Cordelia could picture the yard out back as it used to be; bright green behind the sliding glass doors. The pomegranate tree used to be full of fruit, the trellis built by her dad’s hand covered in ivy. Roses once grew; the stone birdbath once active with aviary life.
They’d play out here, her dad chasing her around a lawn that felt enormous to a child. He’d throw her little body into the air, always catching her just before she hit the ground.
Cordelia wished she could tell her father how much she missed him. Even in her memory he seemed delicate, as if he were propped up in a chair and a touch would collapse his body into inert bits and pieces.
It was an odd recovered memory, but she remembered glimpsing something unfamiliar in the back yard. A drainage pipe poking out of the ground, the metal surface scaly with rust. A distant moaning emanated from the pipe.
There was nothing visible from where she now stood, but she distinctly recalled the dinner plate-sized opening to the pipe had been covered with mesh to prevent wildlife from entering. And it hadn’t been a moan, but the sound of waves from deep down. Another thought came to her, something more aggressive than nostalgia. An old dream perhaps, or several dreams, more vision than reminiscence.
Something had once moved behind her. She’d glanced back to see the pomegranate tree fallen over. Its prodigious, leafy branches blocking the entrance back into the house. The upturned roots had gouged a deep depression in the ground. Cordelia thought she may have peered over the rim of the hole to see a large brick-lined room below with several brick-lined passages trailing off into darkness. The sound and smell of the salty sea drifted from within.
The memory gripped Cordelia with such intensity she could still hear the ocean nestled in her ears, like the moist beginnings of an earache. But she was here, in the present, the table solid beneath her hands and her parents no longer part of her life. She stood, her handprints remained behind in grainy salt particles over the wood’s polished veneer.
She looked through the sliding glass doors into the backyard. The pomegranate tree was intact, but there was no hole in the ground, and the lawn was dirt. The sun had nearly fully set, the scant remaining light emphasizing the salt spread across the yard. Her memory hadn’t been particularly frightening, just troubling, like hearing the tinkle of broken glass in an unoccupied room late at night. Only the crisp dome of the sun was visible now, the sky nearly sown with stars.
Turning from the sliding glass doors, she walked down a short hall into her brothers’ shared bedroom. It was slightly off, something missing that didn’t quite match what she’d once known. The rational part of her brain knew her old home never looked exactly like this—her memory must have created as close an approximation as possible, yet realized it hadn’t quite managed to recreate the details perfectly. She’d fallen into the uncanny valley of sentiment, a childhood imperfectly replicated.
Her parent’s room was unchanged. The bed was still here, though the blankets were missing. The shape of what Cordelia assumed was a body was stained onto the mattress, presumably in sweat. Fine crystals of salt glittered inside the outline. The figure was too thin to be either of her parents.
The hutch displaying her mother’s ceramic collection remained, the little figurines unmoved in all this time. The sensation of returning home, decades after her father’s death, was all rather bittersweet. But an air of distress persisted. None of this made sense.
She picked up a journal on the nightstand. The first page read,
On some distant wedding anniversary, I remembered you handing me a book made out of silk, each thin page covered with painstakingly ornate handwriting. But I wasn’t sure if this had actually happened or if I’d merely wanted it to be true. I don’t have any silk books in my collection.
It may have been her father’s handwriting. Cordelia wasn’t sure.
She heard someone moving around in the back yard. Racing to the sliding glass doors, she saw the suggestion of a pale face fall from the pomegranate tree, then roll to the other end of the yard.
Once outside, she was convinced that what she’d seen must have been a flurry of salt tumbled on the wind. She cast her phone’s light beam around. The pomegranate tree’s leaves were green, but the little remaining fruit had split, oozing a resinous sap swarming with gnats. Globules of the syrup had gathered on the ground. The phone’s light shone upon the piles like rubies.
The fence defining the property was mostly intact, though a few patches of weathered holes allowed a glimpse into the neighbor’s back yard. Cordelia leaned down to peer through. What the phone light could reach revealed that the area around the swimming pool was a dirt lot.
