by Joe Sullivan
Mercedes M. Yardley
Pen fluffed and primped and preened with her friends. She used a steady hand to blacken her eyeliner. She rouged her lips and pressed them together. Her outfit was chosen with care, showing her long legs, but not so short or low-cut that her mama would have disapproved.
She topped it off with a long jacket, her favorite piece of clothing, made of leather and feathers and metallic odds and ends that caught the light in wondrous ways.
“It feels so good to go out,” her sister, Tia, said. They sat in the back seat of the car, crammed in with the other beautiful girls. The car was awash in perfume and body glitter. It was a car of giddy happiness.
“It’s been too long,” Pen agreed. She leaned back gingerly, careful not to crush her feathered jacket. Her sister reached out and took her hand.
“Are you doing better?” Tia asked.
Pen nodded and squeezed her hand back.
“Much. Thank you.”
The women in the car chattered cheerily, but Pen and Tia leaned their heads together and were silent for the rest of the trip.
At the club, they stood in line, checking out each other’s outfits and hair. The men looked good. The women looked fabulous. They showed their IDs and entered. Music pumped loudly, and Pen closed her eyes to absorb it all.
“Let’s go,” Tia said, and threaded her way through dancing bodies.
The girls ordered drinks. They shrugged out of their jackets. Pen draped hers gently over the back of a chair.
“Let’s dance!” her sister shouted into her ear, and Pen nodded. The girls moved onto the dance floor. Magic took over.
The flashing lights and music took Pen away. She moved her body, extending her arms and graceful neck. It took her away. She was no longer grinding her way through school, trying to hold down a job and study at the same time. She was no longer a woman with a broken body who had miscarried the son her boyfriend of five years hadn’t wanted. She was no longer a nobody who was all alone after breaking up with him. He had turned ugly. He told her nobody would ever want used goods. He had reminded her that swans mate for life, but humans were different.
She turned on the floor, dancing with her sister, dancing with her friends, dancing with strangers. Eyes fell upon her, taking in her dark skin and the flash of her fine teeth, but she didn’t know this. Swans didn’t concern themselves with the hungry eyes of strangers.
The music changed to something less frantic, something slower, and Pen pointed at her throat.
“I’m going to get a drink,” she mouthed, and her sister nodded.
She returned to the table, and noticed her chair was empty. The jacket was gone.
She searched. She searched. She peered under the table and looked around. She asked if anybody had seen it, if they had run across it in the night, because it was oh-so special, oh-so dear, and reminded her of a better time. Things have significance, you know, and things can be so very precious, and this jacket was one of those things. Could you help me find it, please?
Her friends flew from the dance floor and winged around. They twittered and asked.
“Jacket? With feathers and gold and all wonder of magic? Have you seen it at all?”
Nobody had. It was soon time to go, and her friends gathered up their glorious jackets, each one perfect, each one tailored to their bodies, and Pen was left alone.
“Come home with me,” her sister sang, holding out her hand. “It’s late and I don’t want you to be by yourself. Stay at my place tonight.”
Pen shook her head and kissed her sister. “It’s just a few blocks away. I’m happy to walk. And I’d like to look for my jacket a little longer. Perhaps I can find it.”
I need to find it, her eyes said. I need this sense of normalcy. I need to dress myself in its feathers and float away, knowing that even if everything falls apart, this one thing will be right with the world.
Her sister didn’t like it, but she had to get home to her husband and son.
“Be safe,” she said, and left with her friends. They swanned into the night in their finery.
Pen stooped and peered under the table again, just in case the jacket had somehow faded into the dark. A pair of leather shoes appeared beside her. She slowly stood up.
He was gorgeous, his jaw lean, his eyes concerned.
“Excuse me, miss. You seem to be looking for something. Will you allow me to help you?”
Pen’s hand wanted to fly to her throat. She wanted to fluff her hair and soothe her nerves. She held her hand carefully at her side.
