by Jason Gurley
Three things catch her eye:
The first is the gaping crater—no, not a crater: a fissure, a bottomless pit—that hisses darkly. It must be a mile across, and she cannot see its bottom, even from this high. It plunges into the earth so far that it might very well have opened the entire planet straight through.
The second is a pair of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs? What else could they be? They are immense, like blue whales trudging about on land, except—bigger. Much, much bigger. The larger of the two beasts stares placidly at her, tracking Eleanor’s fall, and then it turns away.
But the third thing—
The third thing is her mother.
Eleanor sees only a glimpse of her, a scarecrow silhouetted against the flaming earth. She is bitterly skeletal and naked and grimy and black. And she is looking straight at Eleanor.
Shouting. Shouting something.
The ground rushes up at Eleanor, and Eleanor wonders for the first time if she will survive this fall. She remembers a story Jack told her once, about a woman who fell out of a plane at twenty thousand feet and survived. “She was okay?” Eleanor had asked him. And Jack had shrugged and said, “Well—she broke like forty bones. But she was alive.”
But this isn’t reality, Eleanor cautions herself. This is a dream. There are no rules.
Except there are rules.
There are most certainly rules, and Eleanor does not write them.
Below her, the scarecrow who is Agnes Witt waves her open hand at the sky, and Eleanor feels her descent slow, then stop. She hangs suspended in the thick air, breathing hard, her lungs aching, and for one brief moment she thinks that her mother has just saved her.
“Mom,” she says.
But Agnes doesn’t seem to hear her, or recognize her.
Eleanor watches as her mother’s fingers curl shut, forming a hard, bony fist.
The pain, oh my god, oh my god—
Eleanor screams.
It feels so good.
The keeper clenches her fist tightly, her outstretched arm aimed directly at the invader. She can see the stranger clearly now—she is pink and naked, with fire-red hair and emerald-green eyes that she can see even from such a distance.
Her shadow watches anxiously, quivering.
“She’s only a girl,” the keeper says in wonder. “Only a girl. I expected… more.”
She looks down at her shadow.
“How could such a small thing do all of this?” she asks. “How could a little girl destroy everything?”
Her shadow is silent.
The girl floats high above the valley. The keeper squeezes her own fist again, and the scream that comes from the girl’s throat is the most piercing sound the keeper has ever heard. It seems to turn the earth into a tuning fork, the sound building and growing until the rocks vibrate and crumble.
“You’ve trespassed long enough,” the keeper says. “YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE!”
She squeezes harder, and the girl’s leg snaps in half. Squeezes again, and more bones break, the dry crack fierce and loud in the quiet, dead valley. The girl’s scream is cut off with the keeper’s next squeeze.
Then the keeper opens her hand and waves it dismissively, and the red-haired girl falls from the sky, and crashes to the ground like a sack of blood.
The keeper sits down on a rock, and stares at the heap of bones and flesh and red hair.
She can feel the change beginning, her sense of purpose returning. Her strength, like a sun blooming in her chest, restoring her. She takes a deep breath, and when she exhales, she doesn’t cough. She leans forward and works up some spit, and purses her lips and lets it fall on the ground.
It is almost clear.
Not black.
Where it lands, a single blade of grass pushes through the ash and charred dirt, growing slowly but steadily before her eyes. An inch, then two, then six, and then it stops. The keeper bends over and gently caresses the shoot with one dirty fingertip.
“Welcome back,” she says.
The keeper strides over the broken earth, her shadow firmly fixed to her heels. In her wake, little crumpled clovers fight their way through the soil, filling her empty footprints. Tiny, curious green tendrils reach out, rousing the life still buried beneath the destruction, and in response, a thousand thousand blades of grass rise like beautiful ghosts from the ground.
The body of the girl lies there on the raw earth. Her legs are shattered, twisted and folded at impossible angles. Pale white bone splits her skin. Parts of the girl have burst open like fruit, and blood has turned the ground into a red pond. Bits of dirt and debris and ash settle onto the sticky surface.
