Out behind the carnival was the lake where everyone'd risen up and walked on the water back in 1913. It was a green algae slime-covered pool, and theory went that it hadn't actually hosted a real miracle. Instead the miracle had been lake overturn. Poison gases had asphyxiated the original swimming devoted and then brought their bodies back up from the bottom, perfectly preserved. There were photographs of them floating naked and pale after the limbic eruption. All those bodies stayed inviolate for a year, bobbing on top of the great green lake, and that was the everything of Heaven's Avengers. It was why we were where we were, who we were, and what we were. A bunch of dead people. Nobody ever rose, not really, but call it risen and you get worshippers in from all over.
People hallucinated here still, and the lake got the blame, those poisons pushing up into the air.
If the wives were in Heaven — and I wondered for a moment about the Rexes; there was something about the look of them that reminded me of my mothers — they'd won, but I wasn't sure I wanted to go up there. I didn't mind being cultless. I liked life among the living.
We joined hands, me, Reese, and Scarlett. We were sisters and wives. We were widows.
“Did you know chickens used to be a remedy for black plague?” Reese said. Reese had worked in the infirmary. She knew a lot about bad ways to heal things. “You'd pluck a chicken's ass and strap it to the bubo, and then the sick person and the chicken would just walk around together.”
“Did it work?” I asked, kind of knowing the answer.
“The chicken would get replaced until the chicken and the patient both died. You know what I like about the modern world, Natalie? You know what I like about it, Scarlett? Vaccinations and antibiotics.”
“Me too,” said Scarlett. “I don't mind being alive.”
“We have to vote on him,” I said. I had another look into the hen cage and saw Rexie put a claw out in the direction of The Preacher, her mouth opening a little. The eggs shook beneath her, and her orange eyes shone. The Preacher moaned.
“Honor thy father,” he whined.
“And thy mother. You poisoned the pop,” Reese said. “You don't deserve honoring. What if they weren't in Heaven? What if they'd just died?”
We thought about that for a moment. The real thoughts. The way our mothers’ bodies had been put in the high school gym. They way they'd been covered with sheets. The way the smoke smelled in Miracle, and the way no one cared. The way the town got swarmed with evening news for two weeks.
The way we'd been brought up to take everything down.
No one cares about dead mothers. No one cares about dead women, period; that's what we learned when our cult suicided. The women weren't on the news. Reese's boyfriend was on the news, because he was good at sports. Everyone just thought the women were dumb as rocks to fall in with a person such as The Preacher. But we weren't dumb. We were adopted and born into this. We were daughters and wives. We were supposed to be killed, but we knew how to kill too. Vulnerable softnesses. Skulls and bones.
We were just little girls — that's what people thought about us, the Sisters Stuart. Give any of us a drawing of the human body, and we could map the veins, the likely points for access. Give any of us a list of plants and we could tell you what the poisons were and how to mix them. We could give you a dose of goldenseal that'd make you hallucinate walking on the surface of a dead green lake, rising up and diving down through the green mire and into the muck, over and over, for the rest of your life. We had kill skills, that's what the Preacher called them. Did we want to use them? Did we want to be known for that for the rest of our lives? We had other plans. Killing wasn't the only thing to do on Earth.
Reese shook her shoulders back and looked at the Preacher. “You're shit out of luck. I'm going to be a pilot.”
“I'm going to run the country,” said Scarlett. “You're dead, officially, and unofficially, you're in a cage with something hungry.”
“Join us,” said Valerie, but she looked only at me. “Come up to Heaven.” My sisters rippled with white light. It wasn't bunk. I didn't want the crystals and the prayers anymore. I didn't want to be good. I wanted to war. I wanted to kill. But I didn't want to die to do it.
“When I was seven,” I said to my sisters. “And I was made Littlest Wife, do you remember what happened?”
“All the chickens died of pox,” said Reese.
“All the eggs were full of two-headed chicks,” said Scarlett.
“And you stood in the middle of the henhouse, with all them dead, and took out the wishbones with your pocketknife,” said Reese.
