“And you believed this.”
“I…” The sidewalk tilted momentarily, no doubt thanks to the alcohol. A lot of things were thanks to that, and maybe this was something he also needed to admit. “I drank,” he said. “To make myself believe that. I’ve been drinking all my life.”
Her next question was hardly more than a whisper, and yet…it was thunder. “And do you, indeed, believe that?”
Jonas stared at her, unable to answer. Rather than ask again, she offered him her hand. “Dance with me.”
He shook his head and grimaced, would have backed away had the wrought-iron fence not been behind him. “No, I can’t—I don’t want to.”
Then her hand, the skin as frigid as snow, grasped his, and she pulled him forward and into a dancer’s embrace. Jonas’s feet found a rhythm to music inside his head, and it all came back, so many nights in that café with Nadia, so much laughter and joy. Santa Alma’s face was only inches from his own, and she looked so much like Nadia that it hurt him to breathe. Then her features blurred and rearranged themselves, and she resembled another of the women who’d often come to that nameless café, Nadia’s sister and someone else who had been “saved” by his scalpel. Jonas blinked, and her face changed again, and again, and again, faster and faster until he could see nothing in the blur but the dark eyes of a thousand women filled with barren pain.
“All right!” he cried. He yanked free and staggered a few feet away, trembling. “I was wrong—I didn’t do it to help them, I did it to help myself! Because of my drinking the government was the only place I could find work. Nadia was the only person who ever believed I could stop, and I killed her.” His legs would no longer hold him, and Jonas sank to his knees in front of the woman in white, welcoming the bite of the rough concrete through his slacks. “Whatever it is that you’re going do, for God’s sake—just get on with it!”
She stood over Jonas, silent as a ghost, letting him wait until he thought he would explode with fear. In a few moments, the church bells all over Madrid would begin to toll the start of another day.
Santa Alma spoke. “Atonement will cost you a year, Jonas Scharffen, and the time will feel like an eternity. The blood in St. Panteleon’s vial must be revitalized yearly by a soul seeking forgiveness, but that soul’s desire must be strong enough to conquer all other earthly cravings. Do you have the strength to carry this through?”
I can choose forgiveness, Jonas thought. A spirit free of the crippling guilt that not even the drink could extinguish. “And if I say no?”
There was no change in her expression. “Then you will be as you are,” she said simply.
And what was that? Alive, yes…but old and drunk, suffocated by his own conscience. He would not live much longer, but he would be condemned forever. He bowed his head.
“I wish to be forgiven,” he said in a low voice.
“You will die.”
“I’m going to die anyway,” Jonas said. “Better now and saved, than a decade from now and damned.”
Santa Alma nodded, then closed the distance between them. When she reached for him, Jonas saw that her palms were coated with scarlet, a startling display of stigmata. Still, the old physician never hesitated as he grasped her hands, never flinched when fire shot through his body as his dry, shaking flesh touched hers.
And as the bells tolled the onset of another year over Madrid, the cloud of light that Jonas had first seen earlier that evening enveloped him in blissful pain and restitution, then spun into sparkling red—
—and finally winked out.
C.W. Smith on Shirley Jackson's
“The Summer People”
Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People” is easily one of my favorite horror stories. I liked “The Lottery,” but “The Summer People” was more my style. Telling a good horror story in which nothing is explained requires a peculiar talent. More often than not, stories built of such bare stuff as “The Summer People” suffer from missing ingredients. Jackson was a master of detail (the chilling opening paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House is proof enough of that)—and Jackson was also a master of how detail operates within a story. We learn about the vacationing couple in “The Summer People,” but what do we ever learn about the threat? The danger is palpable, but what is it? We’re terrified and we can’t say what of. Shirley Jackson taught me that vivid description isn’t the only way to shred a reader’s nerves.
