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The following chapter is excerpted from Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer. Copyright © 2019 by Dexter Palmer. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

**

The Keepers of the Vigil

History does not record how the first people began to gather in front of Dr. Lacey’s Bagnio, arriving one or two at a time, mostly alone, occasionally hand in hand. There was no organization, no leader, no advertisement publicizing the assembly—they just came. They would join the formation that silently rearranged itself to take them in while keeping its constant geometric order; they would leave when they were at last called home by the intruding consciousness of earthly duties or the grumblings of their stomachs. No single person stayed for more than two hours, but the gathering itself persisted, replacing those who drifted away, shrinking as night fell and growing as the sun rose, its numbers increasing every day.

Perhaps they were peculiarly attuned to the city’s unending song of itself, and could hear the strange, arrhythmic melody that it hummed in the vicinity of Covent Garden, a tune that offered a new kind of beauty to those who had the ears to hear it. Perhaps they could somehow sense that, in a room within the bagnio, the fabric of reality was slowly turning from cloth to lace, and so they found themselves drawn to a place where the truth was mutable; where, if you pushed at facts, they would kindly move aside for you instead of pushing back. Their dreams and wishes were small, perhaps, and usually meant for themselves alone, but a thousand such contrary-to-fact imaginings, working in quiet concert, might bring about a new philosophy, or a new nation. 

*

Robert Swale was a proud Englishman and a prouder Saxon, tracing his lineage all the way back to the hardy invaders of the island’s southern shore in the fifth century (though it was perhaps true that the farther back one went in Swale’s family tree, the more that genealogy became less a science and more an art, a matter of intuition and feeling). One did not need documentary evidence to be sure of his ancestry, or so Swale thought—it could be seen in his sparkling gray eyes and broad forehead, in his height and his stoutness, in the beard that bloomed on his face mere hours after shaving. A hardy creature was Robert Swale; a lover of gustatory pleasures; an eater of many meats.

Robert Swale had gout—at least, this is what his surgeon said. But that had to be a misdiagnosis, if not an utter lie meant to convince Swale to undo his purse strings still further. There was something wrong with the big toe of his right foot, to be sure, but it was a temporary problem of the kind that crop up as one ages, soon to sort itself out once said toe recalled the hardy nature of the Saxon body to which it belonged. His surgeon had tried to push a pamphlet on him, an excerpt from the memoir of a merchant named Thomas Tryon, who felt that “Flesh does breed a great store of noxious humours,” and suggested a diet of “Milk, Pulses, Grains and Fruits,” but Robert Swale was not a child, not one to leave the dish with pride of place at the center of the table left untouched while other men of weaker constitutions loaded up their plates with roast beef. This body of his needed stronger nourishment. The idea of forgoing meat altogether seemed strangely cultish, possibly irreligious, certainly un-English.

Still, though—that God-damned toe. During his days it throbbed and hated shoes; about an hour after supper its ache invariably turned into something mean and stinging, as if an invisible asp had latched its fangs into it and was filling it with poison. Just last night it had woken him up with a stab so strong that it revealed to him a peculiar clarity of mind, its variety unknown to him before, that lay on the other side of the most extreme pain. I should just cut the damned thing off, he thought serenely. A carving knife will do the job—a few tough moments, some quick work with a bandage, and it’s done. But in the morning light Swale thought that was perhaps too radical a solution as of yet—larger shoes might suffice.

He had just purchased those shoes in Covent Garden and changed into them in front of the merchant right then and there, unembarrassed to do so, and was carrying his old ones in his hand while his new ones annoyed him with the constant slipping of their heels. On his way out of the Garden he noticed a group of eight people in two rows of four, standing patiently in front of a bagnio with a mock-Turkish facade, looking up at one of its windows. He sensed a certain tranquility about them, and, curious, he stood next to one of the men in the gathering and said, quietly, as if he wished not to disturb, “What’s this?”

“There’s a woman in there,” the man replied, not taking his eyes off the window. “She gives birth to rabbits.”

Swale believed he’d misheard, and leaned closer. “Rabbits?”

“Rabbits,” the man repeated, his voice intense and just higher than a whisper.

Swale stood next to the onlooker for a moment, observing the window—he saw a silhouette of a man behind the curtains, looking down on him in return, but could not make out his face. He got the distinct impression that he was somehow a person of import, though, a lord or a man of science.

“What are you all waiting for?” Swale asked.

“Hard to say,” the man next to him replied. “But whatever we wait for is sure to come along, soon enough.”

And, just like that, even before Swale realized that he was thinking he might change his plans and stay awhile, if only to satisfy his curiosity about these strangers, the group of onlookers shifted itself around him where he stood, so that he found himself in one of three rows of three, at the corner of a square that held the man he’d spoken to in its center.

Swale stared up at the bagnio window in silence, and as he stood there in the formation, turning his thoughts over in his mind, the throbbing in his foot began to diminish, its angry pulses becoming weaker. Within a half hour, the ache was gone, and he knew without a doubt what was true. The shoes that he had just purchased fit his feet as neatly as if they’d been made just for him: this was true. He was a Saxon man of iron: this was true. And it was true that he knew no pain.

*

Something was happening to Erasmus Charnock’s wife, Caroline—not all at once, but over months, over years. It wasn’t happening to him, or to them, but to her. Caroline’s eyes were fading; her face was falling; the beginnings of a knob of her spine were beginning to protrude from the back of her neck; new strands of dingy gray wove themselves into her raven-colored hair each night. Her hands were cold when he touched them, dry and papery; her voice had the beginnings of a quaver, or perhaps her once forthright demeanor was giving way to a tremulous timidity in the face of her own speedy aging. That was the problem. He wasn’t aging; she was. She was aging and becoming uninteresting, her tales, when she told them, a monotonous, meticulous recounting of the past day’s events, of her endless cleaning, and her cooking, and her eating, and her breathing. One does not expect love to persist through all the thousands of days of a marriage, nor even true joy—no wise man expects those, thought Erasmus. But Erasmus felt that instead of melancholy, he at least deserved a neutral contentment to go along with a youthfulness that had extended well into his forties, a vigor that showed no signs of flagging. Look at this man! Look at his shining eyes. Look at that mouth full of teeth, ten years since the time when an ordinary man would start to have them yanked out. Listen to that voice, its sonorous rumble that sounds as if it comes from a cello’s body. He grows a day younger with each passing day! Soon he will appear to be standing next to his mother, not his wife, when the two of them are out in public. Who, in such a situation, would call himself content?

Erasmus and his wife were in Covent Garden, purchasing foodstuffs from a stand—he thought that perhaps if he pretended love, then love would return, and a thing that a person does when in love is accompany one’s wife on errands that could be accomplished alone just as well, as if her presence were a pleasure no matter the mundane nature of the duty it entailed. But it was hard to see her selecting spinach and potatoes without thinking about how that spinach would be served before him, butterless and nearly raw, how the potatoes would be boiled too long (and cooked without beef fat, for Erasmus’s wife had gotten the absurd idea from somewhere that eating animals was, if not an outright sin, something that decent people should not do). It was difficult to look forward to the conversation that would take place over supper, which would be about the purchase of these same vegetables he was eating, describing in minute detail the very transaction at which he’d been present.

Nonetheless, Erasmus Charnock persevered. As the money was exchanged and they began to leave the Garden, they walked past a group of ten people in two rows of five, standing in an easy formation, staring up at the window of a bagnio with a mock-Turkish facade that looked out onto the marketplace. It was impossible to tell why these people were here, and so Erasmus approached a gentleman at the end of one of the rows, a big, blond fellow whose flesh hung heavy on him, in shoes that were comically large for his feet. “May I ask,” Erasmus said, “what it is you are gazing on?”

“There is a woman inside the room up there,” the man said, pointing his meaty finger at the bagnio window, “who gives birth to rabbits.”

“Rabbits,” Erasmus said.

“Yes,” said the blond fellow. “Another is due any moment now.”

“That,” said Erasmus, “cannot be.”

“Perhaps,” the blond fellow said, and turned away from Erasmus to look up at the window once again.

The dismissal infuriated him. How could he be so certain? And yet, in the back of his mind, the fact that the blond man in his ridiculous shoes seemed so sure of himself, and that others seemed sure of themselves as well, kept Erasmus rooted to the ground on which he stood.

Silently, his wife took his hand and stood next to him, and, with out noticing, the group rearranged itself into four rows of three, with Erasmus and his wife in the back, the large blond man standing next to him.

And, slowly, as he stood there meditating, Erasmus felt a love bloom in his heart, an ember that turned into a fire. This world seemed full of possibilities, and he felt he had the power to describe its shape. If this were true, this absurd thing, then anything might be true.

He looked down at his wife to ask her: Do you realize? And he saw that, once again, she was young, and her hand in his was warm, the blood within it surging.

*

It was important to understand that nothing had happened to Lucy Addison, nothing at all: if something had happened to her, then that would have made her a victim, and a victim she was certainly not. When she looked in a mirror she did not see a cowering, sniffling victim looking back at her; when she examined her hands they were steady, not a shaking victim’s hands. She did not have a victim’s troubled dreams; each night she slept like the dead.

She was not a victim, for being a victim entails activities and duties that she felt no obligation to perform. It means that people who come across you in the street will look at you with pity in their eyes, and smug thankfulness in their own good fortune will lie behind that pity. In the moment they will conveniently forget their own secret tragedies; they will not realize that they are no more fortunate than you are, that calamity comes for every one of us, and assumes the shape that will be sure to hurt us most.

And so there was a thing that did not happen. No grabbing of the wrist as she passed her landlord on the staircase up to the second floor of the building where she had her room, no sudden surprising twist, no foot slipping, no realizing that he’d planned to do this here on the staircase where no one would be likely to see and where she could easily be pulled off balance. His smile, when she saw him after, was a genuine smile that was well meant, with nothing nasty hiding in its corners. He was not someone who would engage in a small act of secret cruelty, meant to grow in a woman’s mind into the threat of something far worse that could have happened there, on the staircase, where no one could see. His comportment was one that commanded respect, and he was an owner of property, and because the thing did not happen, and she was not a victim, she could see the same thing in him that all others saw, and believe in it as everyone else did, and everything was easier for everyone.

Except that the thing that didn’t happen kept coming back. Her mind repeated the story of the thing that didn’t happen to her every night as she dropped into a dead person’s sleep, and every morning when she awoke; sometimes the sudden, unasked-for recall of his face stopped her in mid-stride in a city street, and whenever that happened she felt as if some knife-wielding spirit had snuck up behind her and stabbed her in the nape of her neck. This was the kind of thing that a victim’s mind did to itself. But a victim she was not. To speak of the thing would make it true, or so thought Lucy Addison—best, then, not to speak of it.

She was walking through Covent Garden; she had to get home, had to walk up the staircase to her rooms (where the foot of the man of good comportment had not shot out and tripped her heel, where he had not smiled and said, “Yes? Good” as she fell). She was not a person who feared ascending a staircase, not a person who made excuses to herself to keep from returning to the place where she lived, wandering the city idle instead—

What was this? A group of fifteen people, in a formation of three rows of five, standing before the facade of a bagnio that looked out on the marketplace, all of them staring up at one of its windows. How strange. It was hard to tell what they were looking for, and not at all obvious. She sidled up next to one of the onlookers, a woman holding the hand of a man who was presumably her husband, and said, “Might I ask what this is?”

The woman raised her free hand and indicated the window up above them. “Inside, there is a woman, performing a miracle,” she said. “She gives birth to rabbits.” “Rabbits,” Lucy said.

“Rabbits,” the woman affirmed matter-of-factly. “If we wait long enough, perhaps it will happen again.”

They were all of them oddly silent—and the woman turned away from Lucy, as if even that short conversation was a distraction best brought to an end, for there was important business to attend to—and Lucy’s confusion slowly shaded into curiosity. She had no reason to return home immediately, and so she stood and waited with them (and, as she waited, she found herself, almost insensibly, integrated into a group of sixteen in four rows of four, the husband and wife on her left, and a portly, ruddy fellow with ridiculously enormous shoes on her right).

She gazed up at the bagnio window, imagining what might be inside, and slowly, her mind cleared and became tranquil. For she realized that here, in the midst of this group of people standing vigil, was a place of wonder; in a place where anything could be true, anyone could be a writer of history, rather than a mere reader. An unpleasant page could be wiped clean of its ink, ripped out and burned, its ashes scattered (Lucy thought, as she felt a happiness she hadn’t in weeks, the weeks since the thing that hadn’t happened hadn’t happened).

Best to forget, then, to burn the nagging little memory away.

*

The woman standing next to Caroline Charnock looked as if she’d seen something terrible, or done something, or had something done to her. Even if she fancied that you couldn’t see it in her pallid, downcast face, you could. And perhaps in the end she would be better off speaking of it, even if it hurt her to do so. But she did not have to tell her secret here, and in fact Caroline had no wish to hear of it, not now. This was a space where it was easy to live with one’s secrets, for a little while. There was plenty of room for everyone, and no inclination to judge.