It was a legendary moment in Heaven's Avengers history.
I was a miracle. I was a sign from somewhere, that everything would be okay, that we were winning. I was only a kid, but I cut and cut.
I opened up my purse and showed them my collection. I hadn't broken them. They were precious. I had forty-seven. I fetched up the dead pterodactyl and sliced into its sternum with my pearl-handled blade, and within a moment, I had forty-eight. There was a ritual to do. I brought out a packet of matches, and a little bit of tobacco. I set a small fire, and sprinkled the tobacco on, and then I started breaking bones and wishing.
“Gotta get to the end sometime,” said Reese. “Gotta call in the wishes, real and fake.”
“Good girl,” said Scarlett, and smiled at me.
“It's time to get our vehicle,” Reese said, and walked out from the circus grounds, her pale hair shining in the backlights. I was here, breaking bones and making wishes on them, and none of my wishes were pretty. Scarlett took one end and broke a wish with me. Her eyes were shut and so were mine, and we felt that bone give. All bones will give if you ask them.
I looked at the Preacher. We were here together because of him, but that didn't mean he was a good thing. I whistled and the orange eyes opened. Back in the dark, I could see other cages.
Scarlett whistled too. Other orange eyes. The eyes of the hens. We'd both worked in chicken houses. We knew what hens were like. We knew what mothers were like in general.
In the cage where the Preacher was, Rexie shifted. The man was seventy years old and full of sham.
“Sisters,” he said, in his supplicating voice. “Sisters of Heaven's Avengers.”
“Daughters of a dead guy,” said Scarlett. “Wives of a dead guy.”
Rexie poked her head out, bending the bars. All over the carnival grounds, dinosaurs emerged from their cages, tottering, that high-kneed bird-walk, their chests full of wishbone. Behind us, the lake simmered and a bunch of 1913 ghosts trotted around on the surface of the water. The Preacher looked scared.
The dinosaurs started to tromp harder, thunder-footing, and the Preacher looked even more scared.
“I'm just a simple man,” he said, and then tried to make a run for it. Valerie lassoed him and dragged him back by his ankle, him scrabbling all the way.
“And I'm just a cult kid,” I said. “You set your henhouse on fire. You made some bad mistakes.”
We could hear the humming of a crop duster now, and Scarlett and I whistled louder at the dinosaurs. All over the grounds, pterodactyls pecked and Rexes stamped their feet, and the eggs from the henhouses wobbled and shook. I thought about what would hatch.
Everything. The thought made me so happy I could hardly stand it. I wanted to yelp and whoop and run around, but I stayed still.
The surface of the lake trembled, and out there in all their glory, ghosts danced on the green, victims of tremors, like these dinosaurs had been back when.
The crop duster landed beside me, Scarlett, and the angel in the yellow bikini. I could see Reese in the pilot's seat, and I said “Heaven's just a plot of land.”
The angel looked at me and grinned.
“I might stay down here myself,” Valerie said. “We've got no monopoly on good these days. I got sent like somebody's secretary, down here to recruit. I was thinking I might want to be a truck driver. Maybe I'll run
into you out there.”
“Might do,” I said, and shook her hand. She was an angel in a bathing suit, and I was a kid in a bloody dress. I looked at the rest of the feathery Rexes and figured angels didn't look like most people thought.
Reese leaned out the window of the plane and beckoned us inside; we hopped up, me and Scarlett.
“Little Widow,” Scarlett said. “Little Widow.”
The Preacher was squatting, a Rex standing over him, looking at him with her head tilted.
Scarlett hung out her window as the crop duster took off, down a little runway in the dirt, past the dinosaurs, and up into the sky. The dinosaurs started to dance, all the hens of the world, a circle of them stepping high, claw-footed, their feathers standing up.
I watched the Preacher get snatched up into the teeth of Rexie, and I watched her rooster come running, a gleaming, green-feathered gigantic. The Preacher's head was in Rexie's mouth, and his body went into the mouth of Rexie's mate. We watched as they wishboned him, tearing him into two sections, one bigger than the other. We watched the angels make certainties of his bones.
