Grave

by Turner, Joan Frances

  Passing the time, all the time, that was our job now, just like it’d been before. When we weren’t hunting, Linc had his books and the garden. I had the notebook and a half, page after scribbled page, where I’d tried writing down everything that happened to me, to us, then gave up because I can’t write for shit and tore out the rest of the pages for pictures. Renee did most of our foraging now and was constantly trying to work out how to make a solar oven, weatherize the cabins, build a chicken coop, and a thousand other things every bit as useless as my sitting around trying to pencil her hair just right.

  I blamed Lisa for all that, Lisa who kept reminding and reminding Renee of her long-lost hoodom for no good reason whatsoever and then just took off, with barely any warning, mumbling something about how she wasn’t doing anyone any good staying here and wanting to find out what actually became of things while she was sick and blah blah fucking blah just say you can’t stand the sight of us anymore, why don’t you? She never forgave me for saving her, I knew she hadn’t; never forgave me for pulling her out of the sands as something more than human, not quite human, why the hell was everything for her still and always about the fucking humans? They had their world, whatever was left of it, and I didn’t care what. I had mine. Frankly, I liked my company a hell of a lot more.

  I hoped Linc was telling the truth when he said he foraged all my art stuff from an elementary school, that he didn’t get it from our new neighbors down the road. Always showing up here, that bunch, no warning, acting all please-pretty and howdy-neighbor-God-bless-you and you couldn’t scare them away for love or blood, they drove me insane. Linc hated humans as much as I did, maybe even more, but I still caught him talking to them in the woods and he just shrugged, said They might be useful idiots, sometime. Half of that was right, anyway.

  Once, I asked them to keep an eye out for Lisa, but they said nobody new or old had come their way all winter. All spring.

  Useful chattering jabbering idiots, for when we needed some kind of noise, any noise, in the empty space where our music once was. The unheard music, secret harmonies, that we had when we were properly undead, humming and pulsing through our flesh like blood through a living heart. I could almost remember what it sounded like, that music that would burst forth like spring thunderstorms with no pattern, no warning, into unfathomably sad arpeggios and unbearably exuberant waltzes that all of us heard, all together. Listening and rising and dancing, our rotten shambling mismatched limbs seized and transformed into one great, graceful, glorious body—

  But we weren’t dead anymore, and if you asked those hoos down the road, we weren’t properly alive either, not how they judged it. We weren’t anything anymore. We were just here.

  Renee kept watching me as I stacked up my pencil drawings and put them back under the lake-stone paperweight in proper May to November order. Watching my hand as it jerked instinctively away from the paperweight’s searing, unnatural heat and I pretended that nothing had happened, as I so casually picked it up once again.

  “You’re sure you’re okay,” she said.

  Here we go. Goddammit, I did not want to talk about this right now. “I said I’m fine. Can you take my damn word for anything, or—”

  “About this? Not really, no.” She glared at me, hard and suspicious, then sighed and tapped her ring-rattling fingers on the tabletop. “Another funny dream, last night. The sky went dark but there was still light underneath it, somehow—like it wasn’t really getting dark at all, but a layer of asphalt or black wax or—something—was pressing down, squashing out all the light. And then all the air.” She shuddered a little, a delicate shoulder-shiver as her fingers, covered in corpse-trophy rings, rubbed nervously back and forth. “I woke up feeling like I was gasping for air—I hate that feeling, don’t you hate that feeling?”

  I hate having to breathe at all, is what I hate. Those hoos down the road might not think we’re alive like them, like that’d be some kind of precious prize, but just like them, I’m now a prisoner of the air. Constant, ceaseless, relentless dependency, no more tunneling back safe underground, not with these sorry lungs, and because Renee’s right back to what she was used to and Lisa didn’t want to hear it, I never said anything about how breath was an awful weight, a burden. Linc had the same dream as Renee, just a few nights back, of something dark like a hand or a big box-lid stamping everything down. The exact same dream. He woke up choking, and even though all the beach-cabin doors and windows were wide open, I had to take him outside, walk with him along the shoreline for a good half-hour before he felt like he was breathing again.

