The Unfinished World

by Amber Sparks

  I was a young man when my wife died. I am an old man now, and I am ready for death myself. I have built one hundred death houses and I have seen countless love stories ended and begun. I have become an expert in managing death, in easing life into sleep into death into darkness. It’s a slow process, but a good process. A necessary one.

  And no, no one really comes back from the dead. Even in my beautiful, carefully built Leichenhausen. Even when the sun pours from the Kingdom of Heaven through St. Michael’s stained glass robes and shines on the faces of the dead like rubies, like wine, like blood.

  Take Your Daughter to the Slaughter

  Our fathers wake us before dawn. They wake us and we rise, confused at first, and then excited, remembering what today is. Remembering what we will become, with a little practice, a little patience. A steady eye and hand.

  Today is the opening day of werewolf season. Today we leave our dresses, our heels, our crinolines and crystals in the closet, and we take our camouflage out of storage. We check the contents of our daypacks: map, matches, knife, first-aid kit, water, trail mix, tree-stand safety belt, compass. We shower and spray ourselves down with odor neutralizer.

  We don our Blaze Orange vest and check our ammo, fingering the bright rows of silver bullets, pretty and promising as the moon. If we bring down a werewolf, we get to dig the bullets out and string them on a necklace like bloody, lumpy beads. Some of the older girls have necklaces so long they drape them round two, three times, like strands of pearls.

  When we set up our stands, we feel a little fear, an icicle thrill at the thought of teeth and claws. We know that if we slip up, we could be bitten, we could be killed. We know that we could fail. It is important; it is vital to our town that we succeed. We have spent the year learning how to use our rifles, diligently attending target practice after school, at shooting ranges and on decoys in the fields, when the weather allows.

  Some of us feel sorry for the werewolves. Some of us do not want to kill, the soft thunk of bullet in flesh a thing apart from the hard clean splintering of wood and paint. Our fathers remind us of what we already know: the werewolves are a pestilence, a plague upon our forests, and killing them makes a good sport and a kind deed. There are too many werewolves, our fathers tell us; if we do not cull the herd they will starve to death come winter. They will spread disease and decay.

  This is what fathers and daughters have always done in our towns, they say. This is a good and righteous way to live. And so we nod, and learn the proper way to clean our rifles, to use a compass, to scout a location, to field-dress a dead werewolf. And so we come, every year in our time, to the hunt.

  We crouch beside our fathers in the brush. We hold our breath; we watch a family of werewolves rip the meat from a deer carcass in the clearing. We are silent and still. We are eager to prove that we are good daughters.

  One large wolf, a male, leaves the pack and ambles toward us. We shiver in the cold and the tight grip of fear; a small girl was eaten only last year, her father helpless to act as she was dragged away by a furious and wounded wolf. We blink, blink, and here the wolf stops, sniffing, and here is an unobstructed broadside shot, and here are our fathers mouthing, Shoot, shoot! and here is our shot flying true and flaying skin and muscle just below the shoulder. Here is the unearthly howl, and our blood freezes to our bones to hear it. Here is the werewolf, here is the glassy-eyed stare, here is the twitch and the moan and here is the carcass on the ground and our fathers’ hands on our shoulders, strong and proud. Here is our first kill.

  With the help of our fathers, we dress the werewolf and drag it to our trucks. Later, we will dig the bullets out and string them, silver over our throats. Later, we will eat the hearts of the men they slowly become; we will share this meat with our fathers and we will warm our shame at that howl, our sadness at that last dissolve of paw to hand. Our fathers will hold their palms up and smile.

  We Were Holy Once

  We Benders got headaches in our blood, the way some people got brains or beauty. Me and Katie are both sore afflicted, not only with the headaches but also with dizziness and fainting spells, too. And sometimes we get to feeling sick in the stomach, and sometimes we even get bright, blurred colors, right at the edge of our seeing, like watching a rainbow through window glass.

  Katie makes use of hers because she’s the actress of the family. That’s what Pa says. She calls herself Professor Miss Katie and whenever we move to a new town, we put out that she is a soothsayer. And when one of her fits comes upon her, she makes sure to faint right near a crowd of folks and come up talking about some spirit what was trying to contact a loved one nearby. Everybody knows somebody dead.

