Sister, she corrected in her head, but she let it go. He seemed fragile. Something wasn’t right.
*
Two oak leaves raced through. The third must have got caught. “Are you coming back to the cottage, Dad? I can make you some breakfast.”
“I’m waiting,” he said, “for the other one.” “It’s got stuck, Dad, come on.”
*
Sara had already laid the table for breakfast and arranged several pans on the hob, but she’d disappeared upstairs to the bathroom. Amy took over and had served a full fry-up to Mum and Dad before Sara came down.
“Would you like some?” Amy asked.
“No, thanks.” Sara sat at the far end of the table. Amy filled her own plate and sat right next to her.
“What’s the plan today then?” Sara got up and leaned against the sink.
“I don’t want to go out there,” Mum said. “I mean, I would like to stay here and finish that book by the fire.”
“I need to go food shopping, of course,” Sara said. “What time’s your new boyfriend arriving, Amy?”
“Sixish. Although he said it could get to seven.”
“I’ll do a late dinner then, if he can’t be sure.”
“I’m going to go for a walk today,” Amy said.
“You’ve just been for a walk,” Sara said.
“A longer one. Maybe cross the river and climb the hill on the other side.”
“There’s a good view from the top,” Dad said. “You all loved it up there when you were younger.”
*
Each barely-there filament of the feather added to its delicate Rorschach pattern. Amy twirled it between finger and thumb as she set off down the hill. She might give it to him when he arrived. What would he do with it, though? Would he keep it because she’d given it to him? What if he just discarded it? She wanted to tell him she loved him when they went to bed that night. The words had been in her mouth so many times, but she’d been too nervous to let them out. What if he didn’t say it back? He’d said he needed to take things slowly after his marriage. Did the fact he’d already been married mean he wouldn’t want to do all that again? She’d never fantasised about a big fancy wedding like Sara’s, but still. She let the feather fall back to the ground.
He didn’t like to hold her hand. He’d never said that, but she could feel it when she let hers touch his as they walked. He never took it. It was a small thing really. But did it mean he didn’t like her enough, or that he was still in love with his ex? Maybe he would never want to hold her hand. Would that matter? As she stumbled down the slope she couldn’t pull apart the rush of wind in the leaves from the sound of the water. For a moment she felt as though she was walking beneath the water, and its surface was up above the branches. She might drown in the trees. She had to stop. She leaned against a tree and then sank to the ground between its roots. He thought it was fine for them to not see each other all week. She felt a longing for him that scared her. She checked her phone for him constantly. Every message from friends and every marketing email she’d never signed up for hurt, because she believed for a split second it was going to be from him.
Damp was seeping through her jeans, but the leaves around her felt dry beneath her hands. She stood up and looked at where she’d been sitting. There was a deep crevice, not much more than a hand’s width, in the trunk. It was the hollow tree. She slipped her hand inside and pulled out mounds of desiccated leaves. With her face against the bark she reached in further. There was a smell of wet soil and something sickly. She dislodged an object deep inside the tree. Twisting her wrist, she managed to pull out an old ice cream tub. The label on the lid had disintegrated but there were initials scratched into its sky-blue plastic sides, SP, AP, KP. Inside there were seven ring pulls tied to a length of string, a rusty needle and the book. The fairy tale book they’d taken from the cottage. The text block came away from its sodden cover in her hands. The page edges were mildewed and it was difficult to prise them apart with her nails, but when she did, the printed words were remarkably intact. “The Cat Mother”, “The Bird House”, “Devil’s Bridge”, “Three Green Baskets”, “The Fox and the Leaf”. There were pages missing where the final story should have been; only its last page remained:
The last wish, the un—, had to be hidden from the world. The good sister folded it up and asked me to put it into this story. And a fine story it makes too, but, dear child, take heed; it must never be taken from here.
