Then, as the days drew down to the end of the year, it changed.
Peter got off the bus at his corner and headed for his building, feeling like a soldier spiriting through enemy territory. Christmas Decorations hung listlessly from shops in the cold gray day. Snow had fallen two days ago, and brown sludge clogged the curbs. People, bundled tightly, hustled here to there, watching their feet.
He kept his mind on automatic until he let himself into his loft apartment. Then, in the empty kitchen, he asked disgustedly, “What in the hell is wrong with me?”
This was the first time in two months he and Evie hadn’t seen each other for two consecutive days. Usually, they shared a day’s break but never two.
Evie had asked if he wanted dinner as they left work and a panic had seized him; a chest-clutching panic that sent flashing red messages into his brain: GET AWAY GET AWAY NOW.
So, he’d fibbed, saying he needed to call family and friends back home. With a hard squeeze around Evie’s waist, he said he had a lot to talk about.
She’d giggled and let him go and, goddammit, he’d felt relieved to be getting on the bus.
He went over to the couch and plopped down, confusion wrinkling his face. “Why the hell did I do that?”
No answers but, recently, he’d felt … stifled. Suddenly, Evie’s intellect felt intimidating; her motivation left him disillusioned about his own career path; her beauty made him feel as if she’d plucked him from the stall next to the wetbrain geek at the freak show. Only when he was alone … when he was away … did he feel normal again.
He felt them back there, behind him—the Ghosts of Boyfriends Past. He wanted to spin around, see them in their pale-blue forms—as he pictured them—and ask them, Why? Why did you leave?
She knew it was a dream as soon as she saw her mother sitting on the rock in the otherwise barren and arid landscape. Far in the distance, sharp-peaked mountains like taloned fingers accused a sky the ugly shade of a bruise.
Her mother wore the dress she was buried in. Her dark hair blended into the wide straps. “He’s going to leave you,” she said. “He has no choice. The promise will be kept.”
Beneath her bare feet, Evie could feel thick granules of hot sand. She looked down and saw she was completely nude. The stained-glass was a heart-shaped black hole in her chest.
“Justice must be brought,” her mother went on. “He will leave, and your heart’s transformation will be complete.”
Evie approached. “Peter won’t leave.”
Her mother looked up as Evie approached and Evie saw how witch-like her mother was. “My beautiful, smart, talented daughter. More than I ever could be. Too beautiful, smart, and talented—that was part of the promise. You’ll drive them away and it’ll feed. It needs to come. It needs to be born. This needs to happen. I’m sorry, honey.”
Her voice grew more growling, with each repetition. Evie stumbled back. As she did, the stained glass shot out a ray of pale blue. It burned the edges of her skin. Evie squawked.
The black irises of her mother’s eyes seeped out of its circle and enveloped the white. Her mother’s eyes began to glow with the same light as the glass. She lurched toward Evie, her eyes widening and distorting, becoming monster-eyes. The glow brightened, obscuring her mother’s shape, and it seemed she grew more hulking, less human, becoming the monster Evie’d glimpsed in the mirror.
“I’m sorry but it’s inevitable, honey,” she croaked. “I will have my revenge. For you as well as me. We love and we pay and they never do. Shouldn’t they be punished? You are my sacrifice and monument. When it’s born—”
Evie felt sudden pain rip through her chest, as if an invisible hand had slammed through the stained glass and—
—she sat up in bed, screaming. Evie pawed at the glass heart, but it was cool to the touch. Just another minor ache.
She fell back against the padded headboard, panting. Her eyes blinked rapidly in the darkness. Distantly, she heard a car alarm.
Her mother’s voice whispered in the center of her head: He’s going to leave you … I will have my revenge.
She slumped further into bed, holding her heart.
I can’t go on like this, she thought. Her fingers traced the edge of the stained glass. She thought of removing the heart—not for the first time—and shook her head. God, how could someone remove something fused to her bone? For better or worse, she was stuck in the passenger seat to this thing—
(my mother)
—and the best she could do was … withstand it.
Sleep was a long time coming and she couldn’t let go of the stained glass.
“Long time no see, stranger,” she said as Peter opened the passenger door and climbed in. “What is this? The first date in a week?”
“Hey, babe.” A quick brush of his lips against her cheek. They felt like paper.
She pulled into traffic and headed west, towards the setting sun, out of town. “What’d the reviews say about this movie?”
He shrugged, staring through the windscreen. “Forgot to look.”
She looked at him, her brow furrowing. “You all right, Peter?”
He glanced at her. She saw something in his eyes, but couldn’t place it. “Tired, babe. It’s nothing.”
Her stained glass heart started to ache. She heard her mother say, I’m sorry, honey.
Peter, to his credit, lasted another two weeks.
The littlest, stupidest things got on his nerves. The way she spoke when she hadn’t completely swallowed a mouthful of food. Her light, airy snores. The way she kept her pubic hair. Things that no sane man in a million years would have a problem with drove him absolutely insane. He recognized this and restrained every biting remark, every insult, every question-that-isn’t-a-question that wanted to simply leap from his mouth.