The pool was filled with salt.
A sound at the stone birdbath caught her attention. Shining her light on it showed the slimy water was squirming with tadpoles gathered around a U-shaped object, like sperm around an ovum. She blew on the water to part the animals. The tadpoles moved enough for her to see they were clustered around a rusty orthodontic retainer.
Flakes of salt fell gently from the sky. She hurried back inside.
A noise, as of something crumbling apart as it moved, came from the basement. She rushed to the steps.
Whatever had been preventing the door from budging must have fallen away; this time, it opened with no difficulty.
Her father’s private room was smaller than she’d expected, only furnished with an office desk and chair. One corner of the desk was piled chest high with papers. The room reeked of the ocean air. So many memories came cascading back she was momentarily breathless.
Something shuffled in the shadows at the back of the room, sounding as if it had difficulty maintaining its shape. Cordelia thought of a broken hourglass, spilling its bulk across the floor.
She poked the phone light’s beam into the darker recesses. There was nothing there but a brick wall, crumbly segments on the floor here and there.
The layer of salt on the desk had been recently disturbed. She shook the paper on top of the pile, looked it over, then another. Each bore a sketch her father had been working on, with a date recorded at the bottom. She rifled through several more, increasingly reluctant, though compelled to look at each and every one of his concepts drawn over the years.
The pages had been scrawled in an amateur’s hand. The clumsy drawings of an intellectually deficient child.
She noticed a sheet on the floor beneath the desk. Shaking the salty residue off revealed blue words clearly written by her father:
Salted with fire, they seem to show
How spirits lost in endless woe
May undecaying live.
The room was increasingly dank. What must have been faulty pipes in the ceiling failed to keep strands of salt water from splashing in increments. The wet touched Cordelia’s skin. Salt granules spackled her clothes and hair.
This was where her father had thought his last thoughts. Perhaps he’d retreated here to capture a perfect moment, freeze time at the only instance he’d ever been happy, in here, working on his ideas that were nothing more than scrawls of nonsense. But what moment of his life had seemed more bearable than previous moments? By himself, building useless engines in this room? Away from her?
Cordelia realized the depths of her sorrow. Too many years had gone by to make amends of any sort, but she felt the weight of grief, the burden that comes from absence.
The room was small, but she was suddenly confused by its layout. She couldn’t remember where the door was. Taking a step towards a wall, she knew she’d made a mistake, so she turned to face another wall. She found herself before an endless progression of brick corridors that hadn’t been there before. A pale crust glittered on the bricks and floor.
Deep down the corridors came the gentle sound of waves lapping at an unseen shore. Machinery churned within damp niches. Backing away, she bumped her calf against an obstacle. She squatted and gripped it to get her bearings.
She held a pipe poking out of the floor. Lowering her face to the
grate-covered opening, she breathed deeply of the ocean air. It was increasingly difficult to see. There was too much salt on her face. A shuffling, laborious gait moved towards her.
Something ashen appeared. A crystallized thing preserved in a ghastly semblance of life. Cordelia suddenly lost sight of it, her eyelids lowering from the accumulation of salt.
Someone spoke, but Cordelia couldn’t understand over the roar of the ocean. Hands gently touched her face. She tried to pull away, but they caught her with such certainty she knew she’d never hit the ground.
Gritty arms held her with waning strength. She returned the embrace so tightly pieces of the body crumbled away. There was so much salt in the air now. The engines ran faster, pumping more spray into the room, though quieter, more efficiently. Cordelia could now hear the figure whispering,
Cora dearest.
Now that they were together again, maybe they’d be able to visit the ocean once more. Maybe she’d be light enough to lift above his head and twirl until she was dizzy and exuberant like she used to be.
But Cordelia knew she was too big now, and her father was too long gone to do much more than hold her while she fought back tears with profuse apologies.
They needed to get away from this room, back to the rest of their home that had miraculously sustained itself all this time. But the gleaming lattices of salt were already too bright, and her father was far too dilapidated to sustain himself.