The girl groans, and sucks in a breath, then coughs from what used to be her mouth. A froth of pink bubbles coats her tongue and streams over her torn lips.
The keeper crouches beside the girl, stepping in warm blood without noticing.
The girl’s face is mangled, her eye sockets collapsed, her nose crushed into a pulpy mass. It is hard to tell if the girl even knows that the keeper is there.
“A child,” the keeper says.
She reaches out and cups what she thinks is the girl’s chin in her hand, and lifts it. One eye is smashed in its socket, weeping viscous fluid. The other eye is filled with blood, but it flicks in the keeper’s direction, staring blindly.
“You’re only a child,” the keeper says.
The dying girl says nothing. She coughs, and a rush of blood spills from her mouth.
“What were you doing here?” the keeper asks. “Why destroy my home?”
No answer.
With every beat of the girl’s heart, blood jets from cuts and gashes all over her body. The red pond widens around her.
The keeper stands up.
The girl’s jaw, broken into pieces, slides this way and that, and a thin click comes from within.
“Did you say something?” the keeper asks, leaning over again.
Another click.
The girl groans. “Aaaaa-naaa.”
“I don’t understand,” the keeper says.
She grabs the girl’s jaw-pieces and holds them together, grinding the bone, trying to shape them back into something familiar. The girl’s blood-red eye wheels about wildly, and she moans in unimaginable pain.
The keeper holds the girl’s jaw in place, and breathes softly on the broken skin and bone.
The jaw stitches itself together beneath the girl’s skin, the sound of it like fabric tearing, like glass shattering, but in reverse. The girl’s mouth still doesn’t move right—too many other bones are destroyed—but it is close enough.
“Say again,” the keeper orders.
The girl gags on her tongue, then coughs. She moves her jaw like a rusted, bent mailbox door.
“Maaaaa—” she moans.
The keeper frowns. “Maaaaa,” she mimics. “That’s all you have to say for yourself?”
She stands up again, then looks down at her shadow. “Take her to the pit. Put this… thing out of its misery.”
“—mmmmm,” the girl finishes. “Maahmmm.”
“Enough,” the keeper says. “Quiet, now.”
The keeper’s shadow peels free of her feet, fastens itself to the girl’s own broken limbs, and begins to pull.
The girl screams, wet and choked and bubbly with blood, and the keeper turns away, bored.
There is green everywhere, struggling up from the rubble of the valley. High above her she sees a hint of blue through the fading clouds. Something flies into her face, and she tries to bat it away—and realizes that it is a strand of hair, waving in a soft breeze. She touches her head, and feels the stiff brush of new growth there, winding through her fingers even now.
“To work,” she says, her heart strong and rhythmic in her chest. “Where to begin?”
The keeper lifts her hands like a conductor, and great boulders rise from the ground, light as feathers.
I don’t see her.
The darkness says, She is there. Barely.
Then she sees a faint, sputtering red cinder, far away in the blackness.
What is wrong with her? Mea asks. Why is she so—dim?
Her thread is broken, the darkness says.
Mea feels something draw tight within her formlessness. What do you mean?
The darkness is silent for a long moment, then says, Her thread. It has been torn.
Again, some strange presence washes over Mea, distracting her, but she sees nothing. She can feel her shape distorted by a strong, invisible current, rushing around her, pushing past her, moving toward the faint ember in the distance.
The darkness feels it, too, and is made uneasy.
I felt something. What was— Mea begins, then stops.
In the distance, the tiny spark that is Eleanor flares briefly, and goes dark.
Rain.
Agnes carefully saws through the baguette. Flakes of crust flutter onto the cutting board. The radio plays a Marvin Gaye song quietly, one she doesn’t know. She hums along anyway, feeling the music in her hips. She sets aside the knife and reaches for the butter, then gasps softly, and stops. Puts a hand on her round belly, turns and leans against the counter. She can feel the baby kicking, almost in time with the music.