  “You’re just feeling the weather change,” I said. “Remember those tornadoes a few weeks back?” They never got close enough to do damage but I could still see them out in the distance, dark columnar clouds on the far end of the sickly green sky, the heavy-weighted air pressing down so we all got terrible headaches. “Fucks with your head, all that.”

  Renee thought that one over. “Weather change,” she said. “Fucks with your head. That must be it.” She glanced at me. “It couldn’t be anything else out there, fucking with us. Right?”

  I stared out of the cabin’s wide-open window, at Linc’s vegetable garden up the ridge; it’d been a warm rainy winter and a cool rainy spring but the dirt still looked drought-dry, nothing but gray chalky crumbly powder thick with the ruins of roots. “Weather,” I repeated, sharp and impatient. “Air pressure, all of that, it fucks with your head like crazy, makes you moody as—”

  “Jessie.”

  Her eyes bored so hard into me it made me miss the old days, the days when she was so new from the ground and so shit-scared of everything that I only had to bare my teeth and she’d burst into tears. Her dream, Linc’s dream, the exact same dream I’d had last night, the night before, the night before that and that and that. Each time I woke up choking, weighted down with a genuine suffocating fear that wrang my lungs to limp rags, sent me staggering to the window for what was never enough air; when I tried to piece the dream together, all I could remember was a great, vague chasm, opening wider and wider to swallow the light, the air, the darkness of the night. A great nothingness. I wasn’t lying, when Renee kept asking me if I’d dreamed about anything and I kept telling her, nothing.

  “I don’t know what the hell you want from me, Renee.” I turned back to my drawings, shuffling and straightening them to show I was busy, very busy, that this conversation was long since over. “Because I mean, I’m fucking done playing detective, especially about some stupid dream, after what happened the last—”

  “I know you and Linc have had the same dream. The same time I started having it—a week ago, ten days. I know you’ve both seen... something. Before. I mean, months before this. Walking around the woods. Keeping tabs on us.”

  She glared at me, her shoulders curling automatically into the old aggressive stance—not a fighting posture, all the real fight’d gone out of us three, but a hunched-up, tensed-up I see you, I know you, whatever meat you’re trying to steal you can drop it in the dirt right now. Not as hopelessly hoocow as all that, after all, if she still knew how to talk properly. “You know what I mean, Jessie. It’s like Lisa said once, you’ve seen a lot of stuff, all along the way, that you haven’t talked about ever, and I never liked to push it because of... Joe, and everything, but...” Her shoulders sagged and for a split second she looked like her old, clueless ‘maldie self, the embalmed-up thing that used to follow me around like a lost cat mewing for a cuddle. “Is something else involved in this?”

  The last time I saw Joe, I don’t talk about. That’s what made the notebook project stop. The last time I saw Death, he was walking around our woods enjoying a refreshing stroll, nothing to do and nothing more to say to me, and he vanished so quick he barely even arrived. Linc saw him too. We didn’t discuss it. I never told Lisa because I didn’t want to scare her, and I never told Renee because he came and he left and that was that, and—and the truth was that I’d gone soft lately, soft and aimless like so
mething big and strong and I-see-what-you-got-there inside me had collapsed and rotted away for good, all my strings cut so nothing inside me could get up and dance. Maybe this is what it felt like back in the old days, being a dusty, when your last remaining flesh went to dry powder as all the insects left you and the need to feed, to fight slowly trickled away for good. Like how serene Florian was, that quiet resignation shorn of any fear or anger flowing through him, right before he went to dust. I lost my own chance to find out what that was like.

  “I don’t know what you want from me, Renee,” I said. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. “I really don’t. I haven’t seen anything. Anyone.”

  Renee considered this. Then she reached into her jacket pocket and held out the contents cupped like a Communion wafer in her palm. “I picked this up last night on the shore,” she said. “Just like the paperweight. Go on. Just touch it.”

  Our lone souvenir from the old days, since I refused to draw Sam or Joe or Annie or anyone else who’d died: Lake Michigan beach stones, the kind we could find right outside our door any time we wanted. The paperweight, though, that was one of Florian’s, that he’d carried with him for decades or centuries, that got us all out of Prairie Beach. Linc and Renee were weirdly superstitious, avoided the tokens he’d carried—the things that had saved them, and me—like they were radioactive, but I carried a few everywhere I went because I felt strange and bereft without them, because in ways I couldn’t understand, they were just like me. Dead, inert, yet somehow still alive.

