“No, I err, don’t want to.”
“Perhaps you should’ve called the police.”
At that moment Ian walks back up the basement steps. He frowns and scratches the back of his head. “There’s no one in there.” He looks embarrassed. “Whoever it was must’ve left.”
“Ian, don’t be silly. We’ve been standing here the whole time and we would’ve seen…” she stops abruptly, for Ian’s glance is sharp. He nods at her when he thinks I’m not looking.
“I searched everywhere,” he says. “In every room. And there’s no one there. Nobody.” He says it with finality.
And then the woman, as if delivering her verdict, says. “Oh well, that’ll be that then…”
The key goes in the lock in one swift movement. I push the door open. Step inside. Shut it. Locking it again behind me at the top and bottom. I throw my gym bag on the sofa. Walk into the bedroom, shut the door and collapse on the bed. Within seconds, I’m in that world which is half dream, half sleep. NREM sleep I think my doctor calls it. I’m vaguely aware of a sensation in my pocket. But now I’m drifting, drifting. There it goes again. I think it’s a vibration. It is a vibration! I jump up. Switch on my phone.
Took ur time getting here didn’t ya?
Online
1 meter away
The Ghosts of Emerhad
Nghi Vo
Istow’s ghosts stand behind every seat in the parliament, their eyes burning bright and ambitious, while the dead of Besal roam the streets and will not come into any house.
I stepped off of the train, and almost immediately, a young girl pressed a small blue flower into my hand.
“What’s this for?” I asked. My voice sounded like rusted hell, but she smiled anyway, blithe and light. I guessed that she must have been no older than six when they signed the peace.
“For the armistice, sir,” she said. “For remembrance.”
I smiled at her because you smile at girls with flowers, but it wasn’t the war I remembered, with the horses with their legs shot out from underneath them and the regular tinny sounds of gunfire far off. Instead, I remembered eyes as green as apples, and a promise that we would see each other again in Emerhad.
The train station was brand new, and the only ghosts that lived there were those of the rats and the cats. There was something nastier in the tunnels where the trains came and went, but I kept my eyes forward and they bothered me not at all.
I made my way through the train station easily enough, but at the gate I was momentarily stunned by the people. There were so many of them, and the noise of the city, sharp and raucous in the thin winter air, made me want to put my hands over my ears.
You’ve been away too long, I thought angrily. You’ve lost your taste for people.
It was better when I started walking, better yet when I got away from the new parts of the city. Emerhad was like a woman covering up old scars with beautiful scarves and charm. In the long silences of the night, however, the scars are still there and when I saw them, I felt at home.
I turned a corner like any other, and suddenly I’m away from the city that Emerhad wanted to be. The wall behind me was smeared with soot, and from where I stood I saw another building along the alley, one with a lower floor but not one above. Instead, there were only a few old rafters sticking up into the sky and a door below opened to allow a thin child with its head wrapped up in a scarf to come out into the cold.
This was the city that I remembered, and I wondered if I could hear the ghosts now.
Cities do strange things to ghosts. I know this, I’ve known it since I was a child and saw a man with a hole through his chest board the train in Cosmas. Kalisgrad eats its ghosts; nothing dead stays there. Istow’s ghosts stand behind every seat in the parliament, their eyes burning bright and ambitious, while the dead of Besal roam the streets and will not come into any house. I did not know what to expect in Emerhad; when I had been there during the final days of the occupation, the dying were too loud, and their noise and their pain hid the dead.
Despite the familiar sights, the city was not the same one I thought I remembered. I didn’t remember merchants hawking fruit imported from the south or jugglers in the streets, clad in medieval motley and pitching long knives to each other with lazy grace. I didn’t remember the way the sunlight came through the clouds, picking out the tall towers of gray stone like an engraver’s chisel. It was beautiful, no matter its scars, and I had never known that before.
