Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2

by Nathan Ballingrud

She says, “Do you want to go out again tomorrow?”

  His core may be metal, but the flesh around it flushes delightfully warm.

  *

  Every time he tells her how it happened, he has a different story.

  He was born with no heart and the obstetrician grabbed the nearest replacement. He was in a car crash and died when he was young; the mortician filled his empty chest with something of the same size and heft but it quickened and beat, and he was returned to his puzzled parents alive, almost whole. He went to war and the grenade lodged there in a desert firefight. (Isn’t it the same type his unit carries? He won’t speculate.) He never dared remove it.

  (The war story can’t be true, can it? He’s so young. Too young to both go to war and return from it.)

  She accepts any story he tells. Then she files the stories in her mind so she can call on any of them when she needs them. He’s a lucky accident, a medical miracle, a war hero. Whichever story she needs right then, so she can love him.

  *

  Some days—most days—she doesn’t think of it at all. There’s so much more to think about. Meals, chores, television. Jokes and laundry. Bedroom, bathroom, smiling, sharing the car, sharing the bed.

  But when they make love, his heart pounds like cannonfire, and she draws him as close as she can, so the metal throbs against her own chest, urging its rhythm into her own heart. The threat of explosion excites her.

  *

  She can’t ask how it’s doing. She can’t ask how it feels. That invited uncomfortable evasion first, then snappishness. It’s a ticklish thing. She doesn’t always enjoy the threat.

  The week before Valentine’s Day they have a volcanic fight. It’s the kind that sparks from nothing and ranges around the world, the kind of fight that grows so ferocious that it becomes masochistically fun, like poking bruises or picking scabs. There’s vile satisfaction in making an Ouroboros out of a fight: jamming a snake’s tail down its throat.

  They are on the cusp of wringing out their past gripes, ready to shatter their future, when without warning he takes her by both arms and shoves her away from him, into the hallway.

  “Run,” he says. “It’s happening.”

  They only need lock eyes for her to understand. She flees to the bedroom, the farthest room from the front door, and she hears both doors, hers and his, slam at once. She crouches on the far side of the room (his side) with her back against the bedside table. She clutches her knees, first shuddering, then shivering, and all of her past and future with him scream through her head like bullets.

  She waits minutes. More minutes.

  She hears no explosion.

  *

  He’s leaning against the brick wall by the front door with a lit cigarette between his fingers. He’s paying it no attention. She’s not sure where he got it. He never smokes.

  He says, “It’s really going to happen someday.” He throws the cigarette into a snowbank and it dies with an angry, impotent hiss.

  She knows this is true. She’s imagined it a hundred times. In her fantasy, she recognizes it’s happening, and she has enough time to clutch him as tight as she can, so they’re almost one—jumping on the grenade—and she imagines the burst of metal racking their bodies, the shrapnel cutting escape paths through their muscles and minds, their flesh singed, their blood mingling.

  But she has just spent minutes crouching behind the bed.

  He says, “I put it in myself, you know. Replaced my heart. So I wouldn’t have to use it.”

  She files away his story. Whatever it takes to love him. She slides her hand into his. His fingers smell like smoke, and in the February breeze, they are as cold as metal, every one.

  K. M. FEREBEE

  –

  The Earth and Everything Under

  PETER HAD BEEN in the ground for six months when the birds began pushing up out of the earth. Small ones, at first, with brown feathers: sparrows, spitting out topsoil, their black eyes alert. They shook and stretched their wings in the sunlight. Soon they were pecking the juniper berries and perching on rooftops, just like other birds. They were small, fat, and soft; Elyse wanted to hold them. But they were not tame and they would not come to her.

  The next birds were larger: larks and grackles. They crawled their way not just out of the dirt round Elyse’s own house, the old Devereaux homestead, but farther out west, towards the town of St. Auburn. When Elyse drove down for her week’s worth of groceries, she could see the holes by the sides of the fields, the raw earth scuffed up and still teeming with worm-life. The birds picked at the worms for their meals, pulling them like long threads from a sweater, unweaving their bodies’ hard wet work. Sometimes the corn had died in patterns close to the holes, like it had been burned.

