine cried while Joel spun and spied her and said “Sally!”

The fiddles started in for real, then, and even gray old men nodded their heads, keeping time. The young men went wild, grabbed their wives or their sweethearts and flung them through the air, stomped and jumped and spun.

So Sally flew. Sally felt his hands on her waist more than she felt her feet on the packed ground. She laughed and screamed when he threw her highest and even let him kiss her. She let him kiss her right there in the firelight, in front of all the church-goers, in front of her mama, in front of all those Cornetts and Barlowes.

#

To Sally, standing in front of him, it looked like Joel had grown antlers. But then he was on the ground, buried under the carcass of a deer and Roy Barlowe was standing beside the fire. His coat was streamed with blood from where he’d carried the deer across his shoulders.

He was staring off to the side, and it took Sally a minute to realize that the shouting she was hearing was Mr. Barlowe, yelling at his son, yelling “Keep on him! Keep on him!” So Roy bent over to where Joel was struggling under the deer and wailed on him with big bunched fists.

Joel’s head was caught between the deer’s neck and the ground so his shouts were muffled. Sally leaned in to roll the animal off him, but hands dragged her back. Some Cornett women were saying, “Come over here to the side, girl,” while their husbands and brothers pushed Roy back and pulled the deer of Joel.

But then big Barlowe men were there, too, and the music died and people were shouting and running. Some preachers were there and pulled at the men, yelled at them, but it did no good.

Sally pulled away from Joel’s kin and tried to make her way back to the fire. But a fence of men had sprung up, and she could only look though their locked arms and see Joel standing, blinking the blood out of his eyes. Roy Barlowe had shrugged off some other Cornetts and was there to slap Joel back to the ground.

“You smack him back, Joel!” a woman screamed.

And Joel did. He found his ground for a little time and the others slowed, muttering, waiting to see which way things would go. The boys went back and forth, punching and tearing at each other, gripping and staggering in a smaller circle of their kin. Sally still couldn’t break through the larger circle.

So she could just watch. Joel was fast, she’d known that. Now she saw that he could be mean, that he must have been in fights before. But Roy didn’t flinch or cry out no matter how Joel scratched at him or bit him, those big arms just squeezed and pummeled and Sally saw a scared look cross Joel’s face because the other boy wasn’t easing off any.

Then there was a hiss from a knot of Cornetts and Sally saw a flicker of firelight on steel and then Joel had a knife in his hand. He was staring at it but Roy didn’t see it when he roared and took Joel up in a bear hug. And broke off, looking down at where red and yellow ran out of his stomach.

Then Sally screamed for sure and the Barlowes rushed in around Roy again. But he shrugged them off and yelled “No! No! Leave him!” So all those men backed off again, Cornetts to one side and Barlowes to the other.

There was cursing from among the Barlowes, “Throw him a knife!” But Roy yelled again, “No!”

The big boy lurched toward Joel, who stood with the knife, his hands moving around in little circles on their own, like they were afraid to stay still. Then Roy leaned down over the carcass of the deer and straddled it. Joel started toward him, almost like he meant to help him up.

He stopped though, and Sally saw what Joel had seen, what they’d all seen. The strain on Roy’s face wasn’t from pain but from effort. The sound around the bonfires dropped off to nothing, nothing but the cracks and pops of the burning wood, then a louder crack, then another, and Roy Barlowe stood with two bloody antlers in his hands. Stood and moved towards Joel Cornett with the buck’s rack broken into talons.

He roared and his kin roared with him, and the Cornetts and the Barlowes rushed toward one another. But all the other men there had seen too much and the circle holding Sally back broke as they all rushed in.

Sally went with them, she careened among the struggling, cursing men, looking for her promised. She shouldered a Barlowe or a Cornett to one side and finally found where the boys staggered against each other. Roy held Joel’s wrist like a vise, keeping the knife from finding him yet again. His other arm was wrapped around the smaller boy’s back, the antler in that hand weakly scraping Joel’s side. The other antler hung from where it was caught in the bloody mess of Joel’s cheek.

The way cleared and she ran full at the boys, tucking herself between them. They fell back, bloody and exhausted, not looking at her. She followed Joel as he stumbled, touching her hands to the torn open places at this thigh, his stomach, his face.

“Joel,” she said, horrified. “Joel.”

He brought his hand up and caught his fingers in the horns piercing him. He pushed out and the antler flew away. She started to daub at his cheek with her fingers but he was looking past her, bringing up the knife.

“No!” Sally screamed. “Stop it! Stop it!”

But they were on each other again, barely able to raise their arms but trying, trying to slice or stab. And she was between them, pushing and screaming. They lurched back and forth over the wet ground, scrambling, leaning against one another in a tangle.

Then finally, finally, the tangle fell apart, Roy to one side, into the mud churned up by his feet and his blood, Joel to the other, falling hard against the broken carcass of the deer, and Sally, exhausted, fell face first to the ground, her hair and skirts spilling out around her.

Then a gun sounded into the night sky and horses came ranging in. Men were yelling “Order! Let’s get some order here!”

They could have stayed quiet though, because still fell onto the gathering of its own accord. Erskine Harpe had crossed the way to where her daughter lay. She knelt in the mud and turned the girl over. She cradled her last child’s head to her and crooned and left it to somebody else to pull the antler from the girl’s heart.

#

Joel Cornett blinked and shook his head — quietly, softly — but the red didn’t pass from his eyes. Not that he had expected it to. He’d watched the world through that bloody haze for months now, ever since the Barlowe boy had ruined his sight. His sight and his breath and his legs.

But Joel had taken some things from Roy as well, he figured. Otherwise, the bigger boy would have heard him sometime tonight in the hours Joel had stalked him through the snow.

Joel gripped the pistol his uncle had given him weeks ago and watched Roy shift a deer’s carcass on his slumped shoulders, resting against a tree.

Roy’s breath billowed out into the cold night, faster and harder than it would have in the summer. Joel supposed Roy’s wounds had all closed up by now, as his own had, mostly. He’d seen that Roy favored the side where the terrible slash in his belly had been, though. No, if Joel wasn’t as strong as he had been, neither was Roy Barlowe.

Roy had been able to get out some evenings lately and take his gun to get a little meat. Not so late as this usually, Joel knew. Not so long after dark and not so far from home as this wounded buck had led him.

Led the both of them, Joel thought. He’d been stealing after Roy since the snows fell, waiting for a night like this, a night when Roy had made a poor shot, a slow killing shot and had to track drips and smears of blood way off Barlowe land, over Miss Erskine’s wild fields and up on to the Willow Ridge. Waiting for this very time, when the moon was bright enough to give him a clear shot at Roy from where he hid in some bushes.

But then the clouds slid over the moon again and Joel lost his aim in the dark. Joel cursed under his breath, then thought he’d been too loud because he heard Roy speak. But no, Roy wasn’t calling him. Joel could just make out Roy’s words. He was praying.

“Now you look out for Roy, Lord. That girl didn’t come to harm on my account. You watch over Roy I pray. You keep him from harm.”

That girl. Joel had pushed the reason for his wounds back into himself. His family never spoke about it except to curse the Barlowes. And Roy didn’t seem the type to dwell on that business. Why?

“Oh,” and this time Joel did speak aloud but neither he nor Roy noticed. They were both staring at the low stones spread out between them.

Joel didn’t know whether Roy had been to this place since they’d fought, but he’d stayed far away, himself. Until tonight. If he’d been paying attention, if he’d been watching where the deer led them instead of watching for a clear shot, he never would have come out onto this part of the ridge.

The stones of the little graveyard were just dark shapes against the woods. The wind picked up a little and the clouds blocking the moonlight grew even thicker. But then the markers stood out clear in the dark, clear in pale, cold light.

“What?” That was Roy and he was letting the deer slide to the ground, so Joel didn’t think he heard the scrabbling sound when it started. By the time Roy was trying to find its source, noise was coming from all around them.

The light got brighter, brighter than the moon could have cast even if it wasn’t hidden, but Joel couldn’t see its source. The noise, though, he could track. It was coming from the ground.

Then a light like a lantern beam shot up from the earth before a stone where near Roy. The boy gaped at it, and then there was another, and another.

Joel didn’t dare move from where he crouched as Roy started to back away. He saw Roy trip over the deer, saw that Roy’s feet had managed to get caught under its body somehow.

Hands were following the light out of the ground, clean and white for all that they were thrusting out from the dirt. Hands, wrists, shoulders, then the long tresses of girl children. Girls were climbing up from their graves.

Joel wanted to scream or cry but he couldn’t find his voice. He wanted to run but he couldn’t stand. Across the way, he saw that Roy had stopped struggling under the deer. A dozen or more of the pale, cold girls — it was them casting the light Joel saw — shrugged and stretched, then loped over to the tree where Roy lay trapped.

One of the taller ones gazed down at Roy. Joel saw that there wasn’t any color to her at all. Her hair and her lips and even her eyes were that cold white. Even then, he felt like he should know her, should know all of them. The way they held their shoulders, their clothes, they looked like his cousins and Roy Barlowe’s sisters and like any of the girls at the church.

The tall one moved her hand then, a quick flick like she was shooing a fly. The deer laying over Roy shuddered, then stood. It hesitated, blood dripping out of the hollow place where Roy had cleaned out its guts, then sprang into the dark. But Roy still didn’t move.

Didn’t until she moved her hand again. Some of his old strength must have come back to him because he leapt to his feet. “What?” Roy said again. Then he said it over and over in a queer hiccuping rhythm. “What? What? What?”

They didn’t answer him, just swayed around him and stared him down. Then the hand again and Roy Barlowe, big, stodgy Roy, danced.

He fought it, Joel could tell. Roy fought his own legs and arms with all the strength that was left him. But the girls swayed, so Roy did, and he spun. He circled and swooped and stomped across the cemetery, hurdling their torn open graves. He slammed against the stones and wore the wild eyed look of a man who didn’t know himself. But then it stopped.

It stopped and he was on his knees before a grave that Joel knew, that they both knew though neither had dared visit it. There was no writing on the headstone, Miss Erskine didn’t have any money left for the carving. Dried flowers were strewn around.

Those girls, too, they were all around, still quiet, still staring. Roy sobbed, choking on air. And the ground in front of him trembled a little. Was the light streaming from that grave a little warmer than the lights of the others, wondered Joel? Did this hand hesitate, shy away from scratching in the cold ground?

Whether she wanted to or no, Joel couldn’t judge. She came, though. She lurched up out of the earth the way the others had. And by the time she stood before Roy, Joel could hardly pick her out from the others. White, all white and cold, even her eyes.

Then it was her hand that moved, and she danced with Roy.

She didn’t draw breath, though, she didn’t gasp in the chill. She didn’t stumble, her legs didn’t give out time and again. She didn’t half climb up from the ground to keep numbly moving and turning. Her face stayed white, it didn’t grow redder and redder.

She didn’t blink fast at tears that wouldn’t stop streaming. She didn’t fall. It wasn’t her that finally fell.

Joel stared at where Roy lay face down in the graveyard, unmoving in a pool of light. The he realized that his arms and legs were tingling, that he could move them again.

He didn’t wait. He lurched to his feet and stumbled away from the clearing. The girls made no move to follow and for a minute he felt hope. Then a shape flew out of the darkness and Joel was stunned by the force and pain of a tearing at his face and a blow to his chest. He was on the ground again, under the unmoving carcass of a deer. His head was bent to the ground so he didn’t see her when she approached. He saw her light, though.

He was trembling a little, tensed up, but he moved the way she guided him.

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Richard Butner

Secrest was stable, a high school geometry teacher who still went to see bands at the Mad Monk and Axis most nights of the week. They had met at the birthday party of a mutual friend who lived in Southport. She had signified her attraction to him by hurling pieces of wet cardboard at him at two a.m. as he walked (in his wingtip Doc Martens) to his fully operative and freshly waxed blue 1990 Honda Civic wagon.

The Big Favor started in Wilmington, North Carolina, where they both lived. He had packed the night before — a single duffel bag. She had a pink Samsonite train case (busted lock, $1.98 from the American Way thrift store) and two large paper grocery bags full of various items, as well as some suggestions for motels in Asheville and sights to see along the way. These suggestions were scrawled on the back of a flyer for a show they’d attended the week before. The band had been a jazz quartet from New York, led by a guy playing saxophone. She hated saxophones. Secrest had loved the show, but she’d been forced to drink to excess to make it through to the end of all the screeching and tootling, even though she’d been trying to cut back on the drinking and smoking and related activities ever since they’d started dating.

That was one of the reasons she liked him — it had been a lot easier to quit her bad habits around him. He had a calming influence. She’d actually met him several months before, when he still had those unfashionably pointy sideburns. She pegged him as a sap the minute he mentioned that he was a high school teacher. But at the Southport birthday party they had ended up conversing, and he surprised her with his interests, with the bands and books and movies he liked and disliked. Since they’d started dating she had stopped taking half-pints of Wild Turkey in her purse when she worked lunch shifts at the Second Story Restaurant. His friends were used to hunching on the stoop outside his apartment to smoke, but she simply did without and stayed inside in the air-conditioning.

Hauling a load of drugs up to ex-boyfriend Rusty, though, was an old bad habit that paid too well to give up, at least not right away.

She compared her travel suggestions with his; he had scoured guidebooks at the local public library for information on budget motels, and he’d downloaded an online version of North Carolina Scenic Byways. His suggestions included several Civil War and Revolutionary War sites. Her suggestions included Rock City, which he vetoed because it turned out Rock City was in Tennessee, and the Devil’s Stomping Ground, which he agreed to and did more research on at the library the next day.

“The Devil’s Stomping Ground,” he read from his notes, “is a perfect circle in the midst of the woods.

“According to natives, the Devil paces the circle every night, concocting his evil snares for mankind and trampling over anything growing in the circle or anything left in the circle.”

“That’s what the dude at the club said,” she said without looking up from her sketchbook. She was sketching what looked like ornate wrought iron railings such as you’d find in New Orleans. She really did want to get into grad school in art therapy at Western Carolina.

“Of course, it’s not really a historical site, but I guess it’s doable,” Secrest said. “It’s only an hour out of our way, according to Triple A.”

“So, there you go.”

“This could be the beginning of something big, too — there are a lot of these Devil spots in the United States. We should probably try to hit them all at some point. After you get out of grad school, I mean.”

“OK.” It wasn’t the first time he had alluded to their relationship as a long-term one, even though the question of love, let alone something as specific as marriage, had yet to come up directly in their conversations. She didn’t know how to react when he did this, but he didn’t seem deflated by her ambivalence.

That was how the trip came together. She had tried to get an interview with someone in the art therapy program at Western Carolina, but they never called back. Still, she finished putting together a portfolio.

The morning of the Big Favor, she awoke to a curiously spacious bed. He was up already. Not in the apartment. She peeked out through the blinds over the air conditioner and saw him inside the car, carefully cleaning the windshield with paper towels and glass cleaner. She put her clothes on and went down to the street. It was already a hazy, muggy day. He had cleaned the entire interior of the car, which she’d always thought of as spotless in the first place. The windshield glistened. All of the books and papers she had strewn around on the passenger floorboard, all of the empty coffee cups and wadded-up napkins that had accumulated there since she’d started dating him, all of the stains on the dashboard, all were gone.

“What are you doing?” she asked, truly bewildered.

“Can’t go on a road trip in a dirty car,” he said, smiling. He adjusted a new travel-sized box of tissues between the two front seats and stashed a few packets of antiseptic wipes in the glove compartment before crawling out of the car with the cleaning supplies. As they walked up the steps to his apartment she gazed back at the car in wonder, noting that he’d even scoured the tires. She remembered the story he’d told of trying to get a vanity plate for the car, a single zero. North Carolina dmv wouldn’t allow it, for reasons as vague as any Supreme Court ruling. Neither would they allow two zeroes. He made it all the way up to five zeroes and they still wouldn’t allow it. So he gave up and got the fairly random HDS-1800.