As I walked, I thought about my time in Emerhad, of being cramped in the narrow alleys with a platoon of men and waiting, breath nearly silent, for the order to boil out like ants. I remembered the taste of horse meat, and cat meat as well, and I remembered the sound of bodies slapping the ground as they were brought to the outskirts of the city for burial.
I saw my first ghost after I had walked aimlessly for almost an hour. He was small and ragged, and at first I thought that he was one of the pickpockets that thronged the streets. There was something crooked about the way that he ran, however, and when I looked closer I could see that his sleeve was flapping loose and stained dark with blood. He was off and around the corner in a moment and I kept walking.
I knew Iyan before the war, but that was distant and strange, like gazing through a salt-stained glass. We went to school together, we were friends, we were lovers. During the war, those words mattered less than a furtive match held to a cigarette, cold fingers pressed between bitten lips, and my own name, whispered harshly against my ear, that told me, yes, someone remembered it.
After the war, no one had anything left, not for a long time, and when I found his name on the lists of the dead in Malvo I only nodded, satisfied in a way that still puzzles me.
I went for years without saying his name. I went home to Barjaka. I finally angered my father enough that he disowned me, and I spent time with a widow who had known me since I was at school. I got married, but she had the wisdom to leave me before there was a child. I spent some months as a drunk in Istow, and then the rest of that year in Kalisgrad, where I felt lonelier than I ever had. Then one day I realized that simply not saying a name for ten years did not mean that it hadn’t been on the tip of my tongue the entire time.
In the end, I couldn’t stay away, not with my strange necromancer’s gift, and so I came to Emerhad on the tenth anniversary of the armistice.
I realized that there were still pockets of the war hiding in the city. Like a child who knows he’s not wanted, it kept to the old places and the broken places. I passed by a soldier dying impaled on the gates to a church as the drunks passed a bottle four feet away. From the street, I caught a glimpse of a sniper in a shattered window, his carelessness fatal and played out forever.
The war was here, and I knew that Iyan was, too. I walked faster as the darkness and the cold chased the people indoors. I knew that I would find him. I would come around a corner, or look down an alley, and he would be there.
They said that Emerhad was laid out by a blind Franciscan on a drunk mule. I was lost by the time full dark came on, but it didn’t matter. I could hear gunshots now and when I came around a corner too fast I saw a short line of horses stabled in an alley. One turned to look at me with milky white eyes and I kept walking because I knew I was close.
When the cannons boomed, I broke into a run. I had few memories of being alone during the war, all bad, and I knew that I needed to hurry. The night sky above was clear and, with the street lamps taken for scrap steel, the stars hung crazed and gorgeous above the war in Emerhad.
I felt a hand snatch at my trouser leg, and that was a memory too, though it was not mine. Iyan told me about it happening to him during the fighting in Istow, when a comrade nearly pulled him down into the muck and the blood. I shook the hand off viciously. I knew that if I fell I would be dead, no matter if they found my bones in one of the grave pits or felled on the doorstep of a shocked baker come morning. I ran because it was a war, and I knew I had to find Iyan.
The st
reet stretched before me, as much mud as cobble, and flickering along its length were men fighting one another with the blades of their bayonets, the first charge spent and no time to reload. I didn’t know where my rifle was, but my hands were numb with cold and shock. Everything felt distant and I dodged around the soldiers. They were bearlike in their thick winter uniforms, indistinguishable, I thought, to themselves as well as to me. It didn’t matter, I wasn’t here for them.
I slid in the filth and the muck, hitting the ground hard enough that I could feel the leg of my trousers shred away like paper. It was well I did, because a moment later, I heard a hoarsely-shouted word of command, not in my native tongue but in Scaenen, the language of the enemy, and after my first week in the army I knew the Scaenen word for shoot.
The bullets tore through the air over my head, the shots loud in a way that not even cannons are, and behind me I could hear men dying and in front of me I heard the monotonous, disciplined clatter of a trained regiment reloading. I fought the urge to struggle to my feet, covering my head instead. Another burst of fire went over me and when I turned to my stomach from my side I could see the eyes of the dead men light around me like candles, flickering and unsteady.
