Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three

by Simon Strantzas

  I told myself this was the next best thing. I told myself this was better than being trapped here with the children, that the children would be fine without me, so what if they were taught to hate me, that my presence would make him more volatile and they’d be safer with him and they would be okay. They would grow up okay. They would never know how he felt, or didn’t feel, about them. These are the lies I told myself to make it okay for me to abandon my children with their insane father if it came down to it, a choice between them or me.

  Other women are not like this, are they? It’s documented—it’s why women stay in terrible marriages, in deadly situations, in order to protect their young or just to avoid being separated from them. I loved my children more than anything in the world; I loved them so much I found that love almost unbearable; and yet surely there is something wrong with me, that I could do this cold mental arithmetic that would permit me to leave them behind if I had to. But I am not a monster. I said it forty years ago and I say it here, again, I did not hurt my children. I would never hurt my children.

  It was the sea; the ghosts; the dead things. The seventh wave.

  6

  I didn’t know what to do, so I just drove. The children were subdued. They knew everything I’d told them was lies. There was no vacation, there was no Daddy joining us later, and something was terribly, terribly wrong. That first day, I was so afraid that I drove for eighteen hours straight, keeping on back roads. I was sure that he would have reported us missing and that law enforcement everywhere would be combing the highways in search of a car of my description with my license plate number. But I was so exhausted that I began hallucinating—imagining people stepping out in front of us on the road—and I finally pulled off and paid cash for a motel room, pulled the car round the back, and piled us all inside where we slept.

  We lived like that for a week or more—me, driving until I couldn’t any longer and then a motel. I kept heading west. Isn’t that where people go to reinvent themselves? I’d never been west of Texas or north of the Mason-Dixon line. I imagined the entire West Coast as a glittering paradise where we would be safe.

  I bought spray paint to inexpertly disguise the colour of our car, and somewhere out in the desert, at one of the many low-end, no-questions-asked types of places where we’d spend a night or two to rest up, I asked a shifty-looking desk clerk if there was some way I could get a different license plate for my car. I could barely get the words out; it was such an alien thing for me to do, but he reacted as though customers asked him for things like that all the time, and they probably did. He told me he’d have something for me when I checked out in the morning. After that I relaxed a lot more. Not only were we thousands of miles away from Bernard, but we could not be casually identified either.

  Yet I still didn’t feel safe. We got to southern California and I couldn’t stop; it was as though movement had become a compulsion. I turned north, and we went up through the state and then crossed into Oregon and the Cascade Range. And then we were out of the mountains and by the coast, and it was a sea like I had never seen before. The sea I was used to was on the edge of hot white sands, and it was warm for swimming. This sea was icy, washing up on pebbled beaches or crashing against rocks and cliffs. It was grey and roiling. In comparison to the sea I was accustomed to, it felt wild and untamed.

  And I finally felt safe.

  Those days were such a blur that I don’t know how long we were on the run for. Ten days, two weeks, three weeks? I have never known. But I thought, we can do this, we have done this, I have done this. We can disappear. We have disappeared. And I think for the first time ever in my adult life I felt a sense of exhilaration and possibility, that the life that had been written for me was not the one I had to live.

  True; the children were disoriented and traumatised; they missed their father, and cried for him and for their lost home. But children are resilient. I would find us a place to live, get them enrolled in school in the fall, and things would be better. I still wasn’t sure how I would find work or support us, but I had enough cash to at least buy myself a few weeks, and surely in one of these resort towns on the coast I could at worst get a job cleaning hotel rooms.

  It was in that exhilarated spirit that we’d had an evening picnic on the beach. It had been windy, and a little on the cool side for our Southern bones, but the sun sinking into the ocean had been beautiful, and the children seemed almost happy for the first time since that evening they had come in from sailing with their father. They had begun to run about and play on the rocks jutting up from the water. The tide was actually on its way out, and the waves were choppy but not nearly of a size to alarm.

  I didn’t actually see the moment it happened. I had turned away and was tidying up the remnants of our picnic, was thinking idly rather than in a panicky way for a change about what I would do the following day, that I would start to look for work, when I heard a piercing shriek—

  And all of my children were in the water, and were being carried out to sea.

  I ran in after them. I tried to save them.

  You must believe me.

  They must believe me.

  7

  People tell a story in these parts about the seventh wave. It is not something I ever heard of in my childhood growing up along the southeast coast. The dangerous sneaker waves that snatch people to their death here do not exist where I come from.

  Here, though, the ocean is crueller. These waves come out of nowhere, out of a placid sea. They say that every seventh wave is the one to watch out for, that it is the unexpectedly large and dangerous one.

  I read about the seventh wave, all those years ago. I even called an oceanographer at a university here and talked to him about it. I was so distraught for so many years, and I felt that if I could only understand why it had happened, it would lessen my pain. What I learned was that science and superstition do converge, that patterns do exist in which roughly the seventh wave or thereabouts will be the largest. But sneaker waves lie statistically outside even this estimation. They cannot be explained. No one can say when one will rise like a great hand out of the sea and pluck people from dry land and drown them. No one can say why.

