Eclipse Three

by edited by Jonathan Strahan

  It was like being the victim of an unsolved hit and run. No one knew the motive. No real answers. No revelation. No "aha" moment. So all I knew was pain, mystification, terror and the eerie feeling of having my face seductively licked by death. I looked at my hands. The thin green lines on my wrists had faded some. I was heading home in a few days.

  I sit looking out the airplane window now. We land soon. I never return home from Nigeria the same person I was before. But this time takes the cake.

  Minutes after takeoff, I felt a rush of relief like no other. I was glad to be leaving the motherland. After what happened, I needed some serious space. I scratched at a mosquito bite on my arm. It was red and inflamed and I knew I should leave it alone. But damn, the thing was itchy. Nigerian mosquito bites were always the worst. You never feel them land on you and then you can't stop feeling the itch of their bites.

  I was glad to be sitting near the window. The plane was pretty packed, so turning to the window gave me at least a little privacy. I looked closely at my mosquito bite, rubbing it with my thumb as opposed to digging at it with my nail, the way I wanted to. The more I rubbed, the better it felt. The less itchy. The less red.

  "Oh shit," I whispered. The guy beside me looked at me with raised eyebrows. I smiled at him and shook my head.

  It was as if I'd rubbed off the mosquito bite. My skin was healed back to its usual brown. I quickly got up.

  "Excuse me," I whispered as I made my way into the aisle. I went straight to the bathroom. Once inside, I unbuttoned my blouse. I had all types of scratches from the incident. I touched the painful bruise on my side and ran my finger across it. Erased like chalk on a chalkboard. I undid my jeans and rubbed the scratches on my legs. I rubbed my hands all over. Then, naked, I stood up and looked at myself in the mirror. Not a scratch, bruise, pimple or blemish on my body.

  I was thirty-nine years old. Happy with my life. "Why?" I whispered. "Shit, shit shit! No, no, no." I was a cop. And I loved being a cop. Now what will I become? I wondered. I considered asking my hands. But what if they answer? I thought.

  I sit here looking out the window at the ocean below. What will become of me?

  I hear a sharp scream behind me. Then a gasp. "I . . . I didn't . . . he tried to . . . " The sound of commotion. A woman yells, "Get his hands!"

  "Oh my God!"

  Grunting, screeching, shouting. I jump up along with everyone around me. We're all probably thinking of the same thing. Terrorists, 9/11. I whirl around to see what's happening. It's a sight to behold.

  There are five men piled in the aisle. Two of them are dark-skinned Africans; one wears a white caftan and there is bright red blood smeared on it. One of them is Asian, he wears a black suit with a golden dragon pin on the left breast pocket. Two of them are white men; one in jeans and a t-shirt, another in a navy blue suit. They sit on, hold down, and punch a young white man, mashing his head to the floor. The young man's wide eyes water and he sweats profusely. His face is beet red. He's breathing heavily and babbling, "Get me off this goddamn plane! I want to get off! GET ME OFF!"

  In the seat before them, a woman lies in a man's arm. She coughs, her hands to her throat. A yellow number two pencil protrudes from the side of her neck. Blood spurts and dribbles down. The man holding her, an old Igbo-looking man in Western attire, looks absolutely lost.

  I look at my hands. I don't even hesitate.

  Swell

  Elizabeth Bear

  Of course you notice the blind girl.

  After you've packed up the merchandise table and started clearing the stage, she lingers, beached with small white hands wrapping the edges of her little café table like bits of seaweed dried there. She clings to scarred black wood as if something might sweep her adrift and drown her.

  The crowd breaks and washes around her, flowing toward the door. The wrist loop of her white cane pokes over the back of her chair like a maritime signal flag, in case you somehow missed the opacity of her face-wrapping black shades in the near-dark of the club. And still she remains, a Calypso on her tiny island, while you coil patch cables and slide your warm mahogany fiddle into its case, while the café staff lift chairs onto tables and bring the house lights up glaringly bright, until you start to wonder if whoever she's waiting for is coming to assist her.

  The tall redheaded bartender polishes glasses, her apron tossed over the Sam Adams Boston Lager draft handle. Up in the crude timber-built mezzanine, institutional stoneware makes flat clicking sounds and sticky food smells as someone piles it into a washtub. Your sweat's turned cold with the stage lights off, and your flat shoes reek of spilled beer. You're just packing the fiddle pickup into its hand-cut foam when you see Little Eddie the house manager (little to keep him straight from Big Eddie the redheaded bartender) come through the kitchen doors and notice the blind girl.

  He starts forward, turning sideways to miss skinny dreadlocked Clara as she pauses with the washtub full of plates, but you set the pickup on the closed fiddle case and hop off the riser so you can get to the girl first. Nobody needs Little Eddie at the end of a bad night. You've had enough bad nights here to know.

  He sees you coming and lets his steps go purposeless, turning to stack the glasses on the worst table in the joint—behind the pillar, next to the kitchen—so he can keep a hairy eyeball on you. You come over to the blind girl's table, careful to make some noise, and stop four feet from her.

