by Dahlia Adler
She was my mother; I should’ve been allowed to tell her, to cry in her arms. She should’ve soothed my fears away. We should be allowed that.
I should’ve confessed everything to her, let her see the ugliness inside me. See, Mother, what I did when I touched her, do you know what I am?
I wished to do it, and have Mother reel back in horror—not at me, but at the idea that I carried such ruin. You’re perfect, Jackie, and so was Annabel Lee. Love is never ugly.
That was all I wished.
But Mother was sick, and I could not put that pressure onto her heart.
* * *
Last summer I kissed Annabel on the corner of her mouth, as if it were less salacious than putting our plump bottom lips firmly together, less forbidden than a mingled breath, than a quick taste.
A kiss at the corner of the mouth might be innocent; it’s practically a cheek, after all.
We knelt between two grassy bluffs, hidden from the Kingdom and from the ocean: only the sun could see, the sun and those ruffled white clouds so like our petticoats. Annabel touched my cheek and pushed hair off my temple, and then she kissed me back. Her eyes closed, lashes fluttering. She was so delicate, so lovely, and her freckles were like gilded sand, or stars, or pinpricks. Because she hated them (as she was taught to do), I made up a story that when she was a babe, she was so incredibly beautiful the angels had argued whether to mar her beauty just a little bit. If she was too perfect she’d never survive, some said. Just a little change to make her beauty human instead of angelic. Others said she was destined to be loved with a perfect purity, so might her face not reflect that perfection?
“It’s a pretty story,” Annabel said, tugging my braid with a frustrated wrinkle of her nose. “I wish the angels who wanted me perfect had won.”
“Oh, but they did!” I cried, kissing her cheek again and again. “They—each—kissed—a—perfect—freckle—to—your—face—to—mark—your—angelic—perfection—forever!”
Laughter, unstoppable and sweet, bubbled out of her, and she pushed me playfully away.
Later, she told me she did not know if she had freckles on her shoulder blades, or down the narrow corridor of her spine, and perhaps, one day, I might discover it.
* * *
I dig my fingers into the beach as the ocean rolls up my knuckles. The tide comes in and then out again, in and out: sand sucks through my grip, slippery and flowing, drawn away by the undertow. I am wet up my thighs, and the ocean hungers for my hips.
Above, stars scatter like freckles. I hunt for the shape of a curving spine, a waist, and there, that spray of stars! Those are shoulder blades that flare into wings. An angel’s wings, my perfect Annabel.
When tears slip hot down my temple, I think they are drops from my own internal salt sea marking the beach before the tide smears it all away.
* * *
Part of me wants to be what they say. Dangerous. I would steal a touch here or there, the underside of a wrist, a press hip to hip, too firm to be ignored as innocent. I want to murmur into their daughters’ ears what I know about love. To fill their thoughts with longing, put fire where they strive so hard to feel nothing, to be nothing but perfect dolls.
I know what you are.
No, but I don’t think you do, old woman with your charcoal heart and cowardly hands. I am an angel. Fallen, maybe. But is there anything more natural than a fallen angel?
* * *
Tell me I’m young. Tell me I can’t know myself, that I have not even developed a real capacity to understand love and loss, to experience these big feelings pulling me apart from the inside.
But last summer I never feared meeting new people. I never feared being myself, being seen. I could laugh, gossip, drink my cordial, flick my hand into the sunlight and smile at whomever caught me. This summer I don’t know what I’m allowed to laugh at. The gossip can always turn sharply back against me. Every sip reminds me of Annabel, every sip reminds me of that glass of wine that told me I was ready.
I was not ready.
Is anyone ever ready?
There is a gaping wound between who I was and who I am.
If you do know what I am, please, I beg you: tell me.
* * *
The young man from Room 107 found me walking along the narrow path between the beach and the Kingdom. I’d been sent for a new slipper for my mother: hers had died the victim of a little brother’s exuberant splashing.
I heard him jogging behind me and did not pause. His shoes skidded on the gritty path and he was bold enough to touch the small of my back.
Not bold. Entitled.
His touch shot through me like fury, because I knew he did it only because of what he’d heard. Twisting my love as if I’d give it to anyone.
The young man’s smile was sweet, his eyes bright, and he said, “You seem to be lacking an escort.”
“My integrity is all the escort I need, Mr. McCabe.”
He laughed, a carefree and strong note, because boys are allowed it.
I paused to put my hands on his chest. I leaned in; he fell still. His shirt was soft, buttoned properly, but he wore no vest nor jacket. Only jaunty yellow suspenders that matched the band on his hat.
His stillness, like his laugh, was loud. He had no fears under this sun.
Jealous, I shoved him hard enough that he stumbled off the path.
* * *
Nobody cares if girls hold hands.
Our fingers entwined, a pocket of warmth tingling there, caught between palms.
No sick looks, no long judging glances, no need to hide it in alcoves or behind trees.
Annabel and I held hands every day. We slid fingers through each other’s hair, combing and rebraiding. We leaned close together to whisper secrets. Our cheeks brushed. Her hair tickled my ear. My hair caressed her temple. I felt her breath against my eyelashes when I ducked my face to hide a grin. Her giggle was more of a huff-huff-huff pressure than sounds.
