Deep Cuts

by Angel Leigh McCoy

  Naked, she curled around Little Hank’s impossibly small, impossibly fragile body and asked, “Some of us never had a chance, did we?”

  She licked her lips, the tongue numb though she could still taste the coppery water from the sink faucet. The broken pill went down the drain easily enough, better with practice. She wasn’t sure if it had been one of the ones from her or one she’d cut out of Hank. She’d lost track of them. She reckoned it couldn’t have mattered less.

  “Try and cry, little fella,” she urged the withered twin, squeezing him as hard as she dared. Her breathing slowed even as her heart raced, thumping like a drum against her ribs. “Try and cry, while your big sister has herself a nap. Just a little nap, buddy. Just a little nap.”

  The woman in the parking lot got to hollering again, screeching about perverts and racists, but all Mary-Jo could hear as she floated away was the gentle, bubbling warble from the lips of the last thing she expected to cut out of the man she might have loved, but didn’t.

  MISERY

  Angel Leigh McCoy on Mehitobel Wilson’s

  “The Remains”

  Writing isn’t easy. Most of us have to work at our craft for decades before we begin to see any recognition for all that sweat and disappointment. But then, along comes a new star who brings her talent with her from a past life or maybe just from living right in this one.

  Mehitobel Wilson’s work is emotionally visceral and complex. “The Remains,” for example, takes an entirely new look at the demons left behind to haunt the victims of violent crime. She has a clarity of style and language that build the story with efficient grace, and a gentle creative touch that delivers powerful blows. She’s a thinking-reader’s writer.

  I am extremely grateful to Ms. Wilson who agreed to write this brand new story for our anthology. It’s been a treat to see her go from first to final draft and hone the piece into something that sings so darkly.

  If you haven’t read any of her other work, I highly recommend you pick up her collection, Dangerous Red. It is full of deep cuts that will leave you bleeding inside. This young writer is someone to watch. As long as she keeps writing, you will see more and more of her work in the world, and eventually, if all goes as I predict, her success as a literary horror writer will rival the likes of Caitlín R. Kiernan and Poppy Z. Brite.

  The Remains

  Mehitobel Wilson

  Danielle sat well back from the breakfast table, not touching it. She held her cup of coffee with both hands and counted down in silence. At zero, she would open her eyes. Twelve. Eleven. Ten, and her hands tightened in a spasm around the cup.

  One drop jounced forth and landed, scalding, on her wrist. Danielle did not flinch at the heat or wipe her wrist on the robe cinched too tightly around her, but her countdown raced then, hurtled to zero so she could open her eyes, so she could stand up and rush to the front door, and lead the twins outside, away from the slender ghost that was staring at her from his seat across the table.

  ◙

  Eighteen months before, Kyle had not come home. Every day, for six weeks, Danielle had set his place at the table. She had never done that before he was taken. When Kyle had been alive, he and Chase and Annie had gnawed toaster waffles on their way to the bus stop while Danielle had drunk coffee in front of the TV at home, or slept in. After school, they had squashed bags of potato chips between their knees while playing their video games. At night, they had eaten pizza rolls and fish sticks from a communal plate on the coffee table while watching TV, wiping their fingers on paper towels. The puppy ate the paper towels afterward, but at least the kids weren’t smearing ketchup on the carpet.

  The puppy, Kyle’s gift on his tenth birthday, had been an ugly, scrawny, undisciplined thing. Danielle’s instinct, whenever the puppy came to mind, was to loathe it, but then a memory would blare through her mind so loudly it rocked her: Kyle, shrieking laughter as he rolled on his back, fending off a wiggle-fueled puppy-lick attack.

  The puppy had disappeared first. The front yard had been escape-proof, but anyone could have opened the gate and latched it again when they left. Someone did.

  When Kyle had not come home, Danielle had embarked upon a devotional course of ritualized motherhood. She had separated the whites from the colors and folded everything the instant the dryer’s timer bell rang. She had ironed. She had risen early to cook breakfasts that she couldn’t bear to eat herself, but there were always eggs and bacon enough for three children, not for two. She had cooked pot roasts or chicken parmesan for dinner and set four places, not three. She had done the washing up after each meal, hand-drying all four plates, though one had sat bare.