  I do not know when, but I understand why. The gods and the demons and the ghosts that live in the sea demand human sacrifices. What could be lonelier than being dead? And down there in the ocean depths where pale eyeless things swim, beasts that are nothing but tubes and mouths lurk, where monsters that have thrived since the planet was young and all of evolution’s nightmares converge under cover of darkness and deep, deep water, down, down, down they dragged my three babies, creatures of sun and light.

  It is so late here. It is as late as the ocean is deep, as dark as the depths of the ocean and the blackness of space.

  But, you say to me, you say you love the sea. How can you love such a terrible thing?

  Have you not been reading the story I am telling you? Have I not always loved terrible things? My love has been nothing if not misguided and unwise. And how could I not love the sea, when my children are a part of it? No matter where I go in the world, I can touch the sea and touch some part of them, the atoms of their being.

  On that day, twenty years after I walked into the sea in my attempt to die there, I ran screaming into the sea demanding that it bring back my babies. Ancient and implacable, it did not reply. And it was so calm. You’d have never guessed that such an act of inexplicable violence had just occurred.

  Everything came out after that, of course: my flight with the children, and accusations from Bernard that I was unhinged and had killed them. Because of him, they investigated, but they said they found no reason to think that what had happened was anything but a tragic accident. Bernard said he would never believe that. I think it is because he had a guilty conscience. I would never have hurt them. What kind of a mother, what kind of a person would that make me? I am not that kind of person.

  All of the publicity was strangely advantageous for me. A local i
nnkeeper took pity on me and did give me a job cleaning rooms. From there, I worked my way up to supervising the maids, and then over to the front desk, and at the end of it all, I was running the inn myself. Somehow, from all that horror and despair, I made a good life for myself. I could never have imagined such a life.

  And I travelled the world, and I visited the sea everywhere I went, and every year, on the night of my children’s death, I walk down to the shore where it happened and I talk to them. I tell them what the last year of my life has been like and I tell them stories about how their lives would be now. The first few years it was easy, but the older they get the harder it is; I cannot imagine my babies, even little Joann, in their forties and fifties now! They would have families of their own, of course. Their lives would be blessed. I would have seen to it. I would have given them good lives. I would have.

  This is the first year I am not able to go down to the beach and talk to them. The weather is too bad, and I have done something to my right foot that makes it difficult for me to walk. I am hesitant to see a doctor about it. I have remained what people call “surprisingly spry” throughout my older years, and I know how they are, these medical people, how they take one look at you and diagnose you with “old,” and everything that comes after that is secondary to the disease of “old,” and the next thing you know they are poking you and prodding you and trying to put you away, and you with nothing to say about any of it.

  But I have a little house that is right on the coast, on the edge of a cliff with a path leading down to the shore, and I can hobble out onto my front porch and see the sea smashing against the rocks below. I don’t dare go any further than that. This storm is very violent; it feels as though the wind itself could pick me up and toss me into the ocean. They would collude in that way, the elements, to get me back to the sea, to do away with me like that.

  I have not gone out just yet, though. For some time now the wind has been howling in a way that sounds like the children crying. They are calling for me over and over: “Mother! Mother! Mother!” Children get so angry, and they must be disciplined. They must not be allowed to run wild and do whatever they like, don’t you think? It spoils them, and above all, children must not be spoiled.

  It was better for them this way. We saved them from love, saved them from passion, the sea and I. My only lover, my one true love, vast and unfathomable and savage, subject to the whims of the moon and the vagaries of the wind, oh my darling brutal sea.

  Something thumps on the front porch. A single thin line of seawater has trickled from under the front door and across my floor to stop now at my foot. Their voices on the wind are so loud now, shrieking for me, and their little fists are beating at my door. My children have come home. Suddenly, for the first time, I feel afraid. I never meant any harm to come to them.

  Can you believe that?

  Will they believe that?

  Sadie Bruce

  LITTLE GIRLS IN BONE MUSEUMS

  The exhibit was housed in a nondescript building with sliding glass doors. The block letters on the doors read: BONE MUSEUM.

  In the back of the museum, beyond the more popular bones of the mastodon and the saber-tooth, there were three twisted human skeletons posed in elegant and writhen shapes. The first skeleton curled like the inner parts of a rose, twisting at the ribcage and wrapping her arms with the twist in a frozen hug; the femurs and tibias of each leg were crossed and lifted over the head. Another bent backward with her skull near her pelvis and her left hand reaching its thin, knobby finger bones toward the glass. The skeleton on the far right was from a slightly earlier time than the other two. Her right femur pointed downward, as if she were kneeling, and the other leg stuck arrow-straight out to her left. She bent sideways at the waist, arm slung over her head to grip the arch of the outstretched foot. The left arm had once been used for balance but now dangled uselessly. They hung together, shellacked in the display, suspended lifeless and lifelike by fishing wire. Their bones wavered in the flow of temperature-controlled air. The display’s plaque detailed the lives of the women who tied themselves and drifted among the regular population like dandelions carried on a breeze, delightful, fragile, and seasonal.

