Today’s news: the winter is going to be a long one. It’s summer, but winter is already at the door, knocking and asking politely to be let in. Come winter-time it won’t be so polite. In today’s news, the fifth horseman, Boredom, saddles up their donkey and lopes cheerfully onto the scene, throwing rocks at people’s windows and pasting circus flyers on their doors in the hopes of leading them into the arms of their elder siblings. Boredom insists maybe-we-should-still-do-lunch, or God-I-wish-I-could-go-out. Boredom slips the email into your inbox from the hair salon that reads “WE’RE OPEN AGAIN!” Boredom paints over graffiti, whitewashes the walls, and turns your social feeds all about dogs again.
In other news, the fires coming up all over the country are still, in fact, coming up, and the smoke is choking all the politicians. You can see it, smoke billowing from their teeth in the photos, smoke coughing out of your car radio as you put on NPR. The man at the grocery store has stacked the oranges. They smell like summertime, like fresh hot climates. In Florida the groves go on forever, and the little eyes under the nighttime orange trees might be children, might be swamp spirits, might finally be those alligators who after years and years have had enough and are coming out of their bayous to eat the moon. It never stops, but then, it never has stopped, reports say, and if you thought it stopped you were looking at the ground under your feet on the merry-go-round and that was moving just as quickly as you.
In local politics, residents of Greene County protested the continuing long-haul march of progress. “It has to stop somewhere,” a woman was reported as saying. “My feet hurt and I’m tired and I still only make $8.50 an hour.” No comment has been made by the Horsemen, who are, apparently, too busy sharpening their pikes.
In brief:
· winter
· dogs
· donkey
· salons
· smoke = fire
· oranges
· dogs
· alligators
· dogs
· imminent bloody violence.
Looking ahead to developing stories, this reporter is doing laundry in a laundromat this evening at 6/8 CT, washing the new shorts they want to have bought and the pajamas they’ve been wearing all week. Dinner tonight is rice and baked beans. The weather is beautiful, and the woods above the combination-graveyard-and-golf-course have birdsong in them. One day, this reporter will have a large German shepherd dog and a small car and an income, and all will be, if not well, at least better.
The horseman of Pestilence has called on line 4 to ask when anybody is coming to put these fires out. If anyone knows the answer, please get in touch at this number. For all of America, good night, and good luck.
o gods, but fate’s a funny thing
she tiptoes in while you’re asleep
and rearranges all your sheets
and then she tiptoes out again.
o! but fate’s a funny thing.
o gods, the world is big and wide
and I am but a little thing
and I am missing my right socks
collecting books and leaves and rocks
o, fate is such a fickle thing.
o gods! you made the sky so blue
and under it the ocean soars
tumbles and rumbles, also roars,
and I must check my midterm scores
o gods, fate is a funny thing.
new world.
The waypoint shook again, and for the third time she wished she was outside with the rain and the lightning— she was wilder than this glass castle allowed for, anyway; out there, the sky was the only one inclined to tears, and the monsters came in more varied and interesting forms.
treasure-seeking.
“We found it,” he said, breathless; he was wrong, but they would never tell him.
royalty.
Afterwards, as she took makeup off under sepia dressing lights, I told her she should have been born a queen; she hugged me and claimed I was lying, but if I was, it was a good enough lie to fool myself.
applicant.
In ten years I see myself sitting here at my desk, typing this; I realize how badly I wanted to do astrophysics instead— how much happier I would be— in ten years I gasp, I reach out, and I stop myself from writing the end of this sente
the fall of rome.
Lights rumble by like oracles; breath fogs the glass— in the brown plastic seat, a battered senator exchanges a drink for a few tales, and with laughter, declares to his muni-bound populace: there shall be no shampooing of hair in the Roman empire; the bus trundles on beneath an orange and heedless moon.
time.
She bought the dog two years ago, when the world was clean lines like a coloring book, and she colored it in: sky blue, strawberry, periwinkle, purple mountain majesty— now she laid on the grass with her Labrador; the world had never been so brilliant, and the clouds had never moved so fast.
only paper.
He found them today in old notebooks— that was what he said, at least— and through the glossy polaroid smiles, I saw you travel in time and come back to meet me, and I was so happy to see you make it back home.
Make yourself dinner, get more sleep, move to a new town, dye your hair. Enroll in or drop our of law school, whichever one you currently happen to not be doing. Go and get a drink. Enter a witness protection program. Apologize. If leaving the planet came to you before apologizing did, then apologize several times, and to multiple people, because you probably need to.