◙◙◙
Sanctity
C.W. Smith
Sounds of the child carry throughout the single-wide trailer and permeate the long night. The child’s mother stares up from her pillow to the ceiling with her eyes half closed. She knows better than to tend to the child when it cries like this. She knows his different cries. This is the one she’s most afraid of.
Four hundred miles away, the child’s father stares into a glass. He knows the child is restless again. He feels its need like an itch at the tip of his nose—followed by the rain of nails in his guts. The child isn’t the cause of that distress, only the sensation at the end of his nose; but the molten drip of his digestive fluids follows the itch, and it follows every time. The attacks have been more frequent lately, but money’s been hard to come by. Buck “Nero” Mulligan wraps his torso in his arms and waits for the storm to pass.
The crying child pounds his tiny mattress. His leaden fists have not grown twice their normal size or have they? The force is enough to lift the crib. It comes down hard between arcs. It’s percussion for the crying. It echoes throughout the trailer park and explodes the night.
The crickets stop singing and depart for safer posts. The oldest woman in the park, whom the kids adoringly call Old Racist Bitch, whose underpinning is a veritable cat farm, suffers another stroke in her sleep. The last thing she sees in her mind’s eye is a nude Mexican doctor on top of her administering CPR. He yells for help until he tells her he is God and he’s come for her at last. She screams louder and never again.
Horace Dayton is bench pressing milk jugs filled with cement in his kitchen when the crying and concomitant pounding proves too much. He doesn’t give two shits about kids, he’s planted no fewer than four himself in various gardens statewide. The sound of them crying though sends his teeth to a grind. The newcomers in what used to be the Askins’ trailer are too much. The woman is too sickly to be any fun and the baby has interrupted his reps three nights in the span of a week. H.D. wipes his hair back and grabs his Harley tank top from the aquarium. He leaves his door unlocked because his dog is awake and his dog is a thoroughbred asshole.
The mother, once known as Ann Chopin but for the rest of her human term simply mother, hears approaching footfalls outside. She removes her prostrate form from the bed’s twin mattress with a jolt and the shriek of dead springs.
The mother opens the door before Horace can knock.
“You must leave!” she commands.
Her order is inaudible. Horace reads her lips and interprets what she says as a threat and an encroachment on his civil liberties.
“Woman,” he says. Woman was the word his daddy used to invoke the female’s full attention, and Horace swears by it too. “If you don’t shut that baby of yours up, I’m liable to come up in there and take care of it myself.”
In response to their highly evolved sense of danger, the dozen or so cats who’ve set up shop under Old Racist Bitch’s trailer rush home through the door they’ve made in the bent siding. Sensing an opportunity, some proceed upward through the kitchen cabinets.
“Stranger, my baby is real sick. He’ll fall asleep once he’s done, but ‘til then he has to cry it out. Ain’t nothing that can be done.”
Horace isn’t deterred. Horace has matter of face never been deterred in his life. He dropped out of school. Beat his old man half to death with his own belt. Bit chunks out of two bosses and a cop.
“Woman, this is your last warning. You shut that rat up or I will.” Horace flexes to prove his point. The long scars on his arms, souvenirs from broke
n-bottle fights, swell twice as wide.
She takes a step back to make way for Horace’s inflated pecks but stands her ground just the same.
“Sir, I suggest you go home and you relax. Turn your TV up real loud. Listen to some rock music. Please, just leave us be! It ain’t safe.”
Horace shoves the woman to the side. She crumples like a pile of sticks. When she’s on the ground she appears to have melted so there’s nothing left of her but her nightgown. Despite appearances, she’s in there. Beneath fabric heavier than she is, and as much as she’d love to be melted away to nothing, she’s in there.
Horace follows the racket to the back room. The chair propped up against the knob surprises him. A crazy sight, though he’s seen far stranger. One night as a child in Des Moines, under a half moon, he watched an elderly man morph into a possum. The possum-man ravished Horace’s mother before disappearing in the cornfield behind their house, never to be seen again. Horace tosses the chair aside and storms into the room.