  Elyse thought the town’s new sheriff would notice, and he turned up just as the grackles gave way to magpies. His old police cruiser ground in the driveway, wheels spinning on rock, a sound she knew, and she went out on the front porch to meet him. She was barefoot. She did not like to wear shoes. An old superstition; she had not outgrown it.

  “Sheriff,” she said.

  He squinted through sunlight. Did not approach her. “Miss Mayhew.”

  “Is there something I can help you with?”

  She was aware of the way she must look to his eye: her black hair tangled, autumn skin sunburned, the backs of her hands and her wrists cross-hatched where she’d scraped them rooting through cedar and yew. She would have put on a whiter dress, she thought, something less hedge-witching than wine-colored cotton—but no, let him see it, the darker stains on it.

  “Some strange reports,” he said. “What you might call violations.”

  A magpie took flight over his head: black-and-white plumage precise and foreign. The sheriff raised his hand in a gesture to ward off ill luck—then caught himself. Still, he tracked the bird on the skyline.

  “One for sorrow,” Elyse said.

  “Hell of a lot more than one in town. If you’ll excuse my saying.”

  She held his gaze, thought about staring him down. She couldn’t, though, summon up the anger. She toed the peeling paint of the porch. “It’s not my work,” she said. “You know that. And he’s under the dirt.”

  “Still,” he said. He had keen eyes, blue eyes. Hair the sandy color of birch when you’d stripped all of the pale skin off it. And he gave her that same kind of stripped-plain look. “It’d be best if you scared the birds off.”

  They both looked up, to the gabled rooftop. The brown slates of it were covered in birds, a shifting mass of dappled feathers. The house looked alive. Elyse heard a burst of song—a lark, she thought—and then another bird singing, and another bird, but none of the songs seemed quite complete. They quit mid-pitch, fell off too soon, as though the birds had not learned the notes yet; as though no one, in the places they had come from, had ever been able to teach them the tune.

  “They’re birds,” Elyse said. She crossed her arms: final. “They’re not my creatures. They’ll do what birds do.”

  But larger birds began to surface: a turkey vulture, a hawk or two. There was talk in St. Auburn about a condor. A farmer in Woodbine shot a goose, and turned up on Elyse’s doorstep.

  “Cut it open,” he said, “to clean out the soft parts. For cooking. Found a letter addressed to you.” He held out the letter: bloodstained and wrinkled. It hadn’t been opened.

  Elyse looked down and knew what spindly hand had written that address. She touched the paper, dry as the rue she kept hanging over her kitchen counters. It was a special kind of lacewing dryness. It made her think of insects that moved in the summer night, all wings and shadows. They might have been ten thousand years in the tomb by the time she found them, all lifeless. Just tinder. She swept them off of the porch with a broom, thinking how they had been wet with life once.

  The farmer said, “Do you want the feathers?”

  Startled, she looked up.

  “The bones and feathers. I saved the most of the bird for yo
u.”

  He was a shy man, with that shut country look to his face, and she took the bones and feathers because she didn’t know what else to do. All of it fit in one plastic bag: a mass of down and sinew, so light now that the meat was not on it.

  She waved goodbye to the farmer’s truck. It bounced down towards the two-line blacktop. She could see black birds circle over the cornfields. The bright of the sun turned their wings to fishhooks. She could not say if they were crows or vultures. The wind sighed; dust stirred, and the corn moved.

  Later she sat and read the letter. The lamp in the kitchen wrote a curve on the whitewood top of the breakfast table. The letter, when she held it up to the light, was marked with blood through and through. She could still read the writing, crooked and narrow.

  My dear Elyse,

  I write from the ocean. I cannot know what messages have reached you. Perhaps you do not know there is an ocean. I mean the ocean that is here, not the Atlantic or the Pacific or any such body. The body here is not seawater. It is dark in your hand, and the double moons cast no kind of reflection on it. Sometimes I can see fish in the water, or some things that look like fish, the color of fish if you peeled the skin off them, but they move so fast they drop from view.