After several cups of coffee, she repacked her traincase and grocery bags four times while he sat on the stoop reading the newspaper. They left a little after nine a.m., and she could tell that he was rankled that they didn’t leave before nine sharp. It always took her a long time to get ready, whether or not she was carefully taping baggies of drugs inside the underwear she had on.

Once they made it north out of Wilmington, the drive was uneventful. He kept the needle exactly on 65, even though the Honda didn’t have cruise control. He stayed in the rightmost lane except when passing the occasional grandma who wasn’t doing the speed limit. After he had recounted some current events he’d gleaned from the paper, they dug into the plastic case of mix tapes he had stashed under his seat. She nixed the jazz, and he vetoed the country tapes she’d brought along as too depressing, so they compromised and listened to some forties bluegrass he’d taped especially for the trip.

“You’re going to be hearing a lot of this when you’re in grad school in the mountains,” he said.

She was bored before they even hit Burgaw, and her sketchpad was in the hatchback. She pawed the dash for the Sharpie that she’d left there, then switched to the glovebox where she found it living in parallel with a tire gauge and a McDonald’s coffee stirrer. She carefully lettered WWSD on the knuckles of her left hand.

What Would Satan Do? Satan would not screw around, that’s for sure. Satan would have no trouble hauling some drugs to the mountains. She flipped her hand over and stared at it, fingers down. Upside down, because the d was malformed, it looked like OSMM. Oh Such Magnificent Miracles. Ontological Secrets Mystify Millions. Other Saviors Make Mistakes.

In Newton Grove, she demanded a pee break, and she recovered her sketchpad from the hatch. Just past Raleigh, they left the interstate and found the Devil’s Stomping Ground with few problems, even though there was only a single sign. She had imagined there’d be more to it, a visitor’s center or something, at least a parking lot. Instead there was a metal sign that had been blasted with a shotgun more than once, and a dirt trail. He slowed the Honda and pulled off onto the grassy shoulder. Traffic was light on the state road, just the occasional overloaded pickup swooshing by on the way to Bear Creek and Bennett and further west to Whynot. He pulled his camera from the duffel bag, checked that all the car doors were locked, and led the way down the trail into the woods. It was just after noon on a cloudy day, and the air smelled thickly of pine resin. Squirrels chased each other from tree to tree, chattering and shrieking.

It was only two hundred yards to the clearing. The trees opened up onto a circle about forty feet across. The circle was covered in short, wiry grass, but as the guidebook had said, none grew along the outer edge. The clearing was ringed by a dirt path. Nothing grew there, but the path was not empty. It was strewn with litter: smashed beer bottles, cigarette butts, shredded pages from hunting and porno magazines were all ground into the dust. These were not the strangest things on the path, though.

The strangest thing on the path was the Devil. He was marching around the path, counter-clockwise; just then he was directly across the clearing from them. They stood and waited for him to walk around to their side.

The Devil was rail thin, wearing a too-large red union suit that had long since faded to pink. It draped over his caved-in chest in front and bagged down almost to his knees in the seat. A tattered red bath towel was tied around his neck, serving as a cape. He wore muddy red suede shoes that looked like they’d been part of a Christmas elf costume. His black hair was tousled from the wind, swooping back on the sides but sticking straight up on the top of his head. His cheeks bore the pockmarks of acne scars; above them, he wore gold Elvis Presley-style sunglasses. His downcast eyes seemed to be focusing on the black hairs sprouting from his chin and upper lip, too sparse to merit being called a goatee.

“This must be the place,” she said.

The Devil approached, neither quickening nor slowing his pace. She could tell that this was unnerving Secrest a bit. Whenever he was nervous, he sniffed, and that was what he was doing. Sniffing.

“You smell something?” asked the Devil, pushing his sunglasses to the top of his head. “Fire and/or brimstone, perhaps?” The Devil held up both hands and waggled them. His fingers were covered in black grime.

Secrest just stood still, but she leaned over and smelled the Devil’s hand.

“Motor oil!” she pronounced. The Devil reeked of motor oil and rancid sweat masked by cheap aftershave. “Did your car break down?”

“I don’t know nothing about any car,” the Devil said. “All I know about is various plots involving souls, and about trying to keep anything fresh or green or good out of this path. But speaking of cars, if you’re heading west on I-40, can I catch a ride with y’all?”

“Uh, no,” Secrest said, then he turned to her. “Come on, let’s go. There’s nothing to see here.” He sniffed again.

“Nothing to see?” cried the Devil. “Look at this circle! You see how clean it is? You know how long it took me to fix this place up?”

“Actually, it’s filthy,” Secrest said, poking his toe at the shattered remains of a whiskey bottle, grinding the clear glass into a candy bar wrapper beneath.

The Devil paused and glanced down to either side.

“Well, you should’ve seen it a while back.”

Secrest turned to leave, tugging gently at her sleeve. She followed but said, “C’mon, I’ve picked up tons of hitchhikers in my time, and I’ve never been messed with. Besides, there’s two of us, and he’s a scrawny little dude.”

“A scrawny little schizophrenic.”

“He’s funny. Live a little, give the guy a ride. You’ve read On the Road, right?”

“Yes. The Subterraneans was better.” Secrest hesitated, as if reconsidering, which gave the Devil time to creep up right behind them.

“Stay on the path!” the Devil said, smiling. “Forward, march!”

Secrest sighed and turned back toward the path to the car. They marched along for a few more steps, and then he suddenly reached down, picked up a handful of dirt, then spun and hurled it at the Devil.

The Devil sputtered and threw his hands up far too late to keep from getting pelted with dirt and gravel.

“Go away!” Secrest said. He looked like he was trying to shoo a particularly ferocious dog.

“What did you do that for? You’ve ruined my outfit.”

She walked over and helped brush the dirt off. “C’mon, now you’ve got to give him a ride.” The Devil looked down at her hand and saw the letters there.

“Ah, yep, what would Satan do? Satan would catch a ride with you fine folks, that’s what he’d do. Much obliged.”

From there back to the interstate the Devil acted as a chatty tour guide, pointing out abandoned gold mines and Indian mounds along the way. Secrest had the windows down, so the Devil had to shout over the wind blowing through the cabin of the Honda. Secrest wouldn’t turn on the AC until he hit the interstate. “It’s not efficient to operate the air conditioning until you’re cruising at highway speeds,” he had told her. That was fine with her; the wind helped to blow some of the stink off of the Devil.

A highway sign showed that they were twenty-five miles out of Winston-Salem. “Camel City coming up,” the Devil said, keeping up his patter.

“Yeah, today we’ve rolled through Oak City, the Bull City, the Gate City, all the fabulous trucker cities of North Carolina,” Secrest replied. “What’s the nickname for Asheville?”

“Ash City,” said the Devil.

“Fair enough,” Secrest said.

They got back on the interstate near Greensboro, and Secrest rolled up all the power windows. When he punched the AC button on the dash, though, nothing happened. The little blue led failed to light. Secrest punched the button over and over, but no cool air came out. He sniffed and rolled down all of the windows again.

He took the next exit and pulled into the parking lot of a large truck stop, stopping far from the swarms of eighteen wheelers. He got out and popped the hood.

“You guys should check out the truck stop,” he said. “Buy a magazine or something.” In the few weeks she’d known Secrest, she’d seen him like this several times. Silent, focused, just like solving a problem in math class. She hated it when he acted this way, and stalked off to find the restroom.

When she returned, he was sitting in the driver’s seat, rubbing his hands with an antiseptic wipe.

“What’s the verdict?”

“Unknown. I checked the fuses, the drive belt to the compressor, the wires to the compressor…nothing looks broken. I’ll have to take it to the shop when we get back to Wilmington. You don’t have a nail brush in your purse, do you?”

“A what?”

“A nail brush, for cleaning under your fingernails. Never mind.”

“Don’t forget me,” the Devil said, throwing open the back door. He had a large plastic bag in his hand. Secrest pulled back onto the road and turned down the entrance ramp. The Devil pulled out a packaged apple pie, a can of lemonade, and a copy of Barely Legal magazine and set them on the seat next to him. Secrest glanced back at the Devil in the rearview as he sped up to enter the stream of traffic.

“What have you got back there?”

“Pie and a drink. Want some?”

“No, I want you to put them away. You’re going to get the back seat all dirty.”

The Devil folded down one of the rear seats to get into the hatch compartment.

“What are you doing?” asked Secrest, staring up into the rearview. The car drifted lazily into the path of a Cadillac in the center lane until Secrest looked down from the mirror and swerved back. She turned to look at what was going on and got a faceful of baggy pink Devil butt.

The Devil didn’t respond; he just continued rummaging. Finally he turned and gave a satisfied sigh. He had a roll of duct tape from Secrest’s emergency kit, and he zipped off a long piece. Starting at the front of the floorboards in the back seat, he fixed the tape to the carpet, rolled it up over the transmission hump and over to the other side, carefully bisecting the cabin. A gleaming silver snake guarding the back seat of the car.

“I get to be dirty on this side,” he said. “You can do whatever you want up there.” Then he picked up his copy of Barely Legal and started thumbing through it, holding the magazine up so it covered his face.

Secrest didn’t argue. She looked over at him and noticed he was preoccupied with other matters. Secrest’s hands, still dirty from poking around in the engine compartment, had stained the pristine blue plastic of the steering wheel, and he rubbed at these stains as he drove along.

She could see the speedometer from her seat, and he was over the speed limit, inching up past 70 steadily. He’d also started hanging out in the middle lane, not returning immediately to the safety of the right lane after he passed someone. Traffic thinned out as the land changed from flat plains to rolling hills, but he still stayed in the middle lane. Plenty of folks drove ten miles over the speed limit. That was standard. Secrest probably attracted more attention the way he normally drove — folks were always zooming up behind him in the right lane, cursing at him because he had the gall to do the speed limit. Now he was acting more like a normal driver — breaking the speed limit, changing lanes.

The Devil sat silently on the hump in the middle of the back seat, concentrating on the road ahead. The pie wrapper and empty can rolled around on the seat next to him. She watched the speedometer inch its way up. At 75 Secrest suddenly started to pull over through the empty right lane into the emergency lane.

“What are you doing?” she asked. Then she craned her head around just in time to catch the first blips of the siren from the trooper’s car. Blue lights flashed from the dash of the unmarked black sedan.

The Devil leaned forward and whispered in her ear. “Be cool, I’ll handle this,” he said.

“Goddamn!” she said, and this curse invoked a daydream. In her daydream, she keeps saying “Goddamn!” over and over. Secrest is busy with slowing down, putting his hazard lights on, and stopping in the emergency lane. The Devil is not in her daydream. She pops the door handle and jumps out while he’s still rolling to a stop, losing her footing and scraping her knees and elbows against the pavement as she rolls to the grassy shoulder. She stands up, starts running into the trees along the side of the road. As she goes, she reaches up under her skirt and peels the Ziploc from her panties, but it’s already broken open. Little white packets fly through the air in all directions. They break open too, and it’s snowing as she charges off into the woods. The trooper chases her, and just as the last packet flies from her fingertips, he tackles her. She starts to cry.

Outside of her daydream, the state trooper asked Secrest for his license and registration. He retrieved these from the glove compartment, where they were stacked on top of a pile of oil change receipts and maps. The trooper carefully watched Secrest’s hand, inches away from her drug-laden crotch, as he did this. She was sitting on her own hands.

“Ma’am, could you please move your hands to where I can see them?”

She slid her hands out and placed them flat on top of her thighs.

The trooper took the registration certificate and Secrest’s license, but he kept glancing back and forth from them to her hands.

“Nice tattoo, isn’t it, officer?” the Devil said, pointing to the smeared letters on her knuckles. The trooper slid his mirrored sunglasses a fraction and peered into the back seat of the car, staring the Devil in the eye.

“Not really. You should see the tattoos my Amy got the minute she went off to the college. I won’t even get into the piercings.”

“Kids these days…,” said the Devil.

“Yep. What are you gonna do?” The trooper pushed his sunglasses back up on his nose and straightened up. “Well, anyway, here’s your paperwork. Try to watch your speed out there, now.” He smiled and handed the cards back to Secrest.

They stopped for gas near Morganton. There was a Phillips 66 there.

“The mother road,” Secrest said.

“Last section decommissioned in 1984, and now all we have are these lousy gas stations,” said the Devil.

“Ooh, 1984. Doubleplusungood,” Secrest said.

“I’ll pump,” the Devil said. “Premium or regular?”

“Doubleplusregular.”

Inside, Secrest got a large bottle of spring water, another packet of travel-size tissues, and breath mints. She stared at the array of snacks and the jeweled colors of the bottles of soda, trying to decide. Behind the counter, a teenage boy tuned a banjo, twanging away on the strings while fiddling with the tuning pegs.

It took her a long time to decide to forgo snacks altogether, and it took the teenager a long time to tune the banjo. She tried to think of a joke about Deliverance, but couldn’t. Secrest went up to pay, and she headed for the door.

She went around to the side of the building to the ladies’ room. The lock was busted. She sat to pee, carefully maintaining the position of the payload in her underwear. The door swung open and the Devil walked in.

“You know, I’ve been wanting to get into your panties ever since we met.”

“Get the hell out of here, or I’ll start screaming,” she said.

“Oh, that’s a funny one,” the Devil said. “But I’m staying right here. You owe me.”

“I don’t owe you anything.” She was trying to remember if she had anything sharp in her purse.

“Of course you do. Why do you think that cop didn’t haul your ass out of the car? You have me to thank for that, for the fact that all that shit in your panties is intact, and for the fact that you’re not rotting in one of their cages right about now.”

“OK, for one thing, I don’t know what you’re talking about. For another, get out of here or the screaming really starts.”

“What I’m talking about is all that smack you’ve got taped inside your underwear. The dope. Las drogas. I want you to give it to me, all of it, right now. That stuff is bad for you, in case you hadn’t heard, and it can get you in a world of trouble.”

“Screw you. You’re not getting any of it. I was serious about the screaming part.”

But then it didn’t matter, because Secrest came in right behind the Devil. He spun the Devil around by the shoulder and kneed him in the crotch. It was the first time she’d ever seen him do anything remotely resembling violence. The Devil crumpled to the concrete floor.

“Screw you both,” the Devil gasped. “I’ll take the Greyhound bus anywhere I want to ride.”

They checked in at the Economy Lodge in Asheville. Secrest checked the film in his camera and folded up an AAA map of downtown into his pocket and set out to see the sights.

“The historic district is a perfect square,” he declared, as if he’d made a scientific discovery. “So I’d like to walk every street in the grid. I figure I’ll get started today with the up and down and finish up tomorrow on the back and forth while you’re at the university. Want to come with?”

She told him she was tired and crashed out on top of the musty comforter with all of her clothes on while the overworked air-conditioner chugged away.

She met Rusty at the Maple Leaf Bar. It had been less than two years since she’d seen him, but he had to have lost close to fifty pounds, and his hair, once a luxurious mass, was now thinning and stringy. He still got that same giddy smile when he caught sight of her, though, and he rocked back and forth with inaudible laughter. They walked back to his place on McDowell Street, where he gave her the $900 he owed her plus $600 for the drugs in her underwear. They celebrated the deal by getting high in his second floor bedroom, sitting on the end of the bed and staring out the gable window over the rooftops of old downtown as the fan whirred rhythmically overhead. After a few minutes, he collapsed onto his back, let out a long sigh, and then was silent.

She was daydreaming again. In her daydream, Secrest is out walking the maze, crisscrossing through the streets until he sees the Devil walking toward him from the opposite direction. The Devil’s shoes look even filthier, and his goatee has vanished into the rest of the stubble on his face. His shirt is stained with sweat under the arms and around the collar, turning the pink to black.

“Not you again,” Secrest says, kicking the nearest lamppost with the toe of his wingtip. “I was almost finished with walking every street in the historic district.” He looks away, back toward the green hills of the Pisgah Forest to the south, then turns back, as if the Devil will have vanished in the interim.

