Year's Best Weird Fiction: 1

by Laird Barron

  Seated in the middle of the room Keiko hears the slightest sounds of the vixen. Her thumb and index finger at her throat count the beats of her heart, the pace of which subsides as the beast grows calmer and withdraws. But that is not for long. It returns to rub against the fastening of the window, against the walls and shrubs; it barks. She ought to leave the house, but an insurmountable weariness has seized Keiko. She gets as far as the front door, which gives onto a small flagged courtyard; but at the moment when her fingers touch the door handle she knows that the beast is waiting for her, plaintive and ubiquitous.

  She puts her hands flat on the door. “What do you want?” she asks. “Mother,” comes back the voice. “Never,” replies Keiko, choking with horror and fury.

  At the door into the garden on the other side of the house there are the same sounds, the same exchanges. “The night is multiplying the monsters around my house. I’ll wait for morn­ing; then they’ll have disappeared.”

  She goes upstairs to bed, her knees like cotton. She recalls for the first time without the veil of self-deception the day the beast was born. It is not so late. She calls her lover (he is on a busi­ness trip to Tomakomai) to talk to him about that child that is on its way; but there is no reply and she puts down the receiver without leaving a message—her broken voice, she is afraid, will betray her. She lies on the bed fully dressed, she unbuttons her shirt, she places both hands on her belly and her fingers discover again this object which more resembles something invertebrate than an embryo, an amorphous mass with languid movements floating in her bowels. She falls asleep in the familiar hollow of that jellyfish to which the darkness gives gigantic proportions; she returns to consciousness aching. The beast to which she gave birth in the past summer, now large and pale, is stationed at her threshold. It comes forward. Keiko backs off and falls to her knees, lips compressed. The beast has become the size of a wolf. Its hair is long, its limbs are powerful. It circles round Keiko and nudges her with its paws and muzzle, but without biting or scratching. Twice it forces its huge groin between its mother’s thighs, which it could have opened wide with a single snap of its teeth. As it does this it pants and grunts with pleasure. Keiko tries to rise to her feet. The giant vixen reseats her with a heavy blow of its back leg.

  Presently the body of the girl is in the stomach of the beast, and her spirit flutters briefly between the separated pieces. The vixen leaves the house and stalks through the streets under the cover of the night. Sounds travel through its fur, skin and intestines, which the scattered parts of Keiko would still be able to hear: sounds of car-engines, of asphalt brushed by wheels, of human voices, but also of the puissant heart-beats of the animal, the creaking of its bones as it trots in the ditch beside the road. Then fallen leaves, the smell of decaying undergrowth, earth scraped by the monster. What had been Keiko succeeds at last in dissolving itself in the recesses of the gigantic beast, which, wearied by its running is now gone to rest in a hole in the forest. Winter is on its way. It will sleep and, alone of its species, bring forth young at the return of the spring.

  —Translated from the French by William Charlton

  Kristi DeMeester

  * * *

  LIKE FEATHER, LIKE BONE

  Kristi DeMeester lives, loves, and writes dark, weird fiction in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Jamais Vu, Shock Totem, Shimmer, and others. Growing up both Southern and Pentecostal, she has witnessed traveling preachers cast out demons. These demons still haunt her writing. Find her at www.oneperfectword.blogspot.com.

  The little girl is under my porch eating a bird. Her hair is matted. She did not bother to push it back before she began, and blood has clotted against the white strands. I try to ignore her, but she is crunching its bones, and the sound is like the ground cracking open.

  I creep under the porch, squat near her, but not too near. She still has her milk teeth, and they are sharp, a tiny row of pointed knives. Small feathers cling to her heart-shaped face.

  “You shouldn’t do that, sweetheart. It isn’t good for you,” I say.

  “I want wings. Wings the color of the sky,” she says and slurps at the bird’s eyes.

  “What’s your name, darlin’?”

  “Momma said I don’t have one. But your name is Caitlin.”

  “How do you know my name?” I say, but the little girl shakes her head.

  “It’s a secret,” she says and licks her hands, her small pink tongue darting in and out of the spaces between her fingers where the blood has dripped.

  I feel I should take her inside; put her in a hot bath, wrap her in the thickest, fluffiest towel I can find, but it’s her mouth that keeps me from taking her in my arms and carrying her into the house. She gobbles down a slimy string of meat, and I look away.

  “Where’s your Momma?”

  “Under the water, under the water,” she says, and her voice lilts up and down as if reciting a nursery rhyme. My skin blossoms into goose flesh despite the warmth of the late September afternoon.

  “She went under the water. Like your Jacob. The sky doesn’t go in the water. I want to be like the sky.”

  I haven’t said his name in six months. Not since Colin left.