  That’s how we drum up business. That and also Pa and Ma put out some tables and chairs on one side of our cabin, and strung up a bedsheet so customers can have some privacy, and there’s a cot if they want to sleep as well as dine. And Professor Miss Katie is also Doctor Miss Katie and if folks want a healer, she’s good for that, too. Katie Bender is full of the talents that never got born in other people, that’s what Pa says. And Ma frowns and says nothing at all, but that’s just Ma for you.

  How it works is this: One of the townsfolk don’t trust doctors, and maybe they got a good reason not to, so they come and ask for Doctor Miss Katie instead. They know that title don’t mean Doctor like schooling, but Doctor like healing, helping folks get well. Katie has a lot of different charms and spells she uses. Her favorite is something she calls the Quick Healer—it’s supposed to speed up the getting-better part of being sick. She has a little cherry wood cabinet that Pa made before he got hurt, real pretty with carvings of fruits and nuts spilling from horns of plenty. She’s got it filled with dried herbs, and she chooses different ingredients from different drawers depending on what ails you. She grinds them together with a mortar and pestle, and mixes that with soap and ashes to make a paste. Sometimes she sort of sings while she mixes, her yellow hair hanging down in sheets over her face, her arms twitching with the effort of all that grinding and stirring. She sing-hums charms against death, against poison and rot, against the damp and cold and the evil that lurks outside the door. I don’t much like the song and I don’t like watching her sing it, like a backwoods witch. It makes my skin itch and my head hurt, but I always watch her anyway. It hurts not to watch her, that’s how bright she is, like light off glass. She mixes all kinds of things: waybread, cockspur, chamomile, nettle. Fennel and crab apples and lamb’s cress and dandelion. Milk and honey and burdock, to make the crops grow and the livestock strong.

  I think she makes most of it up. I used to think Katie really was some kind of healer, until one day I watched her humming and muttering and mixing, her hair down and her back to the anxious little fellow waiting for his ma’s medicine. And just for a second the front of her face poked through the hair and she winked at me, bold as brass. How it works is this: Katie Bender is a good liar and a very good actress and how it works, also, is this: People will believe just about anything that comes out of a pretty girl’s mouth.

  I’m not much for acting, and not much good at lying, so Pa says it’s best to pretend I am dumb and that is just what I do. When we get to a town, we put it out how Katie’s a seer and we put it out that I’m not right in the head. It helps because people say all kinds of things around an idiot that they wouldn’t say around anyone else. Idiots must have an awful lot of good secrets. I’m a good listener and I remember most things people say; I tuck them away in the drawers in my head and label them careful so later I can go back and pull out the things I need to know. Like who has just came into a large inheritance, or who has money socked away under the mattress, or who has lost a loved one and would pay good gold to speak to them again. So I come in useful, too, even though I can’t act for beans and I can’t do the German accent, neither.

  The accent was Pa’s idea. He said nobody in these little frontier towns would know Germany from Georgia so it was fine if it didn’t come off perfect. It’s easier to explain w
hy we just came here so sudden, with a decent bit of money, and no people to speak of. Katie taught us all the way to speak, funny and short with sounds like you’re choking on a bite of beef. Pa and Ma are pretty good, and Katie sounds positively foreign. She is forever making us proud, plus she’s real pretty too, with lots of yellow hair and teeth what look like rich folks’ teeth, white and straight and shiny. Half my teeth have fell out already, and Pa has only two teeth left in his whole head; he uses them to open cans and crack nuts. Which he does pretty often. He likes to show off them teeth, as Ma says, like a sideshow freak. Ma doesn’t believe in being prideful. Katie’s a lot more like Pa. Pa says whatever you do, you should be the best at it. And I think we are.