“Yes, you’re very good at staying on the path,” the Devil says. “But now it’s time for a little detour. Your girlfriend is sitting in an apartment on McDowell Street.”

“Oh, really?” says Secrest.

“Yes, and the police are closing in, because an old friend of hers has ratted her out to the cops. They’re probably climbing the stairs right now.”

Or maybe he says, “An old friend of hers is dying on the bed next to her right now.”

Anyway, the Devil reaches out and grabs Secrest’s hand, shaking it energetically.

“Thanks for the ride, buddy,” he says.

Then Secrest comes running up the street to save her.

O

Trampoline
“Other Agents” by Richard Butner
Richard Butner interview

“After you finish your breakfast you are free to go,” she said. “You can go.”

Our eyes locked for a second. Often at this time I had some witticism for her, or some ironic comment as to the morning, the lack of sunshine in my cell, or the predictable fare. I could think of nothing to say this time, looking into her face. I had tried to study that face during her brief visits at breakfast, lunch, and supper times, trying to delve beneath that outer layer of tiredness and distracted concern. To my thirty years she had perhaps ten years more, yet she had about her face the kind of perennial attractiveness that can bring out the admiration of men of any age. While I felt no more than a friendly warmth for her, that I could feel anything at all while boxed in this windowless cell kept some part of me alive that might otherwise have starved and died.

Yet I could say nothing. Our eyes met for a moment as she set the tray down.

“Will you be wanting anything else?” she said.

I shook my head, still unable to speak.

Ardis smiled at me and left, closing the door behind her as she had on all previous days. A faint hint of her flowery perfume remained in the air. I rose from where I had been sitting at the edge of the cot and walked to the door, taking the knob and turning it. The door opened. The motion of it swinging open at my touch had an unbearable novelty to it. I closed the door again and returned to my place on my cot to contemplate my breakfast. Ardis’s words had altered everything. The cot I sat on no longer remained mine; moments before I would have said, “This is my cot, my tray, my cell.” In bringing me my breakfast she had effectively taken it away. Suddenly the four walls, the dull white ceiling and green-brown carpet moved away from my grasp. Ardis had displaced me. I no longer belonged. I was “free” — a circumlocution. These things, this room, even Ardis herself, were all free of me. They had achieved freedom; I had gained uncertainty.

I must have eaten, for when I rose again I had emptied my tray, and I felt a certain physical satisfaction. In the bathroom I washed my hands, examined my face in the mirror, then washed it, and examined it again, expecting it to have changed through the washing. Too long a time spent under interrogation had brought on a distrust of that face. “After all,” I could hear an interrogator saying to me, “might it not be that the brown hair, rounded nose, dark brown eyes, and pale lips do not as such exist? Could they not be providing the facade for a deeper, more mysterious truth?” Yet the water did not change my face. Nor had the interrogations or drug therapies pierced behind that skin or hair or eyes: they were releasing me, an action which in essence said: “You are what you say you are, George Bringland. You are not an alien.”

The question of whether to take razor, toothbrush, or soap — or even the towel — besieged me for a moment. I took the few items from the shelf I knew to be my possessions: a pocket watch which ticked loudly, a set of keys, a wallet with some bills, and a handkerchief printed with fish in a geometrical pattern of greens and blues. I decided to take the toothbrush and razor. Was I to take the clothes I was wearing? What clothes had I brought with me to this place? I could almost seem to remember.

The haziness of my memory brought a quick flash of guilt: I am not of this planet.The drug treatments had left my connections with my memories tenuous. That vague, shifting cloud that seemed to follow me: to even call it a memory any more seemed a twisting of the language. Those people whose faces, voices, and movements I could bring forth to the mind’s eye — they were my parents? My childhood friends? My schoolmates? Were they true memories? They might all have been planted images.

Yet the interrogations had ceased. Those in white lab coats and suits of grey officialdom now turned to me and said, “We were doubters, but now we believe. Go. Leave.” I could turn to that cloud behind me and finally reestablish my claim: You, cloud, are my memory. Stay with me. Be with me. You are mine.

In the hallway I knew which direction to go to find the front desk, where a young woman, perhaps not many years out of high school, handed me a light jacket and a well-wrapped bundle. I had seen her before, at the time the investigators had apprehended me and brought me here. How long ago that had been I was unsure.

“Good thing you came with your jacket,” she said. “Might be a little cool out there.”

In the bundle, not a heavy one, would be the few extra shirts, underwear, and pants the orderlies had brought me each morning.

“I don’t want these,” I said.

“They’re yours,” she said.

“I don’t want them.”

She had light skin and hair, the latter curled and put up in a fashionable manner. She glanced at me without holding my gaze for any length of time: a skittish animal, I thought.

“Do you want us to hold them for you?” she said.

“If you wish.”

I imagined the investigators taking the bundle back into their laboratory, analyzing the fibers and closely inspecting each fold and stitch for some hidden message, some revealing fact. I was suddenly pleased to be leaving the clothes behind. They were a gift to the investigators, who had otherwise got nothing from me.

“Thanks,” I said.

Footfalls down the hall did not herald the approach of Ardis, to my disappointment. I would have enjoyed saying goodbye to her. Instead it was Drs. Roann and Pylckner. Dr. Roann, a younger man with genial features, dark hair, and a marked tendency to frown and stare, walked up the hall in a slight hunch, momentarily caught in his own thoughts. Older than her colleague, being perhaps in her early forties, Dr. Pylckner walked with strict deliberation toward me. I regarded her with wariness. The silver streaks in her hair seemed to continue onto her skin, which hovered somewhere between white and grey, even on her smooth face, a cold set of planes in which her black eyes rested.

“George,” she said. I could not remember her having not said “Mr. Bringland” before.

“Ardis tells me I can leave.”

“She told you correctly.” Dr. Pylckner stopped sharply in front of me and motioned to a small carpeted square near the front door where a set of cushioned chairs and couches sat in conspiratorial arrangements. Looking through the glass of the doors I found myself — or some part of myself, a neglected part — swept outside. Trees losing their leaves, rumpled lawns cold with the melting dews of frost, and a tattered brown horizon where a woodland had met the sky when I first arrived here: I had missed the summer.

“George, we wanted to speak with you before you leave, if you don’t mind spending a few minutes more.” Dr. Pylckner sat on the chair to my left, and motioned Dr. Roann to the chair opposite mine. “We understand the trouble we have caused you. Philip?”

At the cue, Dr. Roann nodded his head vigorously. “We have placed in your account an amount equivalent twice of what you might have earned during your time here, at the job you held, had you held that job during that time you see.” A frown at me, then a stare. “Your rent has all been paid. We took care of the everyday bills, the things that, oh, bother us all. A paid vacation, you see. Even though you probably don’t see it as a vacation.” A short laugh from the man, and the beginning of a stare, and then his frown.

“What Peter is saying is that we are trying to ease you back into the world as gently as possible.” Dr. Pylckner’s voice was not one to reflect gentleness or understanding extraordinarily well. “Since we are unable to establish that you are an alien, the law indicates we must let you go, with ample recompense.”

I could feel her voice grow colder. The fact of autumn did not enter my brain from the evidence of my eyes, from seeing its signs through the glass doors, but from Dr. Pylckner’s voice. A chill spilled down my left side. Rising, I took the coat in my hands and found the pockets where I could put the razor, toothbrush, and handkerchief I had clutched. I must have left the hairbrush.

“If you need anything,” said Dr. Roann, “just let us know.” He rose, frowning but less intensely than at other times.

“Of course,” I said. “Thank you.” I looked at the both of them, the one sitting and the one standing, and suddenly wondered if they were not partners only professionally but personally as well. Had they sequestered away a cot in some empty cell where they could enjoy each other? I could only imagine Dr. Pylckner descending clinically upon the prone Dr. Roann, expertly bringing him to life, and as expertly placing herself upon him, with firmness and measured vigor.

Thinking of Dr. Pylckner made me wonder. Was I involved personally with a woman? In removing me from the rest of larger society, had these governmental clinicians removed me from some more closely-bound, sexually-tied relationship as well? I could not remember. No one had visited me here; but likely no one had been permitted. Not even permitted to know, perhaps. I could not picture any face of importance.

Dr. Pylckner rose and offered her hand, which I shook.

“Goodbye,” I said.

At the door, the policeman standing with relaxed watchfulness nodded to me. I walked past him to reach the sidewalk, the damp lawn, the parking lot, the air, the grey clouds, the silvery boles of the street lamps. I knew where I was. I was on the edge of town. I lived perhaps an hour’s walk away. I wondered what form my new captivity would take.

“You’ve let your hair grow long,” she said.

I stared at her. Joann. I had forgotten her. I had returned here, to the used bookstore, to see if I could again work a few hours. Memory of this woman had escaped me: too young, too vivacious, too stylish and too quick-tongued for me. Yet hadn’t she tried to become close? And hadn’t I begun to hunger for her? Were these true memories? Human memories?

She turned back to her customer and the punch-button cash register, then flashed me another glance.

“Lila’s in the back. She said you’d be coming.”

“Good,” I said. “She knew more than me.”

Joann let out her too-high laugh.

The stacks called me with their musty scent of cracking, glued spines and dust-seasoned pages. The scent brought forth a memory from the cloud of the past, one that seemed true. A famous poet, visiting the nearby university, had stopped in the bookstore and chosen a few old volumes. I had stood at the counter, prepared to ring them up and trying to think of some comment to make: what does one say to a poet? The man had picked up one of the books and widened it at the middle, sticking his nose into the crevasse formed by the opened pages, and breathed in deeply. “That’s how I tell an old book,” he had said.

Lila was sitting pondering cartons of newly arrived books in the back room. She smiled as I entered, apparently with genuine feeling. A small, needle-featured woman having a full head of curling black hair and today wearing her usual outfit of loose jeans and a thick sweater, she commanded the authority of a person twice her size, and somehow did so through her more personable qualities instead of the usual Leader-of-Men pretensions — such as official dress, somber manner, or gravity of pronouncement. Lila had a direct manner I remembered liking.

“I have you down on the schedule, George,” she said. “In fact I’m a little short-handed today, so if you want to stay, then stay. No one’s been doing fanatical alphabetizing since you left on vacation.” She smiled widely at me and let that hang in the air for a long moment. “I know something else was up this summer, but the word is ‘vacation’ around here. Okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Is everything okay really?” she said, switching from her cheerful gear. “It was pretty strange, that you disappeared. I got a few creepy feelings.”

“They thought I was an alien.”

She laughed. “That was one of the stories that came up. I guess I wouldn’t know from your resume, would I? You’ve got your spotty job record, what with your constant dropping out to go be the artist in the garret.”

“You went back and checked?”

Lila gave me a brief worried glance. Then her features relaxed. “We talked about it often, George. Don’t you remember? You’ve told me how you save up a little and go off to draw and write in the countryside. I’m glad you’ve stuck with this place as long as you have.”

Her words made a certain sense. “My memories are a bit slow catching up with me,” I said. “They used drugs. I’ve been through a lot this summer. My head’s a mess.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’m sure you can still work your magic on the stacks. You’re going to stay and work today?”

“I will if you want.”

“Good. I’ll take you to supper tonight to welcome you back. You up to it?”

I thought back to the strange place that my apartment had become. “Sure.”

As I turned to leave the back room, Lila said, “By the way, Joann has a boyfriend.”

“Is that supposed to register with me?”

“Doesn’t it?”

It did not.

The stacks welcomed me back: the dull colors of the long rows of history, the strange bindings and ornate characters in the foreign language section, the colored and pictured spines of the travel and adventure volumes. I moved to check the small shelf of geology books, drawn there by some interior urge: the ancient and prehuman always fascinated me. The old volumes of Salisbury were there, and the series of mining reports from Utah. A few new books sat among them, including a survey of recent paleontological results. The book opened in my hands to a paper by H. Xian-guang which detailed a new early Cambrian species, Atrypella,correlatable with British Columbian Burgessian fauna. Xian-guang wrote, “If the evidence is correct, we have encountered yet another new phylum in the early rocks of China.”

I closed the book. New phyla: paleontologists delved back to one of the points of morphological divergence and identified different types, each of which they designated new phyla. Was it possible? Or were all the functional patterns of organization no more different from one another, deep down, than ladybugs and praying mantids were within the insecta? Or than the ladybugs and the horseshoe crabs within the arthropoda? In other words, why could not all those early patterns of organization, recognized by paleontologists as “phyla,” have fallen into one, single, primordial phylum? Why should not natural groupings change through time as fluidly as the earth’s crust and the contours of the seas and oceans through the earth’s long ages? Or better yet, why shouldn’t our criteria for groupings change across the ages we glance over?

I replaced the book, wondering why these matters should concern me. Perhaps because a group of scientists had followed some hint that I belonged to not only a different phylum, but perhaps even a different kingdom of life from their own.

The alien craft seized by the government, even the one collected from a site near where I stood, were secreted away in chambers known only to the highest officers in the new anti-alien brass. Fenced off from artifacts that should have been made public, we all became foreigners in our own communities. We were barred opportunity for recognition: how many of us, had we had a chance to look on the wrecks and recognize them, would have rejoiced to finally be able to say, Yes, I am an alien, I truly am. We were forced into ignorance of ourselves, and of others. Everyone became an outsider.

Yet could this man, George Bringland, have arrived by ship from even overseas? I found it hard to imagine, even with that undependable fog of memory bequeathed to me by my summer of captivity. The government propagated the myth that alien replication of human form descended even to the level of dna, and to the reconstruction of human-style language capacities and memory structures.

The prospect of such similarities did not disturb me. With such talents for mimicry, the aliens and the humans were surely closely related. Perhaps one of those early Cambrian arthropods that were so much more successful than the proto-chordata in those ancient seas, say whip-handed Leanchoilia or the odd carnivore Anomalocaris, that they developed extraordinary means of travel; imagine if they had developed means of spatial transportation so radical that they shifted themselves to another locale around another sun, only to return later to the home planet in the same form the humans bore, with the same basic structures within their cells. Why shouldn’t they appear to be humans, when we appear to be them? Why shouldn’t we be disturbed at the resemblance we bear to the descendents of lowly Leanchoilia, instead of being disturbed that they look like us?

I turned away from the shelf to find myself confronted by Joann, whose expression contained both confusion and anger.

“Why couldn’t you even say goodbye before you left?” she said.

“It was unexpected,” I said.

“But surely you knew –” She looked as though the rest of her words did not want to follow the first ones out.

“Knew what?”

“You must have known that they were about to find you out. You must have had a way of knowing that they were closing in on you.”

My internal confusion must have become obvious, for her face immediately softened. Before I could react she put her hands on my cheeks and kissed me, not lingeringly, but not quickly either. My heart beat quicker. I was not sure what kind of confusion I was feeling.

“There,” she said, standing back. “I’ve kissed an alien.” With a look of triumph, she disappeared toward the front of the store.

My cell was painted in such plain colors and in such nondescript patterns — or was it a dim wallpaper — that if I closed my eyes I could not re-picture it. In the darkness of my shut eyes, which was my only voluntary darkness since the ceiling lamps were controlled from the hallway outside, I found myself visualizing a few scenes in repetition. Despite their nondescript, inactive nature they impressed me as scenes from a different world than this one, even though I remembered them as peopled with normal beings engaged in normal activities. One scene took place within a cafe serving only vegetable food where people dressed in the garb of cultures to which they did not all belong. A man at one table near mine bent nearer his companion, a woman of similar age but of less ostentatious garb than he had assembled. He wore a rock at his throat on a thong that looked intentionally primitive. “Then she moved a part of my head, with her massaging, you know,” he said, “and I felt holes opening in me. And you know she said sometimes people visit other planets when she manipulates their heads. I think I did. Suddenly for a moment I was like in another place where the light was really different. Then I was back. And what’s really strange is that I didn’t remember that I traveled to another world until three days later. Three days. Then it suddenly burst on me. Iremembered. I could almost see that strange light again.”

