When Things Get Dark Page 7
Carefully, she eases the wardrobe door open to reveal the room where she went to bed the night before. Everything is precisely as she left it, except for two small things she wouldn’t notice under any other circumstances: the window is closed and latched, secured against the outside world, and there is a shoe, one single shoe, under the very edge of the bed. She stumbles forward, too sore to bend, and fishes it out with her own foot. It’s far too large for her, sized for a grown man’s foot, and far too new to have belonged to her father, or to her grandfather, or to anyone else with good reason to be in this house anytime within the last ten years.
Unlike most of the house, there is no dust on the shoe. What would her careless caretakers have been doing, dusting under the bed and leaving random pieces of footwear behind? It’s not like what little she’s come to know of them. Which means, logically, that the shoe came from exactly where she supposes the shoe came from. It is a memoir of a man who came, uninvited, into the lakeshore moonlight, and meant to do her harm. A man she loved once, who proved himself a monster in his own cruel way when given the opportunity. She weighs the shoe in her hand and finds it inevitably wanting. As bodies go, it isn’t much to bury.
In the end, she dresses in the previous day’s clothes, jerkily, trying to compensate for the soreness of the night before, trying not to fall when she lifts her feet off the floor to step into her trousers. In the end, she sits on the bed as she eases them over her hips, and regrets even that small movement. She remembers being spry and flexible and quick to recover from such small offenses of the flesh as sleeping upright in a wardrobe.
When she’s done and dressed she heads for the door, cradling her ex-husband’s shoe in her arms like the baby they were never able to have. She’s not sure what she intends to do with it. Throwing it into the lake feels disrespectful, to the lake. Surely the house comes with garbage service, one more question she should probably have asked before coming here, one more mystery to unravel. Most of life’s mysteries are boring ones, she’s found, barely worthy of the name. Maybe there was another word for those little, boring enigmas once, but it’s been lost. The English language undergoes constant simplification, words escaping and running home to their root languages with dire tales of their time held captive by the American tongue.
She opens the door and steps out into sunlight that hits like maple syrup drizzled on a plate, heavy and somehow sticky, clinging to everything it touches. The light is different here. She’s not sure how; give her time and she’ll decode it. She’s sure of that, if nothing else. Just give her time.
The teen from yesterday is waiting outside, accompanied by two older people dressed in similar clothes that she takes for their parents. One of them has a bristly mustache, and that’s the one who steps forward and says, “I’m sorry the place wasn’t perfectly ready for you when you arrived. We must have read your letter wrong. We were expecting you tomorrow. Did you sleep well?”
“Yes, absolutely.” The lie is as natural as breathing, born from the same deep, awful place as the many other lies over the years, the ones about walking into doors or being so clumsy, really, she shouldn’t be trusted out on her own. She stops, and grimaces, and says, “Not really. Something spooked me in the middle of the night, and I slept in the wardrobe in the bedroom where I’d gone to bed. My back really hurts.”
Telling the truth feels like lancing a wound. The teen exchanges a look with their parents, complicated and silent, and Millie doesn’t resent that silent communication as much as she should. The sunlight is still falling on her arms, still burning the curdled sickness of her marriage out of her, all those years of silence and lies slipping away like mist in the morning. She cradles the shoe to her chest, faintly embarrassed by its presence, wishing she had left it inside until she knew the day would hold no further guests or surprises.
“Julie here is ready to finish cleaning the place,” says the one with the mustache, presumably the Papa the teen had gone looking for the day before. “If you’d like to come walking with me and Eunice, we can help you find a place to dispose of that nasty old shoe.”
“I know the best places for throwing things away,” says the teen— says Eunice, and smiles. For a rural teen in the middle of nowhere, she has remarkable dentistry, as clean and white as the moon that hung over the lake the night before.
“This old thing?” Millie lifts the shoe, looks at it like she’s never seen it before, like it’s something foul and unspeakable. “Yes, that would be best.”
“And when we get back, I’ll make sure the generators are up and running,” says Papa. “You’ll need it if you’re planning to stay past the end of the summer.”
Millie, who has never felt quite this safe or quite this at peace in her life, tilts her face back and breathes in the thick, honeyed sunlight.
“I think I may be staying forever,” she says, and the three locals smile, and all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again, and all of this is precisely as it’s meant to be. They are standing in the open, so near to the deep woods, and the sunlight falling there has been waiting patiently, and after years and miles spent so far away that the deep woods were only a dream, she is finally home.
The light is different here.
A Hundred Miles and a Mile
Carmen Maria Machado
WHEN Lucy thinks back to her childhood, she knows she’s getting close to the memory—not even just the memory, the words—when her pulse picks up, a fat bluebottle fly bumping around a lampshade, urgent and lost. If she doesn’t stop, it gets worse; a string being pulled away from the guitar’s neck. Her blood feels alive, alien, spooked as horses. She knows if she looks in a mirror she’ll see her throat humming its own crazed tune. So she doesn’t look. Would you?
* * *
It’s strange, the knowing-not-knowing. It twitches like something that won’t die. When china shatters. When someone offers her milk. She feels like she’s drifting away, like she’d simply disappear if not for the inconvenience of her limbs and organs.