She was glad that Erasmus had brought her here, for this was a good place for him—she could see the change in him, looking out the corner of her eye. Their marriage was one from which the pleasures had been diminishing, and that was due in no small part to changes in him that she had been too circumspect to mention—his constant trumpeting of his persistent youth and virility were at odds with all the evidence, and yet he did not seem to be aware that he was less of a man than he once was, when the two of them had found each other, long ago. It was no pleasure to see one’s partner through life aging two years for every year that passed, while you yourself were still able to catch a stranger’s eye. His eyes, once shining, were becoming blurred and milky; his back had developed a stoop, and she feared that in twenty years he would make his way through the streets by staring at his feet. If he ate meat at supper he held his hand to his mouth for hours afterward, a sure sign that he would be better off with some of his teeth removed, but he took so much pride in them that he seemed to prefer the pain that came with them—thinking that he might be happier with food that was not so challenging to chew, she’d begun serving him vegetables at supper, offering a change of heart regarding the eating of animals as an excuse. Erasmus may not have believed her—she wasn’t sure—but whether or not he did, he was still a gentleman, and a gentleman always accepts the truth of a woman’s well-meant lie.

But here, in the midst of these people keeping vigil, he seemed . . . if not younger, exactly, then stronger, and nearly as virile as he claimed to be. If his visage had not changed, there seemed to be a new kind of life behind his eyes, and with it a calmness, an acceptance that growing older might mean exchanging one kind of beauty for another. Recently she had come to dislike taking his hand in hers—it was always hot and wet and clammy, as if a furnace inside him were in a hurry to burn itself out, but now, standing here among the group of people that had grown to twenty-four, the temperature of his palm had cooled to match her own. And this was good.

And look—here comes another, making his way across the marketplace to join them. And another, and yet one more.

**

Dexter Palmer is the author of two previous novels: Version Control, which was selected as one of the best novels of 2016 by GQ, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications, and The Dream of Per­petual Motion, which was selected as one of the best fiction debuts of 2010 by Kirkus Re­views. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

The following is excerpted from A Beginning at the End by Mike Chen, Copyright © 2020 by Mike Chen. Published by MIRA Books.

Prologue

People were too scared for music tonight. Not that MoJo cared.

Her handlers had broken the news about the low attendance nearly an hour ago with some explanation about how the recent flu epidemic and subsequent rioting and looting kept people at home. They’d served the news with high-end vodka, the good shit imported from Russia, conveniently hidden in a water bottle which she carried from the greenroom to the stage.

“The show must go on,” her father proclaimed, like she was doing humanity a service by performing. She suspected his bravado actually stemmed from the fact that her sophomore album’s second single had stalled at number thirteen—a far cry from the lead single’s number-one debut or her four straight top-five hits off her first album. Either way, the audience, filled with beaming girls a few years younger than herself and their mothers, seemed to agree. Flu or no flu, some people still wanted their songs—or maybe they just wanted normalcy—so MoJo delivered, perfect note after perfect note, each in time to choreographed dance routines. She even gave her trademark smile.

The crowd screamed and sang along, waving their arms to the beat. Halfway through the second song, a peculiar vibe grabbed the audience. Usually, a handful of parents disappeared into their phones, especially as the flu scare had heightened over the past week. This time nearly every adult in the arena was looking at their phone. In the front row, MoJo saw lines of concern on each face.

Before the song even finished, some parents grabbed their children and left, pushing through the arena’s floor seats and funneling to the exit door.

MoJo pushed on, just like she’d always promised her dad. She practically heard his voice over the backup music blasting in her in-ear monitors. There is no sophomore slump. Smile! Between the second and third songs, she gave her customary “Thank you!” and fake talk about how great it was to be wherever they were. New York City, this time, at Madison Square Garden. A girl of nineteen embarking on a tour bigger, more ambitious than she could have ever dreamed and taking the pop world by storm, and yet, she knew nothing real about New York City. She’d never left her hotel room without chaperones and handlers. Not under her dad’s watch.

One long swig of vodka later, and a warmth rushed to her face, so much so that she wondered if it melted her face paint off. She looked off at the side stage, past the elaborate video set and cadre of backup dancers. But where was the gaffer? Why wasn’t anyone at the sound board? The fourth song had a violin section, yet the contracted violinist wasn’t in her spot.

Panic raced through MoJo’s veins, mental checklists of her marks, all trailed by echoes from her dad’s lectures about accountability. Her feet were planted exactly where they should be. Her poise, straight and high. Her last few notes, on key, and her words to the audience, cheerful. It couldn’t have been something she’d done, could it?

No. Not her fault this time. Someone else is facing Dad’s wrath tonight, she thought.

The next song’s opening electronic beats kicked in. Eyes closed, head tilted back, and arms up, her voice pushed out the song’s highest note, despite the fuzziness of the vodka making the vibrato a little harder to sustain. For a few seconds, nothing existed except the sound of her voice and the music behind it— no handlers, no tour, no audience, no record company, no father telling her the next way she’d earn the family fortune—and it almost made the whole thing worth it.

Her eyes opened, body coiled for the middle-eight’s dance routine, but the brightness of the house lights threw her off the beat. The drummer and keyboard player stopped, though the prerecorded backing track continued for a few more seconds before leaving an echo chamber.

No applause. No eyes looked MoJo’s way. Only random yelling and an undecipherable buzz saw of backstage clamor from her in-ear monitors. She stood, frozen, unable to tell if this was from laced vodka or if it was actually unfolding: people—adults and children, parents and daughters— scrambling to the exits, climbing over chairs and tripping on stairs, ushers pushing back at the masses before some turned and ran as well.

Someone grabbed her shoulder and jerked back hard. “We have to go,” said the voice behind her.

“What’s going on?” she asked, allowing the hands to push her toward the stage exit. Steven, her huge forty-something bodyguard, took her by the arm and helped her down the short staircase to the backstage area.

“The flu’s spread,” he said. “A government quarantine. There’s some sort of lockdown on travel. The busing starts tonight. First come, first serve. I think everyone’s trying to get home or get there. I can’t reach your father. Cell phones are jammed up.”

They worked their way through the concrete hallways and industrial lighting of the backstage area, people crossing in a mad scramble left and right. MoJo clutched onto her bottle of vodka, both hands to her chest as Steven ushered her onward. People collapsed in front of her, crying, tripping on their own anxieties, and Steven shoved her around them, apologizing all the way. Something draped over her shoulders, and it took her a moment to realize that he’d put a thick parka around her. She chuckled at the thought of her sparkly halter top and leather pants wrapped in a down parka that smelled like BO, but Steven kept pushing her forward, forward, forward until they hit a set of double doors.

The doors flew open, but rather than the arena’s quiet loading area from a few hours ago, MoJo saw a thick wall of people: all ages and all colors in a current of movement, pushing back and forth. “I’ve got your dad on the line,” Steven yelled over the din, “His car is that way. He wants to get to the airport now. Same thing’s happening back home.” His arm stretched out over her head. “That way! Go!”

They moved as a pair, Steven yelling “excuse me” over and over until the crowd became too dense to overcome. In front of her, a woman with wisps of gray woven into black hair trembled on her knees. Even with the racket around them, MoJo heard her cry. “This is the end. This is the end.”

The end.

People had been making cracks about the End of the World since the flu changed from online rumors to this big thing that everyone talked about all the time. But she’d always figured the “end” meant a giant pit opening, Satan ushering everyone down a staircase to Hell. Not stuck outside Madison Square Garden.

“Hey,” Steven yelled, arms spread out to clear a path through the traffic jam of bodies. “This way!”

MoJo looked at the sobbing woman in front of her, then at Steven. Somewhere further down the road, her father sat in a car and waited. She could feel his pull, an invisible tether that never let her get too far away.

“The end, the end,” the sobbing woman repeated, pausing MoJo in her tracks. But where to go? Every direction just pointed at more chaos, people scrambling with a panic that had overtaken everyone in the loading dock, possibly the neighborhood, possibly all New York City, possibly even the world. And it wasn’t just about a flu.

It was everything.

But… maybe that was good?

No more tours. No more studio sessions. No more threats about financial security, no more lawyer meetings, no more searches through her luggage. No more worrying about hitting every mark. In the studio. Onstage.

In life.

All of that was done.

The very thought caused MoJo to smirk.

If this was the end, then she was going out on her own terms.

“Steven!” she yelled. He turned and met her gaze.

She twisted the cap off the water-turned-vodka bottle, then took most of it down in one long gulp. She poured the remainder on her face paint, a star around her left eye, then wiped it off with her sleeve. The empty bottle flew through the air, probably hitting some poor bloke in the head.

“Tell my dad,” she said, trying extra hard to pronounce the words with the clear British diction she was raised with, “to go fuck himself.”

For an instant, she caught Steven’s widemouthed look, a mix of fear and confusion and disappointment on his face, as though her words crushed his worldview more than the madness around them. But MoJo wouldn’t let herself revel in her first, possibly only victory over her father; she ducked and turned quickly, parka pulled over her head, crushing the product-molded spikes in her hair.

Each step pushing forward, shoulders and arms bumping into her as her eyes locked onto the ground, one step at a time. Left, right, left, then right, all as fast as she could go, screams and car horns and smashing glass building in a wave of desperation around her.

Maybe it was the end. But even though her head was down, she walked with dignity for the first time in years, perhaps ever.

**

Mike Chen is a lifelong writer, from crafting fan fiction as a child to somehow getting paid for words as an adult. He has contributed to major geek websites (The Mary Sue, The Portalist, Tor) and covered the NHL for mainstream media outlets. A member of SFWA and Codex Writers, Mike lives in the Bay Area, where he can be found playing video games and watching Doctor Who with his wife, daughter, and rescue animals. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

The following excerpt from Dead Girls by Abigail Tarttelin is reprinted here with permission from the publisher.

Dead Girls excerpt:

LATER—much later—Billie went home through the field. I wanted to go with her a little of the way, and told Sam he had to stay on the path.

“On my own?” he whined.

“Don’t be a wuss.”

“I’m not a wuss! Fine, I’ll wait. I don’t care.”

“Cool. Good.”

“Good,” he said, but he still looked nervous. Sam is scared of lots of things.

I’m glad I left him on the road, though, because Billie and I walked through the wheat a bit (it’s taller than us) and played with the paper predictor. It was nice to have some time alone.

“Pick a number from one to four,” said Billie. I picked three.

“One-two-three. Pick a color: red, yellow, green, or mauve.”

“Mauve?”

“M-a-u-v-e. Pick a color: sicky orange, blue, purple, or pink.”

“Yuck. Sicky orange.”

“S-i-c-k-y-o-r-a-n-g-e. Hehehe, you got ‘poophead.’”

“Does that mean I am a poophead or I’ll marry a poophead?”

Billie cackled hysterically. “Dunno. Maybe both?”

I grabbed it off her. “Let me do you. Pick a number.” She picked two.

“One-two. Pick a color: blue, purple, pink, or sicky orange.”

“Sicky orange.”

“S-i-c-k-y-o-r-a-n-g-e. Pick a color: green, mauve, red, or yellow.”

“Yellow.”

“Hahahaha, you’re going to marry a snot-nosed badger!”

We were laughing loudly, and it echoed around the fields. The wheat was suddenly a blinding gold as the sun got low in the sky and hit it. The sky had no clouds, and was purple-blue, like the bruises on Billie’s arms from Chinese burns. I gave Billie the predictor back, and she folded it so it didn’t get squashed. It’s origami.

“Later, alligator,” Billie said and did a salute.

I waved back. “In a while, crocodile.”

I turned back and she kept walking ahead. We both made dark paths in the gold, going away from each other, tramping down the wheat.

I retraced my steps to where Sam waited, and we got home at 9:35 p.m.

Billie didn’t come home. No one knows where she is.

The black dogs return in my dreams. The four of them move into the den, sniffing around, snapping, and slobbering everywhere. They almost catch my feet in their teeth as I slither out through the tunnel. Why didn’t they follow us? In my dream I get to see what they do when we leave. They circle the den on the inside, making sure all of us are gone, and then they stop and wait, more like guard dogs than murderous beasts. I realize they were chasing us out of the den. They are quiet for a minute, but I hear their panting, and then I feel it on my neck. It’s hot and tickly, and then it becomes cold. I shiver. I try to turn around to see them, but I’m stuck. It’s because I’m unconscious. I’m asleep, and so I can’t move my body, but I suddenly know they are in my room, my real room, and one of the dogs is on my back while I lie there. I strain to look over my shoulder, but all I can see is hair. But it’s not my own hair. It’s the hair from the girl I saw in the den. The black dog has morphed into her. She’s lying on my back, and I strain to turn around, and in my dream-that’s-not-quite-a-dream I just manage to look over my shoulder at her wild and staring eyes. Suddenly her hand grabs my shoulder, and I squeal at its coldness.

“Thera!” Mum shouts. I open my eyes. “Thera, wake up!”

“What? Why? What’s happened?”

“You’re screaming!” She sits on my bed, and she hugs me tightly.

“Ow! Mum, get off!”

“It’s okay, they’ll find her. They’ll find her, darling.”

“What? They’ll find who?”

Mum pushes the hair back from my face and looks at me as if I’m nuts. “Billie, sweetheart.”

“Oh.” I shake her palm off my head. “Yeah, I know. She probably just decided to sleep outside under the stars. You know we like to do that.” I pick sleep out of my eyes. “I wish she’d asked me to stay out with her, though.”

“You know curfew is nine thirty on Saturdays!” Mum snaps.

“That’s probably why she didn’t ask!” I counter.

“Urgh, Thera,” Mum says, and Dad calls something through the wall that neither of us catch. 

“What did you say?” Mum sounds annoyed. She strides out of the room and they start arguing next door.