The woman sitting across from the man reached out and put her hand on his. “That’s really great, Jeff. You’ve really been coming along.” She looked with such sincerity into his eyes that I found myself floating up and flowing into the body of the man with the rock around my neck and wanting nothing more at that moment than to climb into bed with this sympathetic, comforting woman with her faith in my spiritual travels.

In the scene behind my closed eyes I forced my attention back to my own plate of turmeric-yellow potatoes and green peas, leaving behind the man and his rock on the thong, feeling myself returning to my own planet.

“We can have cocktails here, too. Cheaper than buying them at the restaurant bar. Besides, there isn’t much wait at the Chinese place. No time for drinks.”

I shrugged agreeably. “Is Barry here?”

“We’re broken up, bub. He’s gone his own way. It’s been a couple months. You missed a few things in your summer away, didn’t you?”

“I guess so.”

I had visited her apartment before, when it was crowded with other bookstore people and sundry guests, most of whom I had encountered as customers at the store. More things had cluttered the space, then: Barry’s, presumably. Lila still had a painting on the wall I had admired at the party, showing a large bird, perhaps a heron, launching itself across a canyon and looking impossibly isolated against the vast rocky landscape.

“I’ll be just a moment. I really worked up a sweat moving those boxes,” she said, heading for the bedroom. “Pour yourself something.” She closed the door behind herself.

At the closing of the door the light dimmed and I was in my cell again. A strap held me back on my cot and kept me from leaping up and running for the wall as I saw the door open and Dr. Pylckner enter. Even the lights to the hall outside had been dimmed. She shut the door behind her came closer, standing near the foot of the cot.

“You’re a little sedated tonight,” she said. “But not too sedated. Don’t move so much so you disturb the wires on your forehead. Of course you have the straps there. They should do the job, shouldn’t they?”

She laughed without raising her voice, sitting in the chair she always sat on and bending over to unlace her shoes, then remove her socks. The whiteness of her coat, blouse and trousers fell away quickly into the dimness of the room. Her skin seemed a silvery grey. She removed her underwear, stretched herself as though truly enjoying what she became without her clothes; I could almost hear an oddly modulating melody as she looked up at the ceiling and opened her mouth, could see her as a celestial animal outlined by faint lines between glowing stars, raising her face to the moon and courting it with a high ululating song. She looked down then and stood there, naked, and moved toward the cot.

The door opened again. I returned to Lila’s apartment. She emerged in a new flannel shirt, her hair slightly more organized. She moved directly to the kitchen without noticing my distraught state. I attempted to reassemble myself before she returned.

“You didn’t pour yourself something?” she said, poking her head back in from the kitchen.

I managed an intelligible order of a drink.

“You know what this alien scare is just like,” she said, settling beside me on the couch. She placed the two glasses of brandy on the table in front of us.

“What?”

“This whole men and women thing. Make sense to you?”

I was feeling dazed, and shook my head. The brandy did not help. It burned in my throat.

“The whole thing about men being afraid of women, and vice versa. I mean, imagine some of that Freudian shit. God, men wanting to go to bed with their mothers, in Freud’s book, and being jealous of their fathers? Hell, society makes men so afraid of women their mothers are the only safe women. That whole vagina dentata thing, what’s more alien than that image of a woman equipped with carnivorous equipment between her legs? People get so damned afraid of the most stupid things. The government is still mostly male and they’ve finally found a new post-liberation way of expressing their fear of women. They’ve come up with aliens. They’re suddenly paranoid they’ll go to bed with an alien instead of a human, and not even know it!”

“Which they’ve been doing all along.”

“That’s right! They should welcome the aliens and finally get around to admitting that there are no aliens.”

I felt awkward and laughed, the first laugh I remembered.

“Sorry,” she said. “I get heavy sometimes. But you know that.” She laughed herself, and lifted her cup in a mute toast. This sip, the ice cubes had softened the bite of the alcohol and gave the brandy a pleasant smoothness. I felt warmer.

“It would certainly help me,” I said, “if there were no aliens.”

“Why? They let you go, didn’t they?”

At the Chinese diner I picked up each piece of vegetable with curiosity, the memory building within me of often having cooked similar food myself. The stylization of the decor extended to the cut of the celery, carrots and bamboo shoots, sliced into even, quasi-geometrical shapes. I remembered not to eat the blackened hot peppers dotting the dish.

“You lost a lot this summer, didn’t you?” Lila said, watching me eat. She looked down then and may have blushed. “I’m sorry. I’m too direct all the time. You’re probably — I mean, this last summer isn’t probably what you want to talk about.” She played with her own food. “I should probably shut up, and just be your boss. You like being back at work?”

I laughed again, enjoying the sensation. “I don’t know what I’ve lost and what I’ve gained. For a while I was an alien, drugged out and living in space. Maybe the government isn’t trying to identify aliens but make them.”

“You think they’ve made you an alien?”

“I didn’t think I was before. Now I don’t know.”

“What if you are an alien?”

“I’ll go into a concentration camp for humans when I get back to my home world.” I thought about that statement, raising an interesting slice of mushroom with my chopsticks. “Or perhaps I am alien, and have passed the test that proved I’m an alien, and am now free to join the rest of the aliens in this big concentration camp of ours.”

“There aren’t any humans, then, if we’re all aliens.”

“We’re looking for them.”

“If the government was looking for humans do you really think they’d find any?”

“Perhaps some will come here from abroad.” I ate the mushroom, then searched my plate for another. “It must be hard keeping the alien stock pure, with so many humans flooding into the country.”

She laughed. “You’re a sketch, George,” she said, her face quickly sobering. “But why do you take your summer so lightly? I mean, you’ve lost a chunk of your life, and it seems like — well, that it’s affected other things. You keep saying you don’t remember things.”

I chewed my food and regarded her, wondering how an alien would see her. Or, if my viewpoint was alien, then how a human would see her. She was showing concern, one of those strange pieces of luggage of the strictly human: compassion, concern, worry, anxiety. I could not feel these things, especially for myself. But I could feel other things which I could not express by any common word. For a moment I sensed a ball of light swelling below my lungs and expanding upwards and outwards — an invisible ball of light, for Lila gave no sign of seeing it or feeling its heat. I began feeling giddy, and recklessly wanted to drop my chopsticks and reach over for her hand, to see if it was a human hand. To me she looked like a human mate; but wrapped in my glowing ball I could not tell from what shores she had arrived. What was her evolutionary history? Had Anomalocaris played a part? Or had she come to me in a straight line from old chordate Pikaia? I felt the ball of light expand to touch her, then dissipate in the glow of the orange-tinted oriental lamps above us.

“I’m not sure that it’s that I don’t remember,” I said. “It’s almost as though I have added memories to my old ones.”

“But you don’t feel angry at what happened to you? At losing a whole summer?”

“Did I lose it? I don’t remember much of it. I’ve blocked out some, or they have done the blocking-out for me. But I think I still have it. I haven’t lost it. Isn’t it true that whatever I have done has become a part of me?”

“You’re beginning to remind me of your old self, George. You once quoted something to me from Socrates a lot like what you just said.”

The ball of light had not entirely dissipated after all, but remained about us, cutting us off from the rest of the restaurant and raising us up into the garlic-scented air where we hung peacefully.

“Did you know me well?” I said.

“Pretty well.” She smiled. “It was getting to be a weird time when you disappeared. I was getting confused about Barry. You and I were getting to be real good friends. We did a lot together. And you were distracting yourself with that kid Joann, and I always supposed it was because nothing could happen between you and me. Because of Barry.”

“The government got me just in time. I was meddling in human affairs.”

“Cut it out, George. You’re as human as the rest of us.”

“How do you know.”

“I trust my feelings.”

I laughed, somehow delighted. Our table having returned to its place among the other tables in the restaurant, I noticed the sound of laughter rising almost simultaneously from every table, as though a spark of knowledge could pass around and charge a wave of delighted laughter through a room full of disconnected people.

The walk was not long. If you started from the middle of town you could pass one park, three blocks of housing, two graveyards, and a last stretch of housing and a lone restaurant and its excessive parking lot before coming to the railroad. The autumn made the walk quicker: you walked to build heat, where in summer you loitered to avoid building it. Once on the railroad you walked north a quarter mile, passed under the overpass, and continued on to the place you could take a jaunt to the right if your eye saw the place to dodge down into the underbrush. The dirt track followed the west side of the creek through low scrub and beneath the tall boxelders and maples. The water ran calm, unobtrusive, and dark. You could reach the bluff by two ways. Either you could turn left before the bend in the creek, or you could go ahead and round the bend, passing the shallows where the raccoons liked to beach the river clams, and following the water until it led you straight to the base of the bluff. Either way, you climbed through the grasses to a spot not at the top where bike trails had destroyed the carpet of living things, nor too far down the side. There, you sat looking across the creek valley to the bluff on the other side.

I was beginning to feel more at home in this world. It felt like mine. I began re-understanding certain things, such as the tilt of the head of a jay before it launched itself raucously from a branch, or the rhythm-keeping of a broken bough bent into the water, bobbing slowly up and down with the current. As I climbed the hill the pebbles embedded in the dirt of a small washed-out area spoke to me with familiarity between the rustlings and quick chatterings of autumn-dried grass blades and the occasional browned seed pods.

I stopped at the edge of the last rise of the hill and turned to sit facing the creek valley, lined with poplars in this section, across to the opposite rise. The day was ending, which made my object of contemplation more visible. By day, from this spot no more than a dark smudge of wires, trucks, and low buildings would appear to the naked eye, merging with the yellowed blur of the field grass. Through a binocular one could see little more, only discovering the fine-marked tightness of the fencing around the compound, the indistinct bleakness of the cement-block cubicles, and the official colors on the pick-up trucks and smaller vehicles. One might even see the surveillance cameras turning atop their poles.

But at dusk the site came alive. Officialdom loves a well-lit space. Lights grew in brightness with the darkness to mark the fence, the outer perimeter of the top of the bluff, and the separate buildings. Above them all, however, rose the high lamps situated around a wide patch of land at the center of the compound. This level patch was never allowed to fall into darkness, having risen to the status of religious relic: here, governmental priests might well have found the heel impression of a governmental deity. In a sense, they had. Here they had found the abandoned, stripped fuselage of the alien craft, identical in all essentials to others found around the country and, perhaps, the world. The government then sequestered it. A few unrevealing photographs appeared on the news services. Otherwise the public received nothing of these contemporary relics beyond the sight of protective compounds and a general air of mystery.

Whether the government had incited the alien scare, or if the furor had scientific basis, it was hard to tell. People shook their fists at the government for upsetting the routine of their placid existences, or at the sky. I had not felt bothered by the scare, interested and amused more than alarmed by the prospect of genetically identical aliens among us. The government was doing memory tests on selected subjects, I had heard. Mainly drifters, eccentrics, and general old folk — people with ambiguous pasts, into which category I had figured we all belonged. Who looks back in time with a crystal clarity? Not I, said the dog. Not I, said the cow. Well, you better, said the hen. Meanwhile the new department for extraterrestrial affairs illuminated these landing pads, setting them up for good night visibility from far, far above.

The darkness of early evening settled in comfortably. I saw the sign of movement on the opposite bluff: a sentry, I supposed. A truck came, stayed, and departed. Through my binocular I could see the motionless dried grass beneath the high spotlights. It was a place locked away from our time. The government, best refuge for forecasters of every stripe, sat around its electric fire in hopes of a vision of the future.

I breathed out into the cold air, briefly fogging the lenses.

The sound of a tom drum suddenly started beside me, startling me.

I dropped my binocular and jerked my head over to see a man beside me in the dark. In the starlight and glimmering of moonlight I could see him well enough. He appeared underdressed for the chill. His breath came out in a great cloud, his hands coming down again on the small drum held between his crossed legs. I had heard nothing of his approach. Even the ever-present rustling of dried grass should not have been enough to conceal his approach. His hands now hovered again over the drums, turning and feeling the air with slow movements before one of them darted down to strike sound out of the tight cover.

He threw back his head, opening his mouth and releasing a thin, high note. A chill ran down my spine. I could almost see the note arch up into the night toward the stars, then curve back to earth, an increasingly bright ember of fire. Its orange hue grew and deepened as it returned, and flashed white as it burst roaring onto the grass just below us on the hill. It remained there as a fire, yet not a fire I could say I had ever seen before: within it, as though its light meant not combustion but vision onto another scene, I could see the spikes and first leaves of new plants rising within the brightness of the flame, some of them shooting up rapidly and producing fleeting, brilliant flowers.

The man beside me was drumming in more regular pattern now. I turned to him again and saw in the light of the flames that a dull wooden mask covered his face, painted a dirty white around the ovals of the eyes and mouth. It seemed to me natural. At that moment I could not have imagined him looking other than this, and I wondered if I had experienced this all before.

As I turned back to look again into the flames with their rising, flowering plants, the man’s voice started up, this time in low register, a deep buzz in his throat running beneath his words as though he could maintain an internal, unceasing breath rotating within his lungs, punctuated only occasionally by drops in pitch or brief cessations:

“The world and the death of the buffalo
The cattle and the death of the world
The sunflower follows the sun
It watches it fall and disappear
Come foreign people
Ancient ways are but youthful ways of play to you
Wisdom is of the gun and horse
Your happiness is to make trinkets from stones
You would take metal and give metal for land
You would make all things bow to the metal of air
You would yourselves obey the metal of air
But it is less than air this metal
I hold your metal to the sunflower and it ignores me
I hold your metal to the corn and it dies
You would have us exchange all things for less than air
You would give up all for less than air
You would sacrifice even yourselves
You would become less than air
You would become your own foreigners
You have made us all foreigners
We are all foreigners
We are in a land bought for less than air –”

The plants grew taller, of a height greater than a person, bursting at the tops with clusters of golden blossoms, petals stretching wide as if to greet all the radiations emanating from the dark vastness of the universe and striking down on this small spot of light on the bluff. The plants then became fewer, and shorter. One burst of knee-high flowers of white-tinted blue and violet preceded the falling away of the leaves as snow began falling around us. The fire died. The whiteness kept falling, the flakes appearing unreasonably out of the star-flecked sky. Then the snow, too, ceased.

I looked beside me and saw no trace of the man with the drum. In the thin layer of whiteness I saw a track of fox footprints that abruptly appeared beside me and trailed away out of the circle of white. Before me in the snow no sign remained of the fire, the grasses still tall and unblackened, and framed now in whiteness.

Perhaps they could afford only simple methods, or perhaps simple methods were the best. A succession of people in coats and formal jackets would enter the room accompanied by uniformed men bearing odd-shaped items encased in leather at their belts. Each person had a task: they would utter a word, move their hands in front of my face, inject me, or attach wires to my forehead and stretch them to sockets in the wall that led to some cryptic place of analysis. They placed objects in my hand, sometimes rough, sometimes smooth, sometimes painful. They altered the temperature of the room, placed water on me, requested me to defecate, spoke unintelligible words and phrases to me and watched my reactions intently, then flashed cards of random items: an automobile, a carrot, a flying saucer, a naked man, a chair, a telephone pole, a watermelon, a naked woman, a grasshopper, a head of wheat, a tank, the president of the country. Once they flashed the cards behind my head. One of the doctors would enter at regular intervals to ask how I was doing. “Fine,” I would say.

Ardis would arrive with her tray, bringing me food. If I could see her without the room moving, and if I could focus normally, I would speak to her.

“They showed me that picture of you again,” I said.

She tisked. “I have to talk to those doctors.”

“You looked fine.”

“They must have taken it when I was a young thing. I’m a bit more saggy these days. Actually I did ask them for a look at those pictures they show you. You’re right. She looks in fine shape.”

“Did you see the man?”

“A bit scrawny.”

“Dr. Roann,” I said. She laughed, and left.