The dinosaurs surged up in a roaring wave of feathers and scales, stampeding, a henhouse from heaven, and maybe they were our avenging mamas and maybe they were not. Maybe they were just Heaven's livestock. But down here, they'd been livestock too, and so were we. We didn't truck with that anymore. We weren't for breeding. We weren't for feeding. We were our own flying things.
From the cockpit of the crop duster, the three Sisters Stuart smiled as we flew just over the surface of the Earth, low enough to see it, high enough to consider our futures.
“Little Widows,” I said, with solemnity. We weren't broken. We were human like everyone else was human. “Now's the time for us to bless the dead.”
“Bless them,” said Reese.
“Bless them,” said Scarlett, and we took each other's hands and blessed.
Below us, Rexes ran rampant, a beautiful flurry of greens and blues and reds, flapping and strutting, eggs hatching in the dirt.
“Bless the dead and keep them dead,” I said.
I dropped the head of the pterodactyl out the window, a spinning thing like an axe blade, twisting beaked and toothed to plant itself in the corn.
No one living had ever heard dinosaurs singing before, their trilling lark roars, their falcon wails, but they heard them now, these heavenly lizards, these glorious angels closest to God.
Out we went, my sisters and I in our little crop duster, flying together, us three, up, and up, into the clear sky, and out of Miracle.
Out went the dinosaurs, a flock of them from our old town, for a hundred hungry miles, their bellies full of meatcows, sheep, and one old man with no wives left to his name. They ran over blood-drenched ground, singing as they went.
See the Unseeable, Know the Unknowable
There are woods, and the woods are dark, though there are lights hung from the trees. Many of the lights no longer light up. Around the edge of the clearing, someone has strung a long chain of origami animals on barbed wire, some gilded paper and some newsprint, some pages torn out of books, some photographs, each animal snagged on its own spike. The animals have been rained on, and more than once. Not all of them are animals, not exactly. There are some shapes unknown here. The grass is trampled down in the center of the clearing, and there are muddy swathes deep enough to drown in.
We know things. We know that there are some things which possibly shouldn't be written about any longer. Possibly shouldn't be done any longer. The golden ages. They've been written, and better, performed, and better. A stranger, for example, comes to town and changes everything. Not a single stranger, but a troupe of strangers, spangled, striped, trapezed.
But we love a circus.
We know it's old-fashioned, but we can't resist it. That is the smell of greasepaint. We know it by now, though it still sings to us. We know how the roar of the crowd sounds. We know what the carnival refreshments taste like. We know the door that takes us to the sideshow. We've slept on the bed of nails, and maybe, though we won't admit it, we've fucked the two-headed goatgirl. And, yes, we know the important lessons, too.
We know never to run away to join the circus. There are circus people in the real world, on the run from circuses, escaped and fled, trying to pretend they never flung themselves in to begin with. Sometimes people get away from the thing they wanted. People like that could tell you stories.
In the world down here, there's a man with a belly full of flames who sometimes chokes on smoke; a tattooed lady with the universe, nebulas and black holes, comets and constellations, and all the words for light and dark that have thus far been invented, hidden up her sleeves. There's a strong man pushing a pencil across a desk.
A sword swallower steps through a metal detector and raises his hands in preemptive apology for the blade he's substituted for his spine. An acrobat climbs through a window and into a museum's upstairs bathroom looking for something that will fix the ache inside him, an elephant charges a train calling for its mate. Circuses dissolve. Carnivals collapse. Things get broken.
We have always come here, when we're in the area. Every seventy-six years or so, we visit, and the place has always forgotten us by the time we come again, but that doesn't mean we have difficulty with our methods. We've been doing this for centuries, and we're skilled.
At the end of the summer, here in this town at the edge of the woods, there's a day on which broadsheets fly in the form of paper airplanes, landing on doorsteps, catching in trees. The townspeople open the flyers and consider the date of the show with some annoyance.
Inside one flyer, there's an advertisement for a performance fifty years in the future. In the next, a performance fifty years in the past.
