Shadows & Tall Trees, Volume 8

by Michael Kelly

  Before exposing the first image, however, Haugland’s first order of business was to make a thorough investigation of the house with his digital camera in tow, hoping to document the dilapidation within, and perhaps even inadvertently capture an image or two of its ethereal occupant. Idle curiosity led Haugland to frame his first digital image directly in front of the tripod, merely to ascertain whether or not the newfangled camera was capable of detecting things unseen. After the image was stored to internal memory, Haugland viewed it through the digital display, noticing nothing out of the ordinary. He dove deeper into the image, zooming as far as he could to the area just beyond the porch, to the place where he first glimpsed the ghostly imperfection. The clarity of the image was impeccable, but revealed nothing beyond what was already there. He shifted the image vector, examining various other quadrants of the house, with special focus on the windows, most of which had been stripped of their glass. He lingered on one of the upper windows, trying to determine whether or not the shadow he detected there contained enough detail to suggest the human form or was merely an oddly hanging drape. He sensed his imagination was getting the better of him, so he shouldered his camera and started toward the house. The sky was relatively free of clouds now, and his intuition told him he would have more than enough time to complete his outdoor shoot. He captured a few more images along the way, even going so far, at the midway point, of doing an about face and snapping a photo of the old camera rising in the distance like an ornate periscope in a prairie sea.

  When Haugland arrived at the porch he hesitated a moment, trying to locate the spot where the blurred figure first appeared. Again he turned so that he was facing the buoy of his century camera. He stared directly at the lens, as though waiting for its shutter to open and begin its lengthy exposure, but after a time he raised the digital camera to his eye, framed the shot, and took a series of images from this perspective. He then cautiously stepped onto the porch, half expecting it to give way under his weight, but it held, offering up only minimal complaint. He took a series of close-ups of the disintegrating railing, finding in its textures of peeling paint an infinite amount of abstraction. He turned his attention to the single warped window next to the door, capturing in its reflection a brightly lit but distorted prairie. Even the tripod could be seen, though just barely. Its blurred outline resembled an ill-defined interloper. By the time he stepped into the house, Haugland had taken nearly fifty images.

  The interior resembled many of the other locations he’d had the opportunity to walk through: stripped of most, but not all, of its possessions, its floors strewn with curling and decayed wallpaper, as well as dirt blown in from its open front door and windows. Layered throughout were bits of ceiling and shards of glass. There was so much here vying for his attention that he had a difficult time deciding where to begin. He knew if he started in this initial space, he would end up nitpicking angles and lose track of time. For now he decided on another course of action: that of allowing himself to wander freely through each room, making mental notes of areas he wished to focus on. He decided to begin on the second floor, even though ascending the stairs caused more than a little trepidation. Not only did the rungs creak horribly, but the rail was so wobbly that after one touch Haugland decided to avoid it altogether. He always considered the construction of past things to be far superior to modern offerings, but time and the elements, could decimate anything.

  When Haugland arrived on the second level, the interior seemed to have darkened by a discernible degree. He walked cautiously to the window overlooking the front of the house, and at first he thought the unbroken pane was so grimy as to allow only a minimal amount of light, but this was not the case at all. Haugland peered into the distant prairie, sighting his tripod. The wind picked up, and whistled through the broken ruin that surrounded him. Tall grass swayed to and fro, and a sudden gust of wind was strong enough to uproot the tripod and toss it to the ground. The prairie resembled a vast undulating maw, bent on removing all evidence of the camera. Haugland scanned the area, and could not even see his vehicle or the road beneath the rise. Without such anchors, a growing sense of dislocation overcame him, as though the landscape were shifting into something wholly ominous and new. A heavy downpour followed, obscuring and further transforming his view. He listened to the wind blasting through the reed-like apertures of the house, and it too seemed to change, altering from intonations evoking terror into something far more pleasing to his ears, something like singing.

  Haugland retreated from the window, determined now to get out of the house and retrieve his rain-soaked equipment before the storm got worse. This might prove to be the final force of nature to topple the century-old abode. As he stood at the top of the stairs looking down, fatigue overcame Haugland and it took every effort during the descent not to fall. Thankfully, the handrail proved more stable than he’d previously thought. Without its support, he would not have been able to descend. The wind and the song intensified as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, leaning for a long moment against the wall, waiting for his energy to return. He closed his eyes, trying to revitalize his previous alertness. The singing was much louder now, and he found it comforted him just as much as the Sibelius or Grieg he played in his darkroom. He opened his eyes and shifted along the wall to the opening that led to the main room and the front door beyond. From there he had a direct view outside, though most of the landscape was obscured by a lithe and long-haired figure standing in side profile on the porch. She seemed to be singing to the prairie.

  Minutes passed before she decided to move, and when she did Haugland became aware of the bark-like skin of her lower back and the obscene indication of her tail. She made her way nakedly into her domain, her gaze fixed entirely upon him, singing her beautiful, entrancing song all the while. Her tail flicked playfully to either side of her hips, like a whip in the lead-up to a strike, and her seductive lips were parted in a sinister smile. Had Haugland been able he would have walked directly toward her, meeting her halfway, but he was as inert as his century camera, his own lens open and alert, capturing everything upon the dry-plate of his mind. Each step she took afforded an opportunity to expose another image to memory, the only faculty of his that remained.