  If she had managed to appease some goddess of motherhood, her child would have come home safe.

  It hadn’t been enough.

  Each night, Danielle had climbed the first few stairs leading to the dark second floor of the house. Each night, the whispers from above had stopped her progress. She would stand, one hand on the banister, one across her stomach, and listen to the darkness. Twice, she thought she heard weeping. Both times, she felt an urge to go on up, but then the whispers returned, and the sounds of weeping grew muffled, as if by a pillow or an embrace. So, she turned away. Better not to go up, better to leave well enough alone.

  Danielle stopped setting a place for Kyle the first day the ghost sat down with them for breakfast.

  ◙

  Danielle reached zero and opened her eyes. She was alone at the table. From the front of the house, she heard a click and then the creak of hinges, footsteps in the foyer, a hush of rustling nylon. She rose, set her coffee cup on the counter and hurried across the house.

  The front door was wide open. Autumn air curled inside, chilling her.

  The twins, hand in hand, stood on the porch, their stillness uncanny. They stared in at her, placid, patient.

  Danielle looked past them to scan the front yard.

  The ghostly man was at the gate, studying the latch. It wasn’t the first time, Danielle knew.

  He began to raise his head, and Danielle spun away from him, toward the door. She wanted to run back inside, through, out the back, and away; but it wouldn’t matter. He’d be anywhere.

  Danielle pulled the door shut, glanced up at the little window set into it.

  He stood inches from her, on the other side of the glass, in her house, his face framed there, the hateful planes of it all hunger. His hair had grown longer since she saw him in life, and his skin was the same greasy gray as his curls.

  Danielle shuddered, focused back on the lock, and made little snake-strike stabs at it with the key.

  “Mom.” Chase’s voice, patient.

  Danielle backed across the porch toward the steps, afraid to look at the house, but afraid not to. She held the keys out in space behind her and felt Chase tug them from her stiff fingers as she stared at the black seam between the bottom of the door and the metal kick-strip at the jamb. She wouldn’t look at the little window. She wouldn’t look at the knob; if she did, and saw it turn, she would lose her mind.

  She backed down the steps and into the yard. Unblinking, she watched that black seam so she wouldn’t miss it if it widened. She watched it past the corduroy cuffs of Chase’s pants as he locked the deadbolt for her, and she watched it past the glitter of his buzz-cut red hair as he reached her side and pressed the key ring into her palm.

  The ghost had not returned to the gate, but Danielle trembled as she reached for the latch. She dropped the sleeve of her robe over her hand and let the thick-knitted cuff shield her from touching the polluted metal.

  The twins’ bus stop was three blocks from the house. Danielle walked behind them, guarding them. The twins themselves were barely visible to her, so intent was she on monitoring the street. She had not been vigilant before, she knew. She had not even known what to guard against, exactly. But now she did—oh, how she knew—and she was hyperaware of every face that passed by, marked the gait and stance of each person on foot, the degree to which
drivers turned their heads.

  Her gaze flicked back to the children. The twins were silent; their heads down as they walked; Annie’s left hand holding Chase’s right.

  Danielle wished she could remember a time when she had looked upon her children with any measure of peace, but what she remembered instead was irritation, annoyance, exhaustion. She remembered watching to be sure they weren’t about to break something, steal something, ruin something she couldn’t afford to replace. She remembered being angry at them every time they hurt themselves: Annie’s burned wrist, Kyle’s fractured collarbone. They’d been stupid to hurt themselves—didn’t I tell you not to—and she’d had to take them to Urgent Care and beg for extra hours cleaning guest rooms at the motel, which her boss had never granted.

  She knew how it felt to find the cut-off notices in the mailbox, and to weigh which they could live without for a bit: electricity or water. She had no choice but to ignore the bills from the clinic and would not notice when the phone got disconnected for nonpayment because she’d long since turned off the ringer to avoid the constant collection calls.