“I’m looking for my jacket. It has feathers and gold. It’s very important to me.”
The man’s eyes were warm.
“It sounds lovely. In fact, I think I may have seen it. There are many fine coats here, but not so many with feathers. Would you come with me and see if it’s yours?”
Something in Pen trumpeted in alarm. He was a stranger, and she was unused to other men after being with her boyfriend for so long. But it was cold outside and, more than that, she wouldn’t be herself if she wasn’t wrapped up in her feathers.
She followed him cautiously, but it turned out that it was only to the other side of the club, not down some dark alley way or behind a dirty gas station. She calmed somewhat.
“Is this it?” he asked and held up a denim jacket with a feather stenciled on the back.
Pen’s heart sank.
“No, it isn’t,” she said, and nearly started to cry.
“Hey, hey,” he said soothingly, and put his arm around her. She nearly jerked away by reflex, but she was so sad and so tired, and his voice was calm and quiet.
“My mother gave it to me before she died,” she said. Her eyes glimmered with tears that she had been trying to hold back for months now. “It’s all I have of her. I can’t lose it. I’ll be naked without it.” She didn’t know why she was telling him this.
His eyes were kind. He nodded.
“I see. Naturally that makes it even more important. Listen, I have a friend here who has a keen eye. Let me text him in case he’s seen it around. Feathers, you said? Actual feathers. And gold?”
She described it and his quick fingers jabbed at his phone. He grinned at her and his smile gave her hope.
“Just a second. He’s usually pretty quick to answer. Maybe we’ll get lucky. What’s your name?”
“Pen,” she answered automatically, and smiled back. “Thank you so much…”
“Tom,” he said. “Call me Tom.”
His phone lit up, and so did his eyes.
“Sounds like he might have a hit on it,” he said. “Feathers with metal accents. He says some girl is wearing it out back and showing it to her friends. Maybe she lifted it?”
“Oh please,” Pen said, and this time she couldn’t keep her hands from fluttering to her throat. “I need it back so desperately. Can he get it from her?”
Tom typed something and the phone dinged almost immediately.
“He says he doesn’t want to pull it off of her without you making sure it’s the right one. Want to run back and take a peek?”
She faltered. She faltered, and her nerves betrayed her. Tom nodded his head again and he looked hurt.
“I get it. You’re a beautiful girl and you don’t want to put yourself in a bad situation. I understand. I’d have him take a picture of it if the camera on his phone worked, but it doesn’t. I could take a picture with mine and send it to you, but I haven’t seen you with a phone in your hand. Do you have one on you?”
“No,” she said, and sighed. “I don’t.”
“My only concern is that she might leave and take your jacket with her. It seems important to you. But whatever you want to do. I want you to be comfortable.”
Nice words said in a nice manner. He seemed calm and open. And more than ever, Pen needed to wrap herself in her mother’s love.
“Okay,” she said, and stood up. “Where is it?”
Tom guided her with his hand at her elbow, not pushy or
possessively at the small of her back.
“He’s outside having a smoke. Just this way.”
He led her to an exit and opened the door.
“I really hope it’s yours,” he said as she faltered. “Wouldn’t it be amazing to get it back?”
She stepped out the door into the cold night. The door clanged behind her.
“Where—” she said, but that was as far as she got before a hand clamped over her mouth.
Pen struggled. Pen fought. Pen cried and prayed and cursed and begged. She threatened. She wept. At the end she just stared at the starry sky over the two men’s shoulders and wished herself away.
If I were a bird, she thought, I’d fly, fly, fly away home.
After her body and soul were used up, Tom and his friend left. Pen sprawled in the alleyway, her feet bare, her dress, so carefully chosen to not show too much, ripped nearly from her body. Her toes were painted a delicate rose. Her necklace was broken on the beer-soaked ground.