If none of this works in your favor, proceed to step 2.
2. Find a trustworthy friend. Tell them that you are leaving the planet. Do not tell them which other planet you intend to leave it for. Offer them all of the money that you have if they will forward your mail.
Do not worry about needing your money for traveling; as yet there is no outward conversion for any earthly money into any functional credit. (If you converted any money to Earth currency when you got here, you are out of luck. )
3. Buy a large and expensive backpack. Fill it mostly with pillows. Do not use any pillows you like particularly, or any pillows that your trustworthy friend (see 2) wants to inherit from you. If you think you will need anything in particular, put it into your shoulder bag kit. Place your shoulder bag in the backpack also, on top of all the pillows. It should look full.
4. Buy a notebook, of the sort without spiral binding or tear-out pages. Scribble in it. In any non-Earth language that you happen to know, write whatever comes to your mind, like a shopping list or a description of the house where you grew up or whatever you don’t like about Earth. If you have sufficiently bad handwriting, then you may write in any language at all.
5. Put the backpack on. Act like it is heavier than it is. Hold the journal in your hands, or put it in an easily reachable pocket of your backpack such that you can get to it without exposing any pillows. If you have sunglasses, put them on; they have been known to help.
6. Call your friend (see 2) again. Tell them that they only inherit everything you own upon your leaving the planet, and not under any other circumstances, such as your being jailed or your mysterious disappearance.
7. Call the President of the United States— they go for this kind of thing. [ (202) 456-1111 ]
Explain that you are from another world. Explain that you would like to return to that other world as soon as possible. Explain that, though you do not know how to build a hyper- efficient light-speed cannon engine off the top of your head, you will get in touch with your buddy who is an astrophysicist and talk to him about it, and then send the information back down. Show them your journal. Tell them these are your notes. Do not go into great detail about what exactly the notes are. Wear your backpack, so you seem prepared to leave.
8. If the people at the White House have been understanding about this, tell them you will sing Earth’s praises as having some of the most understanding leaders in all the nearer arms of the galaxy. Spend the following weeks preparing for the horrific G-forces that Earth-made rockets create when they shove into the atmosphere by blowing themselves up in a mostly controlled way. Proceed to step 16.
9. If they have been less understanding, you will need to take a rocket yourself. Discard the large backpack. Go to the Smithsonian; you will already be in the area, and it doesn’t matter if you have already given up all your money to your friend from 2, because the museum is free.
10. Choose a rocket you like. Do not choose an explosive; these are similar, but they have crucial differences that will matter to you a lot in the end. Read the plaque in front of it to be definitively sure which kind you have picked.
11. Go into the bathrooms. Post an Out of Order sign. Get in the stall, lock it, pull your feet up. Spend the time going over any and all flight training you gathered from your orientation in your head, if you remember any of it.
12. When the museum has closed, exit the bathrooms. If you are the correct size, put on one of the astronaut costumes in the gift shop windows so you can pose as a dummy for night security. If you aren’t you will need to be more careful.
13. Angle your chosen rocket toward the windows. Hope.
If this works, be sure you are aware of any military efforts trying to shoot you down before you exit the atmosphere. Only use this rocket until such time as you can flag down someone else’s, as it will definitely start to decompose once you reach full speed. Take a picture out the window, for the hell of it. Proceed to step 16.
14. If it doesn’t, call your friend one more time. Tell them that you need your money back to cover bail and/or hospital fees.
15. At this point, call the agency that sent you to the Sol cluster in the first place. Explain to them that your interstellar surveying mission has gone wrong. Tell them exactly how long you’ve been stuck in a backwater hellhole and exactly what you would like them to do about it. If they agree to pick you up, do it somewhere relatively uninhabited; try Idaho or Arizona. Grovel.
16. Find out how much money you can sue your employers for before they fire you.
This evening I bring flowers for my lady,
my lady of the shining silver kindness.
I will find them there beside the road.
Twenty years today have I been roaming.
Twenty years is time enough to rest.
This evening I bring flowers for my lady.
My lady loves the dusty purple lilac,
the nightshade, the night-blossom, sweetest-smelling.
I will find them there beside the road,
between the curve-bones of the fallen horses,
between the gaps of rusted armor clinking.
This evening I bring flowers for my lady.