  I touched it. Uncomfortably hot—hot enough to burn skin if we’d all still had human fingers, not these hands we could shove straight into live flames and pull back barely touched—just like my paperweight, and a faint vibration coming from inside it, against my skin, as though the stone were a planet whose tiny earthquakes threatened to split it open at the seams. Just like my paperweight.

  “Warm from your pocket,” I said.

  “Jessie? You know it means something.” She pulled more from her pocket and laid them out on the table, pink and black and striated green all in a neat little line. “I don’t know what it means, but—”

  “But we know it’s something.” Linc was standing there in the doorway, the afternoon sun turning him to a skinny ungainly shadow. He’d changed the least of any of us, the same old scarecrow dead or alive. “And that you’d be able to guess better than us. New drawing?”

  “The old one,” I said, as he came in and slid an arm around my shoulders, examining what he could see of May-Renee around the paperweight. “Better than you? Why could I guess any better than you? You saw... something strange too, in the woods, last fall. Just like me. So why would I know any better than you? Those new little friends of yours, the hoos down in Hootown, they have anything to say about any of this?”

  “My friends,” Linc repeated, his mouth twitching in a swift, mirthless little smile. He curled his fingers around the paperweight, weighed it thoughtfully in his palm. “Nothing, not a damned thing. Why would they? Why are you dragging the children into this, anyway?”

  Linc’s dislike of humanity was quieter than mine, more polite, but it was a steady, vibrant flicker inside him that never wavered or went out. He’d been a card-carrying misanthrope even before he died, with good reason for it, and was more than happy to prove he’d jumped the hoo fence with his first proper hunt; he wouldn’t tell me who he killed, though I was sure it was no stranger, but every now and then he liked to remind me how much I’d missed out, not tasting their flesh back when that didn’t feel like a cousin to cannibalism. Our new neighbors—I wondered if they realized yet that his calm measured ways, his please-God-don’t-hit-me-again face he’d inherited from his awful first life, they meant absolutely nothing when you got him angry. They’d learn. I’d laugh.

  Renee had her arms folded now, staring at me like I was her little kid who just got into the cookies. Like I’d been holding out on—all right, I had been, but so had Linc, who hadn’t believed there was anything beyond these lives until he got sick. Linc saw him—it—too, walking around among the elms and the lilacs. Gazing down at our vegetable garden like it was the most interesting thing in the world. But that was all last year, before the winter.

  “I haven’t seen it here,” I said, hard and brusque because it was nothing but the truth and she’d still never believe it. “I haven’t seen it here all winter, all spring—”

  “It’s not like we need to see it, though,” Linc said, slowly, that fucking irritating habit he had of weighing every side of an argument to see which one fit best inside his head. “It’s not like it has to announce itself. I mean, it didn’t bother before.”

  I picked up my paperweight again, feeling the heat. The insistent little vibrato emanating from inside, like the time I’d had one split itself open right there in my palm. Eternity, that’s what I’d thought it sounded like when I held a shaking stone to my ear like a shell; not just some dry airy semblance of the sea, reverberating through thin little tunnels pink-veined like a cat’s ear, but the actual, barely contained noise of something huge and mighty and constrained in a tiny carrying box. I put this one up to my ear in turn, hearing that familiar low, insistent hum.

  “I don’t know what it means,” I said, feeling drained and deflated, like we’d been fighting in earnest and I’d had all the fight beaten out of me. “I mean, if he’s here—here we are.”

  I fought him off, the last time, but I wasn’t sure I’d do it again. I didn’t want to say that out loud, though: it always got Renee upset. I stared up at another of my drawings, October, a clumsy sketch of our cabins up here on the ridge that Linc had insisted on pinning to the wall. From the corner of my eye, I saw Linc exchange a wary look with Renee; here it comes, I thought. Here it comes.