  ###

  In the beginning of the atrophy, the pain was unrecognizable, a twinge, a moment of eye-widening gasps dissolving away, leaving Piedra wondering if the shock had actually happened or if she’d imagined it. She had heard stories about the anticipation of the torment arriving days before the real thing and torturing the prospective knot with anxiety. The agony started in her foot, which curved like a sickle moon. She was surprised to find it there, having assumed it would begin in a larger muscle set like the thighs or the back. Her arch spasmed and she almost lost her balance, her concentration. Using every ounce of strength she had, she kept her pose with only a small cry escaping. Her instructor, a small dragonfly of a woman, frowned. She had invested more than a year in Piedra. You are worth this extra time, the instructor assured her. Piedra could not fail. Piedra raised one eyebrow, the only movement she was allowed, to communicate she was fine. She could continue.

  The atrophy was a delicate time. One slip and she would be finished and left crippled for life. The cramping sensation radiated out of her foot, up her ankle, and along her leg.

  Piedra had been bound in an intricate knot months earlier. Her right leg stretched upward and bent back over her spine, where the big toe perched on her shoulder. Her left arm reached over her head for the right toes but instead of grabbing her foot, she kept her fingers in a delicate extension, as if waiting for a bird to perch. The right arm crossed behind her back and she twisted her wrist in order to clutch her right calf. Her left leg was bent at an angle to the front and lifted so her left toes kissed the right. Now all she had to do was wait until her muscles lost their definition and hardened in place. Once that happened, the ties could be undone and she would remain forever locked in position.

  And so, the pain. The staff fed her intravenously and encouraged her to blink. An apprentice wiped the sweat from Piedra’s armpits while another one changed the bag and catheter attached to her hip. Piedra could smell her waste but, thankfully, wasn’t able to see anything. Another bag was clipped in and as Piedra bore the uncomfortable sensation of draining fluids without relief, she tried to remind herself that soon enough she wouldn’t need the catheter. At some point, her body would consume every last drop of her feedings. She would be as pristine as a mounted sculpture, free of dampness and stench.

  The instructor gave Piedra techniques for coping: breath, call on a memory, focus on the future, but all Piedra could experience was the lightning-hot hurt of her muscles collapsing and hardening. She was sure she glimpsed madness at the far reaches of her mind, beckoning her to tumble down and live out her life in the peaceful prison of a disabled body and twisted sanity. That prospect was more terrifying than the atrophy, and so she forced herself to ride the pain until her exhausted body couldn’t take any more and she passed out.

  As she descended into the blessed blackout, she heard her instructor’s voice pushing through the fog. “It will end, some day. It will end.”

  Piedra didn’t believe her.

  ###

  The girl with the braids took in the twisted skeletons. She sat cross-legged on the floor with her gaze unbroken and her mouth slack. Her grandmother bent down, touched her shoulder, and the girl rose out of her thoughts.

  “You’ve been here for hours, sweetheart. It’s time to go home.”

  “Grandma, I want to do that,” the girl said, pointing to the bone-knot skeletons.

  The grandmother ignored her aching hips and knelt beside her granddaughter. “It is painful.”

  “But it’s gorgeous.”

  ###

  The sparse room was bright and filled with sunlight. Piedra was placed on a pillow but she couldn’t feel the fabric or the stuffing. She couldn’t feel her body, either, not beyond a dull ache. A small happiness tugged at her and flew into joy when her in
structor entered the room. Piedra opened her mouth to speak but all she managed was a strangled gargle.

  “Hush now. Your voice will return soon enough. Be gentle. The atrophy is over.” The instructor clapped and a flurry of women burst through the door, ready to attend to the new knot. The instructor untied the ropes helping keep Piedra in her contortion. The women bathed her, brushed her hair, and fed her melted chocolate, poking their plump fingers into her dry mouth and rubbing the sweetness along her gums.

  The anguish and trauma of the atrophy faded with time. Piedra practiced her poetry. She read books and composed essays on topics of interest, like butterfly migration. It was important to be well rounded.

  The rest of the month blurred into costume stitching, hair braiding, makeup application, and bleaching Piedra’s roots until her scalp burned. They dressed her in the debut costume, a green sequined sheath covering her body with slits leaving her breasts and thighs exposed when the fabric shifted. Crystal leaves adorned her hair and gold twigs were tucked into the crook of her thumb. Piedra was confident she would have no trouble finding a suitable Baron. The Baron would give her a home, take care of her, and there would be parties.

  The evening before her debut, she rested on her pillow, twisted, frozen, impossible, and complete.

  A bone knot.

  ###

  “I think I would enjoy being a bone knot,” the girl said. “I imagine I would be good at it and I would love it.”