At home, I cook a very small chicken breast and cut it into white cubes. I count the bites and when I reach eight I throw the rest of the food in the garbage. I stand over the can for a long while, breathing in the salt-pepper smell of chicken mixed in with coffee grounds and something older and closer to decay. I spray window cleaner into the garbage can so the food cannot be retrieved. I feel a little light but good; righteous, even. Before I would have been growling, climbing up the walls from want. Now I feel only slightly empty, and fully content.
That night, I wake up because something is standing over me, something small, and before I slide into being awake I think it’s my daughter, up from a nightmare, or perhaps it’s morning and I’ve overslept, except even as my hands exchange blanket-warmth for chilled air and it is so dark I remember my daughter is in her late twenties and lives in Portland with a roommate who is not really her roommate and she will not tell me and I don’t know why.
But something is there, darkness blotting out darkness, a personshaped outline. It sits on the bed, and I feel the weight, the mattress’ springs creaking and pinging. Is it looking at me? Away from me?
Does it look, at all?
And then there is nothing, and I sit up alone.
*
As I learn my new diet—my forever diet, the one that will only end when I do—something is moving in the house. At first I think it is mice, but it is larger, more autonomous. Mice in walls scurry and drop through unexpected holes, and you can hear them scrabbling in terror as they plummet behind your family portraits. But this thing occupies the hidden parts of the house with purpose, and if I drop my ear to the wallpaper it breathes audibly.
After a week of this, I try to talk to it.
“Whatever you are, I say, please come out. I want to see you.”
Nothing. I am not sure whether I am feeling afraid or curious or both.
I call my sisters. “It might be my imagination,” I explain, “but did you also hear something, after? In the house? A presence?”
“Yes,” says my first sister. “My joy danced around my house, like a child, and I danced with her. We almost broke two vases that way!”
“Yes,” says my second sister. “My inner beauty was set free and lay around in patches of sunlight like a cat, preening itself.”
“Yes,” says my third sister. “My former shame slunk from shadow to shadow, as it should have. It will go away, after a while. You won’t even notice and then one day it’ll be gone.”
After I hang up with her, I try and take a grapefruit apart with my hands, but it’s an impossible task. The skin clings to the fruit, and between them is an intermediary skin, thick and impossible to separate from the meat. Eventually I take a knife and lop off domes of rinds and cut the grapefruit into a cube before ripping it open with my fingers. It feels like I am dismantling a human heart. The fruit is delicious, slick. I swallow eight times, and when the ninth bite touches my lips I pull it back and squish it in my hand like I am crumpling an old receipt. I put the remaining half of the grapefruit in a Tupperware. I close the fridge. Even now I can hear it. Behind me. Above me. Too large to perceive. Too small to see.
When I was in my twenties, I lived in a place with bugs and had the same sense of knowing invisible things moved, coordinated, in the darkness. Even if I flipped on the kitchen light in the wee hours and saw nothing, I would just wait. Then my eyes would adjust and I would see it: a cockroach who, instead of scuttling two-dimensionally across the yawn of a white wall, was instead perched at the lip of a cupboard, probing the air endlessly with his antennae. He desired and feared in three dimensions. He was less vulnerable there, and yet somehow, more, I realized as I wiped his guts across the plywood.
In the same way, now, the house is filled with something else. It moves, restless. It does not say words but it breathes. I want to know it, and I don’t know why.
*
“I’ve done research,” Cal says. The line crackles like she is somewhere with a bad signal, so she is not calling from her house. I listen for the voice of the other woman who is always in the background, whose name I have never learned.
“Oh, you’re back?” I say. I am in control, for once.
Her voice is clipped, but then softens. I can practically hear the therapist cooing to her. She is probably going through a list that she and the therapist created together. I feel a spasm of anger.
“I am worried because,” she says, and then pauses.
“Because?”
“Sometimes there can be all of these complications—”
“It’s done, Cal. It’s been done for months. There’s no point to this.”
“Do you hate my body, Mom?” she says. Her voice splinters in pain, as if she is about to cry. “You hated yours, clearly, but mine looks just like yours used to, so—”
“Stop it.”
“You think you’re going to be happy but this is not going to make you happy,” she says.
“I love you,” I say.
“Do you love every part of me?”
It’s my turn to hang up and then, after a moment’s thought, disconnect the phone. Cal is probably calling back right now, but she won’t be able to get through. I’ll let her, when I’m ready.
*
I wake up because I can hear a sound like a vase breaking in reverse: thousands of shards of ceramic whispering along hardwood toward a reassembling form. From my bedroom, it sounds like it’s coming from the hallway. From the hallway, it sounds like it’s coming from the stairs. Down, down, foyer, dining room, living room, down deeper, and then I am standing at the top of the basement steps.
From below, from the dark, something shuffles. I wrap my fingers around the ball chain hanging from the naked lightbulb and I pull.
The thing is down there. At the light, it crumples to the cement floor, curls away from me.
It looks like my daughter, as a girl. That’s my first thought. It’s body-shaped. Pre-pubescent, boneless. It is 100 pounds, dripping wet.
And it does. Drip.