  “Don’t,” Linc said to her. Weary with the knowledge she’d do it anyway, as if they’d argued about it over and over again out of my presence. “Renee, for the eightieth damned time, just let it go.”

  “Jessie.” Renee’s teeth settled on her bottom lip, gnawing, like that little bit of pain lent courage. “If you could somehow talk to him again, maybe—”

  “No.”

  “If we could just find out why he’s doing this. If he’s doing this—”

  “Doing what? You’re both losing your minds over some half-assed nightmare and what the fuck do you think anyway, this is some kind of shaman thing? I channel it or summon it or some mystic bullshit like that?” I shoved the paperweight into my pocket. “He doesn’t talk to me, he talks at me, and he hasn’t done that since we were all so sick and as far as I’m concerned, it all means less than nothing—”

  “It has to be something!” Renee shouted. “Or are you just keeping it to yourself again? Like you think I’m still too stupid to handle it?”

  “I’m not listening to this,” I said. “I’m not listening to any more—”

  “Jessie.” Linc was holding up his hands, a peace-plea he knew was doomed.

  “D’you even know what you’re asking me?” The gnawing, sickly little spark that had flickered to life inside me when we all started to wake up suffocating, when I went just yesterday into the trees and found kitty-Mags, kitty-Joe, the whole colony of feral cats who shared our woods lying dead in the underbrush, it flared up now like a burst of fountain water. I was hot and hollow as the inside of those lake stones, like something was trying to melt me down, but I’m not anything’s fucking candle-wax, I’ve never let fear turn me runny soft. “You’ve got no idea what it’s like actually seeing him, face to face. None. You think there’s any talking to it, that it knows us? Needs to know anything but itself?” I was laughing now. I couldn’t help it. “This was all your idea, right, Renee? Jesus Christ, everything that’s happened and you’re still just a fucking ‘maldie. I thought you were smarter than that. But that thing, it’s like looking at the whole universe at once except that part of it can talk, and you think it gives a damn whether we live or die!”

  “I told you,” Linc
said to Renee as I pushed through the doorway, stumbling when I shoved past him. He was almost laughing, too. “I told you, and told—”

  “Jessie!” Renee yelled, as my feet hit the sands, as I started marching down the ridge to get away. “If he wants us for real this time—I never said to try and talk him out of it!”

  The beach grasses, dry and sharp and crusted with sand, bent and bowed into the wind; the sky was clouding over again, turning an ashy pearl as the sunset crept up, afternoon starting to diminish into night. I kept going.

  I heard footsteps behind me and then Linc’s sharp, reproving voice. Renee still had just enough hoocow in her to think earnest hand-holding talk could solve anything; thank God Linc had some damned sense. Some. The sands spread out ahead of me, a big curving sweep of beige raked into fabric-folds by the winds; nobody’s footsteps marked it but our own, nobody’s tracks and traces but the gulls. When I stood right on top of the ridge, bare toes pressed hard against the shifting ground and all that clean open space below, I could pretend it’d only ever been the gulls and grasses, that I just dreamed it all up myself from nothing. My own private landscape, sketched freehand.

  A good drawing pencil makes a muted, crinkly scratch against crisp new paper. I hated the sound of it. I hated the way the tin foil rustled, when Renee tried wrapping another bent, sagging cardboard box into a useless solar oven. (Cake, Lisa said that once, if we had an oven we could bake a cake. What the hell would I do with a damned cake? Did she ever understand that meat was all that tasted like anything to the rest of us, anymore?) I hated Linc’s tuneless, sing-song muttering as he dug sandy-soil seedbeds, snapped a thrashing rabbit’s neck, leafed through our salvage piles from the Cowles County Library for the eighty-eighth time. All of it was nothing but goddamned useless noise, just like the rush of the lake waters, the winter wind, the spring thunder—none of it, magnified eighty-eight times over, could never do a thing to shatter the quiet inside us all. I was nothing but music, once; its electricity sang night and day all through my supposedly dead flesh, whenever I slept, whenever I woke, but now all that was gone. All I had left, all any of us had left, was the deadbeat pulse of a pumping heart, the nasty little sucking sound of our own hoo breath. Worthless. It was worthless. We’d all gone stone deaf.