He spent the night before he broke up with Evie getting cataclysmically drunk. He raised his glass of amber liquor at the television and slurred, “Here’s to me, the stupidest bastard that ever entered a relationship.”
He drank.
It tasted like guilt and banked fires.
He grabbed the bottle off the table, topped off his glass, and drank.
Repeat.
His head thumped the next day and every joint felt filled with broken glass. His hands shook. His mouth tasted like a baby dragon’s used diaper.
Evie—sweet, too-perfect Evie—noticed.
He said he hadn’t slept well.
She shouldn’t have accepted that—the contradiction was his physical form—but she did. Periodically, on the drive home, he saw her wince, as if in pain.
He didn’t dawdle when they got to her place; couldn’t dawdle. He knew he was making the absolutely worst mistake of his life, but also knew it had to be done. Like a spoonful of awful cough syrup, clench your fists and do it quickly.
So, when she got up from the couch to go change out of her work clothes, he made himself sit up. “Evie.”
She turned.
He swallowed. “We have to talk.”
He saw her eyes darken, as if knowing what was coming. Still, she came and sat down in the scrolled wingback chair next to the couch. As she did, she winced again.
Every word a hard little bullet, Peter began to speak.
The stained glass began to ache as soon as she sat down. In her head, she heard her mother say, I’m sorry but it’s inevitable.
“I …” Peter said, swallowing hard, and looking at the floor. He repeated dry-washing his hands, which shook. He’d said he’d slept badly. She’d smelled whiskey, but said nothing. “I don’t know how to start.” He licked his lips. “I can’t do this anymore, Evie—”
“Why, though?” she asked. The words felt jerked out of her. She thought back to when she’d first seen him. What happens to my glass now?
(oh I can’t take this)
And the ache in her chest grew sharper.
Peter looked at her and she saw tears in his eyes. “You’re so perfect, honey, but it … it’s
not you, not really. It really is me—”
“Stop it!” she yelled. “Don’t tell me that, Peter! They always tell me that! What is it? What is it that drives you away?”
Peter looked as if he’d been slapped. His mouth worked. “That’s … that’s just it, Evie—you’re doing nothing. It’s me. I …”
She looked down, at her knees pressed tightly together. She clenched her teeth hard enough to hurt her gums. It felt like the pain in her stained glass was digging in, trying to get to her real heart.
She remembered her mother saying, He will leave, and your heart’s transformation will be complete.
And then the pain exploded in her glass heart. Her hands spasmed open and she grabbed her chest, crying out.
She heard Peter calling, “Evie! What is it?”
The rays of blue light highlighted her knees, the edge of the coffee table. She looked down and saw the stained glass glowing a cold, pale blue through the latex appliance, her top, her fingers.
Peter, his voice terrified: “What’s happening? What’s—”
She lurched from the chair and stumbled through the archway and into the bathroom, slamming the door and, in an unconscious move, locked it.
Peter’s mind was a hurricane of half-thoughts and unspent emotions. Blue light. Her chest glowed blue light. Her—
He scrambled from the couch, knocking over the coffee table, and dashed after her. From behind the bathroom door, he heard her screaming.
He threw himself at the door. His heart slammed into his breastbone.
“Evie!” he screamed as she screamed. “Let me in! Evie!”
She wouldn’t stop screaming.
He thought he heard—and immediately took only one way—her shriek, “Get away, Peter! AWAY!”
He threw his shoulder into the door and heard a crack.
The pain clawed and chewed, digging into her chest, melting her nerves into one shrieking ball of red.
She tore her top off, then her bra. She ripped the appliance away, feeling the heat of the stained glass beneath. The pale-blue glow of the black heart’s light blasted out, hot and blinding, but the pain didn’t abate; instead, it grew bolder, becoming a Pagan god yearning for her suffering supplication. Its edges blistered the flesh around it.
Evie, screaming, dug at the stained glass, ignoring the sizzle as her fingertips burned, just trying to do anything to stop the pain, stop the pain right now—
She thought of her mother in her coffin, her mother sitting on the rock. Her mother saying, We love and we pay and they never do. Shouldn’t they be punished?
You did this, Evie thought, as her nails snapped and bled against the glass, the droplets sizzling. You did this to me.
Peter’s shoulder slammed into the bathroom door again and the lock snapped. The door shuddered open as Evie stumbled away, towards the bathtub, topless and digging at the glowing heart-shaped thing in her chest.
“Evie!” he bellowed and started forward. He froze as the light touched him. His momentum, his strength, his will drained away. At that instant, he was filled with such self-loathing a part of him wanted to gouge out his eyes. God, how could he do this to her? What right did he have?
“Evie,” he breathed and Evie, crying, looked up.
As the tiny panes of black glass cracked as one.
In her final moment, Evelyn Starling looked at Peter and saw the pain in his eyes, the concern, and, most of all, his love. All right there. Within reach.
“Evie,” he whispered, frozen.
She felt her black heart crack. The pain lessened for the briefest moment.
The panes of glass shattered, and the pale blue light burst forth, unrestrained, giving substance to what had been feeding on her pain and loss, to her mother’s revenge. The creature had needed and wanted one thing from Evie’s mother to do this: a womb.