She thought, for sure, that these spells would leave her when childhood did—that she would outgrow them, as she did night terrors and an allergy to cats. And it’s true that they changed—became less about broken ceramics and dairy products and, inexplicably, quaint roadside restaurants—and became odder, more diffuse. More of a mood than a fear; a sense of oncoming doom, like the seconds before death by drowning.
It got truly bad just before the wedding—well, the almost-wedding— when she and Pete’s mother visited the rental hall. The owner offered her tea, which she accepted; as they walked, discussing the space, she sipped. When it was over—when she drained the final swallow—she saw a design of Cassiopeia on the bottom of the cup. Then, a wave of nausea and panic, a darkening around the edge of her vision. Then, a whisper dropped into her ear.
Don’t do it. Once they have trapped you—
When the vignette faded, she asked the property manager if he had a telephone. That was how Pete’s mother knew she was leaving Pete before Pete did.
She thought Pete’s mother would be angry—furious, even—but when they got into the car Pete’s mother grabbed her hand and said, “I wish I could have done the same,” and then turned on the radio. They sang the whole way back, windows down. (Months later, tangled up in Meredith, she considered that that was it—she knew on some level that to submit to Pete’s bed, sweet and gentle a man as he was, was unthinkable. But why that moment at the wedding hall? Why not when Pete kissed her the first or fifth or fiftieth time?)
Shortly after, Lucy began seeing a psychotherapist, a shriveled little German woman named Dr. Krämer who conducted her appointments from the top of her desk, cross-legged on a zabuton. She was very interested in the story; kept making Lucy return to it, examine it from new angles. Was it simply the reality of the wedding intruding on the fantasy? The knowledge of marriage as yoke, and a larger sense of what was being lost? Or was it the realization no amount of ceremony could make Pete t
o Lucy’s liking, not in the necessary way? Or was it—she said this carefully, pointedly—the cup, with its scrolled handle and thin lip and delicately rendered constellation?
You will never see it again. Don’t do it.
But that would be insane, Lucy thought, releasing her skirt from her white-knuckled grip, smoothing it over her knee. It would be insane if it was just the cup.
* * *
A few weeks before her nineteenth birthday, Lucy took off with Meredith for a long weekend. They laughed as the city receded behind them and were in Niagara by sundown. This was three years after Liberace held the button to little Debbie Stone’s nose to detonate the dynamite, three years before little Roger Woodward survived a barrel-less plunge over the falls. (Polio had frozen Debbie, and fate had saved Roger; even back then, nothing was fair.) They rode the Maid of the Mist, ate too many hotdogs, made love in a motel lousy with honeymooners.
On the way home, they stopped for lunch at a little inn somewhere near Syracuse. As soon as they crossed the threshold, Lucy realized something was wrong, terrible. She collapsed into the chair and held the napkin against her cheeks; she traced the velvety contours of the fork at her place setting. Meredith was feeling tired and irritable and had no time for one of Lucy’s moods. When the waitress came over to see if everything was all right, Lucy stared at her with such naked—well, naked something, not desire, but an expression so open and vulnerable that Meredith stood up in exasperation. “I’ll wait in the car,” she said. Lucy ate in a daze (refusing milk, of course) and after that they drove home in total silence. They broke up just before they reached the city, and the next time Lucy saw Meredith, she was hanging off a blonde at the Bag and looking like a million dollars.
After that, Dr. Krämer asked Lucy if there was something special about the inn, the table setting, the waitress.
“Nothing,” Lucy said. “I mean, nothing that I put my finger on.”
“A memory, maybe? Perhaps you went there as a child?”
“It’s possible. We took trips all over, my mother and father and brother and I.”
Dr. Krämer didn’t say anything but watched Lucy over her bifocals.
It wasn’t that Lucy had a bad childhood. She knew people who did, who wore their past miseries like a winter coat, subtly altering their shape. But no—her parents were good people. She had never been beaten or neglected. She never went hungry, she always had shoes that fit. Her mother’s death—well, she was technically an adult when that happened, wasn’t she? And sometimes such things could not be helped. Her father was a content if lonely widower, her brother in love with his new wife.
Dr. Krämer asked her to think back—relax her mind, come to the moment cautiously, like you’d approach a dog that bites.
Brave girl. Wise, brave girl.
“I wouldn’t approach a dog that bites,” Lucy said.
Dr. Krämer held up her pen like a switchblade. “Then how do you know it’s a dog at all?”
* * *
A few days into her thirties, Lucy woke up in the middle of the night already sobbing, as if she were rounding off a two-day post-heartbreak bender. She put on her mother’s old mink and took a walk. It kept her warm, and every time the wind ruffled the fur she thought about how it was unfair that inheritances so often hinged on death. Why did people choose to wait?
The sky was the color of milky tea and scattered with a handful of stars. She walked past street vendors, drunks, people pouring out of jazz clubs and bars; over puddles and vomit and grates ejaculating steam. She walked until dawn began to thin out the darkness; until waitresses were pouring coffee through the restaurant windows; until shopkeepers unfolded sidewalk signs with a clatter and a sigh.
