Three Slices

by Kevin Hearne

  Something moves under the black cloth. The sound of clicking. Fluttering.

  A bird?

  Safira returns then with a small wooden cutting board. On that board: a glob of bone-white cheese shot through with arteries of something dark. The smell hits Miriam as it passes, a moldy, heady darkness to it. Musky, off, pungent as the congealed sweat on a dead man’s scrotum.

  Miriam scowls.

  The woman pulls the cloth off the other thing—

  And, sure enough, it’s a birdcage.

  With a living bird contained within. A pigeon, by the look of it. Head strutting like it’s listening to music no one else can hear. Stepping left, then right, then left again. It coos and chirrups.

  “Are you cooking dinner?” Miriam asks.

  But Safira just smiles and pulls out a small, hooked knife.

  Oh. Oh.

  Miriam’s been around. She has, to put it plainly, seen some shit. Safira reaches in and withdraws the pigeon from its cage—this is a bird that doesn’t squirm, that seems passive and even complicit in its own momentary demise. The woman takes the knife and, with one quick pull, pops off its head like it was a beer bottle in need of a swift opening.

  Miriam feels it. A twinge across her own throat. Like a tightness in the esophagus. The bird’s black eyes caught her in those final moments, glassily regarding her—and she felt the chance to become one with the creature as it died, to be drawn into its life force snuffed out.

  She’s glad that didn’t happen.

  With the head off, there arrives no great spray of blood, no gout of fluids. Just a trickle of dark red over Safira’s rough knuckles. (Raspberry jam from a ruptured donut.) The headless bird continues moving. Little feet grabbing for ground that isn’t there. Wings shrugging as if to say, Yeah, so, I guess I’m dead?

  A sound comes out of Miriam. Somewhere between a laugh and a gasp. A shocked guffaw. Her mouth hangs open and only droops farther as Safira then—with what looks to be a practiced hand—draws the hooked blade down the center of the bird. Unzipping it like a coin purse.

  Its guts fall out. Onto the cheese.

  They plop and spatter. Red—almost black—blood like lava down a mountain of cheese. Guts atop it like a pile of earthworms.

  Safira forms a claw with her left hand. And promptly begins to smash the mess together. Like she’s working a dough. Claw, mash, lift, mash, again and again—the stink of coppery blood mixing with the rank stench of funky, fucked-up cheese climbs into Miriam’s nasal passages and clings there like a ghost that won’t be exorcised. She stops breathing through her nose but the smell still hangs there. Sucking tight to the roof of her mouth, the back of her throat, the deep of her sinuses.

  “What the fuck,” Miriam says. Less a question, more an exclamation.

  “This is how we speak to the spirits. Those on the other side of the veil no longer speak our language—the tongue of the living, the words of the quick. The veil distorts and contorts our communication. And so we must create bridges. Ways to translate their words to ours, and ours back to them.”

  “Mashing bird bowels into disgusting cheese? You’d think a phone call would suffice.” Miriam holds the back of her hand against her nose. “What about sexting? No sexting the spirits, I guess?”

  “Look,” Safira says, that one word lifted on a tide of genuine awe. “The way the cheese forms fissures—the moisture lost, broken, and here the blood crawls through these unexpected channels. It tells us so much.”

  “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine?”

  Safira ignores her. Instead, the woman says:

  “You’re searching for something.”

  Sigh. “Yes, we’ve established that.”

  “An escape. An end to something.” Then her eyes light up. Her awe deepens. “You are like me. You are a seer.”

  I’m nothing like you, moonbat. But—? Maybe that’s not true. This woman knows things. She’s receiving information she shouldn’t have—admittedly, not in a way Miriam has ever seen before, but she’s met how many other bona fide psychics? A half a dozen? Not even? What’s to say what’s normal with numbers that small? It’d be like meeting six girls and thinking you know everything there is to know about what it is to be female.

  Maybe this “Safira” is the real deal, even if her name isn’t.

  “Go on,” Miriam says, narrowing her gaze.

  “You have come here. Looking for a woman. Melissa. Melora. Mary. Mary. Ciseaux. Stitch. Scissors.”

  Holy shit.