When the mist is thick and moon is rising,
when I have forgotten my direction,
I will find them there beside the road.
Tell my daughter I’ll be home by morning,
leave my pennant out among the ruins.
This evening I bring flowers for my lady.
You will find me there beside the road.
This is how the day begins. The building is tall, the stone more of a cobalt blue in the odd light than the dark grey it ought to be. The stained-glass sheets cast long lines down against the floor, and as Fortuna steps barefoot onto the ledge in the stonework the sunshine feels buttery-sweet. He sighs. Too good, this place.
“Sure.”
Trailing his hand down the wall, he bounces from high door to altar top to the ground beneath, where he crouches like a cat on its haunches, looking about the room. Blue and yellow candles melt down before him, all the flame gone. Dried wax on stone. But oh, the house is so warm.
“Sooner rather than later?” His twin is standing in the doorway.
Resplendent in her blue dress, she takes the stairs like a reasonable person. Gold chains glimmer interwoven in her burnished copper hair. Fortuna smiles for her. “Are you so busy, dear one?”
“I’m replacing the books.” She indulges him. A returned smile slips across her freckled face. They look so beautiful when they smile, he thinks to himself, so kind and clever even with the points of their back teeth.
The candles are his job. He knows this. He’s just giving her grief.
By the time the altars have all been cleaned, the incense swept out, the candles replenished and re-lit, and the heavy purple curtains opened to the light, the sun has finished rising. Pale golden morning— watery in its unsteadiness— has given way now to the full glare of a spring day. Outside, if Fortuna strains just a little, he can hear the noise of carts rolling their way up the foot of the hill; they are on their daily path out of the city and into the wood to give thanks to whatever respective god they have chosen to keep. No one comes every day. But hiding crouched behind the high door, as a bird or a beast, the bright deity watches them; he sees Alabane the priest of Love sing with Orchean who has given her hand to Memory. Spring is for dancing. In the winter, the yellow-dressed keepers of Hearth and Health and War will come to the house. They will sing different songs, and Fortuna will watch them with the same delight. But now is spring, and time for purple- and green-cloaked townsfolk to lead the way.
His fingers weave into the hem of his shirt, and he thinks, blue. His and his twin’s clothes-- both blue.
Blue like the sky. Blue like the water. Blue like the candles on the left side of the offering bowl. Blue like the stone in the pale sun. Blue like a bruise from a delightful mistake; blue like forget-me-nots. Blue like some people’s eyes.
“Fortuna!”
He tears his gaze from the fabric.
In the back of the house, Fatum has fixed the bookshelf. She rearranges it every time she comes in. Once, Fortuna watched her do it; she took out a particular text in red leather and spent a good ten minutes placing it and removing it until it was precisely where it should be. Three hours later a young woman walked in the door to the library, cast her gaze about, and happened to land her eye on it. She took it home. She would be something, Fortuna knew in that moment— a priestess, a knight, a queen— and he blew her a kiss as she left, though she never saw him.
For luck.
Today, his twin isn’t holding a book. Today she holds a drum in her fingers, tapping rings lightly against the edge with a gentle, soft rumble. It’s a medium-sized drum. Very modest. Nothing like the great one they keep in the palace.
He raises an eyebrow at her.
“Do you know whose this is?” She laughs, suddenly. “It’s not marked. And I don’t remember. But I know you watched the festival a few nights ago. Who was drumming?”
“Edell?”
“Edell!” Fatum clicks long nails on green paint. “You’re right. Edell.”
“He was so good.”
“Don’t get moon eyes over him.”
“But he was so very good.” His face is threatening to betray him. “Dear one.” “He’s been practicing.”
Fatum, tired of the discussion hands the drum off to him; she drifts out from the library to check over the candles and the curtains one last time. As she turns her back, he can see the concentration in her eyes. Sometimes he wonders about her. So strange to not know what she’s thinking.
Fortuna cradles the instrument in his arms. Raum-ta-ta-TUM-ta, TAM-ta, tarra-tam-TAC-ta. He shifts his weight; necklace jingling, he follows her back down the hallway.
In the city there is a temple, with keepers who are human and worshippers who are political. They are great important folk in beautiful silvered clothes. And if they behave well enough, they are invited to the house. For no one comes to the house who is not invited.
Tam-taka-taka-ta, taum-TA. Taum-TA-raka-taka-tah.
