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A Wonder of Nature, In Need of Killing

By Virginia Campen

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Aunt Pearl saw the creature first, through the kitchen window. “Snapping turtle,” she said, “a big one, headed toward the cow pond.” She stripped off her rubber dishwashing gloves and shut down the hot water, twisting the busted faucet stem with an old pair of pliers. “I’ll make turtle soup, if anyone has a mind to catch it.”

My Uncle Darnell didn’t respond, busy with his plate of eggs, busy sopping up yellow yolk with crumbling biscuit. On the shelf behind him the radio nattered on about swine flu, unemployment, Michael Jackson’s death.

“Bella’s going after it,” Auntie added, as frenzied barking reached us. This roused Uncle. Many a hound in the valley had lost blood or bone to a snapper, and Bella was heavily pregnant with pups that would sell for fifty bucks each. Uncle had promised me one for my 14th birthday. Not the pick of the litter, which was fine with me. I didn’t care if it was the runt.

“Campbell,” Uncle said, “run catch that dog before she gets bit. I’ll be out directly.” He poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and lit a cigarette. He’d been drinking more and more coffee lately, lingering over breakfast until the need to piss or the fumes of Auntie’s disapproval forced him up. Morning chores had become my responsibility, but it took two people to kill a snapper. One to provoke the creature with a branch or a broom handle until it bit down and refused to let go, until its soft wrinkled neck stretched out all naked and exposed. A second person to swing the axe.

I dutifully pushed away from the table and went to retrieve Bella. Outside, a cloudless pewter sky promised another day of heat. Most of the farm lay fallow, the fields invaded by seedling pines and knotweed. Uncle still worked the hayfields, raised a small herd of beef cattle, and grew pumpkins for the Halloween trade. Made enough to pay taxes and keep us fed and clothed, though the clothed part was thanks to the thrift shop and the fed part was mostly due to Aunt Pearl’s garden and chicken coop.

Out in the pasture the yearling steers huddled together, watching a humped gray shape lurch across the ground. A swath of flattened grass marked its journey up from the river. Wandering snapping turtles weren’t an unusual sight in the summer. Every year a few pulled free from the bottom mud and struck out in search of new water, though if Auntie Pearl saw them, that new water would be bubbling at the bottom of a soup pot.

Except this creature wasn’t any kind of turtle. Bella prowled stiff-legged and growling around what looked like an upside-down laundry basket, one of those round plastic tubs from the Dollar Store with holes in the sides so your dirty clothes get some air and don’t go all to mold. A puff of dark leathery skin bulged through each hole. The legs were the most turtle-like part of it, scaly and clawed, propping the body a few inches above the grass. There was no head to speak of, but as Bella circled, it swiveled to follow her movements, tracking her with a half-dozen glittering eyes arranged like those of a wolf spider.

I wasn’t yet afraid, not quite believing what was plain in front of my face. I grabbed at Bella’s collar which set her to running. She rushed at the creature, only to yelp and leap sideways when a mess of appendages exploded through the holes in the shell, jointed legs and slender tentacles, reddened crab-claws and wiry feelers all waving and lashing and colliding in an uncoordinated frenzy. The sight was both frightful and comical, an ill-made patchwork monster at war with itself. Two crawdad-sized claws grappled until one tore the other free and dashed it to the ground.

“Campbell! Grab the dog!” Uncle approached, an axe in one hand and a stout hickory branch in the other. He stopped dead when he caught full sight of the creature. After a moment of stunned silence he tossed the branch at it, landing a blow in the middle of its spidery eyes. The appendages jerked back into the shell, snick-snick-snick. In the grass the amputated claw clicked open and shut twice, then went quiet.

“Lock Bella in the barn,” Uncle said, his voice low and level. “Be quick. Bring back a couple of hoes or shovels.”

“You plan to kill it?” I matched his tone. He was a man of few words and did not take kindly to questions.