I scramble through my duvet and do a forward roll off my bed, so I’m sat by the wall. I retrieve what I need from its hiding place under the bookcase. Billie and I like these books called The Mystery Kids by Fiona Kelly, and they use this trick to help them hear through walls better: you put the open end of a pint glass to the wall you want to listen through, and you put the other end to your ear. It really works. We used it once to listen to Billie’s dad, but all he did was order fishing equipment. We made up a story that he was going to use it to strangle someone. We wrote it down. Hopefully the police don’t find it and think Billie is a terrible person.

I’m still, with the glass pressed to my ear. Mum and Dad’s voices sound like they are underwater.

“It could have been Thera,” Mum’s voice says. I frown. What could have been Thera?

“Don’t say that. What did she say?”

“Something something…sleeping out under the stars.”

“…might be right.”

“…told you I didn’t want to move here, near your parents.” I roll my eyes. Mum’s from the city. She doesn’t like the country.

“Something something…middle of nowhere,” she is saying.

“Can’t supervise them all the time.”

“…surprised you’re alive after your childhood.”

This almost makes me laugh. Dad used to do things like fix up old motorbikes with his friends and then drive them holding onto the handlebars while standing on the seat. That was when he was fourteen! Barely older than me. I cover my mouth so I don’t make any noise laughing and then, when I take my hand off it again, I sneeze. Silence.

“Thera, are you listening?”

I take my ear away from the glass, and shout through, “No!”

There are more arguing sounds, and then Mum opens the door again. I just manage to get back into bed in time. “Dad is going to drive you and Sam to Nanny and Granddad’s this morning so we can help look for Billie.”

“Can’t I help look for Billie?” 

“No, Thera.”

“But I know everywhere she goes. It makes more sense that I look for her than you do.”

“You told the police all those places last night, didn’t you?”

“But—”

“I said no! I’m not having you out there in miles and miles of cornfields!” She yells this part so Dad hears it. She’s wrong, though: it’s all wheat and barley around our village. I know, because I’m a country kid. Not like Mum.

I grumble. Mum and Dad are always shouting at each other. “It’s not Dad’s fault Billie ran off.”

“Thera! Billie didn’t…” For a second Mum looks stricken. Her mouth is hanging open, like her unfinished sentence.

I frown. “What?”

“…Nothing, sweetheart,” she says. “Nothing. Just…get dressed. Dad’s taking you in ten minutes.”

Nanny and Granddad live out on the North Sea coast. Dad drives us fast, with the windows down and rock music on loud. We all sing along to T. Rex and Badfinger and Led Zeppelin. When we get close to the beach, Dad turns the cassette tape off and makes us sing “Summer Holiday.” Sam is singing loudly and off-key, on the same side of the car as the sun and the sea. He grins at me when he sees me looking at him, showing the gap where he lost a tooth last week. Sam’s a bit of a wuss, but he’s also the best little brother in the world.

Secretly I am pleased we have been banished to Nan and Granddad’s, I think to myself, as we walk around from the car to their house. It’s a Victorian house, five stories tall counting the basement and the attic, and full from top to toe with books. Granddad writes novels and is interested in everything, so he reads all the time. He says he has “intellectual curiosity,” and that I do too, like him. He is a science fiction writer, and when people ask him about it, he says he writes “oh, pulp, yarns, pocket fodder.” He has three interests that he writes about a lot: the future, technology, and spiritual stuff, like gods, dreams, souls, and ESP. He could really help me out today.

Dad unlocks the big black door and calls out, “Hello! It’s me!” Nanny and Granddad are his parents. Dad has six brothers and sisters, but none of them live here anymore. Still, Sam and I come ’round all the time, and Nanny says grandkids are better than your own kids because you get to buy them sweets and not worry about their teeth.

Dad goes down the corridor to the living room, and Sam and I follow him. Did I say every wall at Nanny and Granddad’s is covered with books? The corridor is actually really narrow, because Granddad has built bookcases on either side, and they are filled with paperbacks and several big Roman-statue-type heads whose eyes follow us as we walk by. When we squeeze our way into the living room, Nanny is standing where she always stands: in the doorway to the kitchen, holding the teapot. When she sees us she squeals, “Eeeee!” and runs over to give us big slobbery kisses and pretends to suck the juice out of our skin, so it fills up all the bits in between her wrinkles and she doesn’t get old.

After we have finished giggling and being eaten, Dad says, “Mum, could I have a word?”

Nanny looks at him and nods. “You kids,” she says in her crackly Nanny voice, “why don’t you make the tea?”

“Okay!” We run through to the kitchen. Granddad likes his tea just so, and lukewarm. Nanny likes hers weaker and hot. Sam and I like ours golden brown, like that Stranglers song Dad said is about tea. We don’t have sugar at home but here we each have two. Nan and Dad are talking quietly in the other room. I’m not listening to them because I’m telling Sam to get the milk and stir the sugar in and stuff, but I can hear them in the background.

“What time are you picking them up tomorrow?” Nan says.

“Eight. Otherwise they won’t get to school on time.”

“What did the police say?”

“Nothing much. They something something.” I concentrate harder.

“…we’re going to the station, and then I suppose we’ll split into teams…”

“Did you talk to Paul and Rebecca?”

That’s Billie’s mum and dad. I don’t hear Dad’s reply because Sam is clinking the spoon in the cups too much. “Shh!” I tell him.

He tuts. “Stop listening!” Sam minds his own business a bit too much, if you ask me. Some people don’t want to know anything. I do. I want to see and know everything about the world and my life and what’s going on. It’s intellectual curiosity, like Granddad says. I listen again, but Dad and Nanny are quiet.

“Well,” Nanny says. “Have you got time for a cup of tea?”

“I better go, Mum. Frances is waiting for me.”

“All right. I hope you find her, dear.”

“Love you,” Dad says. “Love you, darling.”

I look through. They are hugging. “Bye, Dad,” I say. He waves. “Bye, snoop.”

“Hey!” I grumble, but I’m joking. I was snooping. I better get better at it so I don’t get caught next time.

“Let’s have our tea here and then you can put your bags upstairs,” Nan tells us. We have our overnight bags with us.

“I have to take Granddad’s tea up,” I say.

“Well, off you go, love,” Nan says. “He’s in his study.”

Granddad’s study is upstairs. It’s a big room, with small writing desks in all four corners. There is a light over each desk and a different-sized chair in front of it. There is also a big table in the middle of the room, covered with the books Granddad is currently reading, all open. The windows are long and large, with a balcony outside, but the room is dark because of the books on all the walls. When I push open the door with my toes, Granddad is sat hunched over the desk in the far left corner, the one with the gold-and-green lamp.

“Aha,” he says, without looking up. I can hear the whisper-scrawl of his pencil on paper. It doesn’t stop while he talks. “Could that be one of my favorite grandchildren, bearing Indian tea?”

“It could!” I say, and pad over quietly in my socks. I put the cup down next to him, give him a kiss, and watch him working.

“Just one moment, Thera,” he says. “Just finishing my thought…There we are.” He looks up. 

“How is my clever girl?”“Good.”

“I hear your friend has gone missing.”

“She’s run off.”

“Ah.”

I chew my lip. “Without me.”

Granddad nods. “I think, in time, it will become evident that this indiscretion was not intentional on the part of your friend.”

“Billie.”

“Yes. Billie.”

I think for a moment and then I drag a chair over from the big table and sit on it. “Granddaaaaad?”

He smiles. “Do I detect in the tone of your voice that a favour is about to be requested?”

“Well, I had this dream.” I look at him seriously. “And I don’t know what it means.”

“I should think we can be of assistance.” Granddad puts down his pencil and beckons me to follow him to a dark corner of his study. He sits in an armchair there before another of the desks and pulls out a book on dreams. “What are we looking up?”

“Black dogs. Savage ones.”

Granddad leafs through the book.

“This tome suggests a dog is a symbol of protection. ‘The dream is warning you,’” he reads. 

“‘You should attempt to protect someone or something in your life.’”

“Hmm.”

“Was there anything else in your dream?”

“Er, cold hands?”

“Hands! Hands…” he murmurs, turning the pages. “Ah. ‘Hands are rarely dreamt of, and their presence in a dream has a strong significance. They are a sign of taking control of our own fate, and of making an impact through our actions on another, or the world at large.’ Interesting. What was this dream?”

“I dreamt of a dog that changed into a girl.”

“My goodness. Not a prophetic dream, then.”

“Why not?”

“I would imagine even modern technology would find such a feat unachievable. Maybe putting a dog’s heart in a young woman, although I believe it’s thought pig hearts are more practical for the purpose.”

“Mm, yeah. It was a ghostly girl,” I add. “And the dogs are from real life.”

“Are they?”

“They came forth from the spirit world and barked at us when we were using the Ouija board. In the woods on Friday.”

“Oh dear. Well, perhaps those dogs were warning you off playing with Ouija. It might not be the best idea in the hands of one so imaginative.” Granddad reaches past me and picks up a box on the shelf near my head. “Still, you might enjoy looking at these, if you have taken an interest in the spirit world.”

“What are they?”

“These are a set of tarot painted by Lady Frieda Harris and designed by Aleister Crowley himself.”

“The dark-magic guy?”

“The occultist, yes.”

“They mentioned him on Eerie, Indiana.”

“I take it that’s a children’s television show?”

“Yeah. What do they do?”

“They can be read, to predict your future. Would you like me to read yours?”

I reach out and touch the pack, and suddenly I feel cold.

I shiver. “No. Not now. I better get back to my tea.”

“And I had best return to my work. Come back later if you need anything. And stop poking around in the netherworld. You never know what spirits you might disturb.”

“Got it.” I shiver again, and run out.

**

Abigail Tarttelin is the author of feminist crime thriller Dead Girls. Abigail’s second novel, Golden Boy, about intersex teen Max Walker, won an American Library Association ALEX Award and was shortlisted for LAMDBA’s Best LGBT Debut. She loves talking to readers and regularly speaks at schools, reading groups and book clubs. Find out more at her website, twitter, and instagram.

Drive

She is a nurse at the hospital in the Northwest and doesn’t own a car. I later learned that she can’t drive and doesn’t have the time to learn either. Her hours are from four to midnight, and often she misses her last bus. Since a lot of drivers don’t like going all the way to the Northwest, I go instead. Interestingly enough, she asks for me, although I have never introduced myself to her.

I watch her come out of the hospital, walking towards my car. I unlock the doors. She always sits at the back; a lot of women do that. And once they have buckled up, they would grab their phones and start typing or swiping until I have taken them home. But she is different. She usually picks something to focus on like the back of the passenger’s seat, or she looks outside in the calmest way. Every now and then, she asks me a question, and it would catch me off guard. She breaks the silence when I least expect it.

“This route must bore the hell out of you by now,” she says.

I look in the rear-view mirror and see a smile on her face. I instantly smile back at her, trying to think of something to say.

“I like it in the Northwest. It’s less busy.”

Her gaze is glued at the passenger’s seat again, and I’m not sure if she has actually heard me.

She lives south of downtown, which is about fifteen minutes’ drive. This is usually the most peaceful drive for me. With her in the backseat, I don’t have to feel like I need to initiate small talk like with other customers.

By the time we reach downtown, there are more people out and about – all dressed up for their Friday night out. Some are waving at me to stop without realizing that my lights are off signalling occupied.

I stop outside her apartment building.

“Thank you. Have a good night,” she says and hands me the cash with 20% gratuity.

“Thanks, you too.”

As she steps out of the car, I see a man running towards me, waving. I don’t usually take random people that haven’t ordered via the phone or the app, but weekends are different. He opens the door on the passenger’s side and hops in. The entire car wobbles at his weight.

“Good timing, bud! To Jameson’s pub on Seventeenth, please.”

“Sure thing,” I say.

I make a U-turn, and before I lose sight of the apartment building, I throw a brief look at the lobby and see her standing face-to-face with a man.

“How is your night going so far, brother?” the fat man says.

“So far, so good.”

“I’ve known your company for a while, and I’m surprised that you’re not an Indian guy!”       

I don’t know what to say, except for smiling politely. As I stop in front of the traffic lights, I notice that he’s still looking at me, expecting some form of an answer.

“Well?”

“I’m sorry, what was that?” I say.

He laughs for a while. “Can I offer you a job, brother?”

“Oh, I’m good, thanks. I have a job.”

“Seriously?” he says. “Do you really want to be driving for the rest of your life?”

I am trying to remember the elevator scene – her body language as she was standing in front of that man. I’m pretty sure she was looking down.

“This is only part-time,” I tell the fat man.

“I see, so what do you do?”

“I’m a writer.”

“Hah,” he exhales. “You’re one of those, hey?”

As soon as the lights turn green, I hit gas and drive faster than I am supposed to. More people are trying to wave me down – not reading the sign. A crying woman runs into the road to stop me. The man that she is with grabs her by the arm and pulls her back towards him. In the mirror, I see her slap him in the face, and their argument continues.

“Fucking crazy, hey?”

The fat man grabs a cigarette and places it on the top of his ear. We’re almost there, driving past more waving people. One guy is giving me the middle finger as I drive past him and his group. The fat man winds down the car window and sticks out his middle finger at them.

“So, what do you write?”

“Anything.”

“If I asked you to write a business proposal for me, how much would it cost me?”

“It depends,” I say.

“Are you a freelancer?”

“Yes.”

“Good for you. So, you work when you want and where you want.”

I see a lineup of people waiting for cabs outside the pub and decide to keep my lights off to avoid picking up drunk people.

“Thanks, bud! That’s for you.” The fat man hands me the cash with 50% gratuity.

“Thanks, sir. Have a good night.”