Fortuna catches Fatum’s sleeve, pushing a chair aside from the center of the room. He laces their fingers together with the hand that isn’t holding the drum. “Springtime is here, you know,” he intones. She gives him a look.
“Time for new beginnings.”
The look continues.
“Joy and laughter, happiness ever after?”
Fatum inclines her head to the door.
They could have been finished with the readying of the house in a minute or less if they hadn’t done it by hand. But by hand was how it had to be done.
Ta-tabada. Raka-taka-tah!
She looks away from him.
Disappointed, Fortuna sets the drum down on one of the benches.
He lets go of her arm-- and she moves half a step forward before catching his and swinging him round to her, as Edell’s drum starts a rhythm of its own accord, untouched. Fortuna laughs, catching his balance. He keeps a tight hold of her arm and spins around her, eyes glittering, ablaze with delight. The music leaps up into the rafters.
They may not do anything as one anymore, but they dance perfectly.
When the doors open some ten minutes later, there is still the echo of a tune in the highest parts of the room. The light spilling in catches gold shimmering in the air before the altar for just a moment. Somewhere behind the high door, Fortuna and Fatum giggle conspiratorially, leaning on each other’s shoulders, and on the nearest bench lies the drum,
elgan fell behind in the forest and for a time that was alright. he made one too many missteps and eventually that kind of thing has to catch up with you; that’s what they always told him, anyway, and so when he slipped and lost his footing and cracked his head against something and nobody saw, when he laid under fungal forest cover for days, it was okay, because you really could say he had it coming.
elgan fell behind in the forest and the forest swallowed him up, and when he woke up later to an uncomfortably buzzing mess of greenery with blood dry in his blonde hair, he couldn’t help but just take it in stride. hard to hide from everything catching up to you in the end. but he hadn’t died. he just fell behind.
elgan fell behind in the forest, and after a while, waiting on the beach on the wrong side brought him some kind of modicum of comfort. he knew how to scrap, and he knew how to swim, and he would eat bugs if they’d let him catch up to them, and he did, and the approach of the steamer on the horizon saw his fire because how could they not and they swung about to see him. by the time they were within range and slowing he was hopping up and down, waving, shouting to them about glory and light.
elgan fell behind. down there, madmen aren’t hard to find, but there was something about him.
elgan got off at the nearest port before the merchant had the sense to just throw him overboard at the mercy of Nar. With his fraction of money he carried he couldn’t get far, but he bought new clothes and a shower and a bed for the night and emerged cleaned up onto alien ground the next day, looked around, found a newspaper in town. Stormed in, all smiles, slapped elbows down on the most important-looking desk and said, chief, you’re not gonna believe this one.
elgan fell behind in the forest and the forest served him well.
he provided samples and vivid descriptions, leaves of strange plants, times, dates, locations exact as he could make them. He didn’t call himself brave, he blamed no one, and all that he changed were the names. Elgan Penrose grew his hair out dark and long and took up wearing coats, and made jokes, and reintroduced himself as Alan, and Elgan died.
Elgan Penrose fell behind in the forest, and he lost a lot, but it took him longest to come to terms with the thought that he’d been forgotten. He wrote more, after that, and more again; he took ships out to strange islands and he nearly died twice, adventures fictionalized forever in serial form over the fingers of many a reader. At the end of the day with his new persona and his name and his pens some could say that he got what he wanted.
Elgan Penrose returned to the New Welsh Republic at age thirty-eight, with some cash and some backup and a very very clean gun,
and a smile.
Elgan Moss took his old name again, and burned Alan Penrose with his sister’s help on the night that he thought he’d be finished. He was never a jeweler, but for all of his travel he never returned to New Bristol— by now it would just be unkind.
With his heart in his throat, he decided:
some things
were better
left
unremembered.
-- from an elegy found on a shipwreck shore, october ‘18.
I am sitting on a chair that squeaks like metal-on-metal, like a factory, like something powered by steam, and i watch as the bee moves over the windowpane. Diane is telling me about the thoughts she was having last night when she opened that shoebox again and I want to listen to her and I cannot because the bee is there so now I think of nothing else.
I didn’t think I would have to be the one to move it, she says. I follow the bee to the top of the pane where it thumps its fragile plastic head on the frame like a Labrador at a porch screen and I lean my body back from the window thinking sooner or later it will be angry at its lack of progress and come looking for someone to blame and Diane says do they do that, possums, and I say, uh huh
The bee is moving now. It lifts its fat heavy sides to the ceiling plaster and bounces off so I shift again. My leg comes away from the plastic of the seat with a hot wet sound like a smack played in reverse.