  What would she do the next time one of the kids fell off a bicycle they weren’t big enough to ride?

  The puppy went missing, and Kyle stole a nudie mag. He sold pages from it for a buck apiece so he could print up “Missing: Puppy” flyers and tape them to the perforated necks of stop signs, as high as he could reach. The signs kept falling down; and on his way to school, when he would spy one, curling and sodden beneath a sun-browned boxwood hedge, he would pull it out, smooth it hard against the sidewalk with his fists, and wrap it around the next telephone pole he saw, strapping it to the staple-encrusted wood with a half a mile of shitty dollar-store cellophane tape that would come unstuck before he’d made it the rest of the way to school.

  And then Kyle had disappeared.

  Danielle’s world of fears had shifted. At first, she had watched for any sign of Kyle. Now, she only watched for him.

  The twins, though, had each other, and they had their doctor, their therapist, psychiatrist, psychologist, one of those. They had the resilience of young minds, the doctor said. Doctor Francis. He wasn’t a big believer in drugs, he said, and thank god for that, because those cost, too. The state was financing what they called “limited care” for the twins, and Danielle had a feeling that Doctor Francis might be giving them some free time of his own. She’d watched his nostrils flare as he met the twins and guessed he was calculating his future worth on the talk-show circuit. It hadn’t mattered. Any other doctor would have done the same.

  Danielle would not tell the doctor, or anyone else, about the ghost. Child Protective Services was already very attentive.

  She was completely alone.

  ◙

  Danielle had been fired from her housekeeping job at the motel after the incident with the Bibles. One day she had taken all sixty-eight of them from their rooms, hauled them home with her, and stacked them in the windows, bracketed the doorways. A few lay open, as if to beam the words into the air. She wasn’t sure what passages were anathema to evil entities so she had let the books fall open and left it at that.

  The Bibles had changed nothing, so she had returned them in grocery bags, left them at the motel’s front desk. Maybe they hadn’t worked because they’d been stolen Bibles, or maybe her own lack of faith had been at fault. Danielle was pretty certain that the man who haunted her would be happy to take a shit all over every one of those books.

  She had burned sage in the house. She had poured salt around the perimeter of the yard, piling extra at the gate. She had read about brick dust keeping evil away and had stolen a brick from the neighbor’s flower garden. She had knelt on the front walkway and squared the brick against one of the concrete steps. But, when she raised the hammer over her head, she thought about the puppy, dropped the hammer, and kicked the brick into the grass.

  None of it mattered, anyway. Danielle understood that she was just closing the barn door, as the saying went.

  Losing her job was okay. No guests to recognize her, no questions. Most of all, she hated reading that nasty initial blaze of excitement in their eyes: the thrill of pseudo-celebrity, the frisson of the lowest of gossip fodder, the pulse-quickening of a brush with death, twice removed.

  Every tabloid and web forum called the man who had killed her son a monster. She thought that was cheap and easy, a handy way for people to distance themselves from the basic truth that he was a man. Just a human being, and there were billions more. Maybe they weren’t like him, but maybe they were.

  Salt wouldn’t keep them out, either.

  ◙

  There were groups on the internet who fancied themselves sleuths, and two weeks after Kyle’s disappearance, Danielle had posted a plea in their “Missing: have you seen this child?” section. A few people had posted sympathetic responses and promises of prayer. One had posted a video of a lit candle, the flame guttering in an infinite loop, as some kind of digital vigil. This struck Danielle as crass, and she blocked the post so she wouldn’t feel that ungrateful flush of shame and anger when she visited the site.

  A month after that, Kyle had his own subforum (complete with a forty-page thread full of goddamn candle posts).

  When his killer was taken into custody, the subforum’s title was changed: Kyle’s name was gone. The killer’s name was there instead. He was of far more interest to the forum than Kyle himself.

  That may have been the same day the police located Kyle’s remains. No one had ever been quite clear with Danielle about that. When she later learned more from the reports on the internet, she understood—the police hadn’t been certain that everything they’d found was Kyle.