  As the woman strode across the detritus of the floor, her appearance slowly changed. By the time she was midway to him, her arms and abdomen and nearly the entirety of her neck and face had transitioned from pearlescent to a putrid, bark-like flesh. Her song, though, remained as beautiful as ever, and Haugland was left to focus on it alone as the spindly-limbed huldra embraced him like some long-lost lover finally returned home. Her transition—like an exposure gone terribly wrong—was so overpowering that Haugland would have given anything to close his eyes, but such a simple act was lost to him. As the final, horrific exposure coalesced in the back of his mind, he fell to his knees and became one with the detritus.

  And all the while his obsession continued its ancient and all-consuming song.

  The Fascist Has a Party

  M. Rickert

  • • ∞ • •

  It was his birthday, and even if it wasn’t his birthday it was a day, and he had been born, and no one could argue with that. He wanted a party, and it was a great day for one—so he declared—the rain only landed on the small heads of those who believed lies they were told by the news which was, after all, totally fake because look, there he was, standing in the sun. Well, all right, it was a room but it was a sunny room, everyone could see that, and if it wasn’t the sun it was a light and the light shone on him and that had to mean something, it meant something about who he was, the way he was followed by a spotlight like the greatest superstar that ever lived.

  He would have invited the children, but the children were missing. This was a terrible thing and the fault of the other party. When the children came back he would have a party for them. A beautiful party full of the beautiful things they loved. In the meantime, there was no point in letting their absence ruin the day.
There would be cake. He had promised cake and there it was, the most delicious cake anyone ever tasted, which was not made of children’s tears, a horrible despicable thing to say. “Take a piece,” he said. “Cake for everyone!” And if not for everyone, at least for some, and if not for some, at least for him, and if not delicious, at least okay, which was a problem, of course. Someone was in a lot of trouble over the cake which tasted only okay, so he convened a meeting right in the middle of the party and said, “Who is responsible for this crappy cake?” and the staff looked at one another for a full half-minute before they all pointed fingers at each other, which he thought was great fun, so he sat back and watched.

  Then he said, “What this party needs is an execution! Where is that traitor?” He said it with such good cheer that everyone clapped and smiled and agreed until they realized he was actually serious, but by that point he was already leading them outside to the gallows and nobody wanted to make a scene. Besides, the guy was brilliant! A genius! And if not a genius he was, at least, the boss, and no one would disagree with that.

  So he made a game of it with balloons and crepe paper streamers and an elaborate set of rules he shared with no one. He might have whispered them to his daughter, but no one else. Not even his other children; and you have to give him credit for that though some people say even he didn’t know the rules. It didn’t matter! It was his birthday, and it was his party and it went on and on, well into the night when someone lit the gaslights and the gallows faded into the shadows, which was a relief, because he did have a way of forgetting his plans.

  So they were dancing to the music he said was playing, and eating the cake he insisted was not made of tears, and when they noticed others missing it was assumed they had just grown tired and gone home to sleep their very beautiful dreams of making their county what it had once been, or maybe never had been, but would become again; a place where bodies hung in the shadows of his great light, and the children weren’t missing. After all, if you listened closely, you could hear their distant cries, well into that great American morning.

  Child of Shower and Gleam

  Rebecca Campbell

  • • ∞ • •

  She took the main floor apartment in a rickety house on a rough street. A block over some speculator had bought properties and boarded them up, lowering the rents to something she could afford, though it still stretched her uncomfortably. But it had a porch and a backyard that was mostly hers, though technically she shared it with the two kinesiology students upstairs and the Engineering doctoral candidate in the basement. Next summer the little girl would be one, and together they would grow rosemary in pots on the front porch and that made it worth it. Even if the kitchen floor descended rapidly toward the back step, so grapes and cherry tomatoes and lentils all rolled away like they wanted to escape. It was okay because when the sun rose, her bedroom was flooded with light.

  Despite economies, each week she was deeper in debt, and not for luxuries, either. Onesies. A second-hand stroller. Often at night she woke to a swollen bladder and thought about what else she could eliminate to pay for diapers or baby Tylenol. She didn’t have a landline, a car. She didn’t drink or smoke. It didn’t matter for her, but she wondered what happened to a kid born to fatherlessness and debt. The lists of things she needed continued to grow. Diapers. Tiny washcloths with pictures of lions and giraffes on them. She made these lists on an air mattress beside the still-boxed bassinette she would eventually have to assemble. Formula if her milk didn’t come in. Tiny socks.

  She was making one of those lists on a Saturday afternoon before work when she heard the knock, and though she hesitated to answer, she reminded herself she had nothing to worry about. A girl. Eight? Nine? Small, with pale eyes and dust-coloured hair tangled into a mat at the base of the skull. She stared. She said, “um.”

