American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “I always wondered,” says Parson beside her as this horrific change takes place, “why he made her more like him—more like us. He didn’t need to, not for his little dalliances. But eventually I understood—he was getting her ready. He wanted to leave her a way out. He wanted to give her the abilities to punch through the fence encircling Wink, evade capture, and go free. Naturally, in all of Wink, only Mr. First himself had that sort of power. And the only way to give it to her…”

  “Was for him to die,” says Mona quietly.

  “Yes.”

  Gracie’s body slowly relaxes. The hairs on her head begin to lie back down again. Then, slowly and gracefully, she descends to stand on the street again. But there is something about the way she stands that causes Mona to wonder if she’s still floating: it’s as if, should she want, she could go flying up into the atmosphere, shrieking like a fighter jet, and never return.

  “Gracie,” says Parson (and Mona is pleased to hear that he is a bit wary), “are you all right?”

  Gracie does not answer.

  “Can you hear me, Gracie?” asks Parson.

  Gracie nods.

  “Do you understand what has happened, Gracie?” Parson asks.

  “Some of it,” says Gracie softly. There is something hollow and resonant to her voice, as if it is echoing down many invisible passageways.

  “Then you know this change will not last forever,” says Parson.

  Gracie nods again.

  “How long do we have?” asks Mona.

  “An hour, perhaps less,” says Parson.

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes. I believe this change was only intended to get Gracie out of Wink.” He looks back at the giant, which is quickly approaching the town proper. “Along with us, if things had gone accordingly…”

  “What the hell do you mean, if?”

  Parson’s tiny child-face begins sweating. “Unless I am mistaken… First’s skirmish with Mother did not quite go as he foretold. It was meant to take longer, give us a chance to prepare. He must have forgotten Mother’s strength.”

  “Prepare for what?” asks Mona.

  “I told you where the wildling is,” he says. “But with Mother approaching so quickly, I do not know what to do with it. This is not what was predicted, Miss Bright. I was supposed to have more time.”

  “So… you don’t know what to do?”

  He shakes his head. “I did not plan for this. I could try what I’d originally planned, but we have only minutes to spare… I am sure it would not work. I’m sorry.”

  Mona looks at Gracie. “You got any ideas?”

  Gracie stares off into space with her black eyes, head cocked. It’s like she’s on some wonderful drug. Mona envies her, a little.

  “Well, fuck.” Mona sighs, and looks at her rifle.

  Gears start engaging one another in her head.

  After all, deep in every Texan’s heart, there remains the steadfast belief that any problem can be solved with a big enough gun.

  “I think I have an idea,” says Mona quietly. “But it’s a desperate one.”

  Parson watches the giant run toward them. “Well, I, personally, am quite desperate.”

  The idea keeps dripping into Mona’s head, taking shape, turning color.

  This is such a dumb thing to do, she thinks. And it is. Because it would take innumerable things happening in the right ways at the right times, and Mona has become intimately aware that the rules in Wink are, at best, whimsical. But it’s this, or they all just sit here and wait.

  “Parson,” she says, “you’re going to take my… the baby.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. And Gracie… I think you’d be a lot better with these than I am.” She holds out the two hand lenses to her. Parson has to poke Gracie to make her notice. She looks at the mirrors, then takes one in each hand. Immediately they gain a shimmering, pearly sheen.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” says Mona. She stands, and looks at her daughter, who is watching the giant approach with marvelously alert eyes.

  It hurts to look at her, just to see her. A tiny, independent creature, sitting up straight in the crook of Mona’s arm and toying with her left ear. It is so astounding to see thought in those eyes.

  If I were to die today, thinks Mona, I would die so happy. Because any world with you in it is a good one.

  But she’s not going to die today.

  “I’m gonna give you away for a bit,” whispers Mona to her daughter, “but don’t worry. I’ll be back. It’ll just be a minute.” She holds her out to Parson. The child starts protesting almost immediately.

  “What are you planning to do?” asks Parson as he takes her.

  Mona tells him.

  “Oh,” says Parson. “Oh, my goodness.”

  “No shit. You hotfoot to the town square, okay? And you,” she says to Gracie, “you head to the mesa. Can you do that qui—”

  Gracie smiles at Mona, her dark eyes shining, and then it’s as if she steps behind an invisible wall, and she’s gone.

  The two of them stare at the empty space where she was.

  “It appears she can do that quite quickly,” says Parson.

  Mona looks to the mesa as if expecting to see Gracie standing on the top. “I hope she’s in place.”

  “We must assume so. Are you sure you wish to do this?”

  “I can’t think of a better idea. But you listen—if things don’t go to plan, you grab that little girl and you run. I don’t care about any of this ‘can’t leave Wink’ shit, you figure out something. And don’t you come back for me. Just get her out of here. You understand?”

  Parson nods.

  “Good,” says Mona. “Then get moving.” And she turns and sprints across the street.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Mona has to break in to enter the store of her choice—a picture frame shop—and she heads straight to the back. With each boom the pictures rattle on the walls and resettle at new angles. She knows she should feel terrified, but after giving up her daughter, everything’s on mute.