Amy shoved the book back into the tree. She stuffed the tub and lid after it, scraping her arm on unseen ridges. She remembered finding a tiny bone in the tree and pretending it was a key from one of the stories. Was that before, or after? They’d been playing in the woods. She remembered being piggy in the middle. She was always piggy in the middle. She remembered following a tangle of red thread through the trees. That was after. They found a little cairn of white pick-up sticks by the river. Sara threw stones at it. There were other parts, not attached to their names, that lay swollen and shining like jewels in the mud. There had been three of them. But by the time Dad had called them back for lunch they were two. There had been nothing left of her little sister: no bones, no eyes, no heart. The woods were empty of her. Before she was gone it was like her body had tried to hold on to the world, to make itself so viciously present they could never forget it. Forget her. But they had forgotten. What was her name?
*
Sara was making the dessert, stirring a thick chocolatey mess in a bowl. Mum and Dad were sitting at the table drinking tea in silence. They all looked so normal.
“Your boots are filthy,” Sara said. It was you, Amy thought.
It was you, it was you, it was you. You unwished her.
“Cup of tea, love?” “No, thanks, Mum.”
She sat and fought with her mud-thick laces. We had a sister. We had a sister. We had a sister. Maybe if she kept saying it to herself she could stop it falling out of her mind again. She tried to picture her, but couldn’t see her for the river water and leaves.
“Look at the state of me!” Sara laughed and wiggled her chocolatey fingers.
Amy watched Sara wash her hands and pat them dry on a towel before letting them rest lightly on her belly. A baby, Amy thought. Sara’s going to have a baby. Of course she was. She always had to be the centre of attention.
“Are you okay, love?” Mum asked. “I’m going to have a bath,” Amy said.
“Yes, best to make yourself presentable for your new boyfriend.” Sara’s hand remained on her belly.
The water ran in a scorching stream. She tried to imagine her little sister into being, but every time her thoughts got close to the edge of her, her mind pulled away. She wiped the steamed-up mirror with her sleeve. Her face was streaked with tears, eyelids thickening. She’d look a mess when he arrived. She needed him to arrive. To hold her. Things would feel okay in his arms.
She folded her clothes neatly in a pile on the floor. How would she explain all this to him? Would he think she was mad? Would he let her cry? Gareth had always hated it when she cried, said she should go on tablets like her mum. Sara was having a baby. A baby. She shouldn’t think about the baby. She couldn’t breathe. Her skin was burning. She added more cold. What would he think of her, a beetroot with puffy eyes? He’d never seen her like this, or first thing in the morning, or kissed her morning mouth. Would she be what he wanted? Maybe he’d leave her too. She remembered the pages of the book washing under the bridge. Was that before, or after? She tried to imagine he was with her. Why wouldn’t he hold her hand? Did he still love his wife? It was all her fault. How could she think he’d love her?
*
There were candles and napkins on the table. “We waited,” Sara said. “Sorry.”
It was raining outside. They ate their lamb steaks in silence. Sara made no pretence with the wine and poured herself a glass of orange juice instead. After dinner, Amy washed up. In Scrabble she got F.O.U.N.D. on a triple word score and wondered why it made h
er want to cry.
Green light leaked into the room. Amy shivered and hugged the blankets around herself. At least she was going home today. Stuffing her clothes back into her rucksack she wondered why she’d bothered unpacking in the first place. She had so little stuff with her that it only took up half the space in each drawer.
KRISTI DEMEESTER
Worship Only What She Bleeds
The house bleeds at night. I know not because I have seen it but because I can hear it. The blood moving through the walls, a singular drumming heartbeat that presses against me, fills me up to the point where I think I might scream. But I don’t. It wouldn’t matter. The blood comes no matter what I do.
Momma tells me that there’s no such thing as bleeding houses and that she ought to whip me for sneaking and watching The Amityville Horror even after she told me not to, but her ears are old, and she can’t hear it. Not the way that I can. Every night the house pours itself back into the dirt. The blood finding its way home.