Who would repair the water meters when they eventually break down? The panicky thought came to Cordelia with such despair she could only accept the inevitable with quiet grace.
Her father’s minerals dissolved in her blood, particles collected on her skin. The lantern of her world was shuttered, the flame within snuffed out by the pinch of an unseen hand.
The murmur of the ocean continued to flow out of the pipe from far below.
SUN DOGS
Laura Mauro
IT HADN’T RAINED IN CLOSE TO SEVEN weeks the night I met you. The rain-barrels were down to the last silty dregs, the skies stubborn in their pale blue clarity. I wasn’t even certain the car would start; it chugged to life on the third attempt, emitting a choked gurgle like a throat full of sand. My sole back-up plan: an ageing Chevy Cavalier, tyres balding, paintwork leprous, a quarter-tank of gas which might not even get me the whole way to Wildrose.
My parents had been preppers; I should’ve known better. Boxes of ammo next to the bread in the pantry, towering crates of bottled water in the basement. Rucksacks in the hall closet piled with emergency supplies—should the End Days catch us unawares—and a framed cross-stitch on the wall: “Failure to Prepare Is Preparing to Fail.” Pastel colours, delicate bluebell border; a portent of doom, handcrafted with love.
I left at dusk. The sky was a cut mouth bleeding out onto the western mountains. It seemed there was not a single soul out on the highway that night except for me. If the Chevy broke down, I’d be screwed; cell phone reception was null this far out into the desert, and hadn’t that been the entire point in the first place? Going solo on the edge of civilisation: the complete amputation of my former life, gangrenous with regrets.
I had a foil blanket in the trunk, a protein bar in the glovebox. Half a bottle of water in the foot-well. Not good enough. I kept an eye on the fuel gauge as I drove, foot light on the gas. There was a gas station at Wildrose, a general store and a gift shop. A campsite out back full of shiny-white RVs, gleaming despite the dust. Desert adventure for kindergartners. A thought came to me in my mother’s voice, criticism from beyond the grave: at least they have water.
The way station was just visible on the horizon, a halo of light lingering over the scrub and above it, a fat, pale moon. Not the blood-red moon of my childhood terrors, heralding the arrival of the End Days—peeling back the curtains, peering up at the sky through parted fingers, because you could never tell when it might happen, and you would have to be Ready when it did.
The asphalt gleamed black in the headlights. Something ducked out of the road, into the sparse cover of the scrub. I saw it in the rear-view mirror; bright eyes sparked momentarily, the shadow of some slender creature crouched just off the roadside. Kit fox, maybe, or bobcat. I turned back to the road.
A man stepped out in front of the car.
I hit the brakes hard. The car arced wildly; my hands were tight on the wheel, my eyes squeezed shut, awaiting the impact, the crunch of bone against metal. When I opened them, the car was still, and the man was intact, staring at me with wide-eyed surprise in the middle of the road. I unbuckled the seatbelt with trembling fingers, aware now of how sore my sternum felt, how fast my heart was beating. Slowly, I stepped out of the car.
The man took a step forward. Clutched tight in his hands was a hunting rifle. .204 Ruger, walnut stock. Approach with caution. He had a canteen of water at his hip, heavy-duty boots, scuffed and well worn. He scanned me. “Are you hurt?”
My ribs ached with each exhalation, muscles contracting over bruised bone. “I’m fine,” I said. His shoulders were loose, his fingers slack on the gun. No obvious signs of hostility, but I was a lone female on an empty highway, and I was unarmed. I could almost hear my daddy rolling in his grave. “You ought to take care if you’re coming out here in the dark. I could’ve killed you.” I swallowed hard, tasting sour adrenaline. “I could’ve killed us both.”
The seashore hiss of cicadas filled the momentary silence. “I’m sorry,” he said, after a time. He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were focused on some point beyond the car, out towards the darkened scrub, dust-pale in the moonlight. I wondered what he was looking for. “Are you alone?” Eyes locked on mine now, a bright, lunatic urgency. I looked quickly over my shoulder, judging the distance to the car. “It’s not safe to be alone out here,” he said, “especially at night. There’re some vicious creatures around. You got a gun?”