She tried to gather herself, but it was too hard, and her body hurt too badly. She stared at the moon, a cold witness to her horror, until it began to change. It swelled and grew brighter, shining, shining, shining, until it hurt her eyes to look at.
“Hey, lady. You okay?”
It was no longer a moon, but a flashlight beaming directly in her face. She squinted against it.
“Mama?” she asked, and the man pulled out his radio and called for help. Somebody brought out a thin fleece blanket and wrapped it around her, covering her brokenness.
“This isn’t right. It doesn’t have any feathers,” she said, and the ambulance doors shut behind her.
#
The hospital visit was grim. The police report was grimmer.
“His name is Tom and he is beautiful,” she said, and turned her face into the pillow to cry.
Her friends dropped by, guilt dripping off their faces in the form of tears. Her ex-boyfriend sent a bouquet of carnations. She hated carnations because they were cheap, and he knew this. But he was also cheap, and so was their old love at this point.
Tia held her hand, as a sister does. Her hand was cold and strong, but it trembled every now and then.
“I wish it had been my jacket instead,” Tia said, and Pen hushed her.
There was internal damage. Liberties had been taken, things done, foreign objects used.
“It doesn’t matter,” Pen told her sister. “A kiss would have been too much. What does it matter? It doesn’t, anymore.”
She was on the news. She was on the web.
“Did you see what she was wearing?” People asked. A picture of Pen and her girlfriends getting ready for the club flashed across the screen. “A good girl doesn’t dress like that.”
“It’s just leg,” somebody argued.
“It’s advertising,” somebody else said.
“Rape is never okay.”
“It isn’t rape if it’s wanted.”
“Consent is sexy.”
“You can’t rape the willing.”
Strangers argued about her body, about her clothes, about her stupidity to go into the dark. Pen wasn’t Pen anymore, but a face used for agendas. They lambasted her friends, accused her sister, accused her ex-boyfriend of masterminding the whole thing.
“That’s what you get when a slut gets pregnant to trap a man. They get revenge.”
Pen thought it couldn’t get any worse. She was wrong.
“Tom” and his buddy had filmed it. The whole thing. The camera was carefully kept away from their faces, but it was front and center on Pen’s. It captured her body. It captured the shattering of her soul and psyche. It captured the precise moment when her spirit curled up and died, and her dark, perfect eyes stared far, far away.
It went viral. Of course it did.
Friends saw it. The members of her church. Children shared it at school, it was uploaded on YouTube, it was shared on porn sites and through personal emails and was downloaded again and again and again.
“No,” she had said.
“Please stop,” she had said.
“God help me,” she had said, but most of these things were uttered with a strong hand clapped over her mouth.
“It smelled like cigarettes and tasted unclean,” she had told the police, but that isn’t enough to identify an assailant.
“Excuse me, sir, but do your hands smell like cigarettes and do they taste unclean?” an officer had mocked outside of her hospital door when he thought she couldn’t hear. But Pen had heard, and heard the responding laughter, and she thought of the sharp pieces of gravel pushing into her back and sides and stomach while that sturdy hand kept her swan song silent.
Pen’s body gradually healed but her mind didn’t. It couldn’t. A mind is used to capture and retain, to relay information, to process and show things over and over and over. Pen relived that moment every night. Every day. She covered herself in layers of clothing, cheap replacements for her jacket of resplendent beauty, and hid in her apartment.
“Do you want to go for coffee?” her friends asked.
“Do you want to go shopping?”
“Do you want to go into public and have the fingers and eyes of strangers touch your soul again and again?”
Stress and terror made her languish. Her hair molted and her skin pulled back from her face. She had become married to this new version of herself quite against her will.
“I just want to be me again,” she told Tia, and they cried together.
“Come live with me,” Tia urged her. “Stay with us. I’ll take care of you until you’re well enough to fly again. You can be free.”
“I’ll never be free,” Pen answered, and slept on the floor that night, curled up between the bed and the wall. It was a prison, safer than the prison her soul currently inhabited, and she slept restlessly, hoping that the dreams and the media wouldn’t find her.