Even more than the sound there’s the smell. A hot, metal smell. Like in the back of your throat in winter when you’ve been running and can feel all the raw parts of you exposed and open. It makes me sick. Plenty of mornings I wake up dizzy, my stomach heaving and rolling. Momma gets me on the bus anyway. Even the morning I threw up because the smell had found its way inside my throat.
*
“Stop being so dramatic, Mary,” she said, and tucked me into my green raincoat.
“A daddy would fix it. They fix things,” I told her last night.
“You don’t have a daddy anymore.” She wouldn’t look at me after that, picked at her bowl of lettuce and cucumber for an hour before tossing it in the garbage. Later, when I should have been asleep, I watched her pluck out her eyelashes one by one, transparent halfmoons drifting toward the ground as she watched the mirror, her eyes unfocused, distracted. The blood roared through the house, and the stink rose, but she still didn’t notice. I fell asleep watching her hands rise and fall against her face, the violence she committed there a small, quiet thing. In the morning, I don’t ask her about it, and she doesn’t mention that she found me out of bed, and we eat our toast in careful bites.
“I think,” she begins but stops. She wipes at her lips with the back of her hand. A smear of red jam lingers in the corner, and she brings the same hand to my forehead, huffs as she sits back down, her swollen belly bumping the table. I think of the baby there, floating in the quiet dark. I wish I could trade places with him.
“You’re warm,” she says. She doesn’t look at me, and her eyes are strange without their lashes, too big and wet, like massive pools of murky water threatening to spill over the shore line. A red scab has formed over her right eyebrow, and she scratches it, her fingers scrubbing against flaking skin.
“I don’t feel warm,” I say, but she shakes her head, her mouth turning down at the corners.
“You’re sick. Very sick. A very sick little girl,” she mumbles and scratches again at the scab. It looks bigger now, the size and color of a strawberry.
I reach across the table and pull her hand away. “You’re sick, too. You could stay home, too. With me.”
“It’s just a rash. I’ll put some ointment on it. I’ll be fine.” She pulls her lips back and grins. Teeth like an animal. Like Princess when we took her to the vet because she had to go to heaven. Like even though she was a dog, she knew something was wrong.
“Don’t you want to stay home?” she says, and I nod my head. Outside, the morning light is covered in dark, and fog creeps against the windows like little fingers tapping. Let me in, let me in.
When she leaves, I hold my breath. Quiet. Quiet. Wait for the house to do something, for it to show that it knows that she is gone, that I am alone. But there is only the sound of my heart whooshing the blood to my head and a dull pain building in my lungs.
Maybe the house sleeps during the day. I try to sleep, too, but the fog rolls against the windows, and I can’t settle down. It’s too quiet and too loud at the same time. Instead, I turn on the television, but the fog has knocked out the antenna, and white and black ants crawl all over everything. I shut it off, and write my name in the dust covering the screen.
For a long time, I stand at the window and watch the fog. Wave after wave of white smoke crushing against the house. I press my face to the glass and cup my hands around my eyes to block out the light, but I can’t see anything. It’s like the house is floating away, the fog lifting and carrying us somewhere not solid.
“Where are we going?” I whisper, but there is nothing there to answer me. I want to go out into the fog, to float in it the same way that the house does. To be cocooned and protected inside of its breath. To sleep. Maybe I would forget the look on Momma’s face when the police came to tell her about Daddy. Forget the worm crawling through the dirt I threw into the hole we put him in. Forget that he had been going to get ice cream for me. For my birthday. Forget that it was my fault.
Momma left the door unlocked when she left. I can’t think of a time when she has done that before. She’s always telling me stories about people who go around testing doors to see who’s stupid enough to roll out the welcome mat for intruders.
“There’s men out there just looking for juicy little girl bits like you, Mary. Looking for places to sneak in and find them and hurt them real bad,” she would say but now the door is unlocked, and I want to float, so I open it and go out onto the porch. The fog licks against my feet, and I take off my shoes, curl my toes against the wooden slats.