I descend to the bottom and up close it smells warm, like toast. It looks like the clothes stuffed with straw on someone’s porch at Halloween; the vague person-shaped lump made from pillows to aid a midnight escape plan. I am afraid to step over it. I walk around it, admiring my unfamiliar face in the reflection of the water heater even as I hear its sounds: a gasping, arrested sob.
I kneel down next to it. It is a body with nothing it needs: no stomach or bones or mouth. Just soft indents. I crouch down and stroke its shoulder, or what I think is its shoulder.
It turns and looks at me. It has no eyes but still, it looks at me. She looks at me. She is awful but honest. She is grotesque but she is real.
I shake my head. “I don’t know why I wanted to meet you,” I say. “I should have known.”
She curls a little tighter. I lean down and whisper where an ear might be.
“You are unwanted,” I say. A tremor ripples her mass.
I do not know I am kicking her until I am kicking her. She has nothing and I feel nothing except she seems to solidify before my foot meets her, and so every kick is more satisfying than the last. I reach for a broom and I pull a muscle swinging back and in and back and in, and the handle breaks off in her and I kneel down and pull soft handfuls of her body out of herself, and I throw them against the wall, and I do not know I am screaming until I stop, finally.
I find myself wishing she would fight back, but she doesn’t. Instead, she sounds like she is being deflated. A hissing, defeated wheeze.
I stand up and walk away. I shut the basement door. I leave her there until I can’t hear her anymore.
*
Spring has come, marking the end of winter’s long contraction.
Everyone is waking up. The first warm day, when light cardigans are enough, the streets begin to hum. Bodies move around. Not fast, but still: smiles. Neighbors suddenly recognizable after a season of watching their lumpy outlines walk past in the darkness.
“You look wonderful,” says one.
“Have you lost weight?” asks another.
I smile. I get a manicure and tap my new nails along my face, to show them off. I go to Salt, which is now called “The Peppercorn,” and eat three oysters.
I am a new woman. A new woman becomes best friends with her daughter. A new woman laughs with all of her teeth. A new woman does not just slough off her old self; she tosses it aside with force.
Summer will come next. Summer will come and the waves will be huge, the kind of waves that feel like a challenge. If you’re brave, you’ll step out of the bright-hot day and into the foaming roil of the water, moving toward where the waves break and might break you. If you’re brave, you’ll turn your body over to this water that is practically an animal, and so much larger than yourself.
*
Sometimes, if I sit very still, I can hear her gurgling underneath the floorboards. She sleeps in my bed when I’m at the grocery store, and when I come back and slam the door, loudly, there are padded footsteps above my head. I know she is around, but she never crosses my path. She leaves offerings on the coffee table: safety pins, champagne bottle corks, hard candies twisted in strawberry-patterned cellophane. She shuffles through my dirty laundry and leaves a trail of socks and bras all the way to the open window. The drawers and air are rifled through. She turns all the soup can labels forward and wipes up the constellations of dried coffee spatter on the kitchen tile. The perfume of her is caught on the linens. She is around, even when she is not around.
I will see her only one more time, after this.
*
I will die the day I turn seventy-nine. I will wake early because outside a neighbor is talking loudly to another neighbor about her roses, and because Cal is coming today with her daughter for our annual visit, and because I am a little hungry, and because a great pressure is on my chest. Even as it tightens and compresses I will perceive what is beyond my window: a cyclist bumping over concrete, a white fox loping through underbrush, the far roll of the ocean. I will think, it is as my sisters prophesied. I will think, I miss them, still. I will think, here is where I learn if it’s all been worth it. The pain will be unbearable until it isn’t anymore; until it loosens and I will feel better than I have in a long time.
There will be such a stillness, then, broken only by a honeybee’s soft-winged stumble against the screen, and a floorboard’s creak.
Arms will lift me from my bed—her arms. They will be mothersoft, like dough and moss. I will recognize the smell. I will flood with grief and shame.
I will look where her eyes would be. I will open my mouth to ask but then realize the question has answered itself: by loving me when I did not love her, by being abandoned by me, she has become immortal. She will outlive me by a hundred million years; more, even. She will outlive my daughter, and my daughter’s daughter, and the earth will teem with her and her kind, their inscrutable forms and unknowable destinies.
She will touch my cheek like I once did Cal’s, so long ago, and there will be no accusation in it. I will cry as she shuffles me away from myself, toward a door propped open into the salty morning. I will curl into her body, which was my body once, but I was a poor caretaker and she was removed from my charge.
“I’m sorry,” I will whisper into her as she walks me toward the front door.
“I’m sorry,” I will repeat. “I didn’t know.”
ERIC SCHALLER
Red Hood
There was a young girl whose grandma loved her fiercely, and so made for her a suit of skin. Her grandma brined the skin, scraped it free of fat and flesh, and soaked it in a brainy mash until it was soft and milky as a baby’s breath. She crafted an opening in the suit with leather cords to tie the flaps. “Promise me,” said the girl’s grandma, while she adjusted the fit, “that you’ll always wear this when you go outside.”
The girl shook her arm and the skin waggled. “It’s still loose.” “That way you won’t outgrow it. Now promise me … ” “I promise,” said the girl.