My next customers are a man and a woman. They have most likely just hooked up in the bar and are looking to get laid. All I hear are sucking sounds in the backseat. The moment she begins to moan, I know that he has put a finger inside her.

I keep replaying the lobby scene in my head. The way they were facing each other just didn’t look like they were living together.

When I arrive at that couple’s location, the guy simply throws two $20 notes at me and closes the door behind him- still kissing the woman. I decide to return to the main office and call it a night.

 **

The main reason why I have this mini job is that I am nocturnal. I might be a freelance non-fiction writer, but it is at night when my sense of fiction prevails. I think of her and the peace that she brings into my car. I want to uncover her hidden sadness. I write about her shifts, how she takes care of her patients by lying to them that everything will be OK, and then she injects them with poison or smothers them with a pillow. I imagine her fuelled with anger and despair, looking to stab me from behind with a scalpel while I drive her home. I write about how she doesn’t want to die alone, but with someone that she doesn’t deserve. I write about her and the man at the elevator. They separated when she decided not to have the baby, and it was his fault – his fault for not doing anything about it.

There are too many questions with no answers. And this is where fiction comes along with possibilities. You create what you want to see, and that’s how you scratch the itch. Things have never ever been different. This is the nature of not asking.

 **

I usually wake up early in the afternoon and check my emails for assignments from numerous magazines or webzines. I often miss out on the good topics and get the leftovers. For some reason, my older pieces of unfinished fiction catch my eye. And for the first time in a while, I feel like completing them in the daylight.

 **

I am parked outside the hospital once again. It’s midnight, and Cinderella needs a ride home. As usual, she hops in the backseat.

“Hi,” she says. “Guess what?”

“What?”

“I’m buying a car.” Her smile widens with excitement.

I have never seen her like that. She has never talked to me like that either. I don’t know what to say or how to feel.

“Good for you. Congratulations. When did you get your license?”

“I haven’t got it yet.”

I start the engine, and just as I am about to release the brake, she says, “Hang on.” 

She steps out of the car and opens the passenger door. The next thing I know is her sitting next to me. I look at her, surprised.

“Are we going?” she says.

“Sure.”

I start rolling down the street, feeling my heart in my throat. She smells like disinfectant; it could also be my car, as I’ve wiped the backseat after the other night’s incident.

“Take a left please, we’re heading to the northeast.”

“Oh, did you move?”

“No,” she laughs and says, “Let’s go to the airport.”

“OK.”

We are on the outskirts, driving up McKnight Boulevard towards the viewing area. I remember dropping people off here, but I’ve never come here by myself. It has never even occurred to me that watching planes take off is a thing. In fact, the viewing hours are already over, but no gates or signs are indicating that after-hours are not permitted.

After parking, she gets out of the car first and walks towards the fence. There are a few aircrafts ready for take-off. I didn’t realize how big the airport is. The flickering lights are, in fact, beautiful. You hear engines running, but from far away. She waves at me, gesturing for me to get out of the car. I turn off the metre.

For a second, I feel agoraphobic, and I’d rather return to the car. She might want to stab me to death during take-off for all I know.

“Do you see the plane over there?” She points at the United Airlines one.

“What about it?”

“That one is not coming back,” she says with a half-smile.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s flying to Arizona and will not come back.”

“Do you know someone on that plane?” I ask.

“Maybe. But if you think about it, who do we ever really know?” She looks at me, 

“People change all the time.”

The plane is pivoting around its own axis towards the runway. It should get an increased ground speed with the current tailwind. I wonder how the pilot feels. Does he or she love a night flight as much as I love a night drive? How does it feel steering a vehicle when you’re up in the air? And how does it feel carrying over one hundred passengers on your invisible wings while taking them to their destination?

I look at the cab, and a sudden feeling of worthlessness befalls me. I take people to a destination, which is not mine. And I ask them questions I don’t care about.

I remember my first flight when I was younger. The moment the plane was off the ground, I wanted to wake up. It was the exact same sensation as a falling dream during a hypnagogic state of mind.

However, I believe she has other things on her mind. The aircraft is accelerating on the runway. Her fingers are poking through the fence, her forehead pressed against it. All I hear is the sound of engines, turbines, and shouting air traffic controllers. I don’t want to watch it get off the ground, so I turn away towards the car.

“Hey,” she says. “Why are you so afraid?”

“What do you think I’m afraid of?”

She shrugs and gazes back at the plane, which is now off the ground, heading south. She is right, it’s not coming back.

“You’re afraid of asking.”

“I ask a lot of questions,” I say.

“Do you really care about the answers, though?”

I see a grin on her face.

Asking the right questions requires tact, determination and good timing. What does she know about that?

I’m inside the car, watching her stare at the plane until it recedes into the distance. For a moment, you think you’re looking at a star, but it’s not.

She slowly walks towards the car, her eyes fixed to the ground, but it’s too dark to read her face. The door opens, and a quick breeze brushes against my face.

“Hey,” I say.

“I must owe you a fair bit of money.”

“You don’t owe me anything.” I point at the metre, which is off. It looks like she’s attempting a smile, but it’s not showing. I’ve long stopped assuming that she is a serial killer. In fact, my imagination has escaped me. It no longer feels like a story. This is all too real; feels too real.

“Are you OK?” I ask.

She nods, and after a long pause, she says, “You wrote an article.”

For a second, she has me stumped. I try to figure out what kind of blogs she reads, and which publisher includes the writer’s picture in the article, as it usually has a link to the author’s biography. She may know more about me than I thought.

“You write about the importance of one’s mind. How we’re all just alone in our heads and that it’s difficult to connect with the outer world.”

She has read my essay on solipsism. She continues, “All because we’re not certain if what we experience outside our minds is real or false.”

At this moment, we watch an aircraft land smoothly, but loudly on the runway. It feels good to know that my feet are on solid ground.

“Doesn’t that make you feel lonely?” she says.

I smile at her.

“Don’t you think that the mind and the external phenomena have to coexist in order to function? No matter if you like it or not?”

“Maybe,” I say.

She lifts a hand up in the air as though signalling that my answer is not good enough.

“Everything is transient, isn’t it?” I say.

I think that’s what she has been waiting to hear. We look at the airport lights and watch how a decelerating aircraft rolls past us. It’s a United Airlines, and we both begin to laugh.

*

It’s just before midnight, and I am parked outside the hospital in my own car. I get out and lean against the passenger’s door while keeping an eye at the entrance.

I have completed the story or stories. They all have one thing in common, which is a happy end. I usually write open ends or no endings, wherever the story takes me. However, this one has got me to quit my part-time job as a driver.

I see her approach the sliding doors, but she is not alone. In fact, she is curled up in a man’s arm, as I watch them come outside. She recognizes me instantly.

“Oh hi!” she says.

The man nods at me and tells her to wait while he is going to grab his car.

“Are you on shift?” she says.

“No, I quit. This is my car.”

She throws a brief look at it, and for a moment, she is lost in thought. And then she says: “Are you picking someone up?”

I nod hesitantly as I stare at the ground. When I look up, I see a worried look in her eyes. It seems like she is about to say something, but she isn’t. I have a question to ask, but I am not asking. The man arrives in his car and stops behind me.

“Have a good night,” I tell her, smiling.

“You too,” she says.

I stare at the clear night sky and wait until I can’t hear the car anymore. I see Orion’s Belt and the flickering lights of a plane that has just departed. For some reason, I can’t help but laugh.

I get in my car and begin to drive further north. The roads are dark and empty.

**

Paula Cheung was born and raised in Hamburg, Germany. She studied Creative and Life Writing in Great Britain, where she had spent most of her time writing her first novel, Heart Like A Hole. She self-published it in August 2018 under the pseudonym Paula C. Deckard. In the meantime, while getting her brain in gear for her next novel, she blogs and writes short fiction. Paula lives in B.C., Canada.

**

Image: Flickr / Dena Burnett

The following excerpt from I’m From Nowhere by Lindsay Lerman is reprinted here with permission from Clash Books.

I’m From Nowhere

It’s the afternoon now and a friend from high school, Rebecca, is picking her up. Rebecca has come into town for the funeral. She’s going to offer practical help; this is what Rebecca does. 

She picks Claire up, and together they drive to the store to get ingredients for meals they’ll make and freeze, to keep Claire going. The sort of thing one does for friends with newborn babies. It’s almost old-world now. Rebecca lives in the Bay Area, and like someone who’s lived in New York, she won’t let you forget this fact. It’s now a defining feature of her adult personality. The One Who Made it in a Big, Overpriced City and Now Has the Authority to Scoff at the Place She Came From.

On the way to the store, looking out the window, Rebecca says, “This place is fucking depressing.”

“I guess,” Claire responds, not turning to look at Rebecca as she speaks.

“It’s just a string of meth labs. Was it always like this?” Rebecca asks half-rhetorically. She says, “All these trailer parks and shithole houses” as though this were her first time visiting.

“I think the poor areas are pretty concentrated,” Claire says with a note of defensiveness. “There are just as many rich people here as poor people. What should the city do? Move the poor people out? Evict them and raze their shitty houses? Find a way to just give them all jobs? Tell capitalism to move back in?”

The mostly comfortable silence of friends bickering like siblings sets in. Rain starts to fall slowly. They pass a group of boys on their skateboards. A little pack of wolves edging into the street from the sidewalk, warning that the street is sometimes their territory too.

Rebecca’s eyes linger on the boys as she turns to Claire and asks, “Were you in high school when you lost your virginity? Is that something an old friend should know?” with a little laugh. “When was it?”

“You mean like when was the exact moment?” Claire asks, with her own little laugh. The boys are in the rearview mirror now, shouting happily at each other, pushing their hair out of their eyes. They look so small.

“Yes,” Rebecca says. “The moment when you lost your virginity. Had sex. C’mon.”

Feeling strangely puzzled by the question, Claire responds, “But it wasn’t just one moment. It was, well, continuous. For most of high school and the beginning of college.”

“You know what I mean, Claire. When did you first have sex?”

“Do you mean like penis-in-vagina sex? Oral sex? The first time I made out with a guy and let him take off my bra?”

“Jesus, you know exactly what I mean. I can tell you I was seventeen and it was with David and it was not great.”

Claire can feel some of her mental acuity returning, as though she were slowly waking up. Dinner with Luke last night sobered her up. 

But she’s not sure she can answer Rebecca. Not clearly. Because by the time she had Sex sex, it wasn’t very significant. Or maybe it was. But it was just another sexual thing to happen in a long, steady process of becoming sexual. Figuring out how to be a sexual being. The first moment of Sex sex was not a big deal compared to the first kiss, the first time a guy went down on her. Those were virginity-losing moments. There were many of them. She’s surprised by her clarity on the matter. It takes years of shitty Sex sex to finally have good sex. Holding hands and making out on a park bench was better than all those first times combined.

Watching Claire think, Rebecca asks, “Okay, fine, but who did you lose your virginity to?”

“Three or four different guys, I guess.”

Quickly seizing the opportunity to make Claire laugh, Rebecca says, “Oooh alright! All at once? Standard college-orientation orgy?”

Laughing at herself, god it felt good; she had forgotten that she had a sense of humor, at how she’d opened this door, Claire says, “Actually that sounds like no fun at all. But no, not an orgy. Three or four different guys who introduced me to sex, I guess.”

“So no one forced himself on you and just, like, made it happen?”

“No.” But.

***

What had happened at the dawn of her sexuality? In truth, she knows, it wasn’t as smooth or linear or painless as she makes it sound. 

She had mostly lost her virginity—all kinds of physical virginity and her conceptual virginity—to one person. The slightly older guy. Impossibly sexy. A wannabe poet. Oh god, am I still as pathetic, as clueless now as I was then? 

They had met through mutual friends. He was the townie who was too beautiful to be called a townie. His commitment to the work of appearing to be the half-stoned vagabond for beauty, day in and day out, was astonishing. Women more or less lined up to fuck him. Claire was terrified of him.

As a high-schooler, Claire was not one of the pretty girls, not really even one of the popular girls, so she had no idea what to do with herself when He seemed to notice her, to take her in with a long gaze and offer a devilish half-smile. She was not accustomed to such attention. One tiny flicker of attraction, of acknowledgement, from him and she was struck dumb. She would be sunk by him, she knew it. She couldn’t have cared less.

When she looks at photos of herself from high school, she understands why he noticed her. She was not cute or adorable in the way of the pretty and popular girls, but you could see that she would eventually—maybe even shortly—be beautiful. Not cute, not adorable, but beautiful, in time. A beautiful woman. 

She wonders sometimes how different her life might be if she hadn’t skipped cute or adorable and gone awkwardly into beautiful after some time being neither here nor there. Would I have stayed in this town forever? Settled down with one of the stupid boys I hated myself for finding attractive in high school?

He. She still doesn’t like to say his name, doesn’t want to particularize him. Thank god she has no photos of him, that he exists nowhere on social media. Let him remain universal—the cloud of walking sex and barely instantiated splendor—that he was to her back then. 

She watched him. Studied him. Drank in his posture, his gestures, his turns of phrase every time she saw him—at parties, at the coffee shop, wandering aimlessly downtown. 

She had never seen someone so confident spending so much time in public alone. He sat at the café with a book and a pen and some loose pieces of paper—just before the days of laptop ubiquity—composing his little lines, the center of this tiny world, an ocean in lithe, dark-eyed human form. 

He sat down across from her at the coffee shop one day, one hot afternoon at the end of her junior year, as she waited for her drink and her friend waited for the bathroom. 