Later the routines would begin again. Often I would see the pictures several times in succession, sometimes with slight variations. Once, when they changed the pose of the naked woman I commented. “You noticed that did you?” said the man, an oversize one with the accent of having come from further south. “Yes,” I said. “I always look at her closely.” He wrote in his notebook. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but they changed the card with the building in it. You didn’t notice that one,” he said, perfectly seriously. “No,” I said. Afterwards I would be fed a pill. Someone pinched my forearm while a light shined in my eye. I was asked to walk a circle, to put my hand in ice water, and to try to imagine a nonsense language and speak it. And the pictures: some new, some old.

I would have the chance sometimes after they left to close my eyes. An image has existed within me for as long as I can remember, an image of flying over the countryside. No wings: it is a mental levitation, I always suppose. I would be standing in a field or in an opening in a woods, standing as tall as possible. I would feel no breeze. Without my moving a muscle the ground would fall away from me and the trees would start growing smaller, but not too small. Then the world would move beneath me, showing me vast landscapes I have never seen. I would never see sign of humans.

Down by the creek I saw movement, and heard a small splash. An aura of light developed around an object that came along the trail: although much too large, it resembled nothing so much as one of the early arthropods, with a flexing carapace and ribbed sections held aloft by series of legs and the tufted ends of gill branches. Two pairs of antennae poked among the grass and dried sunflower stalks along the path. Its slow, deliberate movements brought it to the base of the hill. Instead of turning with the trail, it went off the path at a point just below me, and began ascending. As it climbed the gentle slope, it began altering, first folding down its central axis to define a ridge from head to tail, and lengthening the posterior to extend to a thin whip, which then spread into a fan of thin membranes. Claws appeared on the front, helping ease its way upward by gripping on occasional protruding rocks. A convulsion seized it then while a protoplasmic mass, dimly illuminated in the creature’s surrounding aura, fleshed over the hard shell. Hair, ears, snout grew from the head; it continued crawling while splayed flat on the ground, then lifted its head, wide and massive, to bray at the sky. As it did so the entire body rose, growing higher than my height and then to my height again, taking the form of a towering, plastic-skinned human-thing. Yet it was woman. She continued toward me, shrinking as she neared. When she reached me she had assumed the size and look of Lila, wrapped in a thick down jacket with muffs over her ears.

“I’m sorry about following you,” she said. “I saw you taking off on your walk and I couldn’t help myself. It was a wild impulse. I just wanted to follow. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.” I was glad to see her. I was suddenly filled with a desire to speak with her, to tell her about the odd thing my head had become, and the odd thing the world had become.

She looked down in surprise. “There’s snow here.” Reaching down she grabbed a handful, and tossed it at me. “There isn’t any anywhere else. You really are from another planet, George.”

“It’s nice having that confirmed,” I said, smiling.

She sat beside me, nearer than had the drummer. Her body called out for mine. As I put my arm around her shoulders she turned her face to mine, and wordlessly her lips welcomed me back home.

Originally published in Full Spectrum 4 (Bantam Doubleday Dell: 1993).

“Foreigners” is the title story from Mark Rich’s chapbook, Foreigners, and Other Familiar Faces.

More fiction, etc.

Cora is a morning person. Her sister, Janice, hardly feels conscious till late afternoon. Janice nibbles fruit and berries and complains of her stomach. Cora eats potatoes with butter and sour cream. She likes being fat. It makes her feel powerful and hides her wrinkles. Janice thinks being thin and willowy makes her look young, though she would admit that — and even though Cora spends more time outside doing the yard and farm work — Cora’s skin does look smoother. Janice has a slight stutter. Normally she speaks rapidly and in a kind of shorthand so as not to take up anyone’s precious time, but with her stutter, she can hold peoples’ attention for a moment longer than she would otherwise dare. Cora, on the other hand, speaks slowly, and if she had ever stuttered, would have seen to it she learned not to.

Cora bought a genuine Kilim rug to offset, she said, the bad taste of the flowery chintz covers Janice got for the couch and chairs. The rug and chairs look terrible in the same room, but Cora insisted that her rug be there. Janice retaliated by pawning Mother’s silver candelabras. Cora had never liked them, but she made a fuss anyway, and she left Janice’s favorite silver spoon in the mayonnaise jar until, polish as she would, Janice could never get rid of the blackish look. Janice punched a hole in each of Father’s rubber boots. Cora wears them anyway. She hasn’t said a single word about it, but she hangs her wet socks up conspicuously in the kitchen.

They wish they’d gotten married and moved away from their parent’s old farm house. They wish, desperately, that they’d had children — or husbands, for that matter. As girls they worked hard at domestic things: Canning, baking bread and pies, sewing . . . waiting to be good wives to almost anybody, but nobody came to claim them.

Janice is the one who worries. She’s worried right now because she saw a light out in the far corner of the orchard — a tiny, flickering light. She can just barely make it out through the misty rain. Cora says, “Nonsense.” (She’s angry because it’s just the sort of thing Janice would notice first.) Cora laughs as Janice goes around checking and rechecking all the windows and doors to see that they’re securely locked. When Janice has finished, and stands staring out at the rain, she has a change of heart. “Whoever’s out there must be cold and wet. Maybe hungry.”

“Nonsense,” Cora says again. “Besides, whoever’s out there probably deserves it.”

Later, as Cora watches the light from her bedroom window, she thinks whoever it is who’s camping out down there is probably eating her apples and making a mess. Cora likes to sleep with the windows open a crack even in weather like this, and she prides herself on her courage, but, quietly, so that Janice, in the next room, won’t hear, she eases her windows shut and locks them.

In the morning the rain has stopped, though it’s foggy. Cora goes out (with Father’s walking stick, and wearing Father’s boots and battered canvas hat) to the far end of the orchard. Something has certainly been there. It had pulled down perfectly good, live, apple branches to make a nest. Cora doesn’t like the way it ate apples either, one or two bites out of lots of them, and then it looks as if it had made itself sick and threw up not far from the fire. Cora cleans everything so it looks like no one has been there. She doesn’t want Janice to have the satisfaction of knowing anything about it.

That afternoon, when Cora has gone off to have their pickup truck greased, Janice goes out to take a look. She also takes Father’s walking stick, but she wears Mother’s floppy pink hat. She can see where the fire’s been by the black smudge, and she can tell somebody’s been up in the tree. She notices things Cora hadn’t: Little claw marks on a branch, a couple of apples that had been bitten into still hanging on the tree near the nesting place. There’s a tiny piece of leathery stuff stuck to one sharp twig. It’s incredibly soft and downy and has a wet-dog smell. Janice takes it, thinking it might be an important clue. Also she wants to have something to show that she’s been down there and seen more than Cora has.

Cora comes back while Janice is upstairs taking her nap. She sits down in the front room and reads an article in the Reader’s Digest about how to help your husband communicate. When she hears Janice come down the stairs, Cora goes up for her nap. While Cora naps, Janice sets out grapes and a tangerine, strawberries and one hard-boiled egg. As she eats her early supper, she reads the same article Cora has just read. She feels sorry for Cora, who seems to have nothing more exciting than this sort of thing to read (along with her one hundred great books), whereas Janice has been reading How Famous Couples Get The Most Out Of Their Sex Lives. Just one of many such books that she keeps locked in her bedside cabinet. When she finishes eating, she cleans up the kitchen so it looks as if she hadn’t been there.

Cora comes down when Janice is in the front parlor (sliding doors shut) listening to music. She has it turned so low Cora can hardly make it out. Might be Vivaldi. It’s as if Janice doesn’t want Cora to hear it in case she might enjoy it. At least that’s how Cora takes it. Cora opens a can of spaghetti. For desert she takes a couple of apples from the “special” tree. She eats on the closed-in porch, watching the clouds. It looks as if it’ll rain again tonight.

About eight-thirty they each look out their different windows and see that the flickering light is there again. Cora says, “Damn it to hell,” so loud that Janice hears from two rooms away. At that moment, Janice begins to like the little light. Thinks it looks inviting. Homey. She forgets that she found that funny piece of leather and those claw marks. Thinks most likely there’s a young couple in love out there. Their parents disapprove and they have no place else to go but her orchard. Or perhaps it’s a child running away. Teenager, maybe, cold and wet. She has a hard time sleeping, worrying and wondering about whoever it is, though she’s still glad she locked the house up tight.

The next day begins almost exactly like the one before, with Cora going out to the orchard first and cleaning up — trying to — all the signs of anything having been there, and with Janice coming out later to pick up the clues that are left. Janice finds that the same branch is scratched up even more than it was before, and this time Cora has left the vomit (full of bits of apple peel) behind the tree. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed it. Apples — or at least so many apples — aren’t agreeing with the lovers. (In spite of the clues, Janice prefers to think that it’s lovers.) She feels sorry about the all-night rain. There’s no sign that they had a tent or shelter of any kind, poor things.

By the third night, though, the weather finally clears. Stars are out and a tiny moon. Cora and Janice stand in the front room, each at a different window, looking out towards where the light had been. An old seventy-eight record is on. Fritz Kreisler playing the Bach Chaconne. Janice says, “You’d think, especially since it’s not raining….”

Cora says, “Good riddance,” though she, too, feels a sense of regret. At least something unusual had been happening. “Don’t forget,” Cora says, “the state prison’s only ninety miles away.”

Little light or no little light, they both check the windows and doors and then recheck the ones the other had already checked, or at least Cora rechecks all the ones Janice had seen to. Janice sees her do it, and Cora sees her noticing, so Cora says, “With what they’re doing with genetic engineering, it could be anything at all out there. They make mistakes, and peculiar things escape. You don’t hear about it because it’s classified. People disapprove, so they don’t let the news get out.” Ever since she was five years old, Cora has been trying to scare her younger sister, though, as usual, she ends up scaring herself.

But then, just as they are about to give up and go off to bed, there’s the light again. “Ah.” Janice breathes out as though she had been holding her breath. “There it is.”

“You’ve got a lot to learn,” Cora says. She’d heard the relief in Janice’s big sigh. “Anyway, I’m off to bed, and you’d better come soon, too, if you know what’s good for you.”

“I know what’s good for me,” Janice says. She would have stayed up too late just for spite, but now she has another, secret reason for doing it. She sits reading an article in Cosmopolitan about how to be more sexually attractive to your husband. Around midnight, even from downstairs, she can hear Cora snoring. Janice goes out to the kitchen. Moves around it like a little mouse. She’s good at that. Gets out Mother’s teakwood tray, takes slices of rye bread from Cora’s stash, takes a can of Cora’s tuna fish. (Janice knows she’ll notice. Cora has them all counted.) Takes butter and mayonnaise from Cora’s side of the refrigerator. Makes three tuna fish sandwiches. Places them on one of Mother’s gold-rimmed plates along with some of her own celery, radishes, and grapes. Then she sits down and eats one sandwich herself. She hasn’t let herself have a tuna fish sandwich, especially not one with mayonnaise and butter and rye bread, for a long time.

It’s only when Janice is halfway out in the orchard that she remembers what Cora said about the prison and thinks maybe there’s some sort of escaped criminal out there — a rapist or a murderer, and here she is, wearing only her bathrobe and nightgown, in her slippers, and without even Father’s walking stick. (Though the walking stick would probably just have been a handy thing for the criminal to attack her with.) She stops, puts the tray down, then moves forward. She’s had a lot of practice creeping. She’s been creeping up on Cora ever since they were little. Used to yell, “Boo,” but nowadays creeping up and standing very close and suddenly whispering right by her ear can make Cora jump as much as a loud noise. Janice sneaks along slowly. Has to step over where whoever it is has already thrown up. Something is huddling in front of the fire, wrapped in what at first seems to be an army blanket. Why it is a child. Poor thing. She’s known it all the time. But then the creature moves, stretches, makes a squeaky sound, and she sees it’s either the largest bat or the smallest little old man she’s ever seen. And with wings. She’s wondering if this is what Cora meant by genetic engineering.

Then the creature stands up and Janice is shocked. He has such a large penis that Janice thinks back to the horses and bulls they used to have. It’s a Pan-type penis, more or less permanently erect and hooked up tight against his stomach, though Janice doesn’t know this about a Pan’s penis, and anyway, this is definitely not some sort of Pan.

The article in Cosmopolitan comes instantly to her mind, plus the other, sexier books that she has locked in her bedside cabinet. Isn’t there, in all this, some way to permanently outdo Cora? Whether she ever finds out about it or not? Slowly, Janice backs up, turns, goes right past her tray (the gleam of silverware helps her know where it is). Goes to the house and down into the basement.

They’d always had dogs. Big ones for safety. But Mr. Jones (called Jonesy) had died a few months ago, and Cora is still grieving, or so she keeps saying. Since the dog had become blind, diabetic, and incontinent in his last years, Janice is relieved that he’s gone. Besides, she had her heart set on something small and more tractable, some sort of terrier, but now she’s glad Jonesy was large and difficult to manage. His metal choke collar and chain leash are still in the cellar. She wraps them in a cloth bag to keep them from making any clanking noises and heads back out, picking up the tray of food on the way.

As she comes close to the fire she begins to hum. This time she wants him to know she’s coming. The creature sits in the lowest fork of the tree now and watches her with glinting red eyes. She puts the tray down and begins to talk softly as though she were trying to calm old Jonesy. She even calls the thing Mr. Jones. At first by mistake and then on purpose. He watches. Moves nothing but his eyes and big ears. His wings, dangling along his arms, are olive drab like that piece she found, but his body is a little lighter, especially along his stomach. She can tell that even in the moonlight.

Now that she’s closer and less startled than before, she can see that there’s something terribly wrong. One leathery wing is torn and twisted. He’s helpless. Or almost. Probably in pain. Janice feels a little rush of joy.

She breaks off a bit of tuna fish sandwich and slowly, talking softly, she holds it towards his little clawed hand. Equally slowly, he reaches out to take it. She keeps this up until almost all of one sandwich is eaten. But suddenly the creature jumps out of the tree, turns away, and throws up.

Janice knows a vulnerable moment when she sees one. As he leans back on his heels between spasms, she fastens the choke collar around his neck and twists the other end of the chain leash around her wrist.

He only makes two attempts to escape: Tries to flap himself into the air, but it’s obviously painful for him; then he tries to run. His legs are bowed, his gait rocking and clumsy. After these two attempts, he seems to realize it’s hopeless. Janice can see in his eyes that he’s given up — too sick and tired to care. Janice thinks he must be happy to be captured and looked after at last.

She leads him back to the house and down into the basement. Her own quiet creeping makes him quiet, too. He seems to sense that he’s to be a secret and that perhaps his life depends on it. It was hard for him to walk all the way across the orchard. He doesn’t seem to be built for anything but flying.

There is an old coal room, not used since they got oil heat. Janice makes a bed for him there, first chaining him to one of the pipes. She gets him blankets, water, an empty pail with a lid. She makes him put on a pair of her underpants. She has to use a cord around his waist to make them stay up. She wonders what she should leave him to eat that would stay down. Then brings him chamomile tea, dry toast, one small potato. That’s all. She doesn’t want to be cleaning up a lot of vomit.

He’s so tractable through all this that she loses all fear of him. Pats his head as if he were old Jonesy. Strokes the wonderful softness of his wings. Thinks: If those were cut off, he’d look like a small old man with long, hard fingernails — misshapen, but not much more so than some other people. And clothes can hide things. Without the dark wings, he’d look lighter. His body is that color that’s always described as cafe au lait. She would have preferred it if he’d been clearly a white person, but, who knows, maybe a little while in the cellar will make him paler.

After a last rubbing of his head behind his too-large ears, Janice padlocks the coal room and goes up to her bedroom, but she’s too excited to sleep. She reads a chapter in Are You Happy with Your Sex Life? The one on: How to turn your man into a lusting animal. (”The feet of both sexes are exquisitely sensitive.” And, “Let your eyes speak, but first make sure he’s looking at you.” “Surrender. When he thinks he’s leading, your man feels strong in every way.”) Janice thinks she will have to be the one to take the initiative, though she’ll try to make him feel that he’s the boss — even though he’ll be wearing the choke collar.