  I pretended to listen as he spoke. “I’m sick of your fucking judgment, Caitlin. Like losing him didn’t tear me open. Like you’re the only one allowed to mourn. My boy. My baby boy in the goddamn ground, and I kept thinking that it wasn’t right for him to be down there in the dark. He would be scared. Cold. It isn’t right. I can’t do it, Caitlin. I can’t. ” he had said. But I was happy when he left. He didn’t know what it had been like to find Jacob, his eyes glassy, unfocused, his skin blue, his mouth filled with water.

  “Jacob,” I say and my mouth is full with the sound of his name. The little girl cocks her head, watches me, her eyes glinting in the shadows.

  “Do you want wings, too?”

  I think of the heaviness of Jacob’s body when I pulled him from the water, my fingers scrabbling through his hair, dipping inside his mouth as if I could pull the water out of him.

  I kneel beside the girl and watch her pluck the feathers from the bird. She gathers them in her hand one by one, and she laughs. It is like music, and I am so tired. I lie down in the dirt. It is cold and damp like the fistful of earth I placed on top of Jacob’s small coffin.

  The little girl hums, her voice high and quavering, and arranges the feathers around me. Her fingers are streaked with blood, but I do not care, and she places the feathers in my hair, tests their color against my eyes until she is satisfied. She pats my cheek, and her hands are sticky.

  “There. Now you’re like a bird, too,” she says and resumes her song. Her voice is delicate, fragile, a thing I could take in my hands and crush. So much like Jacob’s cold hands, tissue paper skin stretched across bone. So easily breakable.

  Something flutters at my feet. A small sparrow hops toward us, its beak opening and closing.

  “You’re calling them,” I say, and she snatches the bird, watches it wriggle against her grip before snapping its neck. The sound seems to echo against the slats of the porch, fills up the space. I think of screaming, but if I start I’ll never stop.

  She grins, her mouth all teeth and gore, and holds out her hand. The bird is still. I want to take it from her, breathe life back into it, but I remember Jacob, my mouth working to push air into his still lungs.

  “Look,” she says and turns, lifts her shirt to expose bare shoulders. “You see? It’s working.”

  Dotted against smooth flesh are small bumps, dark specks against pale skin. Tiny feathers beginning to sprout.

  Something sharp gnaws at my stomach. I am hungry. So, so hungry, and the girl turns back to me, places the sparrow near my mouth.

  “Don’t you want wings?” she says, and her voice is Jacob’s voice. There is a roaring in my gut, an aching screaming to be filled, and I take the bird in my hand, bring it
against my lips. It is so small. I do not think it will be enough.

  “I can get more,” she says. Behind her, small wings the color of the night sky unfold, flutter for just a moment before settling.

  I bare my teeth, press them against warm flesh, tear at the soft feathers. It burns as I swallow. The little girl sits with me, sings her song into the growing night. Beneath my skin, my bones shift, and the dead make room for something new.

  Jeffrey Ford

  * * *

  A TERROR

  Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels, Vanitas, The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and The Shadow Year. His story collections are The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, and Crackpot Palace. He lives in Ohio.

  Emily woke suddenly in the middle of the night, sitting straight and gasping as if finally breaching the surface of Puffer’s Pond. The last thing she could remember was the shrill cry of the 6:00 a.m. whistle from the factory down Main Street in The Crossing. Then a sudden shuddering explosion behind her eyes; a shower of sparks.

  She pulled back the counterpane and moved to the edge of the bed. There, she rested; her bare feet on the cold floor, letting the night’s hush, like between the heaves of storm, settle her. Only when a fly buzzed against the windowpane did she remember everything.

  Her health had been bad, her spirit low. She’d felt so weak for days on end that she could barely make it out into the garden to cull wilted blossoms. Her pen, which usually glided over a page, sowing words to correspondents or conjuring a poem, had become a weight nearly too burdensome to bear. At her father’s insistence, the doctor had come the previous week and demanded to examine her. She’d reluctantly allowed it, in her way. He stood in the upstairs hallway, peering through the partially open door of her room as she shuffled past the entrance, back and forth, three times, fully clothed. He’d called out to her, “Emily, how can I diagnose anything other than a case of mumps in this manner?” but she was loathe to see him, to have him or any other stranger to the Homestead near her.

  All that had somehow passed, though, and she no longer felt a slave to gravity. Gone was the perpetual headache like the beating of a drum, gone the labored rasping for breath. That frantic confusion of thought that had plagued her seemed only a fading nightmare, as if now, at the start of autumn, there’d been a spring cleaning in her mind. Before standing, she took stock to make sure she wasn’t deluding herself, but no, she felt calm and rested. She stood and stretched, noticing a dim reflection of her loose white nightgown in the window glass, a floating specter that made her smile.