  "Miss, do you need some help?"

  She doesn't lift her chin to seek your voice, which makes you think she's been blind since birth. She does tilt her head, however, a vertical crease appearing on her brow.

  "You're the singer," she says. She sounds like the cold outside has gotten into her sinuses, her voice rough as if its nap caught on a sandpaper throat. "Has everyone gone home, then? I like to wait for the crowds to clear."

  When she lets go of the table-edge, you can imagine you hear her flesh peel free of the wood. It wobbles as she releases it, rocking back and forth on crooked coaster feet for a moment before settling down with a little list to the left. House left. Her left. Your right.

  "Everybody's gone," you say. "We're closing up. Do you have somebody to help you get home?"

  "Oh," she says, "I can manage."

  She's plain, with bland colorless hair to go with the transparent skin, but even stuffy and hoarse, her voice lifts the fine hairs on your nape like a breath.

  Dubiously, you glance at the light jacket draping her chair, the summerweight, girl-cut t-shirt stretched over her bony shoulders. Even more dubiously, you glance at the door. Each time it opens, the cold washes into the café. Each time, it takes two seconds for the cold to cross the open floor and curdle on your skin.

  Of course, she can't read your body language. So you clear your throat and say, "You know it's January out there."

  "I know my way home." As if to prove her point, she stands and gathers her red-tipped cane and jacket. She starts working her way into the latter one sleeve at a time, but the cane gets in her way. You'd offer to take it, but there's no way to catch her eye.

  "Sure," you say. "But I can drop you. I'm parked out back."

  "You want me to get into a car with a stranger?"

  You laugh. "What's going to happen?"

  "Sometimes serial killers have women who find victims for them," she says, and you'd think she was totally sincere if the corner of her mouth wasn't turning upward just a little.

  "You can call home before we leave and tell them I'm bringing you. And everybody here will see us leave together."

  She's on the hook, but it's not set yet. She chews the inside of her cheek.

  "I'll even warm the car up before I bring it around," you promise, and just like that she says, "Okay."

  She moves toward you, cane swinging, and you stand aside. She taps expertly towards the door. You follow her from the music hall, thinking that it's weird that after all that she didn't give you a chance to go and fetch the car. She's still going to have to wait while you loa
d your gear.

  One nice thing about a blind girl: you don't have to be embarrassed by the un-vacuumed state of your ride. Or the fact that it's a Corolla with a quarter million touring miles on it. It used to be red about six years ago.

  You know you shouldn't ask her, but who can resist? After she gives you directions you ask, "So how did you like the show?"

  Her silence is enough warning to brace yourself for honesty. But then what she says is thoughtful, and not as bad as you were expecting. "You still sound like everybody else," she says. "But that won't be forever. You'll find your voice."

  You nod, and realize again that she can't see you. You know you're generic. Everybody starts off generic. All garage bands sound the same, as a girl you used to know liked to say. So you're generic. But you're still growing. It's a slow, painful process, though, and there's always the fear you'll die before you finish.

  Evolution is the most awful god of all.

  "That stuff you sing about," she said. "You really believe it?"

  "I believe it's important to say it out loud," you say, because you have to say something. She makes a little noise of consideration or disapproval, like a thumped violin, and you're afraid to ask which.

  You can't really talk, so you just reach across the center console and touch the back of her hand, lightly, with two fingers. The side road whirs by under the Toyota's wheels, the verges studded with bare trees burnt-bone stark against dirty snow. The blind girl's not wearing any gloves. You don't think she had any. Her hand is cold.

  Cold flesh, not the surface cold of human chill with the sense of warmth under it, but cold to the bone.

  "You must be freezing!"

  "I'm always cold," she says, and pulls her hand away. "Bad circulation. I was born that way."

  "What's your name?" you ask, because it seems like a good way to apologize.

  She says "Ashley," you think, but when you repeat it she corrects you. She has to say it twice more before it dawns that what she's saying is Aisling, only she's pronounced it the Irish way, correctly.

  By the time you've repeated it to her satisfaction, you're wondering how she meant to walk all the way out here with no sidewalks and no sight. And who on earth would let her try it. She can't be more than seventeen. Even if you weren't sure from her skin, she doesn't have on the purple wristband the café uses for over twenty-one.

  "What does your house look like?" you ask.

  "It has a big porch," she says. "The front lawn is overgrown but there's a slate walk. The trees kind of clear out around it. When the echoes get sharp you're nearly there."

  Of course, you think, but then you deserve it for asking what the place looks like, don't you? And up ahead you can see a break in the trees, a place where the headlights stop catching on crossed black trunks.

  "The driveway's not plowed," you say, pulling up to the curb. There's a tromp line through the snow which must mark out the route of that slate path, and—as promised—a big deep three-season porch that wraps the front of the ramshackle, light-colored farmhouse like a grin.

  "We don't have a car," she says.

  There's no porch light, and the light pole in the stand of birches by the street looks like it hasn't worked in years. White paint shags from the cast iron like the bark of the young trees that surround it, all clearly delineated in moonlight amplified by snow.