For a change, Janice wakes up just as early as Cora does. Earlier, in fact, and she lies in bed making plans. She gets a lot of good ideas. She comes downstairs whistling Vivaldi — off-key as usual, but she’s not doing it to make Cora angry this time. She really can’t whistle on key. Cora knows that Janice knows Cora hates the way she whistles. Cora thinks that if Janice really tried, she could be just as in tune as Cora always is. Cora thinks Janice got up early just so she could spoil Cora’s breakfast by sitting across from her looking just like Mother used to look when she disapproved of Father’s table manners. And Cora notices, even before she makes her omelet, that one can of tuna fish is missing and her loaf of rye bread has gone down by several slices. She takes a quart of strawberries from Janice’s side of the refrigerator and eats them all, not even bothering to wash them.

Janice doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t care, except that Jonesy might have wanted some. Janice is feeling magnanimous and powerful. She feels so good she even offers Cora some of her herb tea. Cora takes the offer as ironic, especially since she knows that Janice knows she never drinks herb tea. She retaliates by saying that, since they’re both up so early, they should take advantage of it and go out to the beach to get more lakeweed for the garden.

Janice knows that Cora decided this just to make her pay for the tuna fish and bread, but she still feels magnanimous — kindly to the whole world. She doesn’t even say that they’d already done that twice in the spring, and that what they needed now were hay bales to put around the foundations of the house for the winter. All she says is, “No!”

It’s never been their way to shirk their duties no matter how angry they might be with each other. When it comes to work, they’ve always made a good team. But now Janice is adamant. She says she has something important to do. She’s not ever said this before, nor has she ever had something important to do. Cora has always been the one who did the important things. This time Cora can’t persuade Janice to change her mind, nor can she persuade her that there’s nothing important to be done — at least nothing more important than lakeweed.

Finally Cora gives up and goes off alone. She hadn’t meant to go. She’s never gone off to get lakeweed by herself, but she goes anyway, hoping to make Janice feel guilty. Cora knows something is going on. She’s not sure what, but she’s going to be on her guard.

As soon as Janice hears the old pickup crunch away on the gravel drive, she goes down in the basement, bringing along Father’s old straight razor (freshly sharpened), rubbing alcohol, and bandages. Also, to make it easier on him, a bottle of sherry.

Cora comes back, tired and sandy, around six-thirty. Her face is red and she has big, dried sweat marks on her blue farmer’s shirt, across the back and under the arms. She smells fishy. She’s so tired she staggers as she climbs the porch steps. Even before she gets inside, she knows odd things are going on. There’s the smells…of beef stew or some such, onions, maybe mince pie, and there, on the hall table, a glass of sherry is set out for her. Or seems to be for her. Or looks like sherry. Though the day was hot, these fall evenings are cool, and Janice has laid a fire in the fireplace, and not badly done. Cora always knew Janice could do it properly if she set her mind to it. Cora takes the sherry and sits on the footstool of Father’s big chair. It’s one of the ones Janice had covered in a flowery pattern. Looks like pinkish-blue hydrangea. Cora looks at the fire. Thinks: All this has got to be because of something else. Or maybe it’s going to be a practical joke. If she lets down her guard, she’ll be in for big trouble. But even if it’s a joke, might as well take advantage of it for as long as she can. The sherry relaxes her. She’ll go up and shower — if, that is, Janice has left her any hot water.

For several days, Mr. Jones is in pain. Janice is glad of it. She knows how a wild thing — or even a not-so-wild thing — appreciates being nursed back to health. (As soon as he’s better, she hopes to bond him to her in a different way.) She hopes Mr. Jones was too drunk to remember about the…amputation…whatever you call it. (Funny, he only has three fingers on each hand. She’d not noticed that at first.)

Cora is still suspicious, but doesn’t know what to be suspicious about. The good food is going on and on. After supper, Janice cleans up and doesn’t ask for help even though she’s done all the cooking. And Janice disappears for hours at a time. Goes up to take her nap — or so she says — but Cora knows for a fact that she’s not in her room. After the dishes are cleaned up in the evenings, Janice sews or knits. It’s not hard to see that’s she’s knitting a child-sized sweater and sewing a child-sized pair of trousers. At the same time, she’s working on a white dress, lacy and low-necked. Cora thinks much too low-necked for someone Janice’s age. But perhaps it’s not for Janice. Maybe Janice has some news she’s keeping from Cora. That would be just like her. Someone is getting married or coming for a visit. Or maybe both.

Mr. Jones is getting better. Eating soups, and nuts, and seeds, and keeping everything down, finally. Janice is happy to see that his skin has faded some. He might pass for a gnarled little Mexican or maybe a fairly light India Indian. And he’s beginning to understand some words. She’s been talking to him a lot, more or less as she used to talk to old Jonesy. He knows good boy and bad boy and sit, lie down, be quiet…. She thinks he even has the concept of, “I love you.” She’s never said that to any other creature before, not even to the pony they’d had when they were little. She’s been doing a lot of patting, back rubbing, scratching under the chin and behind the ears. Though he’s always wearing a pair of her underpants tied up around his waist, and though she hasn’t yet tried the stroking of the “exquisitely sensitive” feet, every now and then she notices his penis swelling up even larger than it already is.

One night, after rereading the chapter “How to Turn Your Man into a Lusting Animal,” she puts on her flowery summer nightgown (even though the nights are colder than ever, and they haven’t started up the furnace yet). She puts on lipstick, eye shadow, perfume, combs her hair out and lets it hang over her shoulders…. (She’s only graying a little bit at the temples. Thank God, not like Cora, she’s almost completely gray.) She goes down into the cellar with a glass of sherry for each of them. Not too much, though. She’s read about alcohol and sex.

She tells him she loves him several times, kisses him on the cheeks and then on the neck, just below the choke collar. Finally she kisses his lips. They are thin and closed up tight, and she can feel the teeth behind them. Then she rolls her nightgown up to her chin. She hopes he likes what he sees even though she’s not young anymore. (If anything, he mostly looks surprised.) But no sooner has she lain herself down beside him than it’s over. She’s even wondering, did it really happen? Except, yes, there’s blood, and it did hurt. But this isn’t at all like the books said it would be or should be. She’s read about premature ejaculation. This must be it. Maybe later, when he knows more words, they can go for therapy. But — oops — there he goes again, and just as fast as before. After that he falls asleep. She not only didn’t get any foreplay, but no afterplay, either. She’s wondering, where’s the romance in all this?

Well, at least she’s a real woman now. She hasn’t missed all of life. She may have missed a lot, but no one can say she’s missed all, which is more than Cora can say. Janice thinks she is, and probably permanently — at least she hopes so — one up on Cora. She’s joined the human race in a way Cora probably never will, poor thing. Janice will be kind.

Janice hardly ever drives. She has always left that to Cora. She knows how, but she’s out of practice. Now she has several errands to do. She wants a nice pin-striped suit, though she wonders if they come in boys’ sizes — a suit like her father would have worn. She wants a good suitcase, not one from the five-and-ten. Shiny shoes big enough for rough claws, though she’s cut those claws as short as she could, using old Jonesy’s nail clippers. Since Mr. Jones looks sort of Mexican, she’ll get him a south-of-the-border Panama hat and dark glasses.

It only takes a couple of days for Janice to get her errands done, and then a couple more to get the guest room ready: Aired out, curtains washed, bed made. (Good it’s a double bed.) She whistles all the time and doesn’t even remember that it bothers Cora.

Cora watches the preparation of the guest room but refuses to give Janice the satisfaction of asking any questions. It’s easy to see that Janice wonders why Cora isn’t asking. Once Janice started to tell her something but then turned red to her collar bone and shut up fast.

Janice has continued making good suppers of Cora’s favorite foods. Cora is still waiting for the practical joke to come to its finale, but even…or especially if it doesn’t end, she knows something’s up. She hasn’t let down her guard, and she’s snooped around — even in the basement, but not in the coal room. Up in the attic she did find a large…very large piece of stiff leather, dried blood along its edges and so brittle she couldn’t unfold it to see what it was. It gave her the shivers. Pained her to see it, though she couldn’t say why. Perhaps it was the two toenails or claws that were attached to each corner. She’s thought of throwing the dead-looking thing out in the garbage, but after she saw those claws that were part of it, she couldn’t bring herself to touch it again.

Everything is ready, but Janice knows Jonesy needs a little more experience and training. She wants to pretend to go down and pick him up at the airport in Detroit. Cora, if she hears about it, will never let Janice go there by herself. But Cora mustn’t be there. For lots of reasons, not the least of which is that Janice wants the trip to be like a honeymoon. They could sneak out in the middle of the night and they could take two or three or even more days coming back. Maybe a couple of days enjoying the sights of Detroit. Jonesy could learn a lot.

Janice has never dared to even think of going on a trip like this before, but with Jonesy she wouldn’t be alone. She sees herself, dressed in her best, sitting across from him (he’ll be wearing his pin-striped suit) in restaurants, going to motels, movies, even…. She’d look right doing these things. Like all the other couples. They’d hold hands at the movies. They’d stroll in the evening after their long drive. Can he stroll? She’ll get him a silver-handled walking stick in Detroit. Better than Father’s cane. He may be a cripple, but he’ll look like a gentleman, and the better he looks, the more jealous Cora will be.

Janice leaves a note for Cora mentioning the airport in Detroit.

And it started out being a wonderful honeymoon. Janice kept the choke collar under Jonesy’s necktie and shirt, running the chain down inside his left sleeve so that when she held his hand she could also hold the chain just to make sure. She also found a way to hold the back of his shirt so she could give a little pull on it, but she seldom had to use any of these techniques. And how could he try to escape, hobbling as he does? Unless he learns to drive the pickup? But Janice wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he could learn to drive it. Even before they get to Detroit, Jonesy is dressing himself, uses the right fork in fancy restaurants, can eat a lobster just as neatly as anyone can. (Though he throws it up afterwards.)

Janice keeps a running conversation going, just as if they were communicating. She keeps saying, “Don’t you think so, dear?” hoping nobody will notice that he doesn’t even nod. Lots of husbands are like that. Even Father didn’t answer Mother, lost as he was in his own thoughts all the time. But Mr. Jones doesn’t look lost in his thoughts. And he doesn’t look as if he feels hopeless anymore. He looks out at everything with such intelligence that Janice is considering calling him Doctor Jones.

In Detroit (they are staying at the Renaissance Center), Janice gets the good idea that they should get married right there in City Hall. Before she even tries to do it, she calls Cora up. “I got married,” she says, even though it hasn’t happened, and whether it ever does or not, Cora will never know the difference. “And isn’t it funny, I’m Mrs. Jones, and I call him Jonesy just like old Jonesy.”

Cora can’t answer. She just sputters. She’s been lonelier without Janice than she ever thought she would be. She has even wished the little light was still flickering in the orchard. She’d gone out there, hoping to find another nest. Partly she’d just been looking for company. She’d even left the doors unlocked and her window open. But then she’d put two and two together. She’s had all these days to wonder and worry and wait, and she’s been down in the basement where the coal-room door had been carelessly left open. She’s seen the pallet on the floor, the bowl of dusty water, the remains of a last meal (Mother’s china, wine glasses), three pairs of Janice’s underpants, badly soiled. And she remembers that piece of folded leather with the dried blood on it, and she gets the shivers all over again. Cora knows she’s been outmaneuvered, which she never thought could ever come about, but she suddenly realizes that she doesn’t care about that anymore.

She sputters into the phone, and then, for the first time — at least that Janice ever knew about — Cora bursts into tears. Janice can tell, even though Cora is trying to hide it. All of a sudden Janice wants to say something that will make Cora happy, but she doesn’t know what. “You’ll like him,” she says. “I know you will. You’ll love him, and he’ll love you, too. I know him well enough to know he will. He will.“

Cora keeps on trying to hide that she’s crying, but she doesn’t hang up. She’s glad, at last, to be connected to Janice, however tenuously.

“I’ll bring you something nice from Detroit,” Janice says.

Cora still doesn’t say anything, though Janice can hear her ragged breathing.

“I’ll be back real soon.” Janice doesn’t want to break the connection either, but she can’t think of anything else to say. “I’ll see you in two days.”

It takes four. Janice comes home alone by taxi after a series of buses. (The pickup is going to be found two weeks later up in Canada, north of Thunder Bay. Men’s clothes will be found in it, including a Panama hat, dark glasses, and a silver-handled cane. The radio will have been stolen. There will be maps and a big dictionary that had never belonged either to Cora or Janice.)

As Janice staggers up the porch steps, Cora rushes down, her arms held out, but Janice flinches away. Janice is wearing a wedding ring and a large, phony diamond engagement ring. She has on a new dress. Even though it’s wrinkled and is stained with sweat across the back, Cora can see it was expensive. Janice’s hair is coming loose from its Psyche knot, and now she’s the one who’s crying and trying to pretend she’s not.

Cora tries to help Janice up the steps. Even though Janice stumbles, she won’t let her help, but she does let Cora push her on into the living room. Janice collapses onto the couch, tells Cora, “Don’t hover.” Hovering is something Cora never did before. It’s more like something Janice would do.

Even after Cora brings Janice a strong cup of coffee, Janice won’t say a single word about anything. Cora says she’ll feel better if she talks about it, but she won’t. She looks tired and sullen. “You’d like to know everything, wouldn’t you just,” she says. (What other way to stay one up than not to tell?…than to have secrets?)

Cora almost says, “Not really,” but she doesn’t want to be, anymore, what she used to be. Janice hasn’t had the experience of being in the house all alone for several days. There’s a different secret now that Janice doesn’t know about. Maybe never will unless Cora goes off someplace. But why would she go anyplace? And where? Besides, being one up, or getting even, doesn’t matter to Cora anymore. She doesn’t care if Janice understands or not. She just wants to take care of her and have her stay. Maybe, after a while, Janice will come to see that things have changed.

Cora goes to the kitchen to make a salad that she thinks Janice will like. She sets the dining room table the way she thinks Janice would approve of, with Mother’s best dishes, and with the knives and forks in all the right places and both water glasses and wine glasses, but Janice says she’ll eat later in the kitchen and alone and on paper plates. Meanwhile she’ll take a bath.

After Cora eats and is cleaning up the last of her dishes, Janice comes in wearing her nightgown and Mother’s bathrobe. As she leans to get a pan from a lower shelf, the bathrobe falls away. When she straightens up again, she sees Cora staring at her. “What are you ogling?” she says, holding the frying pan like a weapon.

“Nothing,” Cora says, knowing better than to make a comment. She’s seen more than she wants to see. There are big red choke collar marks all around Janice’s neck.

But something must be said. Cora wonders what Father would have done. She usually knows exactly what he’d do and does it without even thinking about it. Now she can’t imagine Father ever having to deal with something like this. She can’t say anything. She can’t move. Finally she thinks: No secrets. She says, “Sister.” And then…but it’s too hard. (Father never would have said it.) She starts. Again, she almost says it. “Sister, I love….”

At first it looks as if Janice will hit her with the frying pan, but then she drops it and just stares.

“I do not,” I said. “I definitely do not snore.” I was talking to her back. “You’re making it up!” I was talking to the door. “Someone else would have mentioned it!” I was talking to myself.

Mistakes were made, relationships fell apart, and hurtful things were said. Life was like that.

In the days that followed, I rearranged all the furniture. I threw out everything in the refrigerator. I bought newspices — savory, anise, cumin, cracked black pepper — and packaged macaroni and cheese and powdered soups. Anchovies. Things Joanna didn’t like. I left the toilet seat up all the time and dropped my clothes wherever I took them off. I got a new haircut and collected brochures for a getaway to Panama. I looked at a red convertible but didn’t buy it.

Her crack about me snoring wouldn’t leave me alone, probably because it poked something that had always worried me. My father had snored. I remembered listening to him snore all the way down the hall and around the corner. I always thought it must be awful to be in there with him. Maybe it ran in the family, like baldness or alcoholism.

The solution, once it hit me, seemed obvious. I would record myself sleeping. I had nothing that would record such a long time, so I went to an audio store and bought an expensive machine that would do the job. I used some of the money I’d saved by not buying the red convertible.