  Lynn said nothing

  “I was wondering if you wanted to buy a picture for five dollars.”

  She offered a drawing of a heart with wings and a crown, drawn in marker, with the motto LUv pEEpUL above.

  “No thank you,” Lynn said.

  “Okay.”

  The girl didn’t go away.

  “I have to go now,” Lynn said. “I have to get ready for work.”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “Yes.”

  “When are you having the baby?”

  “Soon. I really have to get ready for work.”

  “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  “Girl,” Lynn said. “I have to get ready for work.”

  “That means I have to go, right?”

  “Yes.”

  The girl left. Lynn watched her through a gap in the blinds as she dropped her five-dollar drawing in the recycling bin. Then she got on her bike and peddled furiously into the humid afternoon.

  *

  Another heat wave hit in the second week of August. Before that she had been pleased with her late summer due date, imagining backyard birthday parties before school started, a last celebration at the beaten-down end of summer. She’d tie ribbons around new shoes for the first day of school while the nights lengthened and tipped into September, the last popsicle of the year, blackberries and late plums.

  Her tiny AC didn’t do much but churn the dense night air, and she was swamped by her own body, rolling into and out of her air mattress, sweat pooling in every crease. She was working nights at the group home, which was easy but lonely, sitting up while the clients slept, listening for a knock at the door and an unwelcome visitor, her phone full of emergency contacts. During the day, when she couldn’t sleep, she spent the afternoons outside, listing the things she could sell. Her laptop might get fifty or a hundred bucks. Nothing she owned, she realized as a glass of tap water bloomed in her hot belly, was even worth pawning. Not even an engagement ring that might bring in a hundred dollars.

  The little one kicked her sharply between the ribs.

  A kid coasted up to the house and dropped her bike onto the concrete walkway by the front door, like it was something she did every day, like the little girl would do in ten years. Like a cat whose neighbourhood wanderings are finished, and who now drops to her side to scratch her back in the dust of her own front yard.

  “Hey, Lynn,” the girl said.

  “Hey,” said Lynn. “I don’t know your name.”

  “Nissa. But people call me Nis.” She said it as though she wanted it to be true. As a kid, Lynn had badly wanted a nickname that was cool or unusual; she’d tried to get people to call her Ynna for a while.

  “Nissa.”

  “Nis.”

  “Okay, Nis.”

  “Can I have some water? I biked all the way here.”

  The tap water was the temperature of underground, almost cool to the touch, tasting of pipes. Smelling, Lynn thought, as water ran down the sink in the ochre-tinted afternoon, like her grandmother’s kitchen, one of the small, hot houses in the small, hot southern Ontario town where Lynn grew up. Not far from where she stood, but nevertheless distinguished by an irresistible barrier, as though light itself could not penetrate the distance between her current location and that old address and phone number. The smell of water, though, running across a sink, like the smell of potatoes steaming in summer, and the firefly darkness of a deep front porch. That was a rope that tightened around her heart.

  The front door opened and she looked down the length of the apartment to see Nis in silhouette. She thought of a long corridor and a mirror at the end, revealing an earlier self—undistorted by pregnancy, or even adolescence—standing in the light.

  “Hello?”

  “Just a minute,” Lynn said, “shut the door or you’ll let the cool out. You should be careful biking in this weather, you can get dehydrated quickly.”

  “What’s dehydrated?”

  “When you don’t have enough water in your system,” Lynn said without thinking, and when Nissa nodded, she wondered if this was the future, the questions and unquestioned authority of motherhood. The feeling
that she could say anything and it would be true.

  *

  The afternoon sky was a blue so deep and still it seemed both limitless and opaque. Unable to get her shoes on her enormous feet, Lynn stood barefoot as the day’s sweat trickled down her back and over the cartilaginous lump that had recently emerged between her ribs. She thought of the day and decided that when Nissa visited they would go in the backyard to water the plants, the girl following after, and Lynn would tell her autumn plans: late flowers, vegetables. Asters. Lupins.

  Then her phone rang with a number she didn’t recognize and she hoped it was about the baby furniture. She had been so excited by the offer she didn’t mind they also seemed to want her to attend a meeting that probably involved a Bible and some advice about how babies need fathers.

  “Hello?” She didn’t even hesitate, didn’t have the moment of mouth-drying dread that had accompanied every ringing phone in the last year of their relationship.

  “Lynn?”

  “Is that—”

  But of course it was.

  “Don’t hang up.”

  “I’m hanging up.” But she didn’t and her voice sounded so unsteady she hated herself.

  “Don’t hang up. If you hang—”

  “—I’m hanging up now I’m hanging up now.”

  “Don’t hang up. Don’t hang up. Don’t fucking hang up.”

  She said other things, or maybe she just cried, and then she ended the call and the texts started and she panicked when she read them and deleted them, but you were supposed to keep threatening communications. It was on the list of things to do when you left. She’d locked everything down, like it said on the list of things to do, and she hadn’t been in touch with her Mom or her sister in two years so how had he got the number how did that happen.