In the shade of Mother’s umbrella, on a hot July day last year, we were surrounded by family and summer neighbors, crashing waves and layers of conversations cried across the sand. Resentful gulls argued on the wing.
The only thing that could not see us was the sun.
Annabel wrinkled her nose at her little brother as he tripped too near us, spraying sand so we screamed, laughing, and covered our snacks. She put her lips near my ear and beneath the cover of all that brotherly chaos, she said, “I love you.”
Everyone was watching.
I felt invincible.
* * *
There is this rolling grief that comes and goes. Like the tide, but there is no schedule for it, no great silver moon to pull it in regular courses.
Worse than the grief is the shame, for it is my own selfish anxiety. What if I did something wrong? What if what if what if? What if they are right about me, about ugliness? I am young, you say, how can I be righteous when the adults, the doctors and mothers and preachers and politicians, all know what I am?
* * *
Annabel Lee did have freckles in a curve along the small of her back, and a thicker, rose-brown birthmark just above her left knee. I kissed it, once. And all winter I imagined her birthmark to be the shape of a kiss, so that if I kissed the window of my bedroom in Baltimore then in my dreams a rose-brown mark would blossom there. If I kissed my mother, if I kissed the soft green leather binding of Twelfth Night, or the palm of my hand, or a winter orange, that same perfect rose-brown kiss would grow.
* * *
I wonder what gave us away. Did Annabel say something? Did she cry out for me in her fever, and before a doctor did she press her hand to that rose on her thigh and roll her hips the way she did when I touched it? Did she confess, did she defy them, did her mother have a vision?
Did winged seraphs descend from heaven to betray us?
That is the story I would tell:
When I kissed the corner of Annabel Lee’s mouth, the moment crystallized. Perfection captured forever in a single ripple
of time. It pulsed through heaven and hell, striking hardest at the angels who envied us. They might be powerful, immortal beings, but they are not two fifteen-year-old girls who hold between them the potential of a million lives. I drew away from Annabel to smile, but the thread remained, livid with musical lightning. Each glance we shared plucked it again, each memory made it hum, each touch—soft or swift or hot—strengthened the reverberations.
Those angels could not bear the purity of our love and sought to sever us. Yet so long as we were together, they could not approach, could do nothing but watch and yearn.
It was only when the winter arrived, when Annabel traveled far from me, that she became vulnerable. Separate.
And now I am alone, too. Vulnerable.
They touched freezing fingers to the thread between us, sickening Annabel Lee. The warmth of our love transformed into the heat of fever, and her shuddering chills were wretched mirrors of a delicate shiver along her arms when I played with the ends of her hair.
The angels perverted everything we were and they killed her. Not me.
Not. Me.
* * *
The tide has consumed me to the waist, to my navel that is a tiny pool of seawater now, a micro-ocean surrounded by the land of my body. If I were naked, that pool would reflect the moon.
Little narrow rivulets spread beneath my back, grasping around me toward my shoulders. The sand is duplicitous now; it appears solid but water creeps throughout its grains, and all the beach sinks nearer and nearer—farther and farther—into the sea.
If the ocean takes me, what is more natural than that?
What is more natural than a kiss?
A touch here, a touch there, this desire born in sunlight and surrounded by familiar laughter, family outings—what is more natural?
* * *
Mother always does better at Kingdom by the Sea than she does in Baltimore, but I can tell she’s not healing. Last summer she would occasionally join Father at sunset to promenade along the boardwalk that lines the bluff. This summer even such a brief, relaxed exercise makes her cough worse.
It is a dry cough, hollow and dull. The fine wrinkles at her eyes strain, and white edges her lips. She laughs, though, and teases us all, Father especially.
Somehow, Father does not seem aware anyone condemns his daughter. He remains too focused on Mother, perhaps, or boldly dismissive of gossip.
One morning when Mother was slow to get out of bed, and her companion, a nurse we brought with us, ordered a morning steam, I asked Father if we would come here still when Mother could not.
He frowned. “Why would we leave her in Baltimore?”
That wasn’t what I meant, but Father didn’t realize it.
The Lees returned after Annabel died, as if there were no way to break the pattern, as if drawn here or tied here, or as if they had to confront her monster.
There is no monster killing my mother. Nothing to confront.
If I were an angel, I would be jealous of how much I love my mother, too.
* * *
Maybe I am a monster. Maybe girls like me—
* * *
Annabel Lee stretches beside me, her hand in mine, a tingling pocket of warmth protected between our palms. The ocean streaks against both our bodies.
She murmurs my name.
I turn my face to hers: she is starlight, she is marble, she is a cold, lost corpse. Unreal, but not unnatural.
The night-tide becomes our blanket, tucking us in.
I must know what I am. An ocean creature, a fallen angel, a monster who does not belong?
A girl by the sea.
When the sun rises and the tide washes back out, will it take me, too?