“You like that?” Agnes asks.
Six weeks from her due date, and all she can think about is food. Her appetite had fled her during the first few months, worrying her. She and Paul had stayed up late one evening after an appointment with Agnes’s doctor. Paul wanted her to eat anyway, and he’d prepared chicken and dumplings—“My great-grandmother’s Texas recipe,” he said—but Agnes couldn’t manage a bite. Even the smell of food made her want to throw up.
But now she wants everything. She slathers butter and pickle relish on the baguette, craving the weird combination in some primal way that doesn’t even make sense to her. Paul wrinkles his nose at her choices lately, and offers to make chicken and dumplings again, but she turns him down, preferring instead the strangest food pairings. She thinks that Paul would be less critical of them if they didn’t seem like something a four-year-old would make themselves for dinner: peanut-butter-and-maple-syrup sandwiches, pizza with ketchup on top.
The baby kicks again, harder.
Paul is confident that it will be a drummer. They often lay awake at night, Paul’s cheek resting on the slope of Agnes’s belly, laughing at the rhythm of the baby’s kicks. The thumps come so quickly that they form a staccato beat, as if the baby is a tiny boxer trapped inside a punching bag.
“Except it’s learned to punch with its feet, too,” Paul says.
Agnes carries her plate into the dining room and sits down with a magazine. She narrates her actions so the baby will know her voice when it is born. “Your father says this magazine is trash,” she says, laying a copy of Cosmopolitan on the table, “but I like it. You’ll get to know that about us. Your father takes everything way too seriously. Me, I like the stories on TV and the gossip pages.”
Outside it begins to rain.
They put off choosing a name for as long as they can.
“We should wait until it’s born,” Paul says.
Agnes disagrees, if only because she hates calling the baby “it.”
“We’ll pick tonight,” she announces one evening when Paul comes home from work, and that’s what they do. No television, no board games, no yard work. They sit together in the bathtub, pink bubbles covering all but their knees and the crown of Agnes’s belly. She rests with her back against Paul’s chest, their skin slick and soapy, and Paul puts his arms around her.
“Henry,” she says. “If it’s a boy.”
She can feel his frown.
“What’s wrong with Henry?” she asks.
“I knew a kid named Henry when I was little,” Paul says. “We called him Slimesucker.”
“I don’t want to know why,” Agnes says. “Fine. No Henry.”
“No Henry,” Paul agrees.
“What about Robert? It’s a good, solid name.”
“Robert’s fine,” Paul says. “Boring, maybe, but I guess that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can surprise people when you’re a Robert. They don’t expect anything from you, and then wham, you write a bestseller, and they ask each other where in the world that came from.”
“It’s not a boring name. Maybe Stephen?”
“Gerald.”
“Ugh. No.”
Paul says, “What about if it’s a girl?”
Agnes says, “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that.”
“Maybe we could name her after—”
“Don’t say it,” Agnes says.
But Paul finishes. “—after your mother.”
Agnes tries to get up, but can’t find a surface to rest her palms on.
“Honey,” Paul says.
“I told you,” Agnes says, floundering around, trying to stand up. “I don’t want to do that.”
She slips and splashes back into the water, and a wave of suds cascades onto the floor.
“God damn it,” she says, and then stops struggling and slumps against Paul. “God damn you.”
“Sorry,” Paul says. “I just thought—”
“Fuck what you just thought,” Agnes snaps.
“It would be a nice tribute.”
“Yes, let’s name our child after a woman who abandoned her family,” Agnes says. She starts to cry.
“Hey,” Paul says.
“Don’t ‘hey’ me,” she snaps. “You know how I feel about this.”
“It isn’t like she ran away,” he says, quietly. “She disappeared. Something might have happened to her. It isn’t like she ran off with a movie star or—”
“I know what you think,” she says. “And—shit. I get it. I appreciate that you want to think the best of her. But—”
Agnes sits up, water streaming down her sides. She labors to turn sideways, then again to face Paul. She tucks her knees up, parting them to make room for her belly, and leans forward, her eyes damp.