See the Unseeable, all the flyers read, and the townspeople grumble at the litter. The next batch are printed Know the Unknowable.
No one on Earth wants to know the unknowable anymore. There are plenty of things to know already. The world is too full and brains can only hold so much. Headlines flash across foreheads. Sometimes the guilt of information is too much to bear, and people hide inside their houses, burrowing under the covers, trying not to listen to the news. Whole countries are dying out there. The sky is falling. Some of the birds have stopped singing, and no one knows whether that's been true for years, or has only just happened. There is too much noise, and it's hard to tell who hasn't been heard from in a while.
There is an ailment moving from continent to continent, these days, and its symptoms include spontaneous deafness and blindness, and finally, in its last stages, spontaneous and permanent silence, without even any satisfying last words. A person might ask for a refill of coffee, and that will be all. Some people try to expose themselves to the disease. The quiet calls to them.
In this town, no one has the disease yet, for which we are grateful. Everyone can hear the flyers flying. Occasionally, one of them makes a trill, and townspeople look up, frustrated, snatch the flyer from the air, and stomp on it, feeling assaulted by whimsy, or possibly spied upon by their government.
On each broadsheet there's a simple drawing: a large black box in the center of a circle of trees. Maybe it isn't a box. Maybe it's a door. And maybe there is something, far off in the blackness inside it, something. But maybe not. Probably not. It's a blotchy drawing, and unsatisfying. It seems to have been done by a child, not by any real artist. Fingerpaints on paper. Each one is hand drawn, not printed. Whoever did them doesn't know much about much.
Nothing's made of paper now. There are better things to write on. Paper melts in rain. Paper turns to ragged slushy nothing. Even folded paper animals eventually disintegrate.
But we like them.
Old-fashioned paper ticket stubs pour down one afternoon in a swift yellow storm. The Show Happened Before You Were Born, they are printed, and on the other side, The Show Will Start After You Are Dead.
It isn't the children who pick them up. T
he children are busy, and things like this are beneath them. The town's janitor uses a snowplow to gather the drifts and then to pile them at the edge of town. He sets them on fire with a single quick breath. Then he sits down in some satisfaction, and roasts a hotdog.
Nothing has come to the town that hasn't always been there. This isn't new. The janitor has seen weather like this before. It always passes, and if it doesn't pass, there's the end of the world to consider.
He has a menagerie of tin cans, and plenty of ammunition. He has some hounds. One day, he suspects he'll need them, but he's lived in proximity to the possible end for long enough that he's used to it. If it gets him, it does. Everyone dies. He keeps things clean, and that's his job. Clean doesn't always mean things are safe. There might be lights on every corner, and there will still be shadows. There's nothing the janitor can do about that, save setting the town on fire, and even then, light only lasts so long. He's only one person here, cleaning up at the edge of the woods, and he works from nine at night till five in the morning. He'd been doing this job for centuries, in this part of the country, which is a notorious part of the country. Everybody knows it is. People live here anyway.
There is, as it happens, one stranger in town. The woman moved here recently, from a much larger city. She isn't officially a resident, though she's rented a tiny house near the place where the forest starts. She owns a gray cat named Susurrus, remnant of a relationship, and a small roll of money that won't take her far.
She left her last place in the middle of the night, as the ambulances were coming, and there was no time to pack up more than the cat, who prowls now, joyful but for his bell, stalking the edge of the woods where the songbirds don't sing.
The woman has used up the name she had before, and now she doesn't have one. She opens the flyer stuck in her screen door, and finds her old name written across it in a filthy blot, as though by a thumb pressed in ink.
She crumples up the paper, tears it into tiny pieces, and then buries it in the back garden, but two hours later, she feels the need to dig it up and put it in the oven on broil, until it's ashes. She realizes only after she's burnt the broadsheet that she has looked at the drawing underneath her name. When she shuts her eyes that night, she can see the dark, smudgy rectangle at the center of the trees, and she can see something inside it, far off in the black, something moving. The date on her flyer, the only one like this, is neither in the past nor in the future.
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 57