Hey, says Diane. I say uh huh? She says you aren’t listening to me what are you doing, and I say, Bee, like it means something. She looks up and misses the bee but it is scraping its wings around the ceiling now and if I listen very closely to it I can hear the buzzing and I am reminded of the dull throbbing old stings have and how they are warm to the touch and sticky. I think of opening the window but I can’t because the bee is in the way.
I threw it out with the shoebox, Diane says. I didn’t think it would. Would what, I say.
Walk a few blocks up from a worn-down apartment, into the old golf course. Turn past the wall of hedges on the left and be sure that your feet don’t linger too long on the concrete path where the grass sprouts in little cascades through the cracks— it wants to distract you. It wants your attention. Don’t let it steer you off.
Underground, a cemetery hides in plain sight. Some 18,000 bodies were ordered exhumed in the early 1900s, but San Francisco forgot a good number. We don’t know exactly how many bodies they left behind, but we do know that without a doubt, the casual millionaire’s weekend game of golf is played upon the final beds of many, many sailors, too poor or too obscure or maybe just too unlucky to make it to their destined resting place in Colma. (Colma, where all the bodies go.)
Beware of the ghosts.
Keep walking. Take half a right when you see the small circle of trees up past the hill, directly opposite the clubhouse but further west into the unknown. Brush your shoes in the grass. Crush a few weeds under your toes with your step to prove to the world— to your companions, to yourself— that this place is real, and you are real, and that the two have met. In the westernmost fog banks it gets much easier than you might think to forget. While you’re remembering things, be sure you remember to breathe. Look up. Be quiet. Take notice. You are entering the Portal.
The structure is stone, half-ruined. Chinese characters sweep their way over the arch, but I never learned what they say. There are iron hooks rusting slowly to dust on both walls, as though they used to support a gate, or perhaps just some enormous chain, but whatever barred the door has long since vanished with the headstones. Anyone can enter. (It is an entirely different question as to whether or not anyone should.)
Before you, the far wall seems to be a kind of altar. It’s covered in dead leaves and dirt, but when you wipe that away, you find holes that might have supported candles once. The archway on the far wall is door-shaped, but it is too small for anyone but a toddler to use it as a door, and besides, it’s sealed off with a perfectly fitting piece of white marble. Someone has painted a crude pictogram of a three-legged animal on the stone. Beside this are handprints, done in the same reddish-brown stain. These were not there when the Portal was constructed, but neither are they recent— I’ve lived in my apartment about ten years, and they have always been there, weatherworn and odd.
Bundle up, adventurer. It’s cold out here with the cliffs and the ghosts and the sea.
For years I have been fascinated with this place. When I was younger, I took my friends out to see the strange, majestic ruin that stood just a little ways into the wilderness, and the ones I knew would understand all felt it: the inbetweenness that hangs heavy in the air. It’s the Richmond’s best-kept secret and San Francisco’s biggest liminal space.
When I turned twelve, my friends and I put on cloaks and toy swords. We walked our way out to the stone gate and sheltered there against the night while we thought of an adventuring plan. A year before that, I borrowed my closest confidante and snuck out of my house at dusk with tiny plastic beads and candles to perform a ceremony for the marble door, hoping it might take us away to some strange magical land of the kind we read about in books. Only a month ago, when a friend from across the bay needed to reaffirm the world was in order, I gathered them and two others, and in the evening mist, we ventured out to the Portal. We didn’t find anything physical, but we found some kind of solace while we sat on the concrete and looked up at the stars.
Be gentle when you brush your hand against the carving. A few dozen grey pillbugs live in the cracks behind the overhang, and you need not scare them. Speak softly. There is no ceiling, but over your head, hundreds of constellations watch you just as closely as you watch them. Bear no ill will, and leave no traces; say thank you as you step back out between the pillars, and leave the way you came. Do not look back.
You have gone nowhere. But you are changed, somehow, in your manner or your tone or the feeling you carry in your chest. One day, that door will open, but it will not be for you or me. Wherever it leads to, no mortal is meant to tread.