I set it up on the dresser across the room at the foot of the bed. I poured myself a nightcap, drank it during the eleven o’clock news, brushed my teeth, turned on the recorder, got into bed and squirmed around restlessly for over an hour, listening to the possibly imaginary whir and hiss of magnetic tape moving through the mechanism.

The next day, there was no time to check the tape as I hurried through my morning ritual and left for work. I was tempted, but I couldn’t afford to be late. Then I got busy and didn’t think about it again until bedtime the next night.

I made myself a complicated drink and a plate of crackers with anchovies and cheese and sat down on the foot of my bed. I don’t know exactly what I expected. I was a little apprehensive. I stretched up and switched on the machine.

There were the sounds of me changing positions and sighing as I tried to get to sleep. I listened and ate a few crackers then stood up and held down the fast-forward button.

There were long periods of silence. No snoring. The house was quiet, too, with that late night stillness that isn’t really so quiet when you finally listen, and the two silences got mixed together until I was listening hard and eating crackers and not caring about the crumbs in my bed.

I continued sampling a moment here and there and then moving on.

“Ah ha,” I said. “I knew it.”

There was a long embarrassing fart an hour or so into the night, but absolutely no snoring. I heard something move in the kitchen like stuff settling in the plastic trash bag, a totally familiar sound. In fact, I couldn’t tell if it was on the tape or had just happened in real time. I heard the house creaking and the distant sounds of traffic and once an auto horn. Several hours later, a siren screamed in the distance, and my sleeping self moaned. The 3:00 a.m. train went by, five miles to the south. I had stopped hearing that whistle a long time ago. It was comforting somehow to hear it again. I speeded the tape forward.

I was home free.

Joanna had been jerking me around.

But then a woman said, “Shush!’ and giggled softly, and I gasped and jerked my hand up and drenched the front of my shirt with my drink.

I looked around wildly, thinking it was Joanna talking, thinking maybe it hadn’t been on the tape, thinking maybe she was standing right behind me, but most of me knew she wasn’t there. And the superspeed scenario I played in my mind where she’d sneaked into my bedroom last night to talk on my tape was stupid. Besides it hadn’t even been her voice.

“Just look at him,” the voice whispered.

I could hear someone moving around in the room. The rustle of clothing, the bump of a leg maybe hitting the side of the dresser or the chair by the window.

“Sure,” a man whispered, “he’s adorable.”

The woman giggled again.

Then nothing.

I carefully put my glass down on the floor. I felt cold. My ears were ringing and my breathing was fast and shallow. I pulled off my wet shirt and threw it at the bathroom door.

The tape still moved but was silent.

I sat there listening for maybe an hour. Then I told myself I had imagined the whole thing. I got up and rewound the tape and played it again.

“Just look at him,” the woman whispered.

I spent the rest of the night listening to every inch of the tape. You would think listening to over eight hours of tape would take more than eight hours, but I made good use of the fast-forward button, and by morning, I was pretty sure that little snatch of conversation was all there was.

I considered calling in sick, but then I would probably fall asleep, and I wasn’t ready to fall asleep yet. I showered and shaved and got dressed.

Things were too bright outside. The feeling was like an old memory of all-nighters in college and crawling out into the daylight finally and feeling like everything must surely be an elaborate set in a movie about someone else. I remembered the way Abby, my first true love, looked in those days, warm young woman, zoomed in tight, big distorted nose, morning close up, sleepy head, kiss kiss, an echoing dress-store dummy somehow moving, smiling too big, too many teeth. Good morning, Sunshine. And later, the coffee so deeply black and hot against my own teeth. Eggs over easy so you can paint bright yellow daffodils with your toast. Thick slabs of bacon.

“You’re doing the Zen breakfast thing, aren’t you?” Abby bumped me with her shoulder. We sat side by side at the counter because the place was always too full to get a booth in the morning.

Where had she gone? I remembered dreaming over and over again that I had accidentally killed her and hidden her body in a closet or out in the barn or under the bed, and for years and years and years I was forced to take care of it so no one would ever find out. I finished school and got good work, met a woman named Louisa, married her, fathered children, lost them but got weekends, met Joanna, all the time playing a complicated juggling game involving plastic bags and big trunks to keep Abby’s body hidden.

I suddenly wondered if that was Abby on the tape.

“More coffee?”

“What?” I snapped out of it long enough to nod and smile at the woman with the coffee pot. “Yes, please.”

I looked around. This was not the diner from my past. This was the restaurant down the block from my office. I never stopped in here for breakfast, but judging by the remains on my plate, I had stopped in for breakfast today. I glanced at my watch. I was late. I finished my coffee too quickly, burned my mouth, left a tip, paid the bill, and hurried off.

Out in the bright morning crowd of busy people all moving so deliberately toward important tasks, I knew very well I hadn’t killed Abby and kept her body hidden all these years. That was just something I had dreamed more than once. But I was drawing a blank on just what had happened to her. I couldn’t really bring her face into sharp focus in my mind. That probably wasn’t her voice on the tape.

At my desk, I made a mental list of the things that might be happening to me. The most obvious was that I was losing my mind. Next, I might be haunted; the voices might be ghosts. And finally, there was the conspiracy angle — someone really was sneaking into my bedroom at night and watching me sleep. But if that were true why hadn’t Joanna complained about spooky visitors instead of making up a story about me snoring?

I didn’t feel crazy. In fact, after the sleepless night, my mind seemed unusually sharp. Everything was bright and moist. I could see every hair on my arm. I could still taste the bacon from breakfast even if I couldn’t remember eating it. I could hear my co-workers talking in low tones across the room.

There was nothing to do about the supernatural. If that was what was happening, there was no defense. That’s what makes it the supernatural in the first place. It’s not like an understandable force that is simply too powerful, like a bully you can overcome by pumping iron and eating your Wheaties. There is no kung fu you can do when it comes to the supernatural. It is irrational and absolutely unpredictable. If there were rules that worked, the supernatural would be science. The truly supernatural must be truly meaningless.

That only left conspiracy, but I couldn’t imagine how it would be possible.

Nevertheless, my exercise in logic made me feel a little better, and in spite of the voices and in spite of a sleepless night, I got caught up in work and by early afternoon, I realized I’d forgotten all about the tape. That realization reminded me of the tape, of course, and I laughed, and everyone gave me a funny look, and I just shook my head and said, “Nothing. Sorry. Just a thought. Nothing.”

For dinner, I stopped in at the same restaurant where I had had breakfast. Then I went home and wandered around the house picking things up and putting them down again. I turned on the TV.

TV was often my meditation. The challenge was to make a coherent program out of a single utterance or exclamation or exploding building or whatever from each channel. No matter what was happening, you could linger on a channel no longer than a sentence. You had to pay attention, and it took hours to get a meaningful exchange, but once I did get a something meaningful, everything fell into place. The universe became a Buddha smile, and I reached a place of blue clarity. Hours passed, and while I could not remember exactly what the experience had been about, I felt as if I’d accomplished something by the time I stopped and pushed the dirty dishes to one side so I could rinse a glass and pour a couple of fingers of scotch and put a fresh tape on the fancy recording machine in the bedroom. I could have just recorded over the old one, but I wanted to avoid ambiguity. I gulped down the scotch, brushed my teeth and undressed. I switched on the recorder, and got into bed.

“I’m going to sleep now,” I said out loud so I’d have a reference point. I snuggled deeper into the covers and passed through the bed and into a dream in which all the people I had lost to death were back again, but changed. Not exactly zombies, just back and a little different. In the dream I had to make allowances for them. I’d say things like, “You’ll have to excuse her, she’s been dead.” I’d say things like, “The way he moves certainly is not creepy, he was dead only yesterday.” They would all come over to my house where I would feed them and teach them things and they would pretend they didn’t know me and wouldn’t seem the least bit grateful for my help, but I would forgive them because they’d been dead and were now trying to get back into the swing of things.

The next morning I called in sick. Judy, who took my call, wasn’t surprised. “You didn’t look so hot yesterday,” she told me.

I popped open a beer and rewound the tape.

Forward, pause, play. Snort, moan, honk, fart, shuffle, shift, yada yada yada. Forward, pause, play.

“He’s paralyzed,” the woman whispered.

“How can you tell?” the man asked.

“Look at his eyes moving,” she said. “There is a mechanism that paralyzes his body when he dreams. Otherwise he might get up and walk around.”

The man chuckled.

“Careful with that,” the woman said.

“I just need to rest,” the man said.

“You shouldn’t . . .”

“Shush,” the man said.

She sighed. “Okay, make room for me, too,” she whispered. “Careful with the covers. Okay, I’ll take the front. Easy, now, easy.”

“If he wakes up now,” the man whispered, “he’ll be looking right into your face.”

“Hmmm,” she said.

“Can he smell your breath?”

“Hmmm,” she said.

“I’m going to pinch him.”

“Don’t!”

“Just joking,” the man whispered.

Then nothing.

My heart was beating too fast. I listened to the silence and small night sounds until my beer was gone. I crushed the can and stood up and hit the fast-forward button.

The voices didn’t occur on the tape again.

I checked all the windows and all the doors but I knew they were okay. When I got home, I always made a quick tour of the house to make sure there were no intruders lurking. I always locked the bathroom door before getting into the shower. I didn’t go to bed without putting the security chain on. The movies have trained us not to make too many stupid mistakes. I had always felt secure in my own house. I’d lived there for years. I knew every inch of the place.

I went around carefully tapping all the walls looking for secret passages. I knew it was stupid. I just couldn’t think of anything else to do. There was no way anyone could get in when I was asleep. How would they know when I was asleep in the first place?

I needed a second opinion. I had to let someone else listen to the tape. But who could I trust? Maybe a stranger would be better. But how would I get a stranger to listen to a tape and how could I trust what they said?

I knew who should listen to the tape. I had known from the moment I came up with the idea that someone should listen to it. I sat there staring down at my shoes, saying over and over again, “Just do it. Just do it.” Okay. I got up and ran the tape back to the points just before the woman first spoke. I took it out of the machine and put it in a box and wrapped the box and addressed it to Joanna at her office. I didn’t know where she was living.

I wrote a note. “Joanna, please listen to this and tell me what you hear.”

I called the messenger service I sometimes used at work. An hour later the messenger arrived, and I gave him the tape and some money.

There were other things I could do while I waited. I put a fresh tape in the machine. I found a sack of flour back behind my new spices. I could spread it all over the bedroom floor and see if there were footprints in the morning. I opened the bag. But wait. If I spread the flour now, I would probably step in it many times on my way to the bathroom, which reminded me to open another beer. I took the beer and the flour into the bedroom. I put the flour down by the recorder. I would spread it just before bed. Maybe Joanna would have called before then, though. Maybe whatever she had to say would solve the problem.

“Oh, yeah,” I’d say. “That’s it. Boy, is my face red. I should have thought of it myself.”

I could do something else, too, but it would take more courage. I could leave them a message. The danger in that was that they didn’t seem to know that I could hear them. What would they do if they found out? I was completely helpless in their company. Maybe I shouldn’t let them know that I knew. I was a kind of eavesdropper, really. Maybe they wouldn’t like it.

They might find out anyway. One of these nights, they might notice the tape machine. And surely if I spread flour all over the floor it would tip them off.

The day passed. I ate stuff from cans for lunch. I got no reply from Joanna. I must be pretty far down on her priority list these days.

I couldn’t find anything else to eat for dinner so I skipped it. There was still beer, but not too much.

I meditated with the TV for a few hours but never could achieve meaning. Around eleven I decided I really would leave them a message. It was night again and too quiet and bedtime and I had to do something. I tore a piece of paper from a notebook and wrote, “Who are you?” in big bold letters.

Now what? Should I pin it to my chest? What if they didn’t find it? I wadded the paper up and tossed it in the trash.

I could write really big letters on the wall.

I dug through kitchen drawers but found nothing I could use to make big letters. I checked the bathroom. Women never leave a place without a trace. Maybe there would be a lipstick. There wasn’t. So much for generalizations.

I had pink stomach stuff but it looked too runny, and I had colorless roll-on deodorant, so the wall wouldn’t sweat, but you’d have to smell the country fresh letters to puzzle out the message.

Ah ha. An old old bottle of tincture of merthiolate. Good god, I bought that before I met Abby. What was the expiration date? Most of the label was gone, but it looked like 1980. I had put the stuff on countless cuts. It still had a nice sting to it. This was one of those products that one bottle lasts you a lifetime. The company had probably gone out of business.

I stood on the bed and, using the little plastic applicator, started my message again on the wall. Rats. The applicator was too small. It would take forever. I poured merthiolate into my hand and smacked my hand onto the wall and dragged it down and up and down and up in a big dripping orange double-u. Okay. The rest went pretty quickly.

Who are you?

If they looked at me, and I seemed to be pretty much all they did look at, they could not fail to see my message.

My hands were orange. The orange stain wouldn’t come off with soap and water. To hell with it.

How about the flour?

Okay, okay. But do it carefully. Get undressed first. Start at the bathroom door and work your way back to the bed. Yes, like that. When you get to the bed just toss the empty flour sack out of the bedroom and get into bed. That’s it. Nothing could move across there without leaving a mark. Good. Good. Goddamn it, you forgot to pee.

I plopped down on the bed. I tossed the empty flour sack over the side. I took a deep breath. Then I walked straight across the flour to the bathroom. One straight path. I would use the same one coming back. Anything off that path would be my visitors.

Except that after I used the bathroom and carefully walked back to the bed, I realized I would need one more path to the dresser so I could turn on the recorder. Okay, one more. I walked to the dresser, turned on the machine, and walked back to the bed. Two paths. Footprints going in both directions. I got into bed.

I stared up at the ceiling, feeling like an absolute idiot. I would have to get up and make another path if I wanted to turn off the light. I got up and walked to the light switch and flipped it off. Then I made my way back in the dark. I knew I was not keeping a straight path. And as I walked, it occurred to me to wonder how they would see my message in the dark. I had probably ruined the wall for nothing. I stopped and closed my eyes to think about it. If they could see me, they could probably see the wall, but what about the orange letters? Would orange letters be visible to ghosts who could see in the dark? Maybe it would be like red light to fish. You put a red light in your aquarium and the fish all think it’s night and you can watch them and they don’t know you’re watching.

I opened my eyes and stumbled forward and saw the street glow through the bathroom window and realized that I’d gotten way off the path back to the bed. The flour seemed mostly pointless now.

I turned, and then stood peering through the dark at the bed. It didn’t look entirely empty. Those shapes could be my pillows. The slight movement I saw, like the quivering of a horse after a good run, might be just the kind of thing you see in the dark. I took a step back.

“Aren’t you coming to bed,” she said.

I cried out.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Joanna?”

“I heard the tape of you snoring,” she whispered. “Kind of a strange apology, but what the hell. Come on, hop in. It’s late.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed. She put her cool hand on my shoulder. I crawled in

beside her. She pulled me in close.

“Is that really you, Joanna?” I asked.

“Of course, it isn’t, you moron,” the man behind me said.

#

From Meet Me in the Moon Room a collection of 33 strange and wonderful short fictions and originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in January 2001.

My sister Ada rolled her over, a little roughly, I thought, and checked the knots. I had faith in those knots. Ada was a rancher from Arizona and knew how to tie things up. I made sure Mom’s sweater was buttoned. I jerked her green and white housedress back down over her pasty knees. I made sure her boots were tightly tied.

The breeze sweeping down the gorge made the gray curls above her forehead quiver. The wind seemed to move the steel bridge a little, too, but that may have been my imagination. Even from up here, I could smell the river and hear its gravelly whisper. Black birds circled and complained in the clear blue sky above us. The sun was a hot spotlight in the chilly thin mountain air. Toby paced back and forth in the truck bed, whining and pulling at his leash and watching us closely.

“What about the glasses, Barry?” Ada tapped a fingernail on the lenses of Mom’s fragile wire-rimmed glasses.