“It doesn’t matter if she ran away, or if she drowned at sea, or if she was—it doesn’t matter,” she says. “I was four, Paul. I was four and my mother fucking vanished from my life when I needed her most. What do you think it was like, growing up with Dad without her? I spent all my childhood making sure he was okay while he got worse and worse and worse. So I don’t want to name our child after the person who took everything away from me. Including herself.”
Paul says, “She was your mother.”
Agnes just stares at him.
But it isn’t a boy, and it isn’t a girl.
It’s two girls.
Agnes wakes up from an afternoon nap, three weeks before her due date, to find the bed drenched. Paul comes home from work and grabs the bags that they packed, and drives her to the hospital. It’s a Thursday. The labor is prolonged and painful, and the girls don’t come until early Sunday morning. Agnes is only semi-conscious when the first cries sound in the crowded hospital room, and doesn’t hear the nurse exclaim, “There’s another!” She only grips Paul’s hand and pulls him close and whispers, “You name it,” and passes out.
When she wakes up, the girls have been washed and tagged and swaddled and are sleeping in a rolling bassinet beside the hospital bed. Paul is standing over them, enraptured—she can see on his face that he will be a better father than she will be a mother. She sees the two babies—each with a thicket of red hair, both in pink blankets—and then looks back at Paul.
He hasn’t noticed that she’s awake.
“I’m going to be the worst mother,” Agnes says quietly.
He looks down at her. He shakes his head and opens his mouth, but she puts a finger to her lips.
“My mother left me,” Agnes says. “I don’t know why, or even if she meant to, but I don’t know what a mother is supposed to do.”
Paul puts his hand on Agnes’s. “We’ll do it together,” he says.
But he has missed the point. Agnes
is not afraid of being a parent.
She’s afraid of being a mother.
She’s afraid of those little girls.
“What are their names?” she asks.
Paul hesitates.
Agnes shakes her head. “Whatever you called them is fine. Really. What are they?”
Paul puts his hand on the bassinet. “This is Esmerelda.”
He looks at Agnes for a reaction, then puts his hand on the next bassinet.
“And this is Eleanor,” he says.
Agnes studies the girls quietly, without looking at Paul.
“I love you,” he says, hurriedly. “Are you mad?”
“No,” Agnes says. “No, I’m not mad.”
He takes her hand and squeezes. She makes no room for him in the hospital bed. Paul smiles, and stretches out in a vinyl chair in the corner. When some time later the girls wake, squalling loudly, Paul shoots up from his chair, but Agnes doesn’t stir.
Weeks later, when the girls are finally asleep at four in the morning, Paul returns to their bedroom. He stubs his toe on the cedar chest at the foot of their bed, and the jolt stirs Agnes from sleep. She blinks sleepily at him in the pale light.
“It’s snowing,” he says quietly. “I rocked them by the window and watched it. It’s really coming down.”
Agnes says, “It’s so early.”
“It’s a little past four,” Paul says.
“I mean it’s early for snow.”
“Oh,” he says. “Yeah. It’s early.”
He opens the curtains before he joins Agnes in the bed. He turns on his side, then scoots backward until he bumps into her.
“No,” she says reflexively. “I’m not ready yet.”
“Just be close,” he says. “Watch the snow with me.”
Agnes sighs, and turns over and rests her arm over Paul’s chest.
“I bet there’s six inches in the morning,” he speculates.
“It’s already morning.”
“You know what I mean.”
The snow drifts down like feathers, exploding into crisp diamonds in the glow of the back porch light. The house is still, the girls slumbering. Agnes can hear Paul’s breath begin to slow and grow even, and when he is asleep, she lifts her arm and turns her back to him, and pulls a pillow close to her breast. This isn’t what she expected, none of it. Her insides are knotted, her chest hollowed out. There should be room in there for her family, she knows. There should be room for herself. But the space is thunderously empty.