  How it works is this: We set up something called a séance in the dining room. It sounds fancy, but it just means a meeting with dead people. We move all the tables out, and Pa and me drag in the big table and the medium’s chair from the shed out back. Pa built that chair special for Katie, with a false back where she keeps the things she needs. I always sit next to Katie so we can both keep a hand free. I’m an important part of the séances. When all the people come in—no more than six because our little cabin just ain’t that big—we get them sat down and douse all the lights. It’s always at night because it has to be real dark, black as molasses hung right over the moon, so nobody can see a thing except for what we want them to. Katie’s got a whole bag of tricks. She can do voices, so sometimes she’ll speak in a high, soft child’s voice. Sometimes she’ll do a woman, but deep-voiced and brassy, a warm, twangy kind of voice. That voice always makes me a little sad, because she sounds like someone it would be awful nice to know—someone kind and with a sound of home about them.

  Sometimes I’m supposed to open the false panel and pull out the fishing pole, and attach a letter or a handkerchief or some other white thing to it, and wave it about until the visitors all go into hysterics. Katie has a lever she works with her foot—it hooks into the bottom of the table and she can make the table tip this way and that, and the ladies all scream and gasp at that one. My favorite, though, is the bell trick. Katie puts a little gold bell smack in the middle of the table, a little glass dome over top of it. You can see it all through the séance, not moving, even while you hear the muffled sounds of a bell ringing out. It’s a pretty spooky effect, and of course nobody thinks that maybe Katie’s got a bell hidden away in that panel, wrapped in a piece of muslin so’s to make that muffled sound. It’s a real good trick.

  After the séance, the women usually cry and the men shuffle their feet and look at the floor, and everybody calls Katie a miracle and gives her lots of money. She just smiles and smiles, my pretty sister, and all the while you can see her green eyes filling up with cash.

  At bedtime Katie used to tell me stories about how we were, us people, a long time ago. How we were all holy once. How the earth was full of plenty, how everybody loved everybody, and how there was no sin. And how nobody went hungry, and how people were kind and gentle, even to the animals. And how a woman went and ruined it all for everybody else.

  Ain’t that just like a woman, I would say, and roll my eyes like Pa when he talks about god. And Katie would laugh, and pretend to cuff me, and instead she’d muss my hair and tell me to be off to bed. Ain’t it just, she’d say, and she would smile the kind of smile she uses for the strangers who come to our place and do not ever leave it.

  How it works is this: When a guest comes to stay the night, Ma and Katie string up the curtain splitting our little cabin in two. Pa and I bring the tables in, and Ma and Katie make them look real nice with clean white tablecloths and fresh cut wildflowers from the field out back. Ma makes a hearty dinner, with fried potatoes and steak and soda biscuits, and a dried apricot pie for dessert. Katie brings out a glass of good whisky, wearing the kind of dress barmaids at the Blue Saloon would blush at. But Pa says it’s for the greater good. He says everything is for the greater good, and that we shouldn’t feel bad about these men, these fat, lonely men who worship nothing but money and god. I’m too afraid of Pa and his black pinprick eyes to ask him anything. But once I asked Ma what he worshipped and she scowled at me and said I was a fool. So I think maybe he doesn’t worship anything, and I suppose that I don’t either. Or maybe I just worship Pa. Maybe worship and afraid is the same thing.

  Anyhow there’s Katie in her tight blue bodice, making sure the men’s eyes are on her all the time, and she’s pouring whisky down their gullets. And there’s me, opening the trapdoor right behind the chair and there’s Pa, coming up swinging his sledgehammer, and there’s Ma with the rope, binding their hands, and there’s Katie with the big butcher knife, slicing the throat clean open just like you’d kill a hog. And I suppose in a way, they are like hogs, and ever since we all fell down from Eden we’re animals, all of us, turning on each other every day. Only some folks like us Benders just do it more direct. Or maybe we’re just better at it.

  If we fell so long ago, Katie says, it could hardly be our fault that we went bad. But long ago seems like not that long ago to me. Long ago, Katie and I went to school, and we studied hard, and I thought maybe I would be a carpenter like Pa, or that maybe I would go into the army and learn to fight and use a gun. And long ago the world was small enough, and big enough, and we had friends and Pa did a good trade and even Ma would smile now and then. I’m not too sure when long ago became just now, but it happened too quick for me to notice. I think sometimes maybe it was when Pa hurt his hand, or maybe it was when our little sister Susan died so sudden of the measles, or maybe it was when me and Katie started fainting, and the townsfolk started giving us the sideways eye. In any case, somewhere in between long ago and now, we learned how it works. We got smart.