A slow grin spread across his face, yellowed teeth making a rare appearance against the dark of his beard and mustache. He looked as happy as a kid who’d found a two-headed garter snake. “Kill it? Hell no. I aim to keep it. I can make money off a freak like that.”

We hazed the creature toward the old boar pen, Uncle armed with a pitchfork and the axe, me with a hoe. On the threshold of the sty it stopped. Two whip-thin tentacles emerged from under the lip of the shell and twined firmly about the gateposts. Uncle chewed his moustache for a moment before poking at the creature with the pitchfork, lightly at first, then pushing with his full weight. The beast dropped to the earth, clawed feet disappearing. From a hole at the peak of the shell a thick tentacle arose, purple-black and ropy as a burn scar, tipped with a spiky knob the size of a cocklebur. It made quick questing motions, like a hound nosing about for a scent.

Uncle lashed out with the axe, cleaving one of the tentacles tethered to the gatepost. The cocklebur tentacle snapped back into the shell and the beast scuttled into the pen, careening off timbers and wire mesh in a frantic search for escape.

I joined Uncle in pushing the heavy gate shut. A piercing shriek startled us both. Auntie, come to assess our turtle-catching progress, stood at the far side of the pen, her eyes wide. “What in the name of Jehovah is that?” she demanded. The creature paused and swiveled toward her voice, returning her glare with its multiplicity of eyes.

“It’s a goddamn wonder of nature,” Uncle said.

“It’s an abomination, in need of killing.”

Uncle shook his head. “It’ll make us money. I’ll put it on display at the county fair, in the freak show, right next to the World’s Largest Sewer Rat and the Living Head in a Jar. Hell, folks paid a dollar last year to see Daniel Whitaker’s six-legged calf.”

I suspected Aunt Pearl had never visited a freak show, never seen Electro Boy or the Snake Woman, but mention of the Whitaker’s six-legged calf gave her pause. She’d witnessed Daniel and Doris Whitaker rolling up to church last November in a new used Chevy Blazer, with Doris bragging about how they’d paid cash thanks to the six-legged calf who, alas, died the day after the fair, victim of too much noise, too many hours under hot electric lights, and too much poking and prodding by kids eager to see its flailing walk.

“I guess,” Auntie said, giving the beast another look-over, “I guess I could talk to Doris next Sunday. Ask how they got a place at the fair, find out what permits and permission they needed.”

My heart sank. It went without saying that I’d be caring for the creature and, come October, I’d be at the fair, helping exhibit it. My classmates would come to gawk, and there’d be tourists from Allegheny, the far city that I’d never seen, tourists visiting the fair in between apple-picking and antiquing.

In the boar pen our creature resumed its examination of the fence, tentacles and claws tugging and tapping on wire and wood. Auntie moved away as it neared her, walking backwards.

“Don’t mention what we found,” Uncle cautioned. “Not a word, to the Whitakers or anyone else, neighbor or stranger.”

---

That evening Bella whelped her pups. I found her nestled in her box on the front porch with six warm wriggling bodies blindly nudging her teats. She lay on her side, panting and proud. I checked each pup, counting legs and eyes and tails. They were perfect.

Here’s what I remembered of life with my mother: a trailer park next to a muddy lake, the smell of cigarettes, a mobile home filled with stacks and stacks of books. On her good days she’d take me fishing in a leaky rowboat, baiting my hook so I didn’t have to touch the worms. On her bad days she’d hide in bed and read for hours, forgetting I was by her side. When the social service lady came to take me, mom roused herself enough to pack my bag, tucking a small lacy pillow that smelled of lavender and cigarettes in with my tee shirts and tube socks. I spent a month in a foster home before being delivered to the farm.

“She went to Allegheny,” Auntie said when I asked about my mother. “I doubt she’s ever coming back. But you’ll always have a place with us. Blood is blood.”