“Aight, listen up! Sandman’s here, so put a cork in it!”
Four hundred miles away, Nero Mulligan falls out of his barstool. The bartender picks up the phone, but a look around the bar compels him to return the receiver to the cradle. He pours himself another beer while Nero seizes.
Less than forty feet away, Ann Chopin reaches for the doorknob to help herself up and wonders how far away she can get before the child comes after her.
“What in the blazes is this?” Horace bellows.
The baby stands in the cradle fuming. Two empty plastic bags rest at his shit-stained feet. A modicum of white residue is left in the corner where Junior couldn’t get to it; otherwise, the bags have been sucked clean.
Junior grips the bars of the cradle and pulls them apart. Splinters shred his wee little hands but he doesn’t notice. With his features twisted by withdrawal, with his eyes red, with splashes of long-dried white beneath his nose and around his mouth, Junior has the face of a rabid bat. Horace has momentary and coinciding flashbacks to the possum-man and juvenile hall. He and Junior rush each other.
The trailer begins to wobble. Ann starts for the truck, but stops when she hears the scream. Junior begins to reel her in by their invisible umbilical chain. He pulls so hard she nearly throws up her reproductive organs. She intuits via the fiber-astral filaments linking mother to child that Junior has rifled through the felled man’s pockets and has turned up a pair of twenties. She follows the psychic leash toward the trailer. She remembers what her family pastor said long ago about a mother’s blood oath to her child. Every life is sacred. Every mother must surrender her life to her child, even if, especially if her recreational drug use turns her child into a cocaine-dependent psychic vampire.
The baby is hungry. He begins to cry again about the time she reaches the bottom of the plastic steps leading up to the front door. The child’s cries carry throughout the singlewide trailer and escape into the endless night.
Colleen Anderson on Shirley Jackson's
“The Lottery”
As a child, I was assigned Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” for a class. I was already writing fantasy, though rather badly. Her horror story snuck through that barrier, before people understood what the genre was all about, besides the schlocky werewolf and vampire movies. When you read a great deal, sometimes only the most brilliant stories shine through the years. And Jackson’s was one of those. The horror was more real because the place seemed like an everyday town, the people like you and me. And yet, they were complicit in their agreement to a brutal ritual. Everyone took part for fear they would be the victim. The Lottery stands to this day as a disturbing morality tale about how easily it is for us to slip into bestial behaviors. I find many of my own tales deal with morality from the resonance of “The Lottery” in my mind.
◙◙◙
Red is the Color of
My True Love’s Blood
Colleen Anderson
My hand touches the cool metal of the door knob. I’ve been humming a tune. The problem is when I do this I sometimes zone out, forget what I was doing. And I’ve been to Jordy’s door so many times before that it’s almost automatic.
But what’s different today is that my flight was canceled due to the weather and I thought I’d surprise him with dinner. I push the door open with my shoulder and carry in the bag of groceries. Music drifts like a wraith down the hall, and amber light capers over the living room walls illuminated by a fire crackling in the fireplace. The scent of sharp pine resin mixed with an odd metallic smell fills my nose.
I turn right into the open layout kitchen, maneuver the bag onto the counter, then return to the living room. I check the logs in the fireplace and warm my hands for a minute, staring into the fiery dance. The axe is lying in the middle of the floor. I take a few moments to absorb the heat, the scent, and the space of Jordy’s home. Soon this will be mine too. I pick up the axe and prop it against the fireplace, near a fresh pile of wood brought in to dry. There is a sticky residue on the handle. Back in the kitchen, I wash my hands.
I smile; just like him to put a fire on and then forget its ambiance as he goes back to his thesis. He’s so close to the end now, which will be a cause for celebration on several levels. Not only will he be done with years of school and have his PhD but I’ll get to move in. We both agreed it would be less distracting for him in these final stages if I moved in after his defense. But that’s now only a month away and we’ve been distracted enough by each other as it is. I’d love to just crawl into his bed and wait for him there but it could be hours until he notices.