“Hey,” he said casually. And she, drawing on a reserve of nonchalance she didn’t know existed, responded with an equally casual “Hey.”

Within a week, she was in his car, listening to Purple Rain and making out with a promising ferocity. His skilled hands and fingers. Good god his hands. His mouth that tasted of tobacco and beer. His lips against her ear: Her first drug. All of it her first serious high.

***

There is one night that stands out.

He was going, was leaving town—finally leaving this shithole—and he wanted to spend a night with her. Despite, or maybe because of his comprehensive sexual experience, he hadn’t pressured her for anything she wasn’t ready for. 

He had always watched her carefully, not wanting to push her too far and to push her away. Later she realized this was likely because he was getting it elsewhere, anywhere really, all the time, anytime. He was mostly tender with her, but it was incidental tenderness. It wasn’t for her, he wasn’t loving; he could afford to be patient with her.

But this night he is stoned. Stoned enough that he can’t watch her, or himself, closely, or at all. It’s one of his last nights in town, he reminds her. 

Maybe he has plans with different girls and women for each of his last nights in town, but she doesn’t care. On this night they’ve drunk their beers in her parents’ car, smoked some weed in the shed behind his dad’s house, wandered with clasped hands to the few open places in town. A grimy pool hall, the kind of rural bar she’ll eventually come to love and fear in equal measure, the convenience store attached to a gas station where he bums cigarettes from the girls who work behind the counter. 

She knows there’s nowhere else for them to go. They could do it in the car she borrowed from her parents, or they could do it in his dad’s house—if his dad’s not home—or they could do it out in the desert next to some scrub oaks and boulders. It wasn’t so hot then. They could wander outside for hours without fear of heat stroke.

The paradoxical and paralyzing fact of being in a rural town so small: The land stretches forever outside this town, but the town is small enough that privacy is unachievable. 

But none of this is on her mind then. This is the night of her first real sexual encounter and she can feel it coming. It’s like sensing the presence of another breathing creature in a darkened room. She knows it’s there, but she doesn’t know what it is. The fear and exhilaration intensify each other.

He must have known that the shrine was the only place likely to be empty in the middle of the night. St. Joseph is at the foot of the hill. The shrine winds up through the hill. She can see the cross at the top, the white ceramic Jesus glowing a little in the moonlight. He lights the candles at the shrine, slowly, carefully, taking his time like a seasoned pothead, and he takes her hand to lead her to a bench at the foot of the scene. 

There’s some sloppy, rushed kissing before he hurriedly pulls her shorts off, and her heart is pounding and she can’t believe this is happening but she knows for a fact that she is not ready. Not ready for this. He leans her back and stretches her out on the bench. She’s flat on her back and he’s climbing on top of her. She wants him to look at her face but she can’t—doesn’t know how to—tell him to look. At her. Can you see I don’t think I want this? She watches his face as his eyes roll around haphazardly in his skull, the whole side of him glowing red from the candles in their votives, as if he were being burned alive from a distance. 

He’s gone. He’s elsewhere. Take me away, take me with you, she had wanted to say earlier. But now she sees that he was never here to begin with. There was no him to take me along.

She turns her eyes to the sky, the stars hanging up there, the moon yawning down at her. 

This can’t be pleasure, she thinks.

**

Lindsay Lerman is a writer and translator. She has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Her debut novel, I’m From Nowhere, is now available from Clash Books. Her translation of François Laruelle’s first book, Phenomenon and Difference, is also forthcoming.

 

The following excerpt from Ceremonials by Katharine Coldiron is printed here with permission from KERNPUNKT Press.

**

Never Let Me Go

When I was eleven, my aunt took me to the seaside with my two cousins, who were composed of pastry flour and margarine. I’d never seen anything as large as the sea before. Anything that dwarfed my life to a cracked nut. It was the first thing I ever loved.

I had read Hans Christian Andersen, and I knew “The Little Mermaid.” I knew about people who lived beneath the waves, beautiful women with yearning hearts and greedy witches with no hearts at all. At eleven I’d grown too old to believe I could live down there with them, but I did not exactly disbelieve in them. It was possible, I thought, to dive under the water and hear mermaids singing. If only just possible.

My cousins sang an atonal duet of complaint from moment one, but I focused on the sea to drown them. Drown them out, I mean.

Crash and foam. Fold and fall. Pull and expire. The bubbles and the tiny sand creatures and the restlessness and the blue, so blue, multihued like the cool shimmers in mother-of-pearl.

Queenly. My lady ocean.

I flopped into her lap with more enthusiasm than skill or safety. Above the surface boiled the opposite of peace, children gulls waves hotdogs popcorn butter fried dough sizzle colored towels umbrellas people people people. Underneath, wadded ears, clouded eyes. Dim noise.

All the day this high and low, bobbing like an apple––out of the sea and into the sea. I nearly forgot about my cousins. My aunt hollered intermittently. The lady’s murmur parched me, while the sun shone, benevolent until it burned my indoor skin.

When the air cooled and the breeze freshened, my aunt took up hollering and wasn’t inclined to stop. The swells emptied of bathers. Without thinking I turned and paddled out, an inept puppy fleeing an attempt to housetrain it. Further I went. The seaside smells dispersed. I thought of ice cream, the tin ladle of water by my bed. The water pocketed cold. I paddled on and on, the waves fading to weak, inconsistent frequencies. Sparks of sound, like sequins, from the shore.

A mouthful of seawater. Cough and it’s okay. But what’s down there, underneath? What can find my feet?

Dunk my head. Cough. It’s okay. The shore seems farther away than before. I paddle, but it doesn’t get any closer.

If I fall, will I sink forever?

Another mouthful, more. Cough, cough. Maybe this is not okay.

Paddle harder. Electric red in my mind. Paddle faster.

The shore is quiet. I can’t distinguish human figures, just a colorful blur.

I will be asked to do this again. It comes from nowhere, but beats like a pulse.

Dunk, for longer. My fingers, pruned, wave around like leaves in a quickening breeze. Cough, cough, cough, more water. Eyes burn. Skin stings. I’m helpless is what’s overtaking me, the sense of being dwarfed by something more powerful than I will ever be. Encircled in the ocean’s arms, squeezing my chest until my heart bursts and the dim becomes black. Is that singing? Triton’s children calling me down?

I will be asked to do this again.

No, it’s a whistle. The squeeze is the grip of a Samaritan, a strong holidayer from the next county who saw my dark head go under one too many times and pulled me back, against the undertow, and delivered me unto my aunt, who put on a tremendous show, weeping and wailing over her darling Corrie as I spat up seawater and struggled to get off the cold sand, which abraded my indoor skin. Everyone held me down against the sand. I never found out the name of my rescuer.

I will be asked to do this again.

I have wondered, recently, whether the rescuer and the Directress are one. I have wondered whether there are any coincidences. I have wondered whether any child, any normal, untouched child, could be so bewitched by the sea as to ask for another trip to the seaside on the very same day she was nearly drowned in it, on the way back to her bed in the attic, while her cousins wrestled noiselessly over a bag of sweets. Is that child aware of her fate, distant as she is from it in circumstance, near as she is to it in element?

The ocean has no bottom. A lake is self-contained, no matter its size. My feet found a place to land. 

**

Katharine Coldiron’s work has appeared in Ms., the Washington Post, LARB, the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, BUST, the Believer, the Rumpus, VIDA, Brevity, and elsewhere. She earned a B.A. in film studies & philosophy from Mount Holyoke College and an M.A. in creative writing from California State University, Northridge. She has read many, many books. Born in the American South to a professor of poetry and translation and a U.S. Navy captain, and raised along the East Coast, she now lives in Los Angeles. Ceremonials, out in February 2020, is her first book.

The following excerpt is from The Dollmaker by Nina Allan, recently published by Other Press, reprinted here with permission.

The Dollmaker

How do you go about killing a fairy queen? There are no books on the subject – I know, I searched – and ironically I found myself falling back on Lola’s own. After largely ignoring Lola’s oeuvre for most of my life, I now devoured it eagerly, reading all of her books in sequence right through from her debut – Cousins – to her most recent novel The City Gates, which had been published to ecstatic reviews just six months before. 

I found her plots as opaque and dull as ever, but one potentially useful discovery I made, and made quickly, was that Lola was obsessed by detail. Not just the forensic details that are central to solving crimes, but the practical and other mundane details of how they are committed. Toxicology was a favourite subject of hers, as was ballistics. In one novel – End of Service – she even had an excruciating five pages describing the commonest materials for making an effective garrotte, and where best to source them. 

I wondered how she knew all this stuff, how much of it was true. I couldn’t see myself wielding a gun, much less a garrotte, because I knew I was almost certain to make a hash of things. If I didn’t get killed myself, I’d almost certainly be caught, and then I’d be sent to prison for life, with the entire courtroom believing I killed my poor disabled aunt because she stole my boyfriend. 

It would have to be poison. Aunt Lola’s books furnished me with enough information to begin hatching a plan, but that still left me with the problem that had been bothering me from the start: did what worked for humans also work for the small folk? Would arsenic kill an elf queen, or would she wolf it down like sherbet, and lick her lips afterwards?

I had no idea. 

**

Aunt Lola made the procurement of deadly chemicals sound like the least of a would-be murderer’s difficulties, and she turned out to be right. There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, and a city this size boasts more establishments selling under-the-counter merchandise than you might imagine. Poky little shops in the factory district, hole-in-the-wall outlets down every proverbial back alley, all seeking to do business and all without attracting the kind of attention that might prove harmful to trade. The place I decided to try was called Warbinski’s, a grubby emporium advertising itself as an Ironmongery and General Stores, where the proprietor would weigh out bismuth and antimony by the ounce. 

“And you don’t mind working with this stuff?” I asked him, a red-nosed, runny-eyed gnome of a man I presumed must be Mr Warbinski. I wasn’t buying anything that day. I had resolved to use Warbinski’s as a testing ground, to see what kind of reaction I might get when I started asking the kind of questions I needed to ask. 

I posed as a radio journalist, of all things. I told him I was researching a programme on old family businesses. 

Warbinski shook his head. “Used to it,” he said. “None of these materials are dangerous, so long as they’re treated with appropriate respect. Don’t want strychnine ending up in the sugar bowl now, do we?” 

He laughed uproariously, his nostrils flaring wide. I managed a smirk because I knew it was expected but it was difficult for me not to imagine that his supposed joke had been at my expense. When he offered me a cup of tea I quickly refused. 

“Just one more thing,” I said, as I was leaving. “Do you sell anything for fairy infestations?”

“Good Lord,” Warbinski said. He was doing his best to look outraged but I could tell it was a put-up job by the way his gaze was momentarily diverted towards the back of his shop. As if he were afraid I might be a decoy, and that even now a team of detectives were trashing his storeroom in search of blacklisted substances. “We don’t go in for that kind of thing here, indeed no. The materials you are referring to are only available under special licence. Cost an absolute bomb and definitely not worth the blowback if some idiot gets their sums wrong, goodness no.”

I decided I would have to take a chance. I took out my wallet and placed a note of a painfully large denomination on the counter, licking my fingertips and staring into his eyes as if we were both actors in some low-rent spy movie. “I’m sure you know where such materials might be available, though,” I said, deliberately. “What with your family ties to this part of the city being so extensive?”

He hesitated for less than a second before grabbing the note. “Zivorski’ll see you right,” he said. “Under the bridge and then right into Gagarin Street. Only I would strongly advise you against. Not to be messed with, those fae buggers. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“This is just research,” I reminded him. “My enquiry was strictly theoretical.”

“Right you are, then,” said Warbinski, brightening up again. I knew he didn’t believe me for a second, but by his reckoning he’d done his moral duty and that was enough.  

**

Zivorski’s turned out to be a jeweller’s, and judging by the stones on display in the window, quite an expensive one – not what I had expected at all. I peered in through the bowed, nicotine-stained glass, trying to work out if Warbinski had been taking me for a ride after all. 

In the end I decided to chance it and went inside, pushing at the peeling door in its warped frame until a bell sounded, summoning the eponymous Zivorski. I was surprised by her youth, I suppose because the shop itself was so decrepit. 

What surprised me even more was that she was a dwarf. A human dwarf, I assumed, rather than fae, although the shock of seeing her, given the reason I was there in the first place, almost made me turn around and leave before I got in any deeper. 

What did I think I was doing in this part of town, anyway? My mother would have a fit. 

“Good afternoon,” said Zivorski. “How can I help?” 

She spoke quietly but firmly, without that edge of deference adopted by most service personnel. Her dress – a grey silk shift – was obviously expensive but without looking flashy. 

She knew how to play down her disadvantages, that was for sure. 

“Warbinski sent me,” I said. That at least was the unvarnished truth. 

“Leon? What’s he been up to?” Her guard seemed to drop at the mention of Warbinski’s name. The two were genuinely acquainted then, which at least was something. 

“I only met him today,” I said. I was about to launch into my radio journalist spiel but something in this woman’s expression gave me to understand that we were beyond that. “I went to his shop because… I have a problem. Warbinski said you might be able to help.” 

“Don’t tell me you’re intending to kill someone? There are easier ways of solving problems, believe me.” 

“She’s fae,” I said quickly, my trump card, although I had an idea Zivorski would have worked that out already. 

“I’m sure Leon will already have told you this isn’t a good idea,” she said at once. “So let’s skip that. It won’t be cheap.” The figure she quoted was indeed the better part of two months’ wages. Something of my dismay must have shown in my expression because she gave a wry smile. “These family feuds are best forgotten, you know. What was it your father said? Get on with your life?” 