  She knows.

  She fucking knows.

  Miriam says, “Tell me. I need to know.” I need to be rid of this power. I need to cut it the hell out of me. This she says despite knowing she still wants it, too. It’s like trying to kick heroin: she knows it’s bad for her, but hey, how about one more hit? For old times’ sake?

  Then: Safira’s eyes roll back in her head. Showing just the whites, like tops of skulls. Her head rolls around on her neck, loose, unpinned, a low whine from the back of her throat. Two fingers thrust down into the mash of blood and cheese, scoop a glob of the white cream and dark gore, and then begin to furiously scribble numbers—nine of them. 239159184. The odor swells like a tide as what looks like some kind of grotesque miscarriage is stirred—like ghosts bothered out of their graves. Finally, a smear of viscera beneath it: a crass, violent underline.

  As if for emphasis.

  “I don’t get it,” Miriam says. “It’s just... It’s just a number.” Nine numbers. What’s nine numbers? A phone number has ten. Could be a social security number, maybe. Safira’s hand, the one with the fingers dripping, goes to her face—she goes suddenly pale, a green color like something spoiled.

  Then she turns and retches. Gagging. Dry-heaving.

  “Get it away,” Safira says. Words spoken through strings of spit.

  Miriam looks down at the cutting board. The red mess. The glob. The string of numbers off to the side. Then she lifts it, takes back to the kitchen. Nearby, she spies a couple of pens in a ceramic mug that looks like a ladybug—its wings cracked and chipped—and then she pulls a swatch of paper towel off its roll.

  She scribbles the numbers across it.

  239159184.

  Then: back to Safira.

  “You okay?” Miriam asks.

  The woman offers a meager, wan smile. “Yes.”

  “You look like kicked shit.”

  That earns from Safira a dark, bitter stare as response. But then she nods. “Speaking with the spirits is...not always pleasant. Their world is different from ours. A world of decay and madness. Even crossing momentarily to the other side is...harrowing. I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  Miriam folds her arms, shoving the flats of her hands under her pits. She needs another cigarette. “So, what does it mean?”

  “What?”

  “The number. What does it mean?”

  “They don’t explain themselves. It’s a message. They expect you to understand it.”

  Miriam sneers. “Well, I don’t understand it. The spirits can suck a bucket of ectoplasm through a long straw if they think I’m picking up what they’re laying down. I don’t speak numbers. I don’t speak math.” She holds up the paper towel and shakes it in the air. “This? Is useless to me. It might as well be a booby doodle drawn by some bored, horny kid.”

  The woman dabs at the corners of her mouth with a long, purple handkerchief. “I’m sorry. That was the message. They have no more for you.”

  “Great. Thanks.” Miriam plunges an angry hand into her pocket, pulls out a dollar bill. That one hand crumples it into a boulder, and then she flings it into the woman’s lap. “Thanks for absolutely nothing.”

  “I wish this was more helpful to you.”

  “Me, too. Can we go now?”

  “Yes. I can take you to where you’re staying...”

  Which is a dinky-fuck motel off 70, and it’s too far a drive and Miriam’s now burning with a hot, high-fuel concoction of inchoate rage and utter b
ewilderment (with a splash of total desperation for good measure), and instead, she decides that she’d rather go back and drink more. A lot more.

  “Take me to the bar. The lodge. Whatever it’s called.”

  “Vega. Yes. Of course.”

  5. Now: Sestra

  I’M MELORA.

  I’m your sister.

  She looks familiar. Miriam can’t place it. But there is something about her.

  “I don’t know you,” Miriam seethes, the side of her face pounding. Her tongue drifts across the tops of her back teeth, gives a little push. The tooth wobbles in the gum.

  The woman smiles—a big, broad, manic grin. “We’re sisters. We share...so much. We both drowned... the river, always rising.”

  It all starts to come back to her now. Her memories like the pages of a book flitting past. The number. The land. Pigeon guts mashed into soft cheese.

  John. The Caldecotts. The swallow tattoo.

  The vision.

  “The Mockingbird Killer,” Miriam says. “You. Still one of you left out here after all, isn’t there? One more of your sick fuck family.”