  I am never hungry here, and I don’t drink the water. I lie in the well of the boat to sleep, but it seems sleep is not of this country. I watch the stars. They still turn in a wheel, the strange stars I wrote you about. And sometimes I sail past the shapes of islands and see lanterns on them—are they lanterns? is that the word?—and I hear voices, but not any human voices. The lanterns scatter when I come near.

  I think about you, the stroke of an eyebrow, the shell of an ear, the map of your hairline. That long uncharted archipelago you make with all the parts of your spine. There is nothing I forget about you.

  Peter

  When she was done, she folded the page back in segments. She poured herself a finger of whiskey and drank it just out of the lamplight. Dusk had gone and darkness was settled. Insects were pocking their bodies on glass, trying to come in out of the night. Peter’s work boots were still in the corner. She had not moved them in his absence. The mud on them had long since dried. Flakes had cracked off of the leather like skin. Tomorrow, she thought, she would put them outside; out on the porch, maybe clean the soles. Prise the mud off with a pocketknife.

  She slept sitting up in the velvet armchair. Her mother had told her that when witches died in the old days, no one who’d seen or known them would sleep in a straight-bed for a fort-night, for fear that the witch would sit on their chest and steal the breath from them. Elyse had tried to picture this: the witch pressing his ghost against a body, trying to get what was inside. She had thought, I just want to press my body against another body, when I’m a witch and I die. But she knew bodies did not work like this; had known it already when she was a child.

  *

  In the morning, the sheriff was on her porch step. His hat was in his hands. He stood up fast when he heard the door open. “Miss Mayhew,” he said.

  She was wearing a gray cotton dress with flowers. The weight of her long black hair was wet. She still felt scrubbed-clean, unshelled by the shower. She didn’t want to face a man like that. She put Peter’s boots down on the porch boards, rested a hand on her hip. “Sheriff,” she said. “Have you come to arrest me?”

  “No, ma’am.” He put his hat back on his head; went around to his car and opened the trunk. He came back with a white swan in his hands. It was dead: there was blood still on its chest-feathers, gone dark now, not that living red. She could see the place where the bullet was in it. Its wings and its lithe neck drooped in death.

  She reached out and put one hand on a wing. Lightly, only: the brush of her fingers. She didn’t want to trouble it.

  “Fellow out in Marsdale brought it down. I figured you’d know what to do with it.” The sheriff fixed her with his gaze. His face was very patient.

  “It’s not mine.”

  “Never said it was. A letter, though, once it’s sent …”

  Elyse said, “You spend too much time talking to farmers.” But she took the swan from him. It felt like a child, the weight in her arms. Cradling was what you called the motion. There was no other way to carry it.

  She didn’t want the law in her house. There was lead and gunpowder lining the threshold, cloves over the door to guard against it. But she asked the sheriff, “Have you got a name?”

  He paused halfway to turning. “Linden.”

  “You’ll bring the birds?”

  “When I find them.”

  “Did you shoot this one down?” She hefted the swan a little.

  He looked at her with those August sky eyes, like she was confusing to him. “No, ma’am. I never had much time for hunting birds.”

  Elyse said, “Only men.”

  Later she watched him drive off, the lone car on the road. It was early, still, and the air was cold. Autumn had started moving in: setting the first of its furniture up in the room that summer had not vacated.

  There was no point to putting off unpleasant tasks. She set the swan on a broad cutting board and went to work dismantling it. The feathers went first, in matted handfuls, because she could make some use of them. Then she took the butchering knife and carved a space between the ribs. She had to snap the breastbone first. It was hard, the bone slippery in her grip. Even birds had such tough bones, bodies built for survival. She marveled at it. But when she got into the soft meat of organs, she found the letter almost at once, feeling for it with her fingertips. The same envelope, sealed and dirty; the same precise and crooked address.