  How it works is this: They come for us at dawn, sun up like an egg, the raw, angry posse with fists around guns and torches and knives. We cleared out in time, because we’re smart, we’re Benders, and we’re always one step ahead. We leave behind the bodies in the orchard and we take the money—some ten thousand by Pa’s reckoning—and we light out in the wagon just before daybreak. Later they brag, that posse, they tell all kinds of tales: they found us and they beat us all to death; they found us and they skinned us all alive; they found us and they shot us all or burned us all or fed us all to starving coyotes. They gave us to the savages who beat time with our bones.

  But none of this is true. How it works is this: We’re always going to be one step ahead. We see things most folks can’t. We see the dead, and we see the real ugly souls of the living. And we see better in the dark than you.

  La Belle de Nuit, La Belle de Jour

  This is the troubled edge of the kingdom. It is rumored that dragons sleep near, just off the coast of our dreams. Our days are short, and our troubles grow along with the darkness. We are alone and mad here in our isolation. We live in heaps of blight and scarce, scraggly vegetation, good for nothing but lighting our fires. Our trees are all dead; the branches crack and snap like brittle bones.

  It was not always like this. Once this was a green place, full of memory and music. Once it was, perhaps not paradise, but clean, whole, a lively place at least. There was a sense that things were growing, becoming. There were so many rhymes then, so many songs, burbling up from the soil and rivers like laughter. I was training to be a singer myself, learning to sound both the new and also the ancient notes, learning to weave the stories of the kingdom’s heroes into complex melodies. My brothers were learning to be great kings, like the kings of the days long past. There was a sense that the people were renewing themselves, and the people dreamed of a golden age come again to the world. On our days off, my brothers and I hunted and fished and swam and flew our kites. We took pictures of one another, my eldest brother always pulling faces and making our parents laugh. On our favorite days, my youngest brother and I would drive to the great shore and feed the swans, watching them gracefully sail through water like small white ships.

  But then one day the rumors reached us: a great an
d terrible witch was on her way. And the earth seemed to shrivel and wither. And the animals disappeared under the ground and over the hills. And one sad day, I stood in the doorway of our castle and watched the last of the birds winging away, the sky a pale and eerie red as they flew. Even our beloved swans left us.

  Many of our people burned in the great fires, sacrifices to the gods that might stop the witch’s coming. I always thought I would end up among them, there in the center of the cypress husks, but my father forbade me go and my mother was too ill to be alone with so many sons to care for. And so I watched my friends dance in the fires, falling one by one to ash as the skies grew gray and the smoke filled the heavens with haze. Of course it didn’t work. She arrived just the same, stepping off the jet in her fur coat and sunglasses, a beautiful, haughty, horrible thing. We watched on TV, the cameras snapping away, her strange made-creatures ringing her like clay golems. When the cameras zoomed in, you could see the thumbprint on their foreheads, the dead, awful eyes, the huge hands. She waved to the curious crowds and smiled like Morgana, and got in her car and headed straight for our kingdom. We stopped dreaming that night for good. We started to fall under her spell, one by one, until only my brothers and I remained untouched.

  And then, one horrible afternoon, just three days after we buried my mother, my father married Her. The queen of darkness, la belle de nuit, lady of the last days. She brought his soul through hell and fire and made it hers.

  The first thing she asked for was the moon. Then the sky-stained stars. Then the canvas of the sky itself. My brothers rose up in anger at that, left in a pack to hunt and bring back a boar’s head that looked like hers. They left me alone and I was angry, terrified. The eldest said they would be back soon, and smiled, and said not to worry. The youngest looked back at me, and frowned, and warned me to stay out of her sight while they were away. But that same afternoon she put deadly toads in my bath and snakes in my skirt. Only the warnings of the servants saved me. She poisoned my words so they left my lips as bees, stinging my throat and tongue so badly I thought I would die. And she reached out with her mild blue eyes and turned my brothers to seven wild swans, in mockery of the creatures that meant the most to us.