  Melora looks aghast. Something well beyond insult. Injured.

  “Oh, Miriam,” she says. “There’s so much you don’t understand.”

  Miriam kicks her in the crotch.

  6. One Week Ago: The Bar Bet, Take Two

  SAFIRA SAYS one last quiet apology. Miriam offers nothing in return. She gets out, and then Safira rolls down the window and says, her breath showing in icy puffs as she speaks, “The number must mean something, Miriam. Take heed.”

  “Uh-huh,” Miriam says. “Thanks for nothing.”

  The VW Golf gutters and grumbles away.

  “The whackadoo tell you anything good?” asks a voice behind her.

  Miriam, heart suddenly fluttering like the wings of a startled sparrow, wheels, her hand already moving to her pocket where she keeps her knife. A quick part of her thinks, I need to get more knives. Because knives are cool.

  It’s John. He’s standing behind one of the wooden posts holding up the overhang here at the lodge. He’s got a crooked, hand-rolled cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “So?”

  “I want one of those,” Miriam says.

  “It’s weed,” he says.

  “It’s not fucking weed. I know what weed smells like. It smells like a skunk that someone set on fire. That is high-grade tobacky of the non-wacky variety. And like I said, I fucking want one.”

  He laughs. Pulls out a little Altoids tin, and starts fishing for a hand-rolled cigarette. “I never took much to marijuana.”

  “Me neither, Grandpa.”

  He hands her the cigarette. Lights it for her, sheltering the match flame from the wind. Paper crinkles as it burns. She inhales. Smooth, like velvet.

  Her skin tingles. Her lungs pulse.

  “No,” she says, blowing a jet of smoke from the side of her mouth. “The whackadoo didn’t tell me anything good. Just a number.”

  “A number, huh? Phone number?”

  “No. Only nine digits. So? Maybe a social. I dunno.”

  He shrugs. “Sorry.”

  “Yeah. Well. Life goes on.”

  “About that.”

  “About what?”

  “Life. And its opposite.”

  “You wanna know,” she says, a smile spreading across her face. The warm embers of satisfaction stir into a straight-up campfire in her belly. “That’s what this is. I see your face, John Q. Jerkenheimer or whatever your name is.”

  “John Lucas.” He takes one last hit off his cigarette and then flings it into the parking lot—a pinwheel of orange sparks in the night. “And yes, I would very much like to know. Miriam. Go back in? Let an old hound buy you a drink?”

  “I’m still not going to fuck you.”

  “I still don’t want you to.”

  “Then we’re good. Let’s go drink and explore the fun-tastic wonderland of one’s own encroaching mortality!” She takes a few more sucks off the cigarette—like velvet, this smoke—and then they head back inside to the bar. Sit down at a booth. Order a couple white whiskeys. Something that comes from a bottle that looks like a pig. Same bartender: Janice.

  As she brings the two whiskeys, Janice says, “She’s not gonna do you, John. You know that, don’t you?” Then to Miriam: “You’re not gonna do him.”

  “It’s not the plan, no,” Miriam says, then tips back the whiskey. It cuts a burning channel right down her center. Like a core of lava boring down through her heart. John just waves both of them off, and Janice gives one last wipe-down of the table before retreating. To John, Miriam says, “So. Why now?”

  “Why now what?”

  “The decision to see.” Part of her just wants to get into it. Grab his hand. Take the Grim Reaper’s bone coaster through John Lucas’s inevitable end. But her curiosity goes deeper than just his demise.

  He sips at the whiskey. Winces. “Whiskey’s not my thing.” He clears his throat. “Anyway. I, ahh. I’ve been Army for a long time. Career. Or I thought. I was married. Have a son. The ex hates me. My son, well. He’s...” His voice trails off. Whatever he was going to say, he drowns with another taste of whiskey—this one a gulp, not a sip. “I think it’s just time to see what’s coming for me.”