  The killer had given the forum members plenty of fodder. He’d kept a blog with daily posts. He’d had profiles on dating sites, where he’d posted photos of himself wearing makeup and a string bikini. He was everything a murder fan could want.

  He had even killed a puppy with a hammer, according to the police. They had found the corpse in his apartment, in the garbage. The news ran a photo of the puppy. Danielle didn’t think the twins had seen it, but she didn’t ask. She was afraid that, if they had seen the photo, her asking would bring the images back to mind. Better to leave well-enough alone.

  The true-crime gossip fanatics pissed their sweatpants with joy, each scrambling to be the first brilliant internet investigator to announce some astonishing tidbit. They dedicated a thread to the puppy and speculated that the man had taken it himself and then approached his prey to say he’d found it. This was most likely true.

  They posted the property records of houses in proximity to the killer’s and delved into the personal lives and transactions of his neighbors: a fifty-year-old single father, three doors down from the killer, had donated money in 1988 to a college that in 1996 published a magazine of student poetry in which there appeared a haiku about a little boy. The author of the haiku had later become a consultant, and he had a blog hosted by the same free hosting service that hosted the killer’s blog. The connections were obvious and damning, the forumites agreed, and they made sure to send their discoveries to the police department investigating the case. They took care to CC the FBI and the host of a cable television true-crime program, just in case the local police tried a cover-up.

  Danielle had seen a nature documentary once. There had been a big beast, a yak maybe, dead. In a time-lapse sequence, the yak had been beset by scavengers and maggots and flies and a wild ravaging crawl of bacteria. That was what she saw when she dared to visit the forum.

  The moment a thread had been opened with her own name in the subject line—“Kyle’s Mother Danielle: CPS visited 2x!”—she had closed her account, deleted her bookmark, and vowed never to visit the site again. She didn’t want to see what they said about her and her family.

  But by then, she had already read and absorbed far too much. After each silent dinner, Chase and Annie would go play in their room, and Danielle would heave the ancient laptop
onto the kitchen table, take a deep breath to quell the dread, and press the power button.

  She had read the killer’s blog and watched the short videos he’d posted of himself, talking about his day. He prepared spaghetti in one of the videos. He wrote about bad dreams he had been having and about how peeved he was to be forced to waste baseball tickets because the terms of his parole meant the police had to visually verify his whereabouts every two weeks. He wrote that he understood the position of the court, that sure, being a Level 3 sex offender should indeed bring some occasional inconvenience upon him, that he understood he was being punished and all—but that he was irked nonetheless.

  He complained that most people who had served their sentences were called ex-cons, but people like him were called sex offenders. He found this unfair.

  He wrote that such punishments, such constant judgment from the courts and the police, even after he had served his time and been released on good terms, might just possibly be responsible for a fellow getting it into his head to go off and rape a little boy, or something.

  He wrote that “the System” was so hard on poor convicted child rapists that, on the off chance the parolee was able to slip out from under its heavy thumb from time to time, it was likely that said parolee would simply slaughter any child he raped and then get rid of the evidence.

  He wrote that “the System” might consider taking a good hard look at itself and placing blame where blame was due.

  Danielle had thought he was misspelling “prosecuted” until she grasped the fact that he truly felt he was being persecuted. That he wanted his readers to feel sorry for him, as sorry as he felt for himself. That he was embarrassed about what he saw as his most egregious mistake: that of letting his first victims live.

  In the final post on his blog, he had written about his love of cinnamon toast and of socks hot out of the dryer. He’d related what he seemed to think was a hilarious anecdote in which his brand-new twenty-pound bag of birdseed had split as he refilled a feeder, and how seeds were suddenly turning up in the unlikeliest of places, days later. He’d asked if any readers had a favorite brand of ginger ale. He’d said he was looking forward to his upcoming camping trip. He’d said that, all in all, his intent was to harm society as much as he could and then die. He’d said he’d be dying soon. He’d reminded himself to take out the trash.