Time stopped, you mentioned, the day you saw her smile. Time, slipping through your fingers like water, breathable, livable, but not physical. Time cannot be held. Time, in the depths of the ocean, making the faces of clocks crack. Time, pushing down on the dusty graves of the man before you and the man before him and the man before him and the— time; the time is two minutes past four in the afternoon, and there is no more bread at the table, and no one will meet your eyes. Time to be home, time to stay, there is time enough for other things. Time, she murmured, running her fingers over the back of your hand, time to go, can’t you see you want to? Time and tide wait not for you, oh no, ink surrounds your little vessel and you go down, down, down, but shipwrecks are timeless. Time yet for your dreams. You wish you had the time to chat. Time, as the metal creaks, is priceless, but you sit here killing it, waiting for your next move. You are going to make up for lost time (lost water, loose fingers) when you are above again, and when you leave the dead to their eternal sleep beneath the salt, you think to yourself, it’s about time.
THE RIVER mended the two halves of the valley like hand-stitched clothes, a long blue thread that ran down the center of the green grass. It turned greyish in the fall. The stones at the bottom of the river, polished smooth by decades of running water, shone a crisp weathered color. Autumn was cold in the great waiting south— cold and full of secrets. The leaves turned amber and ember and rust, fell, landed in the icy washes of the river Thorn and were carried on east— seawards— until eventually it lost them all. They snagged on fallen logs or bridges, speckling the banks like the scales of an unimaginably massive carp. Later, walking along the edge of the water, Alli would find pockets of them brown and rotting, and he would know that winter had come at last.
For now, though, it was only cold.
Basket in hand, Alli’s long trek took him away from the road, up across ditches and mud. He knew he would ruin his clothes by the end of this, almost without doubt, but the thing he would do more than made up for the cost of a new set. He could only hope it wouldn’t need more than the one trip. It wasn’t good to leave tracks in the soft bank of the Thorn, but neither was it good to walk on the path, and anyway, the path did not lead where he meant to go.
The lake was surrounded on the southern side by a crown of red-orange jewel-toned leaves. Autumn hit the far south first, Alli had always found; like a wolf over water, it took it a time to make the leap over the river line. Fall preferred not to get its feet wet. Well, so did Alli. As he broke the line of bushes on the northern edge, the sun had just begun to set. Liquid light scraped off on the tops of the trees: gold on copper, gold on maroon. The whole wood might’ve been on fire.
He hesitated— later than he’d have liked— but knelt at the edge of the lake to get at his basket. Inside, two loaves his under cloth and a layer of cheese, still warm. Steam wished up from the towel as he unwrapped one,
lifted it from its swaddle,
threw it full-force into the water.
Alli looked on anxiously as it bobbed there, bouncing gently every few seconds. When the ripples from the impact had reached his toes, it was listing badly, and in another moment it was gone. The still surface had eaten it whole.
“I only have the one other,” said Alli. This was the part he hated. Hearing his voice in the silence, even at the half-murmur he was using— he might as well have screamed.
The water, of course, said nothing.
“Will you take it all, then? What will I give my brother?” said Alli. Still nothing.
The sun had dipped below the trees. The sky was just again pink by the time he left the lake. When he thought he’d gotten far enough, far enough that the water couldn’t tell, he stopped walking and broke into a run. Back along the river. Feet crunching in the leaves. Up and onto the path that led to the road that took him back to town.
There was always something there.
Ali had known it since he was little. He’d known, first, when he’d see the little house across the lake on the southern bank. He’d known when he saw the gleam of white in the river and found dog bones there— but then again, too big and mean for a dog. He’d known when he watched fall burst the banks and burn up from the south of the Thorn until winter hunted it back down from the northern border, and he knew when, upon telling her, his best friend had ventured to cross the gap into the southern woods. She had slipped in the rocks upstream of the lake. He remembered the ribbon of red from her curly brown hair, drizzling into the lake water. He remembered how horrible and hungry the lake had been.
When she recovered, she remembered none of it, but Alli knew.
He fed the lake after that. He didn’t want it to stay hungry. But despite throwing it offerings weekly, he worried it wouldn’t be enough. That one day the things in the Thorn and the things in the southern woods might come across the water, searching for the girl whose blood they tasted just a few years ago.
He never told her.
Alli slept badly most nights. In his dreams, the wolf rose up from the river. It walked the bank at dawn, and in the sunrise he heard it at his door, dripping brackish water—
— drip, drip, drip.
It whispered through the walls to him. If he listened close enough, he could hear it; grinning, it let the secrets of the south stumble like smoke from between its
long,
sharp
teeth.