  “You want to see if it’s something you deserve.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Some people want to know how they kick off because... they think they can avoid it. Or because they like the idea of rubbernecking at their own death. It’s like a fantasy, because in their hearts, they don’t really believe that what I say I can do I can really do. You, though. You’re one of those other ones. The ones who want to know if the way they go out is earned. Like maybe you’ve been spending your whole life buying your death in increments. All your moments cashed in toward a very specific grave plot.” She finishes her own drink and feels for a second like she could breathe fire. She urps into her fist. “What did you do in the military, John?”

  He sniffs. “They called it, ahh, HIC. Human Intelligence Collector.”

  “That sounds like something out of a horror movie.”

  He stares off at a fixed point about a million miles away. “Yeah. Probably about right. Truth of the thing is, I tortured people for information.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And I wasn’t even the real deal. We just warmed up the poor bastards for the CIA. They’re the ones who came in and... well. We don’t know what they did, not exactly. They didn’t want us in the room and they didn’t record it, but, you know. You hear things. Half true, half something else, maybe. But even half true—even one-tenth of truth—that still gives me the piss shivers.”

  Miriam lays her hand out on the bar table.

  She turns the palm up.

  “Well, John, let’s do this.”

  He looks down at it. Suddenly scared. She thinks, Don’t puss out on me now, dude. Give me my taste.

  John draws a deep breath.

  Then he reaches down and plants his hand in hers—

  7. One Week Ago: Wicked Johnny

  JOHN LUCAS has been tortured.

  His palms cut into Xs.

  His head wreathed in a crown of barbed wire.

  Something painted on his chest in blood—blood now dried, blood brown like rust and earth, blood that must be his. Blood that forms a bird with wide wings and forked tail: a swallow.

  A shape roams into view. A tall figure with a leather hood. A hood that dead-ends in an all-too-familiar guise: a plague doctor mask. Long bird beak with holes cut in it. No smoke drifts, though, no smell of burned roses or crisped carnation, no funeral-flower incense—just the shiny glass eyes, the beak, the hood.

  The figure holds a hatchet. Brand-new. Like for camping. It’s all black. Matte. No shine. Just dull metal, swallowing the light.

  “I’m glad I get to show you this,” says a voice from inside the hood. A woman’s voice. But someone else is there, too. Someone who stands behind it a
ll, in the shadows, shifting from foot to foot. The hooded figure seems to be talking to this third person when she says: “You need to see this. You need to see what I’ve become.”

  Then the hatchet rises.

  Then the hatchet falls.

  But it isn’t a clean strike. It’s clumsy. Awkward. It doesn’t take the head off, not like a heavy axe would—and so the Mockingbird lifts it and drops it again and again, chopping at John Lucas’s neck like it’s a stubborn branch or a bone in meat on the butcher’s block. Chop, chop. He screams. Thrashes. Until his screams are drowned. Bubbling, gurgling. Chop, chop. Soon, the head rolls off the table. Still attached by a strip of long, lean skin.

  One last hack. Cleaving that skin strip.

  The head hits the floor with a thunk.

  This happens in one week.

  8. One Week Ago: Fuck This Noise

  —AND THE vision kicks her in the teeth.

  She yanks her hand away.

  “Shit,” she says.

  He laughs a little like this is some kinda joke. “You okay? What’d you see? It’s nasty, isn’t it? Do I die on the toilet? My old man died on the toilet and—on the one hand, that’s probably a good place to go in case you let everything loose when you go, but dignified, it is not—“

  She can barely hear him.

  The Mockingbird Killer. Alive? Is that even possible? Of course it is. Because it wasn’t one killer. Carl Keener wasn’t just one branch: their legacy grew in the twisted roots and black branches of a whole family tree. Beck Daniels. Eleanor and Edwin Caldecott. Who knows where else those tendrils grew?

  “I have to go,” she says.

  “Wait—” He reaches for her. But his hand knocks over the whiskey—the glass rolls toward the edge of the table.

  By the time it falls and shatters, Miriam is already halfway to the door.

  9. Now: Mockery

  THE WOMAN, Melora, doubles over—because while it isn’t the same as a guy getting kicked in the soft, pliable sack that dangles between his legs, kicking a woman square in her lady-purse is no delight. Pain is pain, and this kind of pain is special—already the crazy bitch is clutching her middle as the feeling radiates up into her gut. She coughs. Winces.