They always did.
“Do you think the attack had anything to do with race?” a reporter asked her.
“How do you feel that the attackers haven’t been found?”
“Did you bring it upon yourself by taking your jacket off in the first place?”
“If you dance in front of men, what do you expect?”
She had been a maiden before this but became something else after. She was no longer Pen but became the girl who traded her virtue for a coat. It didn’t matter what she said. It didn’t matter what had really happened. She had walked into a club, all dolled up, and slid her protective covering down so she could dance.
“Mama would be so ashamed,” Pen cried to Tia. Tia was the only one who came over anymore. Everyone else had stepped away.
“Don’t say that. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I did everything wrong. I’m a woman, aren’t I?”
“You can’t think that way.”
Pen’s face was tattooed with tears that her eyes would no longer cry.
“That’s what the world would have me think. Who am I to deny it?”
Pen faded more day by day, her long neck hanging down, her breast turned toward the sky. Tia couldn’t take it anymore. She gathered up her flock and they donned their finest coats.
“We need to fly,” she said, and they took wing. They went to the police, to the media, to the Internet.
“We need to find these men,” they said. Their voices were bold. “We’ve waited long enough. One of us was attacked and stripped naked, first by filthy men and then by even filthier society. One of us dies of a broken heart. Did you know that heathens used to mark a swan’s beak to show ownership? What have you done to her? You scratch your name into her beak with claws, with your fingernails, with screwdrivers. It is enough. Bring these men to justice and let our sister come back to life.”
Their words stung. The beating of their wings against injustice stirred them up. Suddenly armchair reporters stopped ripping apart the feathers of Pen’s outfit that night and set upon Beautiful Tom. They analyzed the video and studied the
features of the men, of the club, and compared it to other videos popping up online.
Beautiful, Disgusting Tom and his friends showed up over and over. So many women, so many Pens, left crying and broken, tattooed and scarred.
“They will be found,” Tia told Pen. She stood strong, regal, and proud. She pulled Pen up beside her and brushed her hair away from her face. “There will be justice.”
Pen practiced standing upright, folding her arms about her like wings. This was how it was supposed to be. This was how she had been raised. Stand tall instead of hiding. Face the sun instead of hiding her head under her wing.
“I have something for you,” Tia said. She opened her bag and pulled out a beautiful jacket decorated with feathers.
Pen gasped.
“Tia, I couldn’t. That’s the jacket Mama gave you before she died. I could never take it.”
Tia draped it around Pen’s shoulders and took her hands.
“She made it herself from her own jacket. It would always protect us. It’s the most precious thing I own, but you are far more precious.”
Pen’s eyes filled with tears, and they were beautiful.
“Fly away,” Tia whispered. She closed her eyes. “Fly, Pen.”
There was a rustle, a handful of feathers, and Tia’s hands were empty.
Mercedes M. Yardley is a whimsical dark fantasist who wears stilettos, red lipstick, and poisonous flowers in her hair. She is the author of Beautiful Sorrows, the Stabby Award-winning Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu: A Tale of Atomic Love, Pretty Little Dead Girls: A Novel of Murder and Whimsy, Detritus in Love, and Nameless. She recently won the prestigious Bram Stoker Award for her story Little Dead Red. Mercedes lives and creates in Las Vegas. You can find her at mercedesmyardley.com.
Mercedes is a member of the Horror Writers Association and co-chair of the Las Vegas HWA Chapter.
A Circle that Ever Returneth
Kevin Lucia
You never thought it would come to this. You had ambitions. Dreams. A job with upward mobility. Career opportunities. You had plans.
Then everything fell apart. Maybe you pushed too hard at the quarterly business meeting. Or spoke harsher than you intended in a parent-teacher conference. Showed up to work drunk once too often. Screwed the wrong secretary or flirted with the wrong intern at the office Christmas party.