I crawled on my belly to the shelter of a short wall. When I looked at it out of the corner of my eye, I could see that some whimsical person had set statues of the eight gods along the top, their colors bold even in the starlight. When I looked at it straight on, though, I saw that it had been half-blasted away, and the jagged edge of it bit into the night sky. I curled up next to it anyway, my hands over my head, and I shook, and I screamed into the noise. The cannons belched fire and made a wall of sound that struck me in the chest, and then I could see the long shadows of horses on the walls around me. We had lost the horses early in the war, but all the dead are dead alike, and they were screaming, their long elegant bones snapping and splintering.
I was frozen like that, the layers of the battle from one year to the next piling higher and higher around me and on top of me, and I never thought that I was trapped because I had never been anything else.
A hard hand grabbed my collar and hauled me partially to my feet. I cried out in fear but then I was being pulled along, and it was all I could do to keep my feet. I couldn’t quite turn, and I couldn’t straighten, and so I only saw flashes of the scenes around us, of the air gone dense with smoke, of a boot with the foot still inside it running blood into the gutter.
He dragged me away from the street into an alley, one that twisted back and forth. It would have been hell to fight there, but there was no fighting. He released my collar only to grab me by the arm, and we kept moving.
I called his name but he refused to speak. Instead, he led me away from the war in Emerhad.
We came to the mouth of the alley, and at last he turned. His eyes were as green as apples, but now there was a flickering light behind them too, unsteady as the flames of a candle, and when he grinned, there was something empty there that had never been so before.
I thought he would say something, but he only reached out to straighten the collar of my jacket, his touch rough and hurried. When his hands dropped to my breast pocket, he stole my half-finished cigarettes with his old familiar grace.
His mouth shaped the word thanks, and with a hard shove to my shoulder, I was out of the alley and into the street.
I caught a glimpse of his turned back, another ghostly burst of gunfire in my ear, and I staggered into back into Emerhad, into a cold night in early December. The moon was properly risen, bathing the street in frigid silver, and the only person nearby was a reeling drunk.
Not a drunk I realized, but an addict. He had glazed eyes and the sweet cloying smell of a kama smoker. Kama was the army’s preferred sedative and war surplus had turned that medicine into a cheap poison.
“Sir, I’m a veteran, I wouldn’t ask, sir, but I’m a veteran…”
Even bent and crabbed with pain, he was taller than me, and I could only imagine how tall he had been years ago. I ignored his words and dug into my pockets. I found a fistful of bills to give him, but I also found a crumpled blue flower.
He blessed me, staggering away down the street, and I was left holding the flower between my fingers, silent as a stone.
In remembrance, the girl had said, but I wouldn’t need a reminder, not so long as the stones of Emerhad stood. The war didn’t need to be remembered, the war was right behind me, down the half-dozen twists of a dark alley, and so was he.
In the end, I laid the flower at the mouth of the alley, offering or atonement or bribe, and I turned and walked away. If it was a comfort, it was a bad one, if it was a resolution, it was a cruel one.
The war ended, but there are places where I know it never will.
How to Dress
an American Table
J.E. Robinson
Danny said he hoped Craig would give him pointers about the backstroke. My son wanted that badly. He seemed to live for that possibility. When Daniel wanted something, it is hard to resist.
I must remember my son’s name is Daniel. Anything else embarrasses him. Ever since he was eight and stopped answering to “Danny,” he reminded me it is “Daniel,” blushing mad. I don’t want to embarrass him today. Of all days, Danny, Daniel need not be embarrassed today.
I didn’t know much about him, except that Danny talked about him all the time, even before they moved in together. He was a senior vice president at a brokerage firm in the same building downtown where Danny was a paralegal. He didn’t sound like a black over the phone, and he didn’t sound that old. Jerry called NASD, just to check out this guy. In the twenty years since he got his license, not a blemish, not a complaint. All with the same firm.