I’m still humming, unpacking the crusty baguette, the head of lettuce, the basil and crimson tomatoes for an al dente pasta sauce, and am reminded of Jordy’s thesis. It’s a fascinating subject and really, how we first met. He’s looking at the psychological and mythical symbolism of the color red. Every color has its significance but he’s always been drawn to red. Perhaps I have too.
Maybe that’s why he noticed me with my spiked, red only-a-bottle-can-give hair. That and my photo show, Nature’s Rainbow. Each image of nature focused on a different color; the wild green of trees with young leaves, the blue of a gentian against a lake reflecting the sky, the red of an apple amongst turning leaves. He had wandered in, his dark wavy hair falling over one eye, spending so long before each picture, especially the ones with red. My show had had two photos for each color, the second one played out a juxtaposition of manmade objects with nature; the blue of a car against the backdrop of sky, a red lacquered wood-handled knife spattered with blood from a slaughter—to show how humans encroach upon nature.
Jordy’s thesis goes into more depth than my show, more history. He could have written a book on each color but said red was the most vibrant. It’s the lifeblood, and looking around his place I see accents of scarlet embellish each room. The rust red wall in the living, the trim on the counters is cinnabar. The carpet is beige with random speckles of dark ruby, which I’ve never noticed before. When something is drawn to our eyes we suddenly see it everywhere.
A thin, cherry border encircles each dinner plate, and his cutting board is red marble. I’ve laid out the ingredients and put the pan out but I better check to see how he’s doing before I start. I should let him know I’m here.
I stop for a moment. Something seems odd, out of place. But then I’m what’s different at this time, my schedule disrupted. I smile. It’s worth it to get to spend a few moments with Jordy. He doesn’t complete me necessarily but he makes me happy, is counterpoint to my thoughts. Where I see patterns and shapes, he sees lines and symbolism. We mesh well like that. He is like a great scarlet balloon rising into a summer sky and bringing joy. His laugh always lightens me.
Jordy is one of those people who likes to work with extra stimulus, music playing or a radio talkshow in the background. I like the opposite, a cone of silence in which to concentrate or sort out the natural sounds. But I guess I'm the only one who believes that as more than one person has
commented on my humming. It’s a subconscious thing; I don’t even notice most of the time.
I like the glow from the fireplace, the warmth, and the softly sinuous shadows. It makes me think of centuries ago when people lived in the mysteries of color. Jordy said Christian religion used red to represent saints, and of course blood, the active humors and the earthly connection. Even Catholic cardinals, like the bird, wear red. Brides in China, and women in India do as well. Studies have shown people get fired up, (fired up!) by red but interestingly orange is used on inmates because it supposedly calms them. Or is it just that they’re easier to spot if they escape? Maybe I’ll do a series next on colors tied with emotions. Green is jealousy. Yellow is cowardice.
Color is so integral to many things, and the patterns and shapes of color form my focus in photography. People or places don’t matter as much as the colors they embody. Blue for calm, black for death, white for spirit. So many ideas attached to what nature provides. Blood is red. Red is anger, love, war, passion. Blood is used to curse, to heal.
Jordy said numerous cultures use blood for rituals, such as voodoun. Some just try to predict the future, or contact a dead granny to find out where the jewels are buried. Yet, other rituals call on gods and spirits for knowledge and retribution. Curses are always about getting even, a punishment to fit the crime. If justice can’t be brought upon the perpetrator, then the curser can get those from the other side to mete out an eye for an eye. People make up so many things.
One night we both had too much wine, laughing about all the superstitions attached to colors. When Jordy knocked over the glass, slicing his finger on the shards, I held my hands to my face in mock horror. “Blood sacrifice,” I giggled.
Deep Cuts Page 14