  She opens the car door while you're still wondering if you should get out and help her, but the stiffness in her neck says she wants to do this for herself, and she doesn't seem to have any problem finding the path through the snow. Her cane seems to waver before her like a snake's tongue tasting the air.

  "Thank you," she says. She shuts the door and moves forward confidently. Caught on the horns of your dilemma, you opt to drape your hands over the steering wheel and watch, just watch. To make sure she gets into the house, that's all.

  She climbs the snowy steps without mishap. The lights in the house don't come on when she rattles the porch door open and steps inside.

  The door is shut behind her before you realize you never told her your name, and she never asked it.

  You keep a musician's schedule, but when you wake up early the next afternoon you haven't overslept. You've still got a couple hours of daylight and it's Tuesday, so no gig tonight, though you're supposed to be driving to Boston on Thursday and Albany Friday night. The memory of the girl and the steps haunts you all through cold spaghetti breakfast, too much coffee, a shower that washes the stiff stage sweat from your hair. At least you don't reek of cigarettes, the way you used to after a gig back when you started.

  It's not until you're wrapping the robe around your shoulders that you realize the steps Aisling climbed last night had not been shoveled, and that while there were footsteps leading towards the house, there hadn't been any leading in the door.

  You're skinning into jeans, wool socks, a thermal top and flannel shirt before you realize you've made a decision. More coffee tumbles, black, into a travel mug, and with a jingle of metal you lock the door behind you.

  It's crisp clear winter as you descend the wooden steps, ice melt crunching under lace-up boots, but the air breathed through the alpaca scarf your sister knitted is warm and smells of lanolin. You scrape the windows of the Toyota, saving gas and the environment by choosing not to warm it up before you climb in and drive away. It starts on the second attempt, grinding and complaining, but bumps out of the driveway easily enough, as if it were just following its nose.

  You remember the way, and twenty minutes later you're pulled up in front of Aisling's house.

  In daylight, it looks even more disreputable. The gutters along the edge of the porch roof sag. One has frozen saplings sprouting. You pull the Toyota over into the snow bank until the tires crunch on ice and get out. Even though this is the country, city habits die hard. You lock the doors behind.

  It's cold enough that the snow squeaks under your boots, and the sun hasn't yet made a brittle crust on top. You stride through it, noticing two sets of footprints—one big and one small, one boots and one sneakers—and stop by the front porch door. Footprints lead around the side of the house, off towards the oak wood, but on the steps only two trails break: one up and one down.

  The ones leading down cross over the ones leading up.

  You fish a miniature Maglite out of your pocket and shine it through a grimed louvered window, though you already suspect what you're going to see inside. Boxes, torn and waterstained. Mouse droppings. Blown leaves curled like brown dead spiders. There are footprints in the dirt on the boards, but they stop right inside the door and turn around.

  A ghost-story chill chases around your shoulders, or maybe that's just the wind sneaking between your scarf and your hat. Deep in the woods, the metallic call of a cardinal blurs through naked branches: wheet, wheet, chipchipchipchipchipchip. Nobody lives here, and hasn't in years.

  You catch yourself looking over your shoulder and shake your head. No one is sneaking up behind you and you'd be sure to hear them crunching if they were. Still, when you step back from the window, you hunch your shoulders at more than the cold.

  The trail leads around the left side of the house. You stuff your gloved hands into your coat pockets and rub the sleek case of your cellphone with leathered fingertips. You'd call 911, but what would you tell them? I dropped a girl off here late last night and I'm not sure she was really blind? You're not even sure if she was really here.

  If you call, you won't have to find what you might find in a snowdrift. But then if you call and there's nothing, what will that look like? Better to go check for yourself, just to make sure.

  Maybe somebody was waiting here for her. There's the other set of footprints. Maybe there's a carriage house around back, an in-law apartment or something, and that's where people live.

  Sniffing deeply, you can imagine you smell woodsmoke. But when you come around the corner into the back yard, there's nothing but those two sets of tracks, still laid over one another, one big and
one little. They cross the yard diagonally, past a trio of blueberry bushes in torn wire cages, and vanish among the trees. The snow is well-trampled, too: you don't think these are the marks of only one passage, or even just a couple.

  You glance over your shoulder again. Then, shoulder squared, eyes front, you start forward, whistling the jaunty cardinal's song back at him.

  You hope to see him flicker through the trees—red wings would be a welcome distraction from a world of white and black—but the only movement is the pall of your breath hung on the air, the way it curls to either side when you move through it. A hundred yards into the trees, just the other side of a snowy scramble over a humped stone wall that must once have marked a field boundary, the paths diverge—larger booted footsteps back towards the road, smaller sneakers deeper into the wood.

  "Two roads diverged in a snowy wood," you mutter, conflating two poems, but Frost isn't here to correct your misquotation and, furthermore, it amuses you. The problem is, neither of them looks particularly less-traveled. But you're guessing that the smaller feet must be Aisling's, which means you should go that way. Deeper into the woods, in the fading afternoon.