Sometime after the sun was fully up, she found herself in front of a Gimbels. She hadn’t been in a department store in years, and it was breathtaking—as if she’d entered some dusty, crowded market in Baghdad. She fiddled with some gloves, examined some scarves. She wandered into the perfume department and touched her fingers to the bottles and stoppers. She uncapped a lipstick and twirled it free, then bent to a mirror and circled her mouth with the wax.
It was there that she spotted the child—across the room, rosy cheeked, wrapped in a smart white coat.
The child’s mother was trying to decide on a watch for her husband. She was examining them closely, asking questions, holding them up to the light. She was distracted because she did not want the clerk to know how little she knew about watches. It was very easy to lure the girl away.
* * *
The police were called. They thought they were looking for a small child who had wandered from her mother, which is why they didn’t notice Lucy at first, kneeling in the corner of the shoe section on the third floor, whispering something frantically to the girl. The girl was not squirming away—she was, in fact, listening with a solemnity and intent her own mother would not have recognized—and so she did not stand out. It was only when the manager recognized the girl in the white coat that they were separated. The girl waved goodbye to Lucy, and Lucy waved back.
When they were reunited, the rescuing officer assured the mother that the eccentric woman did not appear to have been harming the little girl in any way. She appeared to be merely speaking to her, telling her something. He almost ended with another word —telling her something urgent—but he stopped himself. He didn’t know why. The mother crushed her daughter to her breast; didn’t noticed the way his sentence trailed off.
The police took Lucy to their station. She told them she simply needed the little girl to understand. To understand what, they asked her, but she had fallen asleep in her chair. She stayed asleep for three days.
When the little girl in the white coat became a woman, she would, on occasion, think back to her own past and come across the memory of the department store for reasons she did not fully understand. Her mother. The watch. Her own reflection in a glass case. Only when she looked at it sideways would she remember that it held something else entirely: a hulking, sorrowful creature—red-mouthed and sleek as an otter—extending her hand and whispering the thing she needed to hear.
Quiet Dead Things
Cassandra Khaw
IT began with a murder in the late summer, which is to say it started with a natural repudiation of the act. When news came forward of what had transpired—the woman, tidily flayed and bolted to a tree in the adjacent village—the village of Asbestos woke with rage. How dare their neighbors. Rural living was already besieged by sneering gossip about how cousins would marry their way into monstrosity, allegations of nonconsensual coital relations with the livestock, claims that its parishioners lacked both education and adequate hygiene routines, had bad politics and worse music and nothing like common civility.
It did not need this.
To add homicide to their dossier of purported sins; it was unthinkable.
Like Asbestos, the township of Cedarville was incensed. Mr. Carpenter, who, despite his family name, had no facility with timber but made up for such inadequacy—at least in his own head—by having more than a passing gift for people, sent out little personalized letters to each of his constituents. As the mayor, it was his responsibility to provide order, dispense reassurance, and sustain morale. What happened in the village wasn’t just shocking, it was disgusting too, a reminder of how flimsy civilization was, a veneer under which still rutted and writhed all kinds of paleolithic barbarisms. To be human, Mr. Carpenter believed, was to work relentlessly from dawn to deep dusk, perpetually vigilant against the shadow-self.
If any of you hear of such repugnance, wrote Mr. Carpenter, please make use of official council channels to inform us of what you’ve discovered. Your anonymity, of course, will be preserved.
The channels in question were, in actuality, a small bird box installed outside the local arboretum, much too small to fit every one of the township’s missives, but luckily only a handful of the population were properly civic-minded. Over the years it had been a square of farmlan
d, a community garden, a green house, a short-lived manor torched to its bones by the young daughter of the last family to inhabit its walls, several pubs, a graveyard for the pets of the township’s rich, and, prior to the inauguration of the arboretum, a corner store operated by an immigrant pair. Cedarville had especially fond memories of the last. Mr. Wong and his late sister were, though no one would admit such feelings in sober company, novelties. Up until their arrival, Cedarville was comprised entirely of Irish, French, Russian, Swedish, and German immigrants, all of whom produced children who then enjoyed romances with one another, creating a population who were, to a man, a heavily dilute salmon in color.
To see that much melanin and the refugee gods the Wongs brought with them, wages of a superstitious life unburdened by Christ, was invigorating. It was a reminder there was a world outside the fishbowl of Cedarville, lives outside the schedules of almanacs and shipping routes, places to go and things to do that did not require going home and were far, far from even the scrutiny of the things that lived on Mr. Richardson’s farm. Exotic, the township of Cedarville understood, was an egregious description when applied to another human being.
But they all thought it.
Mr. Wong and his sibling were very exotic.
No one else in the township kept a shrine in memory of a deceased relative. At most, the local Catholics lit votives while murmuring sheepish orisons, aware the baptized dead had absconded to a better place. Mr. Wong, his round face ablated into a massif of grief, jowls and haggard cheeks hanging low as his spirits, brought his late sister—six years younger than him once, and only sixty-two when she died—food, too: soft white buns, spiced cakes, austere bowls of sour vegetables, white rice, ladders of fatty pork belly.