“Twenty years!” Jerry said. “Shit! His book and his Series Seven are almost as old as our kid.”
Danny needn’t hear that from us. Too much in love, apparently, he loped from the elevator on cloud nine, in a building too pricy for his resources. “You’ll totally love the view,” he said. “We picked this place because you can see the Park.”
“Great.”
Daniel looked back at me as he unlocked the door. “You sound like a fucking cheerleader, Mom.”
We had known—I had known—ever since he was in swimming. His event was the medley; he was good at it, a master of all strokes since the second grade. In freshman year, he was enthused he could be on the school team. He bubbled. Gone was his talk about being president. College was still in the cards, law school, too, at the time, but my son lived for swimming. He practiced strokes even while doing geometry and French.
“If I keep this up,” he said, flailing the air, “I can be anchor.”
Because he wanted it, I wanted it. His happiness was very important to me. It still is. Daniel can be hell when he is unhappy.
There was a boy on the team my Danny looked up to. His name was Craig. I suppose you can say Danny had a crush on Craig.
I wonder if that senior VP knows about Craig. Did Danny tell him?
"Hey!” someone next to me said as I got a pedicure. “Barb Hausmann! Remember me? My son Leo was in swimming with your Danny. Remember? How’s your Danny doing?”
“Swell as melons,” I said.
The question has been with me ever since. I approached Danny as he watered the lawn. He had weeded the flower beds, as I had told him, after washing the windows, and he had cleaned his hands on his chest, the mud smeared like blood.
“Did you do it?”
He didn’t answer me. He simply smirked. He bent over to adjust the sprinkler. I could see my teenage son wasn’t wearing anything beneath his sweatpants.
Daniel has never answered the question. I doubt that senior VP knows enough to ask.
It always will grate.
Danny was proud of the kitchen, a place compete with everything, capable of feeding the president.
“Tommy loves to cook,” he said of the senior VP. “After a tough day with the Market, nothing is more relaxing for h
im than whipping something out.”
“I bet it is.”
Danny laughed. He became as red as his hair. “Yeah, yeah, Mom. That, too.”
He was right. There was a good view of the Park, framed in a large picture window. Nearby was a picture of a cute black boy.
“His name is Hal,” Danny said.
“Did you meet him?”
“We’ve played one-on-one a couple times. For a black kid, he could play basketball better. He plays like a white guy at Duke.” Danny laughed again. “Just kidding. He lives with his mom in Jersey.”
“Was your friend, Tommy, married?”
“Tommy is not the kind of guy to keep a baby-mamma in Brooklyn, I assure you, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Setting the picture in its place on the buffet, I prayed for the kid. If this senior VP knew better.
For swim practice, Danny got himself up early. He never ate breakfast, never showered--those things he did at school, after practices. Instead, he washed his face and brushed his teeth, and waited for Craig to show up.
Craig drove Danny to school. He was a senior, an early decision to an Ivy League, I think, and had privileges. His family got him a new car to go back and forth in, one that was cheap, reliable, and safe. Leo Dolan was always in it, in the front seat.
I still see my Danny sitting in the living room, tapping his toes. He was always an anxious kid. He didn’t want to miss Craig. Then, when Craig came, Danny became the third kid in the backseat. He never liked that. He didn’t want my “good-bye” kiss.
After it happened, I asked my son if he wanted to visit Leo. Daniel just called Craig a jerk. That didn’t make sense. Craig wasn’t the one that was crippled.
This senior VP had given Danny a silk bed, large and neat. Danny splayed on it and angeled his arms. “I can fall asleep like this.”
“Where is his room?” I asked.
“Here, Mom,” he said, patting the near side of the bed. “He sleeps right here. By me.”
“Of course.” I had forgotten they are man and wife. “Will you go to Connecticut or Massachusetts?”
Wilde Stories 2014 Page 2