“Yes.”
“Keep it loaded. Carry it with you.” Staring back out at the roadside now, finger inching closer to the safety catch. His paranoia made my skin itch, as though it were contagious. “A kid got killed up at the campsite yesterday. Some kind of animal got him. You’d best take care.”
“I’ve lived out here for some time now,” I said, mindful of how he held the rifle, how intently he scanned the horizon. My muscles were tight, my breathing a little too quick. “I can handle animals just fine.”
He snorted. “They’re getting bolder. People feed them like they’re pets. Try to get pictures with them, if you can believe it. They’ve forgotten to be afraid of humans and they ain’t keeping their distance like they used to.” He stepped off the road, into the sand. I flexed my fingers, loosening too-taut ligaments. I thought about asking what he was doing here, alone on the highway; what he was looking for out in the scrub. I caught the sudden glint of his rifle scope as he turned, the muscular heft of him illuminated in the headlights, and I thought better of questioning him.
The car had come to rest at an angle, bisecting the highway. I slipped into the driver’s seat and locked the door behind me. The man was a little way off the road and moving further, cautious steps like a hunter flushing out a deer, gun raised and ready.
This time, the engine started on the first try. I hit reverse, pulled the car around; wheels ground on gravel. I peered over my shoulder as the car reversed.
And then I saw you, cowering in the back seat; skin and bone and blood, torn blue jeans and a man’s leather jacket; I bit back a cry of surprise, staring in rapt horror at the bright blood pooling on the seat beneath you, finger-smeared over your face like war paint. You looked up at me, eyes wide, finger pressed urgently to your lips, and I could sense your terror so acutely I could almost feel it; a shot of panicked adrenaline straight to the heart.
I had no water and precious little fuel, but I swung the car round. He couldn’t fail to notice the change in direction, but I paid him no mind as I hit the gas. If I drove fast enough, he’d never know where I’d taken you. If the fuel held out, we might e
ven get there in one piece.
“It’s going to be okay,” I told you, though I had no idea if it really would. You pressed your face into the worn fabric of the back seat, exhausted; your limbs were slack, your eyes closed. It looked as though you were dying. The thought terrified me, not because I cared about you, but because, although I could shoot and skin and gut a deer without so much as flinching, I had never in my life watched a human being die.
The wheels ate up the distance. Above, the night gathered like a bruise. I wondered what had happened to you. How you came to be out there, all alone in the desert, and whether it was you the man had been chasing in the dark.
The car ran dry a quarter mile from home. I had to carry you the rest of the way, first on my back, then in my arms when you at last fell unconscious. My bruised ribs ached with the weight of you. Your skin was hot, as though you’d baked a while in the sun; you felt empty in my arms, exsanguinated, breathing shallow. Helpless. I thought about leaving you there. Taking you a way off the road, out into the dunes, so that when death came for you—inevitably, I thought, cradling your bird-hollow bones—the coyotes and hawks might pick your remains clean. But home was close, and your heart still beat, and I thought we’ve come this far. Only a little further now.
Home was a brick and timber shack built on land that had once been my father’s. He in turn had bought the land for next to nothing from a man who’d run a campsite there in the early 90’s. It was where my dad had always intended to ‘bug out’ to when the End Days came. As it turned out, heart failure came first. He hadn’t prepared for that eventuality.
I didn’t want you in my home. You have to understand that. Those last hundred metres to the house were beset with doubt. I couldn’t have left you bleeding by the roadside, entirely at the mercy of an armed stranger; I knew the ways men could hurt women, how inclined they were towards it when the power balance shifted in their favour. I could’ve taken you to Wildrose, made you someone else’s problem, but if he had been chasing you—and my instincts were screaming that he had—then he would surely think to look for you there. I can’t honestly say why I took you with me except that in all my years, I had never seen anyone look quite so afraid as you had in that moment.
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