  Moonlight sifted in through the two windows and showed her the way to her writing table. There, she lit the taper in the pewter candlestick and took it up to lead her through the darkened house. She wanted to let them know that she’d recovered from her spell. Turning right, down the hallway, she stopped first at Lavinia’s room. A tapping at the door brought no response. She rapped louder, but still couldn’t raise Vinnie from sleep. Quietly, she opened the door and crossed the dark expanse. Bringing the candlestick down in order to light her sister’s form, she was surprised to find the bed still made, empty. She left that room and hurried further down the hall to her parents’. Her mother had been in the poorest health, and Emily was reluctant to wake her, but concern for Vinnie overcame her caution and she knocked heavily three times. Silence followed.

  The raised lantern revealed her parents’ bed to also be empty, still made from the day. She hurried back up the hall to the top of the stairs and called out for her father. The glow of the candle only reached halfway down the steps. Beyond was a quiet darkness from which no answer came. She felt the nettle sting of fear in her blood and called again, this time for Carlo, her dog. At any other time the Newfoundland would have been right by her side. Slowly, she backed away and returned to her room. She set down the candlestick on her writing table and stepped toward the bed. After a quick look over each shoulder, and a moment of just listening, she pulled the nightgown off and tossed it on her pillow. She was paler than the garment she discarded, glowing within the glow of the candlelight. From the closet, she removed her white cotton day dress from its hanger and slipped it on with nothing beneath. She found her walking boots in the shadow at the end of the bed and guided her bare feet into them while standing. Not bothering to tie the laces, she picked up the candlestick and left the room.

  The untied boots made a racket on the steps—better, she thought, than having to utter a warning to whatever revelation lurked in the dark. She discovered that the clock on the mantel in the downstairs parlor had stopped at 2:15. Stillness reigned in every room, from her father’s library to the kitchen. She fled to the conservatory, to her gardens, for comfort. As soon as she crossed the threshold from the house into the growing room, the aroma of the soil soothed her. An Aeolian harp in the one open window made music, and she turned to the plants, desperate for a moment’s distraction.

  It seemed to her like it had been weeks since the last time she’d inspected the exotics. September had definitely come and was drawing the summer out of blossoms. The peonies, gardenias, jasmine drooped dejectedly, their closed petals half-wilted. The summer gentian were long shriveled, and she knew she must pick them before they fell in order to make the purple tea she’d dreamed of. Resting the candle in a patch of thyme, she leaned over pots of oregano to reach the plants and pinch the desiccated flowers from their stems. Only when she had a handful did she recall that her family had vanished in the night. She shook her head, muttering recriminations at herself, put the petals in the pocket of her dress, and blew out the candle. Her eyes had adjusted to the moonlit night.

  Before leaving through the door at the end of the conservatory, she grabbed from a peg the tippet of tulle she often wrapped around her shoulders when walking or working in the outdoor gardens. It was a flimsy wrap, and did little to warm her against the wind that shook the trees in the orchard. She thought of it more as a familiar arm around her shoulders. She kept to the path and called out in a whisper for her father and then Vinnie.

  Upon reaching the heart of the gardens, she rested upon the log bench her brother, Austin, had built when just a boy. She resolved to go next door to The Evergreens, Austin’s house, and get help. She had a choice to either reach it by traversing a lonely thicket or going round to the street. For the first time ever, she chose the street.

  She hadn’t been in front of the Homestead in over a year, and the thought of being seen drained her will. She found it ever preferable to be in her room, sitting at her writing table, watching, through the wavy window glass, the traffic of Main Street. For long stretches in the afternoon, before she’d put pen to paper again, she’d watch her neighbors come and go. Her imagination gave her their names and their secrets, but she felt in her bones that only at a distance could she know them.

  It was different when the children came into the yard and stood beneath her window. They could smell that she’d been baking. When the cookies cooled, she’d slip them in a crude envelope she made from butcher wrap and then attach a parachute of green tissue paper her mother had been saving and forbade anyone to use. There’d be three or four children on the lawn, looking up at the white form behind the glass, a mere smudge of a phantom. Opening the window, she’d say nothing, but launch the cookies, the green paper cupping the air. The parcel would float gracefully down into their grasping hands. They’d hear her breathy laughter, the window would slam shut, and they’d scurry in fear.

  She opened the wrought iron gate of the fence that ran between the property and the sidewalk, cringing with the squeal of its hinges. Looking around, she waited for someone or something to come at her out of the dark. She left the gate open so as not to make it cry again and headed right, toward The Evergreens. The wind pushed against her and dry leaves scraped the street. She shifted the tippet on her shoulders but it could do no b
etter. It was only early September, yet she smelled a hint of snow and felt winter in her brain. A line from a poem she’d written surfaced, and she spoke it under her breath: “Great streets of silence led away . . . .”