I felt the blood drain from my face. “Come on,” Zivorski said. “That’s just ground-level telepathy. It’s perfectly harmless. The things your aunt could do to you are a hundred times worse. If she finds out, I mean. Have you thought about that?”

“That’s why I need her gone.” My voice sounded dry as a rusty hinge. “I can’t go on like this. Always wondering what she might do, what she might be thinking. It’s driving me mad.”

“Well, it’s your funeral.” Zivorski sighed in a way that suggested she dealt with fools like me every day of the week and was getting tired of it. She came out from behind the counter and I had the chance to observe how oddly shaped she was, the trim elegance of her upper body contrasting dramatically with the squat pelvis, the plump bowed legs, the unnaturally tiny feet. There was something powerful about her though, a decisiveness in her movements that said she didn’t care how she might be perceived, her body was splendid to her and she wouldn’t change it even if she could. She bent slightly to unlock the back panel of the window display then reached inside, drawing forth a tray of gemstone rings. She placed the tray on the counter before selecting one, an incredible square-cut topaz set in gold. The stone seemed to wink at me as if it knew something. I shivered. The topaz looked unnervingly like my aunt’s single, all-seeing eye. 

“There’s a tiny catch just under the stone, here.” Zivorski pressed lightly against the metal with the ball of her thumb. The topaz sprung open like a miniature door, revealing a tiny golden cavity beneath. Inside the cavity lay a spherical tablet, or capsule. It had the sheen of nacre. 

“This will dissolve in any liquid, alcoholic or otherwise. It runs through your victim’s system much like human tetanus, but at a hundred miles an hour. She will curl and shrivel before your eyes. It can be distressing to watch, I warn you, especially as she’ll probably be conscious until the very end.” She paused. “I might be able to give you something back on the ring afterwards, if that’s any help.”   

**

I left Zivorski’s with the ring in a leather casket and my bank account more or less empty. I walked back towards the centre of town, navigating the refuse-smelling backstreets and questionable retail outlets as if I’d lived in the slums of the factory district all my life. 

And it may well come to that, I thought, if any single part of this goes wrong. I wondered if it would really be so bad. No one knew me here and rents were bound to be dirt cheap. I could set up a beauty parlour. I’d have clients coming out of my ears in no time at all. I was surprised and a little appalled by how appealing it seemed, the idea of sliding out of one life and into another. I couldn’t help thinking about what Aunt Lola had said when I first went to live with her, about anyone being capable of murder, given the right circumstances. 

Did I truly mean to go through with this? I clasped my satchel to my chest, the trick ring inside. Zivorski had told me the poison in the capsule would only work on fair folk.

“Which gives the product an inbuilt advantage, you know, if you happen to have made a mistake,” she added, leaning heavily upon the last word as if she were offering me one last chance to resolve my predicament in a less radical way. And save myself some money into the bargain. 

The problem was that I didn’t want to save the money, not any more. I had even lost some of my hunger to see Lola dead. At some point during the planning process, my anger and hatred had reshaped themselves into something less visceral and more chilling: curiosity. I had become like one of Lola’s protagonists: secretive and introverted, obsessed with minutiae. 

It sounds incredible I know, but what I wanted most was to discover if I could get away with it. 

**

I waited three days, just to steady myself, then gave Aunt Lola a call. She sounded delighted to hear from me, her voice trembling with emotion. Or was that simply the result of a bad telephone connection?

“Sonia, dearest. I’ve been longing to talk to you. It’s been so difficult to know what to say.”

“I should have called sooner,” I said. My heart was pounding. I couldn’t remember ever having been in a situation where what I was saying felt so violently at odds with the thoughts in my head. The feeling was exhilarating, a sense of being ahead of the game, of knowing something my enemy – for was she not my enemy? – could never have guessed at. It was easy to see how this kind of power might become addictive. “I hate us not speaking. Can we meet?”

“That would make me very happy, my dear. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to hear your voice.”

She asked if I would prefer to meet up in town – neutral ground was what she meant – but I said no, I would come to the flat, the flat would be fine. 

I hadn’t been near the apartment since the day I found Lola in bed with Wil and the thought of going there now made me sick to my stomach. Nonetheless, we agreed that I would call round at three o’clock the following day. I rode up in the lift as normal, the rusty chugging sound so comforting in its familiarity that I could almost imagine calling off the murder plan and agreeing to move back in here, to let bygones be bygones. 

Then I remembered the crucial element that had been missing from our phone conversation: Lola hadn’t mentioned Wil, not once, which must surely mean the two of them were still together. If they’d split up she would surely have told me, or at least dropped a hint.

It suddenly occurred to me that Wil might even be living with her now. I’d glimpsed Wil around the studio from time to time but I’d deliberately avoided him as much as possible and those friends of mine who were also friends of Wil’s kept a diplomatic silence. I had no idea how he was or what he was doing, which suited me fine. But this did also mean I’d left myself open to nasty surprises.  

I rang the bell. The familiar, harsh buzzing, then silence. I tried to compose myself, to be the person I was pretending to be – the person who had turned up on this same doorstep eighteen months ago with two bulging holdalls and a broken suitcase, in fact. It was only then that I realised that person no longer existed, that whatever happened in the next forty-five minutes she was gone for good. 

Then the door burst open and there she was, my aunt, wearing a beautiful hand-finished trouser suit and smiling like a movie star. 

Her hair looked as if it had been recently styled, the wispy auburn curls both softer and brighter. She looked radiant. If I’d had any doubts about how things stood between her and Wil, those doubts were gone now. 

I wondered if Wil knew what she was, if he even cared. 

“Sonia,” she cried. She threw her arms around me, kissed my cheek. “You look lovely, dear. Come inside.”

She didn’t even sound like her old self: mildly sardonic, wryly amused, cautious and consistent. It was as if she believed the whole world must now share her happiness, a joy so pure that its origins in deception no longer mattered. 

**

The truth is difficult, isn’t it? I want to tell you how this story ends, but I’m not sure how to do that. I could tell you about how we sat down together in Aunt Lola’s living room with the photographs and the books and that ugly bronze beetle of hers, how Lola talked and talked, insisting that when she first went for a drink with Wil it was just that – a drink – because they’d enjoyed each other’s company so much the previous evening. 

“You have to believe me, Sonia, I didn’t plan any of this.” She even blushed. “I think I might have been a little crazy for a while.”

Just for a while? I thought, but didn’t say. I kept my smile on and said it was all right, I understood, that’s what love does to people. She leaned forward in her chair then – the same chair Wil had been sitting in the night he met Lola – placed her hand on my arm and said yes, that was it exactly, and I did understand, didn’t I, that she loved Wil, that it was the real thing, that she wouldn’t have dreamed of coming between us otherwise. 

“I still feel ashamed,” she said. “Not of Wil and me, but of the way it all happened. You finding out like that. I can’t tell you how dreadful I feel. I wish I’d found the courage to tell you properly.”

I patted her shoulder and said she should stop blaming herself, that Wil and I had been on the rocks anyway, that the past didn’t matter now because I was with someone else, a jazz drummer named Marco I’d met when his band played the Maraschino three months ago. 

“Really?” gasped Lola. “Oh Sonia, that’s wonderful. When do I get to meet him?” 

She sounded genuinely pleased for me, too, suggested we should come round for dinner as soon as possible, me and the non-existent Marco, who I think I might actually have fancied if he’d been real. If Lola thought she had a monopoly on creative invention, she was wrong. I smiled and smiled, all the time thinking that if she said one more word about her and Wil and how maaahvellous they were together then I might just have to kill her. 

Which was funny really, because I was going to kill her anyway. 

“Let’s have tea,” she said at last. “And you can tell me more about Marco.”

She hurried off into the kitchen. I heard the sounds of running water and the rattle of crockery and at one point I even heard Lola singing although I might have imagined that. I got up from my seat and moved slowly around the room, running my fingers over the spines of the books in the bookcase, gazing at the framed photographs of film stars just as Wil had done and wondering if any of these things would pass down to me when my aunt was dead. 

She came back at long last, placed the tray on the low coffee table between us. We waited while the tea brewed, talking of nothing. Lola finally plied the pot, the liquid falling in a perfect amber arc, making that inimitable sound tea makes as it flows into a cup. It was only once she’d finished pouring that Lola realised she had forgotten the milk. Lola always took her tea black, in the Russian fashion, with a lump of sugar. Normally she would have remembered that I prefer mine white. Either she was just nervous or what with me being out of her life for so long she had genuinely forgotten. 

“How silly of me,” she said. “I won’t be a moment.” She hurried back to the kitchen. It was now or never. I hadn’t practised the manoeuvre at home because I was afraid it might jinx me. Perhaps I was just lucky, but I needn’t have worried. The whole thing went perfectly, as if I was used to poisoning people’s beverages for a living. A quick movement forward, press with the thumb, a tiny sound – plink! – like a solitary drop of water falling from the tap into the bath. The tablet dissolved so quickly I barely saw it happen. Which made it easier to tell myself afterwards that the horror of what occurred next was not my fault. 

Zivorski had warned me that it might be upsetting to see Lola die, to watch her agony, though in fact it was not. Rather I beheld it, as I might have observed something that was happening on a television screen, or the final day’s rushes from whatever film project I was currently involved with. Assessing them for bungled lighting or muffed lines. 

I think I would be right in saying that this was a perfect performance. Lola raised her cup to her lips, blew gently on the liquid to cool it as was her habit, took one quick sip and then another, grimaced slightly then replaced the cup in its saucer. I had just enough time – a second or so – to curse myself for not asking Zivorski how much of the liquid had to be consumed before the poison was effective, before Lola began to die. 

A look of terrified surprise came into her eyes, an expression I can best describe as acute awareness. Then her muscles went taut, all of them, at once. She jerked bolt upright in her seat, as if she’d been turned into a line drawing of herself, all points and angles. Her fingers gripped her knees like the talons of birds. I could see how she was trying to unclamp one of her hands, to reach for me, for the table, for anything, but her joints were locked tight. She couldn’t speak either, or scream. 

Instead, a terrible gurgling, the only sound her constricted throat could now produce. 

I sat and watched, gazing at her as the knife-bright awareness in her eyes changed to the dull fog of delirium, as her spine bent itself backwards in a paroxysm of desperation – I heard it crack – and her bent knees beat against her chest like demented drumsticks. 

The whole process took less than two minutes. A brief interlude, I suppose you might call it, unless you were Lola. When it was over her whole skeleton seemed to fold in on itself, a bunch of twigs wrapped in soiled rags, that’s what she looked like, her head lolling crazily off to one side like a broken doll. 

When I felt able to move I lifted the two cups carefully from the coffee table and carried them through to the kitchen. I emptied their contents into the sink, chased them down with hot water. Then I washed the teacups and carefully dried them, returning my own to the correct cupboard and replacing Aunt Lola’s in its previous position on the tray. I poured her another cup of tea, then dusted the handles of all receptacles with a clean cotton handkerchief I had brought specifically for the purpose.   

There would be other prints of mine, everywhere throughout the flat, but then why shouldn’t there be? I had lived there for more than a year, after all. I had visited my aunt this very afternoon, and found her quite well. 

**

Nina Allan is a novelist and short story writer. Her previous fiction has won several prizes, including the British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel, the Novella Award and the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire for Best Translated Work. She lives and works in Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute. The Dollmaker is her third novel.

“The String” by Victor Ladis Schultz was first published in failbetter.

The String

Herman Bloch was the first to fall ill, though back then we thought him merely overcome with grief. His niece had been killed. That awful business in Delaware. Sweet girl passing notes in class. Small mercy: she was the first victim. Never even saw the shooter, classmates say. Never felt a thing, we hope.

We were shocked for maybe ten minutes, not so much because a resident’s niece had died–however suddenly or tragically or violently–as because she had brought on us, a small-town nonplace out west, the hungry condoling eye of the entire republic. When the eye flitted to the next victim’s backstory, we reacted as infants passed from strange hands back to our mothers. The tension left our bodies. Best to forget all that. There there.

Herman tried to forget too. When he left town for the funeral he was still struggling to put on a brave face, but by the time he returned he looked rejuvenated. Reborn, almost. Bloch taught music at our middle school, and before long the children started to leak accounts of some truly bizarre songs in class: glacial dirges, no melody or dissonance, words that were foreign or nonsensical, possibly extraterrestrial, and sung only by Bloch. His interactions with the faculty raised as many eyebrows. His first week back, when the social studies teacher accused him of stealing her lunch, Bloch marched her straight to the faculty lounge, opened the fridge, and pointed out that he had eaten everyone’s lunch, not just hers, and what made hers so special anyway since she hadn’t even buttered the bread on her ham-Swiss? The principal let this pass with a verbal admonishment; grief can make us not ourselves. But when, one morning the following week, the custodian unlocked the school only to find Bloch asleep on a drop cloth in the gymnasium, the signature cerulean-and-gold walls now cozied by an almost comically gentle shade of pink, the superintendent had no choice but to place Bloch on administrative leave.

Administrative leave turned into psychiatric care. Bloch was a confirmed bachelor, lived alone. A neighbor found him catatonic in his own living room. He had fouled his clothes. Hadn’t eaten in days, certainly. His medical record showed no history of manic depression, no history of anything. 