  She grabs a mirror off the wall as well as a thin drape, one that’s see-through. She takes the stairs in the back to the roof, and though she stays low she can see the hulking form of the giant kicking its way through Wink. Pipes and bricks and streetlamps fly around its feet like shrapnel.

  “Fuck,” says Mona. It will be here even sooner than she imagined.

  She can see Parson standing in the park in the center of town, and in his arms… “Oh, Jesus,” says Mona. Her daughter is hysterical, screaming at the top of her lungs. It’ll just be a little bit, baby. Just a little bit. Just hold on.

  She takes the mirror and wraps the drape around it so it will not cause any noticeable glare, though she can still see its reflection. Then she props it up against an air-conditioning unit on the eastern side of the building, so the mirror faces the town square, where the courthouse and the park are.

  Once she has it situated, she lies down perpendicular to the edge of the building, hidden from the street behind a short wall about two feet high. If she looks straight down along her body she can see the mirror, and in its reflection what is just over the wall behind her: right now there is nothing but more shop fronts, trees, and the pink water tower that just says WINK.

  Good. This works. Now she sits up to see if the rest of this stupid idea of hers is going to.

  Parson and her daughter are still standing in the park. Her daughter’s face is flaming red, just utterly beet-red.

  The earth shakes. The giant is eight blocks away now.

  It is huge. Tremendous. So big Mona cannot even understand what she’s seeing. With another step, it’s six blocks away.

  The streets below begin to crack, like fibers of a net unable to contain their catch.

  Mona looks to the mesa. She hopes Gracie is ready, because it needs to be…

  “Now,” whispers Mona. “Now. Now.”

  Does she imagine a glimmer of light on the m
ountain? Maybe reflected from a tiny surface…

  Parson and her daughter grow slightly translucent. Then with no warning, they vanish.

  The giant stops in its tracks.

  Mona drops to lie flat on the roof of the building.

  There is no sound but the buzzing that echoes across Wink. Mona imagines the giant standing there, wondering exactly what the hell happened. Because after all, She’d imagine that with First gone, so went all the real threats in Wink…

  The earth shakes, but much more softly, much more slowly—a hesitant step. Mona can hear roads and buildings cracking behind her like icebergs in the Arctic.

  Mona quietly eases the bolt of the rifle up and checks the chamber: a glint of gold winks back at her. She reaches into her pocket and sets the five or so shells still there on the ground beside her. Ideally she won’t need them: if Parson was right, this will take only one shot.

  Then two incredibly loud steps, very fast and very close. Mother must have realized the baby is on the mesa, near Coburn and the lens. Mona imagines Her terror as She wonders if someone in Wink knows something She doesn’t, and if there is some secret to the lens that might reverse all this. Could they know? Could they possibly know?

  The roof of the building starts going dark, as if in an eclipse. But Mona knows better. It’s Her shadow.

  The trees quiver madly. The glass in a nearby building quakes, buckles, shatters. Shards make a twinkling rain on the sidewalk below. The giant must be so close…

  Then the mirror goes dark with a sea of black, pockmarked flesh. Right outside the park.

  Now.

  Mona springs up, wheels around, and brings the rifle up, the jittering optic bewildered by the sight of such huge, sprinting legs, and then…

  The booms stop.

  Mona puts the optic square on her target. She considers the distance, the wind… yet it doesn’t really matter, because it’s such a huge target…

  But the giant has stopped. It is turning around.

  Mona becomes aware of two huge lamplight eyes looking down on her.

  She begins tightening her trigger finger.

  Time seems to slow down, and the next few events take place in what must be a millisecond:

  Mona thinks: It can’t have seen me. It can’t.

  (But is Mona not that creature’s daughter? Perhaps the giant can sense her just as it can Mona’s own daughter. Maybe it always knew she was there, waiting. And now it begins to suspect…)

  The giant’s hand twitches.

  There is a crackle in the air.

  A scent of ozone. A burst of white.

  And, somewhere, the echoing sounds of distant thunder.

  Parson sees the lightning bolt come shooting down to strike the building’s roof. A dull boom echoes across the valley to where they stand on the mesa.

  “Oh, no,” Parson whispers.

  Behind him the baby grunts disconsolately as Gracie rocks her. She is placated chiefly by Gracie’s dress, whose stripes the child finds very interesting. Gracie is slowly becoming less… whatever it is she became, and more human, and more catatonic. She stares off into space, eyes vacant, as if she is too bruised and wounded to cry.

  Parson ignores them, and peers at the town. The roof is now black and covered in smoke. He assumes Mona is dead, which means he will have to try to do this himself somehow… yet then he sees a figure standing in the smoke, completely still, with a rifle saddling her hip, staring ahead.

  He keeps watching. Neither she nor the giant moves.

  “What is she doing?” he asks.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Mona does not immediately become conscious. Rather, the first of her senses to revive itself is olfactory: she smells laundered sheets, a freshly vacuumed carpet, and, perhaps, the smell of something baking.

  Then a thought cracks across her mind, waking the rest of her up: This is… not right.

  She opens her eyes.