  She opened it and read it with the blood still on her hands.

  Elyse,

  I worry that time doesn’t pass for you the way it does here. I worry that I’ll get out of sync before I find you, before I find my way back. I told you about the birds in the forest, how they seemed to migrate so fast, so that one moment there were summer birds, then just starlings. And moss seemed to cover the bark of trees as I walked past. Like everything was living in motion. I saw a flower open and close. A fox get carried apart by ants, till all that was left was the bones of it. I want to date these letters somehow, but don’t think I can.

  I am following the railroad out towards the ocean. There are no trains ever, only tracks. I see animals, but no other people. Sometimes lights very far in the distance, lights that look like cars in the dusk, driving on highways, out to the west. If there are train tracks, why not cars? But it makes me so sad to see them.

  I miss our own quiet country road. I miss the unmarked settler graves you found along it, that summer that we went bone-hunting. You were the one who could find the dead where the ground hid them under its skin. You are a better witch than I was. I admit it. I miss the way you smelled of witchcraft. Soot on your fingertips, sage and hyssop, sweet dock and cedar tips. Even in the thick of the forest, nothing here has a scent.

  Be safe and know I am trying to reach you.

  Peter

  Elyse put the letter beside its cousin, in a box she had once kept recipes in. She finished stripping the swan of feathers and set them aside. The meat and bones and skin she took outside and laid in the garden, hoping wolves would come to eat at it—the skinny wolves that haunted the fields, gray interlopers. Being a witch, Elyse had nothing to fear from their presence. The townsfolk objected, were frightened of them. But Peter had had the gift of wolf-speaking, and when Elyse saw their black shapes in the night, the glint of their eyes, she thought of him.

  Out in the yard, she saw new hollows, places where birds were still breaking the surface. The roof of her house was thick and busy. A crane landed for a moment, ghostly white legs crooked and graceful, then flourished its wings and was flying again. Elyse could not think why the sheriff had spared her. By rights, she should have been taken in; the birds were evidence of witching, and this was the place they had marked as their home. Men had been put in the ground for less; she would kno
w. She would know.

  She cleaned off the cutting board in the kitchen; made a sandwich, cut it in two. The whole house smelled of blood and magic. She could hear the birds on the roof. For a long time, when Peter went into the ground, she had not eaten. It had been hard to swallow, hard to chew; hard even to take the knives from their drawers, to knead the bread, measure coffee to brew. This was not a widow’s grief, or not all of it; green onions, when she touched them, sprouted anew, and eggs cracked, and the yolks crawled out on the counter. Potatoes sent out new roots. A leg of lamb once pulsed with blood. She feared what her hands might do, while something in her reached for resurrection. It was easier not to touch food.

  The wolves left rabbits out on her doorstep. A whole deer once, its eyes still dark, its dun skin soft and smooth. Wolves, she thought, had simple thoughts. Hunger, not-hunger, and sometimes the moon.

  The sheriff—newly appointed—had brought a casserole. From the ladies down at Mission Valley, he said. Then another day: from the ladies at St. Jude’s. Elyse had thought they came from the same kitchen.

  “Charity,” she’d said: scornful in her anger.

  He’d shrugged: awkward in the new uniform. “It’s just food.”

  Now she ate in hard little bites. A hummingbird floated at the window, all dark green chest and nose like a needle. It was too small to carry a letter, she thought. Maybe just the tiniest rune, written down on a thin strip of paper, wrapped round its heart. Or the very same rune, cut into the fluttering muscle. Carved in one motion: a word, a wound.

  *

  She drove into town. The neighbors were watching. She wore her best dress: bright red, with a plume of flowers that spread up across her chest. Her hair was unbrushed; it frayed like a spume of water just breaking off the ocean. She’d thought for a moment of going barefoot; instead, wore Peter’s old work boots. She shopped through the aisles of the little coop, ignoring the whispers. Her feet were heavy, and she liked it; felt knobbly and wild, substantial, good.