The professionals in the psychiatric ward performed admirably. Bloch’s body was on the mend within a couple of days, but the most dramatic transformation took place in his personality. Gone was the hyperactive vandal, gone the bandleader from Mars. In their place stood Herman Bloch as he had been before the tragedy–but better. Colleagues who visited him noted a more patient temper and a subtler sense of humor. Most unmistakable was what seemed a newfound erudition, a certain but unpretentious knowledge of things that had once happened in the world. Current events too. At first we assumed he just had a lot of extra time to read the internet while he was in hospital care. Only when he began making equally certain pronouncements about the future did we take pause. 

Take heed, he said. The Harvest Festival will be canceled this autumn.

Take heed, he said. The snows this winter will be our worst yet.

For old Margot Belcher he had bigger news: Take heed, he said. Mrs. Belcher will have a son seventeen months hence, on the 21st of December.

Margot had never spoken to Bloch in her whole life. The doctors held him for further testing.

Not long after that the spree shooting at Ida happened. The casualty figures weren’t as high, of course, but imagine our surprise when one of the dead turned out to be the Cruz boy from over on Juniper Street. He had grown up here and then gone on to make something of himself. His family still lived in town: parents, a couple sisters. Good tight circle of friends. College kid, they’d called him, but never fancy college kid. Afterward he moved to Michigan to teach high school. History.

His mother, Maria, was the first Cruz to lose it. Tried to bury herself in her own backyard, middle of the night. His father, Eugenio, checked her into the hospital just in time for his own spell the next morning. Drove his jeep at speed right into the war memorial in the town square. When witnesses dragged him uninjured from the wreckage, they found he was soaked and naked, as if he’d jumped straight from the shower into the car. The Cruzes shut down quicker than Bloch had. Just a week after we heard about Ida, all four of them were glassy eyed in the hospital. Worse yet, the daughters’ families started to act up. One of their sons built a ham radio, then initiated a series of broadcasts comprising only epic screeds against individuals whose names no one had ever heard–not the boy’s father, not his siblings, not his few nonplussed listeners, not the deputy who visited the home just before the boy fell catatonic and joined his mamá and abuelos in the psychiatric ward. A few days later, the father sneaked off his job as a hunting guide. Stranded a few tourists in the hills. They were lucky to get out alive. He turned up the next week, bearded over and draped in the furs of recently slain mammals. We housed him with his family.

We had to cancel the Harvest Festival that fall. A slew of venders had dropped out unexpectedly.

We suffered through record snowfalls that winter. The trucks ran out of salt by January.

Margot Belcher learned she was pregnant that spring. She had a December due date.

We asked Bloch how he could have possibly known these things. He credited his muse.

The next school shooting was that little academy in St. Louis. The dead gunman had good grades. When police identified him as the grandson of Frankie Metcalf, a lawyer who lives here, we started to panic. When the Cruzes and their kin began making predictions–Take heed, they said–we called an emergency council. Had to use the school’s gymnasium to hold everyone. The room gave off a febrile buzz and the walls seemed to be moving but they weren’t. Mayor Ford had a frog in his throat. His first words into the microphone sounded like a burr looks:

Ladies, gentlemen, this is what we know at this time.

What we knew was that eventually somewhere else would notice. Phones would ring, questions, questions, questions. Word of the sick would get out. We would become a case series. We came to an agreement: we would quarantine ourselves. No one in, no one out–it was the responsible thing to do and only what the republic would’ve done anyway. Meanwhile, perhaps the string, as we’d come to call the phenomenon, would break. Perhaps the next time a psychopath chambered a hollow point in study hall, none of us would lose anyone. Perhaps the sick would heal and life could be something familiar again.

Around the time Metcalf began talking of things to come, we heard about the next rampage. Oregon high school. Casualties were light: a few wounded, just one dead, just a footnote in the broadcasts. The one fatality was cousin to Mora Lee, our treasurer.

The Cruzes’ predictions were starting to bear fruit. Eugenio largely contented himself with the temperatures and tidal activity near the Puget Sound and the Sea of Cortez forty-two days hence, but Maria, it is known, accurately foretold the assassination of the governor down to the minute and caliber of bullet.

The ramifications multiplied quickly; one death often laid low several households. Soon no room remained in the psychiatric ward, then no room remained in any ward. No matter, as too many of the hospital staff had become patients for the facility to operate. For everyday maladies, healing happened at home, or not at all. Teaching too: the school was now a storehouse for oracles. Few lucid students and still fewer teachers had remained once the hospital reached maximum capacity, so we designated the middle school to house the excess ill.

Maria eventually became a pillar among them. The school had been her idea. Your farsight is a gift, she said, and instructed the gifted on its use. She urged her husband to cast about for visions of greater substance. She gave tell of natural disasters and morbidity rates and secret nascent rebellions in lands whose names appear on maps but sounded fanciful on her tongue. All came to pass, and as more time passed the string grew unchecked:

Uintah High, Vernal, Utah–our bank manager’s niece.

Live Oak Elementary, Lafayette, La–our sheriff’s great nephew.

Appleton North, Appleton, Wis–our barber’s cousin’s son.

Memorial High, McAllen, Tex–our principal’s sister.

Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC–our baker’s daughter.

Thus did we begin preparing our own bread.

#

I was the last. Blood all over the country: they all ignored me. Kept their young in school. In the end the fated was my own son. Junior-high basketball game outside Cleveland. South Central Trojans vs Monroeville Eagles. My son played forward for the Eagles. My ex-husband had custody but never went to the games. By the time everyone’s ears stopped ringing the only two people left alive on the court were the mascots.

I leave the maternity ward. No one here but far off I can hear a woman screaming. I have an appointment elsewhere. Feel my way down the stairs to the lobby. Its stillness and gloaming. Its broken doors and aquarial windows. Anyone could see in from out there, if there were anyone.

Out into the street where Mr. Orozco used to stand crossing-guard before his niece fell victim to a maniac in algebra class downstate. No cars, no people, the streetlights haven’t come on yet. Still the screaming endless and thin.

So it’s not from the hospital then. Outdoors the direction is impossible to pinpoint. The scream bears the by-now unremarkable intensity of the tortured. You can’t unhear it but so what. The volume here sounds the same as it did in the maternity ward. I am clothed, I notice for the first time.

I do not stop at my house. No need. Nor do I check in on my neighbors: I was the last. As I push eastward, downtown, the pitch does not waver, the shriek does not fade. Here our own manias have left their mark. On one lot stands a spacious lodge built of naked mannequins. Up the street the church’s siding has been stripped and its awing stained glass boarded up: God’s work, the pastor said, over and over, after he lost his youngest brother.

Farther on, the bank’s roof has crumpled under the weight of a fallen cell tower. I stop. I can remember the mannequins and the church and the others, the messages left in the street or the acres of weathervanes planted like steel soy. The fires. I cannot remember the bank. The wind wheezes through the rubble. The scream eats the wheeze. One is of the throat, one of the earth, but which of which? This must have been my work then. I was the last.

At the edge of town, the exodus has begun. Maria directs. We need you, she says. I take my place at the rear. Massed thus we look like many, but the roads are many more that will peel us off the parade, one by one, carry the seers to the extremities of the republic. Surely at the end of such byways waits a host with a long memory for names.

Take heed. Years on, the fall of cities. Man, hunter. Woman, hunter. Child, hunter. Each by his own hand fed or slain. Then, the rising forth: rivers, reservoirs, seafloors. Man becomes fish once again, and woman summons him, and child summons him. They swim as one school, surge as one, as though bound by a single voice unvoiced. Sing, goddess, the anger of our sons.

**

Victor Ladis Schultz is a writer whose short fiction appears or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Third Coast, Confrontation, and other fine publications. By day he works as a copyeditor for a trade journal near Chicago. By night he works on a novel. Follow him on Twitter, where he tweets out minor quotations by major writers.

**

Image: Flickr / ashokboghani

“Trouble” by Kate Wisel, from Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, is reprinted here with permission from the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Trouble

We were all the same age, our new neighbors and us. Our puppies were the same age, our new puppy and their new puppy. We learned this as the neighbors hauled boxes out of their car and our little prize thrashed his neck against the thick leash we’d bought at Petco. Unleashed, he mistook my ankles for chew toys. He found my cigarettes, even when I hid them, and ripped them to bits. We should call him Ashtray, I thought.

“That’s why we buy him toys, dumbass,” Niko had said. Cigarettes were already overpriced, and like a homeless person, I was picking through the promising ones.

Outside the new neighbors’ car, for a split second, we expected that we would become great friends. The neighbors and us, just like normal couples. Just like the puppies, normal puppies, who were pawing at each other like lovers.

“What’s your puppy’s name? Sorry I’m eating strawberries,” the girl said. She dropped the carton and the strawberries rolled next to her laundry basket. The puppies teamed up to demolish the berries, then chewed her sweatshirt collar, the gray sleeve darkening with slobber.

“His name’s Trouble,” I said. News to Niko, who looked at our puppy reluctantly, but I had him there. It wasn’t something he could argue with. Our puppy had hole-punching teeth and coal-lined eyes like an emo teenager.

“Get back,” I said. Trouble was spread eagle on the concrete as the neighbors’ puppy tongued his privates. I jerked his leash back. Not on my watch. I scooped up Trouble as he writhed in my arms, then started yelping like a Mormon girl during a kidnapping. I edged up the stairs while Niko charmed the neighbors. The girl bought it, and started talking his head off about how we should all go to dinner. Or make it.

“We should have a dinner party,” the girl said. “We’re twenty-six. We’re over partying.”

Briefly I saw myself from the view of the light fixture on the stairs, head-first, swollen eye, the door locked, bolted, my credit cards strewn below me like clues.

**

Later, while Trouble raised his leg to pee freely in the corner of the kitchen, I asked Niko if he noticed that both the girl and the guy neighbors had lazy eyes. I just thought, what were the chances? Both of their eyes milked at the center, identically, their pupils going googly like Magic 8 Balls.

“What does it matter?” Niko said, pouring bacon grease into a beer can. It matters to me, I thought. Did they look at each other, or half look at each other, and think, You complete me?

I hid under the dining room table with Trouble, squeezing him like a tube until he slinkyed out of my grip. I loved Trouble so much that I kind of wanted to hurt him. The muscles of his underside were so tender that to even look at him I had to bite the insides of my cheeks to shreds. Trouble stared back like he was so miserably disappointed in me, though he’d only known me a month. I thought of my brother when he was little and couldn’t speak. How he twisted his hands in front of his mouth. Blowing kisses, pointing to cookies in the aisle, then back to his mouth. Mouth to object, object to mouth. His sincere words dribbling out like applesauce. Since I couldn’t understand him, I would push him as hard as I could when no one was looking. I’d push him again, his helplessness the maker of my fury.

Trouble gagged, hunched, and heaved onto the hardwood. My cigarettes.

“No! Trouble! No!” I said. I pointed my finger to emphasize my anger, but it reworded itself as excitement. “Go! Trouble! Go!”

I kept my head in my hands as Trouble ran track around the table. He howled, barks like gunshots, his paws slipping and clicking on the hardwood.

“Why are you such a fucking baby?” Niko said, walking past, assaulting me with the sharp smell of new sneakers. At the coffee table he looked otherworldly, with his plate of stacked bacon, paleo fanatic that he was. Niko was gorgeous—everyone knew. He had slick black hair and tan skin like a man on the beach whose shoulder beads with water. Our children would be blended and according to any elderly lady in line at Stop n Shop, beautiful. I sometimes imagined their sparkling cheeks and kinky, highlighted hair. They would be him with my affectations. In photos, their eyes tiny riots, wild with inarticulate demands.

**

I want to tell you why I disliked our neighbors, the girl in particular, so you won’t hate me as much as my puppy hated me. The following week on the back stairs, the girl remarked on the convenience of our shared lawn out back. When she spoke, I couldn’t tell which eye to look into, so I looked at the lazy one. It swung up, receiving radio signals. 

“There’s going to be a lot of shit in that yard,” the girl said, like a fact. Maybe I didn’t know things, like why Trouble needed monthly shots when I didn’t have health care, but I knew damn well that we should clean up after him. We were adults. Every day, we were adults.

Back upstairs, I’d try to explain this to Niko, but then Trouble would start barking, and we’d freeze. Trouble’s barks were an alarm going off that we did not know how to disassemble.

“What do you want?” Niko would say. 

Trouble would hop madly at my waist. “You think I’m playing, esé? Say something.” 

Niko would step towards me. He’d say, “Why didn’t you set her straight?”

I’d jerk my head back without meaning to. Niko had hit me many times. More than many. More than hit. Smashed my face into the wall where a mirror from a garage sale hung by the door where I never failed to check my gaze. 

**

A month later, I stood on the lawn, shaking my knee. The sky was bleeding down the center like a knife wound. I was waiting for Trouble to go already so I could clomp back upstairs to watch Bravo and eat Doritos standing up. He would circle me, the Doritos a red bag of crack. Am I your fucking Matador? I’d think. His tongue hanging loosely, that deranged shark. It was among these thoughts that I noticed a piece of shit on the lawn.

“Do I have to do everything?” Niko said, all smug, like he was the smarter one. We were on our deck with the higher view of downtown. I’d forgotten to take out the trash. 

“You don’t even have a job.” Niko liked to remind me. School is a job, I thought. The twelve-pack of craft beers he’d drunk stunk from the sweat that ridged his bald chest, which was now up against mine. 

After I reset my nose with a pencil, I went to be alone in our guest room, where Niko’s electric guitars hung on the wall like a rich kid’s toys. I hid in the closet. I was the guest, to talk to the guy I’d been talking to. When he teased me, I teased back, a drip of blood tickling my lip, my old clogs smelling like burnt rubber.