  She sees there is a ceiling above her. Not just any ceiling—the ceiling from her childhood home in West Texas, the one she lived in for the fourth and fifth grade. She knows it exactly. How many times did she stare at it as she tried to fall asleep? She can see the remnants of her Glen Campbell poster, which she pinned up there before her father told her to take that shit down, and the few glow-in-the-dark stars she never bothered to peel off.

  She sits up. She swings around and puts her feet on the ground. Her multicolored carpet still bears some old stains (she can see where she tried to melt crayons in the second grade), but overall is clean; her shelves are stocked with books, and bedecked with little plastic horse figurines; standing in the corner is her battered old BB gun, which she has cleaned as though it were a rifle. And someone, somewhere, is baking bread.

  Mona opens the door and walks down the hallway, rubbing her eyes. As she enters the den, she sees a dull orange blaze as the afternoon sun filters through the glass pendant lamps, and in the corner a stringy pothos that’s in need of some severe trimming, and a fresh bowl of potpourri on the entryway table. And there, in the battered old chair across from the television, is Laura Bright, née Alvarez.

  She is in a state Mona has seen her in only once before: she wears the red dress from the can of film Mona found in the attic, and she is immaculate, incredibly perfect, hair curled and lipstick so clean it could have been applied by a surgeon. She is flipping through an issue of Southern Living with a look of slight disinterest. As she licks her fingers, Mona sees her nails are beautifully done in bright red; she cannot ever remember her mother having such excellent nails.

  This is wrong. She knows this is wrong. But the dreamy nature of this place makes it very hard for her to really understand why…

  “It’ll still be a minute before it’s ready, hon,” her mother says absently as Mona walks in.

  Mona stares at her. She takes a few steps forward, and asks, “What will?”

  “The bread, silly.” She licks a finger, and turns down a page, perhaps marking a recipe for further study. “The cinnamon bread.”

  Mona looks into the kitchen. The light in the oven is on, and something is definitely baking there.

  She walks toward her mother. “What’s… what’s happening?” she asks.

  Her mother looks up. “What’s happening? What do you mean, what’s happening?”

  “This… wasn’t happening just now. I was somewhere else. And you were… you weren’t there at all. I don’t think.”

  Her mother smiles. It is such a warm smile. Her eyes are the color of rich toffee. Mexican eyes, like Mona’s. “Well. I did think we needed to have a talk. Why don’t you sit down?” She pats the couch beside her chair.

  Mona slowly, reluctantly sits. Something bothers her about the kitchen: the ceiling fan. She remembers when her father installed it, and how he cussed up a storm as he tried to figure out the circuitry, because after that the lights in the den stopped working, and it was because—

  “This was a new house,” says Mona.

  “What was that, hon?” asks her mother.

  A new house. The house they moved into years after Mona’s mother killed herself.

  A memory swims up to her: Gene Kelly’s face smiling down at her from the silver screen…

  “This never happened, did it,” she says.

  “What didn’t?”

  “This. This moment.”

  “It’s happening now,” says her mother, amused.

  “Yeah. But when I lived here… you were already dead.”

  “I wasn’t dead then, my dearest. I just wasn’t there, with you.”

  “Then this isn’t real. None of it is. And you’re not my momma.”

  “Of course I am,” she says, slightly hurt, yet still forgiving. “I’ve always been your mother, Mona. And I know you must feel a little scared right now. You haven’t seen me in so long. And you don’t really know me. But I’m back now. And I want to be here to stay. Are you fighting that? Do you not want me to stay?”

  Mona furro
ws her brow. Something about this place—perhaps something about this time—makes it very hard to think, and remember.

  There was a fight. A baby. And she lay in the sun on the roof of a building, watching a mirror…

  The mirror.

  She opens her eyes.

  Things tremble. There is a world behind this world, full of sun and mountains…

  Then back. Back to this orange-colored den, and the smiling woman in the chair.

  She begins thinking. “Why have you brought me here?”

  “Because I want you on my side, dear. That’s where daughters belong, on their mother’s side. I want you to be a good daughter. I want you to be what you are supposed to be.”

  “What you wanted me to be.”

  “Yes, I suppose,” she says. Her voice is incredibly soft and soothing. “I want you to be here, with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you would be happy here. Happy’s a very hard thing for you to be—isn’t it, Mona?”

  “How… how could you ever know what makes me happy?”

  “I know a lot, dear,” says her mother. “Mothers always know more than people think.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  She smiles. “Yes. Yes, I do.” She raises her finger, and taps the air…

  … and ripples radiate outward, as if she’s tapped the surface of a pond, and as things ripple they change…

  Mona becomes aware of a change in height. She looks down, and sees she is, without a doubt, a little girl of about nine, sitting on the couch beside her mother. But now it’s her mother’s house in Wink, the rambling adobe ranch house. It’s the perfect image of how it looked in the film Mona found, shining with Mid-Century chic and little New Mexican additions. It’s mid-afternoon, and the sunlight through the windows is purer than snow.

  Her mother remains the same: red, smiling, perfect. “You wanted this,” she says. “And I can give it to you. You can grow up here, with me. And we can do it right this time. We’ll have Christmases, and Thanksgivings, and I’ll help you with your homework, every night…”