The signboard was still damp when Maia pressed her hands on it. She fumbled with the pins. The last one— bottom left corner— broke through the thick paper skin of what must have been several generations of residents’ concerns with a pop, and she stepped back and admired her handiwork.
WANTED:
Friendly resident with large flatbed truck or similar for mid-weight hauling job, ASAP. One trip. 20 minutes approximate drive time. Gas included. For info, contact Maia Wright, 638 743 5753. Pay negotiable upon call! Please ask.
Bring gloves.
“Pay negotiable,” scoffed Aaron. He was following behind her, carrying the remains of her stack of posters. He'd already picked his fingers on pushpins twice, declared the pursuit a lost cause and suggested that they stop for coffee. He was getting bored.
“Sure. Let’s redo the poster. ‘Help wanted! One truck driver. Will pay the cost of your gas and make you a ham sandwich. Apply immediately.” Maia held up her phone. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“It’s the sound of every single person in Annebrook not calling me.”
They’d been at it for an hour and a half. Posters had gone up on phone poles and on the grocery store window, taped up crookedly with translucent bug’s-wing Scotch. The public noticeboard in the center of town was only the final touch. Maia leaned against the large potted cosmo opposite and stared into the middle distance, wondering what she could do next. It was a Sunday, and Sunday meant no work for her and work for Aaron at five o’clock. Maybe they deserved a coffee after all. There definitely wasn’t anything to be done about the thing on the beach other than the posters. She couldn’t deal with it now; she didn’t have a car.
Maia had a memory of a grey-green sedan that she’d driven off the ferry to Annebrook from the mainland at the beginning of vacation season. It was a decent car. She remembered distinctly that it had a little lucky cat hanging off the mirror, paw over his ears, reaching for the stars. But when she tried to trace what had actually happened to the thing her thoughts got hazier. Nothing to do with a sedan on the island, after all; she supposed she’d sold it.
Three more minutes and it registered to her that Aaron was talking.
“—isn’t much business lately, even over the summer,” he was saying, flipping his thumb over the pointed edge of the poster sheets. “It’s okay. I mean. It’s not a tragedy. But still, though, it really doesn’t make you want to go in and sit behind a bar all night in an empty room, you know? Not my idea of a fun weekend. All we get in is old men, Carl and Bill and those guys. And then they just sit in the empty room in the bar and the bar’s still empty.”
“Uh huh,” agreed Maia, cautious. That would hold him for another moment.
“I swear to God.” Her friend brushed a stray hair out of his eyes. “It’s like the whole town is full of ghosts. There’s nobody here at all.”
“Uh huh.”
The second one had been a mistake. She got a funny look for it from Aaron, tilting his head, shifting the posters to one side— never able to stay still.
“Maia, are you good?”
“Uh huh,” said Maia, automatically. She winced. “I mean! I’m fine. Just tired.”
When the time comes, he will be spread upon the table.
The words will flutter over him like
butterflies like
swallows like
breath.
He has long since gone to meet his cousin Death;
only the blood remains,
red gold,
and brown, and drying draining into stains.
When the time comes,
your curiosity will be too much, and,
full of morbid fascination,
you will take the knife to what is left of luck.
Beneath the pale prism of his prison skin
is meat, thick
but parting under steel showing bone beneath the veins.
The body is a temple, they say.
You will cut
away
the ropes,
and if you donʼt choke,
youʼll find the subtle etching on the ribs and spine.
Greedy, as is natural in our kind,
your magnifying glass will pick out promises,
for lost love and wedding rings,
small things,
stolen kisses near misses
pinkie swears
summer rains.
Take the scalpel, let it slip and slice his lung open
last gasps of air on metal unheard anyway,
who would have caught a word, you say
the blade still parting tongue from open mouth.
His lips are soft,
look closer,
at the b2se the last remains of golden ichor
now
shimmer
out.
Time passes, unforgiving.
With the ticking of the clock, you half
expect to hear another knock—
this heart lies, still,
loving no less for all the frost,
loving no less despite the things it lost,
and no matter how true you cut,
youʼll never find
what
you wanted.
Each gasp of his was a devotion, but
that wonʼt end up in the morgueʼs report; after all
science never met religion.
Filled with a kind of postmortem shock,
you set aside your butcherʼs tools,
and slide this ruined art into the drawer
hang up your newly painted frock.
“It was a car,” you say;
“a car,” and turn your key
in the lock.