Her grandma then showed the girl how to smear the blood and offal of the Risen over the skin for camouflage, including onto the hairy scalp of its cowl. The girl kept to her promise. She never left home without the blood-smeared suit, and so everyone called her Red Hood.
One day her mother gave Red Hood two tins of soup and a bottle of cough syrup. “Go, my darling, and see how your grandma is doing. She is sick and could use our help.” Red Hood loaded the supplies into her knapsack and put on her skin suit. Her mother applied blood from a pot they kept by their apartment door and handed her a sheathed knife, its wooden handle split and repaired with duct tape.
“With luck, you won’t need this.” “It’s broken,” Red Hood said.
“The worth of a knife is in its blade, not its handle,” her mother said. She then gave Red Hood a few last words of advice. “Don’t follow the road because your shadow will show in the sunlight, and don’t talk to anyone until you get to your grandma’s apartment.”
Red Hood descended the stairs until she reached the sub-basement of their apartment building, and then followed the dusty trail of footprints her mother called the Lost Highway. The trail twisted and turned in the darkness, leading from one building to the next. Red Hood maneuvered past hulking furnaces, octopus-armed duct systems, and grimy cars abandoned in parking garages. Sometimes her flashlight picked out the decapitated bodies of the Risen. Sometimes the dust tickled her nose. She pressed a finger hard above her lip—-a trick she had learned from grandma—-so that she did not sneeze.
She did not encounter anyone animated until she had completed half her journey. Tinny and wan, like the mating cry of an insect, music was the first indication that she was not alone. She swung her flashlight around. A stranger leaned against a desolate sports car. He wore a squirrel-fur hat and had kindly eyes. He held a tiny machine in his hands and cranked its handle with the tips of his thumb and forefinger. “What’s that?” Red Hood asked. Then remembering her mother’s admonition against strangers, she added, “Who are you?”
“A friend.” The music stopped and was replaced by a silence that felt like loneliness.
Red Hood looked longingly at the tiny machine.
“It’s called a music box. A genie lives inside and he sings when I poke his ribs.” He cranked the handle, and Red Hood heard the startled genie’s tune. This time the stranger sang along with it. His voice was rough, but the words were pretty:
Away upon a rainbow way on high
There’s a land that I learned of once from a butterfly
Away upon a rainbow bluebirds sing
Of warmth and food and all the love that you can dream.
Red Hood had never heard anything so wonderful. She clapped her hands. “Please play it again.” She said please and so the kindly stranger obliged.
“Would you like my music box for your own?” the stranger asked.
“Oh yes,” said Red Hood.
“I can’t give it to you, but you can earn it.”
“How?”
The stranger’s forehead wrinkled. He stroked his naked chin. Then his eyebrows shot up. “I have it. We’ll have a race to the next apartment building. First one to tag the EXIT sign wins.”
Red Hood had visited her grandma many times and knew the Lost Highway well. She knew its dangers and obstructions: the cave-ins, the flooded levels, and, most importantly, where a Risen might lurk at a dark intersection. She gained two full steps on the stranger before he even knew the race had begun, but her skin suit slapped and dragged at her ankles. She slowed and the stranger passed her like she was a rooted in the concrete. He wasn’t even panting by the time she caught up with him at the EXIT sign.
“My suit tangled in my legs,” Red Hood said. “Otherwise I could have beaten you.”
The stranger looked so sorrowful it was surprising his eyes were dry. He placed the music box on the floor and ground it beneath his heel until it squealed. Nothing was left of it bu
t a mess of crushed metal and plastic. “See what you made me do,” he said. “That’s the music box and the genie also.” There was a spot of rust on the floor that might have been genie blood.
“I’m sorry,” Red Hood said.
“Will you pay the forfeit?”
“Forfeit?” He had said nothing of this before.
“I’m not asking for anything of value. Just a kiss.”
Red Hood had kissed family members, even a few boys. This kiss was different, hungry, and just when she thought it over, the stranger bit her lip. She gasped, tasted blood.
“Now,” said the stranger. “I have something that your mother would like.” He rummaged through his pack and exhumed a plastic comb, pink and with a floral design. “Will you race me for it?”
“To the next apartment building?”
“Yes.”
Why dwell on the details of this race? All happened as before. Red Hood took a head start but the skin tangled in her legs and she slowed. She would have cried over her failure but for the sympathy of the stranger. “See what you made me do,” he said. He cracked the comb across his knee and threw the splintered pieces away as if to hide these from their sight.
“Is there another forfeit to pay?” Red Hood asked.
He nodded.
“The same as before?”
He nodded again.
In truth, this kiss was nothing like the first. The stranger’s tongue pummeled her lips and teeth and, when she relented, pursued her own tongue like a hungry salamander. He only withdrew after he had wrestled her tongue into bruised submission.
The stranger wiped spittle from his lips and smoothed his eyebrows. He removed a crystalline flask from his pack. “If you can beat me to the next building,” he said, “I’ll give you this medicine for your grandma.” He uncorked the bottle, swirled the amber liquid inside, and let her smell its honeyed aroma.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 26