“Please, don’t do this, children.”

“Shut up, Jessica.” Ada spoke not to our mother but to Mom’s interface with her nanopeople. When Dr. Holly Ketchum (Mom, that is) introduced a colony of nanopeople into her own body, it was seen by many as a bold new step. It had, after all, never before been done under controlled conditions. Nanotechnology held such promise — long life and good health, a kind of immortality, really.

So how did it work out? What one word would sum it all up?

Well, “whoops” might be a good choice.

The problem was that after a few generations, that is to say, after a few hours, the nanopeople became convinced that their world shouldn’t take any unnecessary chances. It made no sense to the nanopeople to let their world endanger herself. Jessica claimed that individually, nanopeople were as adventurous as anyone else. “But put yourself in our place, Barry,” she’d once said to me. “Would you let your world put sticks on her feet and go speeding down a snowy mountain at 60 miles an hour? Or swim with sharks? Be reasonable.”

Mom looked like a TV grandmother these days — plump, rosy cheeks, and translucent white skin. Her nanopeople could have fixed her vision easily enough, but they thought the glasses would make her more cautious in most situations. They could have left her appearance at its natural 48 years or even made her look younger, but they chose this cookie-cutting, slow-shuffling granny look to discourage relationships that might turn out to be dangerous. They could have left her mind alone; instead they struck her silly. A slow-moving stupid world is a world that takes no chances.

Jessica had been created to explain things to Mom. She was really a network of nanopeople working in shifts to produce the illusion that called itself Jessica. The nanopeople, invisible, sentient, self-replicating robots of nanotechnology, simply thought more quickly than big people. If Mom were struggling to access a multisyllabic word, there could be a week’s worth of shift changes among the nanopeople running the Jessica interface. In fact, a nanoperson could come into existence, grow up, get trained, find a mate, write poetry, procreate, rise to the top of a career, screw up a relationship, get cynical, and die in the time it took Mom to cook up a batch of brownies.

The real horror, I suppose, was that while individual nanopeople might come and go, as a society, they intended to keep Mom alive and stupid pretty much forever.

I plucked the glasses from her face. “I’ll save these for you, Jessica, just in case you ever need them again.” I gave her a look I hoped was menacing and let my remarks just sit there for a moment, then I sat Mom up and leaned her against the bridge railing. “There’s still time for negotiation, Jessica,” I said.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Barry.” Jessica was doing what the nanopeople thought was Mom’s voice. I wasn’t fooled. Mom never whined. Not the old Mom anyway. At least we had the nanopeople’s attention these days. At first, Jessica had not bothered to even acknowledge our existence. Then we started pushing Mom into water over her head, and Jessica decided to talk to us.

I tied the big rubber bands to Mom’s boots.

“The word is bungee, Jessica,” Ada said.

My sister was becoming one scary chick, I thought, what with her horse tattoo and western hat and the ever-present toothpick in the corner of her mouth. It was almost like she was enjoying this. Or maybe she was just a better actor. I remembered how she’d cried on the phone the night she called me home from graduate school in Oregon, how she kept saying Mom had nothing on her mind but cookies, cookies and cakes and those little flaky things with sweet red crap in the middle, and I need your help Barry, I can’t do this alone Barry. I’d gotten verbal assurance from my advisor in the physics department that I could take a leave of absence and had bussed to Tucson the very next day.

Mom made me a pie when I got home.

I took Mom under the arms, and Ada grabbed her feet. We swung her like a sack of laundry, and on the count of three, tossed her over the side of the bridge. Toby went crazy, barking and pulling at his leash, in the back of Ada’s truck.

We put our hands on the bridge rail and watched Mom fall and fall toward the river, the long bungee bands trailing behind her, and listened to her scream — well, listened to someone scream, anyway; when it was Jessica, it was a howl of frustration and terror, but when it was Mom, it was an exuberant whoop! Or maybe I was imagining things. Maybe I didn’t have the faith Ada had in this plan to get the nanopeople out of Mom.

We watched Mom bounce like a yo-yo on the end of her bungee bands, her housedress hanging down over her head. We decided to let her swing awhile. Ada unpacked our picnic lunch and we settled down on the bridge to eat.

As we munched and sipped, I heard a small voice calling, “Help, help,” but I decided to ignore it.

“So, Ada,” I said. “How come Mom’s nanopeople don’t transform her into something that can climb up the rubber bands? A giant spider, say.”

“I call the answer to that my King Kong Theory,” Ada said. “I’ll bet the nanopeople can see in Mom’s memory that picture of Kong on the Empire State Building with all the airplanes buzzing around and shooting. Or some other picture like that. The thing with these guys is safety first and always.”

Those far away cries for help were getting to me. I gave Ada a sidelong glance. I didn’t want my big sister to think I was wimping out on her. “So, shall we pull her up?” I tried to sound casual.

“I suppose.” Ada took another bite of her sandwich then tossed it into the basket.

We pulled Mom up.

“So, Jessica,” Ada said. “You want to do that again?”

“No!”

“Let’s talk then.”

Jessica let Mom’s chin fall to her chest and was quiet for a minute or so. Then she raised Mom’s head. “What do you want? How can we make you stop this?”

“Get out of Mom!” I shouted, and Ada gave me a sharp look. I had no talent for diplomacy.

“That’s pretty much what we want, Jessica,” Ada said. “We need to discuss the terms of your eviction.”

“That is an absurd notion,” Jessica said. “Each one of us lives a life every bit as important and significant as yours, Ada. You just move more slowly. You’re just bigger. None of that signifies. Have you no empathy? Holly is our world. This is the only world the People have ever known. Just where do you suppose we could go?”

“We have an idea about that.” Ada signaled me with her eyes.

I got up and walked to the truck and untied Toby’s leash. With a great leap of joy, he bounded out of the bed of the truck. Tail wagging, trying to look everywhere at once, nose to the ground, nose in the air, he dragged me back to Mom and Ada. I convinced him to sit down in front of Mom. Taking advantage of the fact that she was tied up, he licked her face. I often wondered whether the dog knew this was Mom. He seemed to like this dowdy little person, but this person was always around these days, and it seemed to me his enthusiasm for her was somehow of a lower quality than the worship he had always had for Mom. Maybe he’d just gotten used to Jessica.

“We want you to move to Toby,” Ada said.

Toby’s ears stiffened at the sound of his name, and he looked up at Ada.

Jessica was quiet for a moment. Then she made Mom’s soft grandmother mouth a hard line. “You want us to move into a dog?” She sounded incredulous.

“You got it,” Ada said.

“You want an entire civilization, billions of us, each with definite ideas and hopes and dreams, to just shuffle off to another world? You think that generations of tradition and deeply felt religion and philosophy can be tossed aside? You think we’ll move into a dog?”

“I think she’s got it,” Ada said.

“We won’t do it,” Jessica said. “And we won’t discuss it further.” She closed Mom’s mouth and squeezed Mom’s eyes tightly shut.

“Hey! Wait a minute!” I yelled.

“Never mind, Barry.” Ada grabbed Mom’s feet and gave me a sharp look.

I got the message. I took Mom under the arms, and we tossed her over the side again. Toby just sat there for a moment like he couldn’t believe his eyes, then he jumped up and put his front paws up on the railing and watched Mom bounce.

When we pulled her up this time and propped her against the bridge railing, I looked closely into her wild eyes, hoping, I guess, for a little momness. Not a chance. It was clear we’d finally pissed off her little friends. Big things were happening in Mom. Her face twisted into a horrible grimace, her cheeks puffed out and her eyes bulged. She suddenly spit a huge stream of green stuff at us. We jumped out of the way.

“She’s mine.” The voice was deep and male, a truly scary demon voice. “You can’t have her.”

“Ah, Jessica,” Ada said. She took off her cowgirl hat and used it to swat Mom on the side of the head. “We’ve seen those movies, too. If you’re not going to be serious, we’re going to throw you over again.”

“You don’t know what you’ve done,” Jessica said in her usual Jessica voice. “There have been uprisings since we talked last. People have died. Listen to me, Ada. Barry. People have died. People every bit as real as you. Good people. How can you continue this?”

“But you’re destroying our mother!” I said.

“One person for the good of billions! And besides she wouldn’t be destroyed.”

“This one person is our mother,” Ada said. “And that’s where you’re in trouble. We won’t quit. Mom would rather be dead than stupid. Let’s throw her over again, Barry.”

“Wait!” Jessica said. “That’s not true. What you just said. You forget we’re inside here. We have access that you don’t have. We talk to Holly all the time. We’re not monsters. Holly is our Mother World.”

“Then why do you keep her stupid?” Ada asked.

“Not stupid.” Jessica sounded sincere, but I didn’t buy it. “Content. Holly is our mother, but she is also our child to be guided, much as you mold and guide your own world.”

I could have told her a thing or two about how well we molded and guided our own world, but suddenly that seemed as if it might work against us. I kept my mouth shut.

“Our solution is perfect,” Ada said. She put her hand between Toby’s ears and scratched. “What do dogs do but lay around all day anyway? You could keep him as fat and lazy and silly as you want.”

“That will simply never happen,” Jessica said. “We will never be able to convince all of the people. In fact we will be able to convince very few. If you throw Holly off the bridge again, you could cause a war in here. I want you to think carefully. It won’t be nice if there is artillery shelling going on in your mother’s lungs. Hand-to-hand combat in her stomach. Swordplay in her heart. There will be cell damage. We are fighting for our very world. Would you destroy an entire people, an entire world, for your Mother?”

“Yes,” Ada said at once.

I was glad I didn’t have to answer that one. I didn’t even want to think about it.

“And what will you do, Ada, if you force our society into a state of primitive savagery,” Jessica said. “How do you think Holly will like having little bands of hunter/gatherers roaming around in her liver?”

“If her mind is free, she’ll be able to handle her liver.”

“We won’t move to a dog,” Jessica said, and then she was quiet.

Ada took her feet. “One more time, Barry.”

“But what about all those people?” I asked.

“Shut up.” Ada dropped Mom’s feet and wiped tears from her own eyes with a big blue-checked handkerchief from her back pocket. I shut up and took Mom under the arms again.

We threw her over the side. Jessica didn’t even scream this time.

We pulled her up after only a few bounces. Ada looked grim, and I feared that this whole business would fail. All those people. I could be honest with myself, at least in little short bursts. I understood how entire lives could be lived in minutes. I knew that Jessica was right when she said the nanopeople were as real as me. I understood that some of them were dying. We rolled Mom over. She looked dead herself, but when I grabbed her wrist, I felt a pulse. Ada sat her up and gently slapped her face over and over again. I scooted back and grabbed a soda out of the picnic basket and poured a little in my hand and flicked it at Mom. No response. Toby pushed his way in between Ada and me and licked Mom’s face again.

Some time passed.

Then Jessica opened Mom’s eyes.

“So much has changed.” Jessica sounded weak, diminished somehow. “But one thing is still firm. We will not abandon our world.”

Ada sighed. I hoped she wouldn’t want to toss Mom over the side again.

“We propose a compromise,” Jessica said.

“We’re listening,” Ada said.

“We propose to let Holly have more control over her life,” Jessica said. “We have combed through her memory and found a set of activities that we feel prepared to tolerate. Ballroom dancing, for example.”

Ada’s face got absolutely purple. Her hands closed in fists and opened in claws, closed and opened. When she spoke her voice was steady and cold but coiled like a spring, cobra tight. “You’re telling me that you will allow Dr. Holly Ketchum, a respected physicist and leading authority on nanotechnology, a woman so full of curiosity and life that some people simply have to step out of her light or get burned, a woman vibrating with sexual vitality and gentle innocent love and openness for almost everyone–” She jumped up and shouted, “A woman who thrives on the adrenaline rush of white water and rock faces and free fall– you’re telling me you’re going to allow this woman to do ballroom dancing? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Well, yes. Among other things.”

“Ada.” I grabbed her hand, and the look she turned down on me would have loosened the bowels of a biker. “Let me try,” I said. I thought she was going to say something to make me feel small or even hit me, but she jerked her hand away and stomped off to her truck instead. Toby and I watched as she kicked big dents in the door of her truck. When she stopped yelling and slumped to the ground, I turned to Mom and spoke to Jessica.

“If there is to be a compromise, Jessica,” I said. “It will have to be on our terms. Or if you think about that a little, it’ll have to be on Mom’s terms. You’re going to have to learn to live with what your world wants, not what you want for your world.”

“Well, we did come up with this list.”

“You’re going to have to let Mom come out and tell you want she wants.”

“But she takes such chances!”

“You’ll just have to learn to trust her,” I said.

Jessica didn’t reply, and I was suddenly at a loss. It seemed clear what must happen next, but I didn’t know how to convince the nanopeople. I felt a hand on my shoulder and jerked my head around in time to see Ada squat down beside me.

“Barry’s right,” Ada said. “You must turn inward. You must let Mom take care of the stuff outside. You don’t have what it takes to deal with things out here. We can keep throwing you off the bridge until your society is completely disrupted. If it starts to look like those of you who are left are getting used to bungee jumping, we can do something else. Access Mom’s memory of alligator wrestling.”

Jessica squinted Mom’s eyes for a moment then jerked her head to the right as if Ada had slapped her.

“Look at ultra-light stunt flying,” I said, encouraged again by Ada’s support.

Jessica jerked Mom’s head to the left.

“Do we need to go on?” Ada asked. “We won’t quit.”

Jessica let Mom’s shoulders slump. She sighed. “We’ll try it your way,” she said. “We’ll try it. But strictly on a trial basis!”

“No conditions,” Ada said.

Jessica rolled Mom’s eyes for a long time, then she said, “You win.”

A smile grew on Mom’s face, bigger and bigger, until she laughed out loud. “Ada! Barry!” She struggled with the ropes around her wrists. “I knew I could count on you two.”

I could see it was Mom, something about the way the body was controlled convinced me Mom was to some degree in charge, but how much Mom was it? I worried that the nanopeople would have her on a short leash.

Toby lunged across my lap to get at her. The entire back end of his body wagged as he licked her face, and he could not contain his joy to the point that he peed all over me. I didn’t know how Ada felt about it, but a Mom real enough to make a dog pee was a Mom real enough for me. I leaned in and kissed her cheek.

“Untie me,” Mom said, twisting her head this way and that to avoid Toby’s tongue.

Ada pushed the dog away and pulled the big blade from the sheath on her belt. She turned Mom around and cut her wrists loose.

Mom’s hair turned brown even as she stripped off her sweater. Her eyes cleared; her skin tightened. She pulled the dreary housedress from first one shoulder and then the other and wiggled it down to her hips. She bounced a little and pulled the dress along with her underwear down her thighs and over her knees. Ada undid the bungee boots and pulled them off Mom’s feet. Mom’s wrinkles disappeared and her bones straightened. When she stood, nude and magnificent and beaming a big smile at us, she was Mom in body again. Well, in a way. This was Mom, I thought, as she must have looked at thirty or so. Long reddish brown hair falling over slightly freckled shoulders. Pale blue eyes. Small high breasts. Long strong legs.

“Shall we go home, Mother?” Ada asked.

“Not so fast.” Mom sat down on the bridge and pulled the bungee boots on again. “I need to pin down just who’s boss in here.” She climbed up on the bridge rail, and with a wild scream of joy did a perfect swan dive into the abyss.

We watched the arch of her dive and listened to her yell and watched her bounce.

“Do you suppose we’ve just postponed things?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, what do you think will happen to her when we’ve either got nanopeople of our own or we’ve died? How about then?”

Ada seemed to think about that as we listened to Mom whoop at the upswing of each bounce.

“Well, maybe we’d better pull her up and get some motherly advice,” Ada said.

from the collection Meet Me in the Moon Room

…a collection of 33 strange and wonderful short fictions

July 1, 2001 1-931520-01-1 $16.00

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1992. ]]> http://smallbeerpress.com/free-stuff-to-read/2001/07/01/moms-little-friends/feed/ 1