A place for its birth in the world. A place to gain substance.
And her mother had given it Evie.
The final burst of pain came, so full and complete it rocketed through every nerve in Evie’s body. Darkness crowded her vision. She fell away, out of the blue and into the black. Thinking of Peter.
In the last moment of his life, Peter McDonald, hopeless romantic to some, loser to others, saw the blue light envelope Evie, but not before he saw her own light go out of her eyes.
Leaving before him the mind-bending thing that had resided and fed in Evelyn Starling’s chest. Its vaporous black form hulked over him, sucking him in its blazing blue eyes. Its visage was obscured by the blue light it emitted and, for that, Peter was grateful. To actually see it, he knew, would’ve fractured his mind in an instant.
The floor creaked under its weight as it took form.
The thing approached, fed all these years by the pain of Evelyn Starling, birthed by the scorned anger of her mother, hungry for much, much more. It would repay their pain.
Its pale blue phosphorescence engulfed Peter McDonald, and Peter McDonald’s death, the first of many lost loves that long, long night, was brief.
Because his last thought was of Evie.
The Universe
is Dying
THE WORLD IS ENDING, but you don’t know that yet.
You are James McIntyre, 31, and the instant before the smartphone on your nightstand rings is the calm before the storm.
Deanna in the other room on the phone with her agent. You take a final moment to adjust the ends of your tie. You smell the cool saltiness of the Pacific wafting in through the bedroom windows. You think of nothing but what notes the producers gave Marty about the latest draft of the screenplay. This is your life, and it, as far as you can gauge, is perfect. This is your life and it is all calm.
The calm passes when you pick up the phone and hit ACCEPT, when you bring it to your ear, when you say “Hello?”
The storm arrives when the boy’s voice at the other end asks, “Where the hell have you been, Jimmy?”
The boy’s voice wakes up your brain in a big-bad way, like the biggest hit of coke, but you’ve done coke a few times and coke is not like this. Great Klieg lights flash on in the center of your head, banishing mental shadows you didn’t know existed, showing the shapes of things too big and too numerous to take in at once, showing how little had actually been visible, how little you’d been working with. You can’t even be confused yet.
“You need to come home, Jimmy,” the boy says and your head is nodding and the Klieg lights begin to fade, and darkness flows in, and you make a strangled noise in your throat. The darkness takes your few memories—coming out to La-La Land, getting the coveted Universal writing internship, signing with Marty, meeting Deanna—with it, but not before you see how flimsy they are, hurried sketches to a storyboard of a film trapped in pre-production hell. You did not live these times. They are not yours and, as such, you lose them.
Deanna calls your name, but you don’t hear her. A hum fills your head, rising quickly, becoming a ringing and beginning to swallow you.
And you say, as the ringing reaches a deafening level, as the darkness descends over one final glimpse of the Pacific and Deanna’s strained face, “I have to go home now.”
Deanna opens her mouth, but the darkness falls.
The ringing, like the aftermath of a gun going off next to someone’s ear, dragged McIntyre back to consciousness slowly, receding as he became more aware. He looked through the windshield, at the intersection made surreal by the moving curtain of water on the glass, without seeing.
And then the intersection flickered like a television with bad reception.
“Gah!” he yelled, dropping his smartphone and jamming the heels of his hands into his eyes. He pressed until neon colors flashed, then warily removed them.
The intersection—the puddles of rain in the street depressions, the drooping, dying trees along the corners, the low one-storey YMCA across the street—did not flicker. He took it all in and a name bubbled up from the back of his mind: Traumen, Ohio.
He was home
and his mouth dried. “What the hell?”
He looked around the car—no key in the ignition, a tape-deck in the dash. The interior constricted around him. Heart thudding, he got out, grabbing the smartphone in his lap. The rain soaked him as he backed away from the car, a nondescript 1990s-era four-door he’d never seen before. It sat in the center of the intersection, paused in the middle of turning left
(off of petroleum street and onto west front street.)
He shook his head. It felt crammed full of newspaper
(like we used to put into our snowboots when they were too big.)
He turned the way he presumably had come and faced a girder bridge
(the petroleum street bridge)
with a raging gray river beneath.
He looked back at the intersection, but saw nothing there. No other cars in sight, not even parked along the curbs. No other people. The only movement the rain plunking into the street puddles. It was all so still, a movie set waiting for cast and crew to arrive.
A rising panic filled his head with static, closed his airways to a straw, pressed weight against his chest. Never mind Traumen, how he’d gotten here. Figure it out later. Just get away. Get away now.
McIntyre did, running from the car, running for the bridge. He’d run right down the center, run right out of town, run—
—right into what looked like nothing else but felt solid.
McIntyre bounced back hard onto his ass. He looked up unbelievingly, the panic momentarily pushed aside. The bridge was there, the grey sludgy water beneath, but this close, it was obviously a matte-painting landscape, something Alfred Whitlock would’ve done in The Birds or the 1982 remake of The Thing. This close, McIntyre could see the brush strokes.
Bones are Made to be Broken Page 13