Behind me, the door closes. It won’t, I think, ever open again.
The smell lives in the fog now. Stronger than ever, and I gasp against it, pull my shirt over my nose so that I won’t retch. It worms against my skin, tries to open me up, little razors seeking something soft. It hurts, and I back against the house, try to get away. But the door is closed, and I can’t go back.
The fog reaches grey fingers down my throat, twists inside of me until I gag, and I claw at the wood beneath my hands. Let me in. Please let me in.
The wood gives way, splinters into nothingness as I press harder, a hollow space yawning wide and warm. It’s nothing at all to make it bigger, the wood breaks easily under my fists, and there is a hole large enough to crawl into, a place to hide from the sharp teeth of the fog. From somewhere deep in the house, the heartbeat starts up.
I creep into the space, careful not to catch myself on the jagged edges of the hole. The air here is softer, the smell not as strong, but dull, the reminder of a smell instead of the smell all by itself.
I should be afraid. Should leave here. Find a way to open the door. Go back to sleep and hope that I wake up when Momma gets back home, listen to the sharp sounds of her cutting vegetables, pulling meat from bone. But it’s so nice here. So warm, and the heartbeat is like a lullaby.
Just like a little mouse, I think and giggle. Inside and outside at the same time. In the guts of the walls, under the floor. The hole tunnels forward, getting smaller as it goes on. I have to hunch my shoulders and duck my head, but the tunnel is just big enough for me to fit. I push myself forward.
My fingers brush against the edges of the tunnel, burrow into piles of something soft. It feels like fur, like petting Princess, only it’s longer and stringier. Like my hair when I haven’t washed it in a few days and Momma practically pushes me into the shower.
It’s wonderful to be inside the house, to squirm along just behind the walls, snug and safe where no one can see me. I have to hurry. Momma will be home, and she won’t want me here. Will say it’s strange to be inside the walls, and I don’t want her to know that I found this place. She’ll roll her eyes again; tell me that I’m imagining things. Like she did when I told her about the blood, about the smell. Like she always does.
She never believes me.
My hands are wet and sticky, but I don’t know how they got that way, and when I push a clump of hair out of my eyes, something gets all gummed up in the strands. It’s
too dark to see what it is.
There’s light coming from up ahead. Probably an opening into the house. Behind me, the tunnel is all closed up, and the fur stuff pulses and moves. I don’t like it. I don’t like that it’s wet and looks like it’s reaching out for me. I don’t want it to touch me, to smear its damp fingers across my arms, my legs.
A round pinprick of light shines into the tunnel, and I stop my burrowing, stand before it, look out and out and out. I blink, shake the stars from my eyes, wet my lips with my tongue.
Momma’s home. I can’t see her from my spot inside the wall, but I can hear her humming. I don’t know the song, and the notes don’t sound right together. They’re all jumbled up and screechy, and her voice slides over them like oil.
I’m inside the wall of her bedroom and can see her bed, the corners tucked tight and pillows propped just so. The dress she put on this morning is draped across the mattress, the shoulders placed across her pillow, as if she laid down and the bed swallowed her skin and bones and left the dress behind.
“Mary,” I think I hear her say, but the words slip into something else, something that sounds like another language. The warm air in the tunnel has turned cold, and I shiver. The humming stops. Starts again. But it is different this time. Ghosts of words dance in the air, and I strain against the house to hear them. Underneath everything, the beating grows louder, and the fur stuff twitches.
When Momma steps into view, I scream. She is naked. Her legs bend impossibly, the joints crooking the opposite way, and she walks with slow, jerking steps. The scab on her forehead covers her face now. She’s scratched at it, torn open the flesh, and blood drips across her neck and chest. Her mouth is open, a wide O, the tongue a fat, wet piece of meat, and her teeth are pointed and sharp.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 14