**

The day after the Fourth, both in sweats, the girl and I stood on the lawn as our puppies rocketed towards each other, tumbling together like free-fallers. It was noon and I’d already had two Coronas. My right eye was a puff pastry enclosing a pink slit. I wanted to be alone. Really alone. Before Niko, before Trouble, the neighbors, before I could even remember. I wanted to be alone with the guy I wasn’t supposed to be talking to. I’d go anywhere with him.

“Trouble got bigger,” the girl said.

My heart sprang like a red punch from an arcade game because I couldn’t measure change with what was mine. But he wasn’t mine; I’d never asked for Trouble. Niko and I had woken up from a bad fight. A purple shiner covered my eyelid in a deep swell but matched my makeup, so we decided to go for a walk. We were walking past the thick window of a shelter. Niko thought Trouble could be a gift, a romantic gesture. Wow, I thought, I’ve never received a gift I’d have to walk for fifteen years.

When he picked Trouble out of the litter, I thought he’d stay that same size forever, the size of an organ, sticky-soft and warm. We took Trouble home. He trembled by our feet, then ripped up the sectional Niko had bought without insurance.

“Cut it out, you fucking monster!” I screamed.

In my spot, in the closet of the guest room, he fell asleep and had puppy dreams in the cage of my arms. His paws batted the air in a field where we were free and unleashed. 

**

“Hey,” the girl said after the neighbor dog nipped at Trouble’s neck. The girl and I watched as they tugged at each other’s skin, then retreated, their eyes fixed intently on the other’s, waiting to pummel. I didn’t care about my eye, dabbing it with concealer and setting it with powder. I wanted her to see.

“They like each other,” the girl said. I knew what she meant. She meant us. She wanted us to like each other. She wanted it since that first day they pulled up with their goddamn sorcerer’s auras and dirty laundry.

“Stop it,” I said to Trouble.

“Do you want to go to that new Mexican place down the street? Just you and me?” she said.

I wanted to go, I did, but if I opened my mouth, the heat would crawl in. I wanted to sit next to her in the booth with my superior eyes, tracing my fingers down the row of similar but different margaritas. She was waiting, with her permanent grin on, I could tell, though I stayed busy watching Trouble.

He was lunging this way and that way, trapped in the yard, thinking he was free. Was he bigger and why couldn’t I tell? When would I know? And then the dogs started barking, cruel little yips, and I grabbed at the leash, but Trouble had this new kind of force as he lunged at the neighbor dog. I looked at the girl, thinking she would do something. But for the first time she said nothing. Dumb chick just stood there, waiting. I was wordless, wanting. Wanting to look where she looked, but she was looking at me.

**

Kate Wisel is a Boston native. Her writing has appeared in publications that include Gulf Coast, Tin House Online, and Redivider as winner of the Beacon Street Prize, among others. She received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago, and was most recently a Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she taught fiction. She currently lives in Chicago. Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is her first book.

(c) 2019 Holding On To Nothing by Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne, reprinted with permission from Blair

Excerpt From Holding on to Nothing

Jeptha Taylor had been in love with Lucy Kilgore since he was sixteen and her smile was the reason why. She had a smile that made people feel safe. Jeptha, particularly. He wasn’t sure why exactly—he just knew a warm, contented feeling stole over him that struck him as exactly the kind of silent bliss a newborn baby feels when his mama feeds him. But when Jeptha pulled his Camaro, dark and shiny as a pond at midnight, into the parking lot behind Judy’s Bar on a hot Friday night in June, he had no idea that Lucy’s smile would be for him tonight, that it would spark through him and spread to her like a hay blaze—fiery, fast, and destructive. 

No, as far as Jeptha was concerned, tonight was only about bluegrass and ass, if he could get it. It was his first time at Judy’s Bar, and he felt a bit disloyal for being there. The bar had been open for four months and—being run by a Yankee—had been in disfavor for all those months with the local drinkers. Except for the real drunks, neighbors all, whose loyalty extended only to Jack, Jim, and whatever bar gave them the best shot at driving home shit-faced without getting caught. For those who could afford to be principled in their place of vice, the bar of choice was Avery’s Place, owned by a hometown boy named Avery who had spent ten years fighting the Pentecostals and the Baptists, both Freewill and Southern, for the right to open a bar in what previously had been a dry county. That a Yankee swooped in five years after Avery’s long fight finally ended and made use of the same provisions he had fought so hard to establish was enough for Jeptha, his friends, and the rest of the town to stay well clear of Judy’s Bar. Until, that is, four boys, so far unnamed in the paper even though everyone in town knew who they were, got high behind Avery’s Place one night in early July, lit a small fire in a patch of grass already dried out in the summer’s drought, and ran like hell when it whooshed into a patch of wiring that snaked up the outer wall of the bar. The fire caught hold in the electrical system and sparked its way from wire to wire, finally nesting in a box of receipts that Avery kept under a couple of bottles of 151 proof Everclear, reserved for the worst of the worst drunks. Within minutes, there was only a wall of flame where once there had been a bar, and Avery’s customers ran, taking their principles with them. 

Jeptha, not being a subscriber to The Review, the town paper, or really much of a reader generally, heard about the fire two days later from his friend Cody. Jeptha and Cody were bandmates in a Boy Named Sue, a bluegrass group that played Friday nights at Avery’s—Cody sang and played banjo, with Jeptha on mandolin. After a respectful period of silence, in which they thought of the drunken nights—both good and bad—they had enjoyed at Avery’s, Cody explained that Judy had called him two days after the fire (“Typical Yankee. Didn’t even wait for the damn ashes to stop smoking.”) and offered the band a job playing Friday nights at her place. Cody was principled, yes, but a fool? No. He’d accepted and gone on to call his band mates. Jeptha was happy to keep the gig, and all too happy to forget any moral stand he’d once had. He’d agreed to be there on Friday.

And so, Jeptha pulled his mandolin off the passenger seat of his car and made for the front door. He was showered for the first time in two drunken days, and most of the stink had worn off. He wondered if the girl who’d been in his bed last night—Brandy? Brandy Anne? She’d been bendy for sure, that one—would be in the bar and up for another go. Bluegrass and sex wouldn’t be such a bad Friday. He wondered if he’d need to remember her actual name to get her back to his place.

Occupied as his mind was, he hadn’t absorbed the fact of the full parking lot, so when he opened the door—happy to smell the right scent of beer, sweat, and leather that came flooding out—he was shocked to see the place packed to the rafters. He wasn’t sure he’d ever played in front of so many people. A trickle of fear gnawed at his belly. He elbowed his way through the crowd. He gave a quick nod and half smile to the girl from last night. She laughed and looked down at the table, but not before Jeptha saw a blush creep up her cheeks. He smiled to himself, pretty damn sure she’d be up for it again, assuming he could finesse the fact that she was sitting with a girl he’d slept with a few months back and never called again. He gripped his mandolin case and worked his way into line, feeling content. It had the makings of a good night. 

Jeptha finally caught the eye of the bartender and owner, Judy. She was in her sixties and, rumor was, had moved down to Tennessee to run this bar with a local man she’d met up in Boston. Jeptha was hard pressed to imagine why someone would move to Boston in the first place, and then, having flown the coop, decide to come back and with a Yankee in tow, no less. Still, here they were. Jeptha couldn’t say that Judy appeared happy about it. Her gray hair, which looked to have never seen the inside of a beauty salon, was pulled into a loose bun from which haphazard chunks escaped, and her t-shirt, wet in spots from the ice she dumped into glasses without so much as an attempt at aim, strained over a set of sagging, ponderous boobs.

She widened her eyes at Jeptha. “Yeah?” she said.

“Hi. How’re you?”

“What do you want?”

“Um, I’ll have a Bud Light, ma’am.” Jeptha shut his mouth. She was clearly a Yankee with no time for formalities. 

“A Bud Light and what?” 

“Just the beer, ma’am.” 

“Don’t call me ma’am.”

“Okay, ma—” Jeptha cut himself off when her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed. “Just a beer, please.” 

“You guys are too damn polite for your own good.” She slid the bottle across the bar and nodded at the stage. “You with the band?”

“Yes, ma—” Jeptha stopped. “Yes.”

“If you guys need anything tonight, grab Lucy. She’s helping out with the tables.” 

Jeptha turned to see the Lucy she was pointing at with her chin, and the trickle of fear in his belly grew to a flood. There she was—the wavy blond hair tickling her waist where her shirt rode up from bending over to take people’s orders; the pert little nose, turned up at the end in a way that was more cute than beautiful; and her cut-off skirt hugging curves he never got to see in church, back when he used to go. Most of all, there was her smile. Every time he saw it, he fell a little bit more in love.  

Jeptha knew Lucy’s smile didn’t mean anything when it was turned to him—birth had given her a nice one and she was polite enough to use it often, but Jeptha had never been able to help the feeling he got the few times she flashed it his way. Even though her smile made others feel safe, she rarely looked as if she felt that way. She instead sported a hunted look, as wary as a deer stopping to nose through a leaf pile for acorns in the fall, the kind of deer that looked so nervous, so ready to bolt, that Jeptha could never bring himself to even sight his rifle on it. Every time, a few seconds after warmth flowed through him at the sight of her smile, he’d see that wariness on her face and realize that he may as well have been standing in the woods without a gun, for all the chance he had of getting her. Especially now. He’d heard from his sister that Lucy was leaving town, moving to Knoxville to work and go to school. At least he wouldn’t have to see her anymore, though his stomach bottomed out at the thought. 

Jeptha grabbed his beer off the counter for a much-needed sip of courage. Despite the pulsing needs of the crowd, he could feel Judy’s eyes still on him. Her lips flickered. It looked like her last real smile had occurred sometime in the 1970s, and yet here were her lips, the edges moving up subtly toward her eyes. Jeptha mumbled thanks and walked toward the stage, uncomfortably aware of being watched. He kept his head down, trying to avoid making eye contact with Lucy. If he looked at her, the fear he was feeling would travel out to his hands and make them as useful as an arthritic bird dog.

“Y’all ready?” Cody asked, as Jeptha stepped up on the stage and wedged his beer between two amps. 

Cody nodded once and then tapped his foot—one and a two and a here we go—and launched into a riff on his banjo, which Jeptha and the fiddler and the drummer raced to catch up with. His fingers were stiff and stumbling. His stage fright, which usually decreased as he played, grew into an untamable creature, fed by the fear of playing poorly in front of Lucy. He played like he was six years old, holding the mandolin for the first time—his fingers glancing off the strings, missing his intros and staring into the crowd at Lucy during what was supposed to a solo. It was the kind of pitiful performance that makes a pick-up band think they ought to start practicing.

During the fourth song, he watched, mesmerized, as Lucy’s hips snaked this way and that through the crowd toward the band. She had a small tray in her hands, on which rested five shot glasses, full of what looked tantalizingly like whiskey. She waited at the left side of the stage a few feet from Jeptha until the song ended. 

“Hey,” she said after they wound the song to a half-hearted close. “It’s Jeptha, right? Deanna’s brother?”

“Unfortunately.”

“You said it, not me,” she said, her eyebrow raised. “Judy told me to bring these over. Said y’all couldn’t sound any worse drunk than you did sober.” 

Jeptha winced. “I was hoping y’all couldn’t hear that,” he said, passing out shots to Cody and the other guys. He nodded at the tray. “Who’s that one for?” 

“Me, I think.” 

“You get to drink on the job?” 

“You are.” She wrinkled her nose at him and straightened her shoulders, clearly annoyed. Jeptha felt like a fool. “Besides, Judy said I needed to loosen up, get some better tips.” 

“You look to be doing all right to me.” 

“If you count slaps on the ass as tips, then yeah, I’m rich as hell. Cheers,” she said and tipped the shot down her throat. In his hurry to keep up with her, a few drops of whiskey went down the wrong pipe, and he coughed so hard tears welled in the corners of his eyes. 

Lucy cocked her head at him, a teasing smile on her lips. Jeptha’s insides fizzed with a longing so fierce he felt it in his fingertips. “I’ll tell Judy to make the next one a lemon drop,” she said.

“Hey, that ain’t nice,” he said to her, but in his head he was thinking, Do it again. Please, God, do it again. 

All trace of teasing dropped off Lucy’s face, and she nodded seriously. “You’ll be great. I heard you play at church back when.” 

“You did?” 

“Yep. Besides, if you get nervous, imagine all these people naked. Not me, though. I want no part of that, thank you.” 

It was the longest conversation Jeptha had ever had with Lucy. She walked away as Jeptha tried and failed to keep his mind off the much-nourished fantasy of her naked. Finally, he shook his head and tore his gaze away. He nodded thanks to Judy, who mouthed, “For what?” followed by the tiniest, coolest of smiles. He relaxed under the influence of the whiskey and the image of a naked Delnor Gilliam tapping his foot against the floor, his gray, straggly beard bouncing off his belly in time to the music. He nodded at Cody, ready to play again.

**

Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne grew up reading, writing, and shooting in East Tennessee. After graduating from Amherst College, she became a writer and a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly. Her nonfiction work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Globe, and Globalpost, among others. She worked on this novel in Grub Street’s year-long Novel Incubator course, under Michelle Hoover and Lisa Borders. Her essay on how killing a deer made her a feminist was published in Click! When We Knew We Were Feminists (edited by Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan.) Holding On To Nothing is her debut novel. Find her on Twitter @ecshelburne.