* * *
There is a place deep in the heart of the ocean, so black and cold light cannot survive, and there, I think, Annabel and I could kiss, and no matter how strong the reverberations, no matter how lightning-bright that thread of time between us, the killing angels could not find it. Nor us.
I know what you are!
If the night-tide drags me deep, I’ll be a siren, a deep-sea girl. I’ll find Annabel and we’ll fly down there.
If the sun rises and I’m still here, cold in the tomb of sand, but alive by a spark—a warmth—a rightness—I’ll stretch my arms and let the morning brightness dry me, let the blue sky give me a new name.
I’ll teach that name to my mother, and to all the other girls.
I’ll know what I am.
Maybe the tide can tell me.
The Glittering Death
Caleb Roehrig
inspired by “The Pit and the Pendulum”
The devil comes for me in a dark alley, wet with rain and lit by a cold moon. And I walk right into his clutches.
It’s a careless move, like the countless careless moves people make every day with no consequences, even when they know better. Even when they know they fit a profile, and that someone is hunting people just like them on the streets at night. But it’s the end of my shift, I’m tired and irritable, and all I want to do is go home. So I’m distracted when I take the garbage out to the dumpster behind the café—my mind already fixed on a near future of fast food and streaming video, trolling my group chat with bad puns—and I’m not paying attention.
The alley is narrow, a space that seems to exist solely for the convenience of trucks to make deliveries and haul away trash, and the streetlamps meant to illuminate it burn out and go weeks without being replaced. There’s hardly enough light to see by, and I’m hoisting a bag up to the metal rim of the bin when I hear a footfall behind me.
I turn with just enough time to see a dark shape separate itself from the shadows by the wall, lunging forward; to see the swirl of a long robe, the point of a hood, and two eyes that glint in the center of a black void where a face should be. An iron grip closes on my arm, something sharp pricking the flesh of my bicep, and a gloved hand clamps my mouth shut before I can scream. My heart races, my head grows light while my limbs grow heavy—and the alley blurs, darkness sliding over darkness, as I sway on legs that have suddenly given up their support.
The devil folds me into his embrace, my heart pounding slower and slower, the world a slippery thing that won’t hold me anymore; and just before I lose consciousness, I hear him speak. “I’ve got you now.”
* * *
“He calls himself the Judge,” a woman had announced before an afternoon assembly at my school, two weeks earlier. Standing at the edge of the stage, she had glared down at us with a stern expression, her dark skin looking impossibly smooth under the bright lights. Cut in clean, severe lines, from her tailored blazer and white shirt to her angled cheekbones and sleek cap of black hair, she’d identified herself as Agent Fields. She’d even held up an official FBI identification badge for show-and-tell, as if any of the six hundred students gathered in the school theater were close enough to read it from the audience. “I’m sure that many of you have read or heard about him in the news already.”
She was right, of course. With a population of three hundred thousand, Toledo, Ohio, isn’t exactly a small town—but a serial killer who cuts women open and sends anonymous letters to the press after the fact tends to make a wide impression.
“What we know about the Judge,” Agent Fields went on, her voice carrying to the far reaches of the room, “is that he targets young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five; that most of his victims have been white, with dark hair that is approximately shoulder length; and that he abducts his victims and holds them in captivity for some time before he kills them.”
The words landed with the precision of an ice pick, carving room for themselves in the fear centers of our brains. Agent Fields was there to make her own impression, eyes sharp and arms akimbo, and exhibited no patience for an auditorium full of teenagers who gossiped and whispered while she was trying to terrify us.
“What we know,” she boomed, “is that the Judge saws his victims’ chests open while they are still alive, and
that he then removes their hearts. We suspect he keeps the organs as souvenirs.” This gruesome detail finally brought some silence to the room, and satisfaction pulled at a corner of the FBI agent’s mouth. “He dumps the bodies where he knows they’ll eventually be found—farmland, parks, drainage ditches—and once they are, he delivers a message to the press explaining why he’s done what he’s done.
“The letters accuse each victim of one or more of the seven deadly sins—pride, envy, wrath, lust, avarice, gluttony, or sloth. The letters also list the supposed weight of each missing heart as part of the so-called evidence in his ‘finding of guilt.’” Agent Fields paced the stage, pivoting on her heel, peering up into the balcony with the lights in her eyes. “We’re talking about a complete psychotic, here, okay? These letters are the ravings of a madman; the girls he’s killed were guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Fields had a partner, Agent Prescott, who stood impassively in the background. Petite and blond, with thin lips and spiky hair, she kept her arms folded throughout the presentation and every time I looked up I could swear she was watching me—as if she could hear me telling my friends that she looked like Clarice Starling’s love child with Rosemary Woodhouse. I was seated in the back of the audience with Brandy, Mark, and Shauna, and we were trading quips under our breath for the entire assembly; we call ourselves the Mean Girls as a joke, but the truth is that sometimes we are sort of mean.
“The abductions and the subsequent dumping and discovery of the bodies all follow a pattern,” Agent Fields went on relentlessly. “They all take place at around the same time in each lunar cycle. Girls go missing three to seven days before the full moon, and are discovered dead anywhere from one to six days after the full moon—”