---

Uncle named the creature Cooter, which was what the old folks called red-bellied river turtles. Aunt Pearl didn’t approve of the name—she thought it sounded dirty—and vowed to never speak it. She began collecting table scraps and garden refuse in a slop bucket, just like when they had proper pigs. Every evening I lugged the bucket out to Cooter, who would scuttle to where I leaned over the fence and dumped out the slop. He’d settle on the pile of rotting vegetables and moldy leftovers like a broody hen on her nest and commence slurping and gurgling, consuming every bit.

All in all, Cooter proved easy to take care of. His scat was dry and dense, like the pellets of a great horned owl. He scratched out a depression in the dirt, a nest where he sat motionless for hours. His appendages emerged only when feeding, a few at a time, a pale display compared to that first chaotic day. This worried Uncle. “People pay a dollar to look at a freak, they expect it to move around. We need to liven him up before the fair.”

---

Auntie and Uncle began sitting together at the kitchen table after breakfast. They poured each other coffee and planned how to exhibit Cooter: a portable pen, the kind that can hold a bull, or perhaps keep him locked in a slat-sided livestock trailer. They discussed whether, after the fair, they could lease Cooter to a traveling show for the winter carnivals in Florida and Texas. They considered how to spend their profits. Not on a vehicle, not like the Whitakers, but on the farm.

“We can fence in the old orchard,” Uncle said. “Turn it into a pig yard, buy a dozen shoats next spring.” Aunt Pearl smiled, jotting down notes in a spiral-bound notebook, and I realized these dour, exhausted people might have once felt joy. Uncle tipped his chair back and looked at me. “How old you gotta be before you can quit school, Campbell? We’ll need more help around the farm soon.”

---

Uncle stood outside Cooter’s pen, pondering how to make him move, make him show a few crab-claws or tentacles. He’d tried loud noises – a bell, a horn – and tossing cans at the creature, which only made it hunker down.

“Open the gate,” he said, and entered armed with the pitchfork. Cooter turned to watch him. From the top of the shell, the thick ropy tentacle tipped with a cocklebur began to rise. “Move, dammit,” Uncle yelled, and stabbed Cooter with the pitchfork, sinking a tine into a scaly leg. The creature erupted into a lashing, snapping, twirling fury. Uncle jumped back but the tentacle was faster, lashing out, catching him in the belly and pulling taut, binding man and beast together for a heartbeat before the tentacle snapped and Uncle fell to the ground, his face a mask of pain. Cooter scrambled away as Uncle staggered upright, staring at a bloody hole in his shirt. A fleshy strand hung from the wound, coiling and thrashing like an earthworm tugged from the loam.

“Damn thing stung me,” he said, pinching the writhing tentacle between thumb and forefinger and stretching until the spiky knob came free with a soft wet plop. Uncle held it up for a closer look, sneered, and flung it away.

By late afternoon Uncle laid flat in bed, slick with fever from whatever poison Cooter pumped into him. He refused to tell Auntie what caused the hole in the purpling meat of his belly, refused to consider the hospital out of pride and embarrassment and for certain a fear of the bills. Auntie doctored him as best she could, cleaning the wound, laying cool cloths on his forehead, ignoring his fever-fueled rants. She pulled bills from the cookie jar where she kept her egg money and told me to watch over him while she drove to the crossroads, to buy oxycontin from the low men who gathered behind the Pick-n-Pay at all hours.

---

Uncle visited the creature as soon as his fever broke, though he was still jaundiced and weak. He began spending hours leaning against the barn, smoking and gazing at Cooter.

“Are you mad at it?” I asked one afternoon, and Uncle gave me a puzzled look, as though he’d forgotten about the pain, the bloody wound.

“We need another name for him,” he said, ignoring my question. “A name to put on a big banner at the fair, to show how special he is.”

“How about Alien River Monster?”

Uncle frowned. “Cooter isn’t an alien. He crawled out of our river.”

“Mutant,” I said. “Mutant River Monster.”

Uncle smiled. He knew about mutants from the movies: X-men, Godzilla, Spiderman. “Good one, Campbell,” he said, and chucked me lightly on the shoulder.

His unexpected praise made me reckless. “We should have my science teacher come over. Bet she could figure out what Cooter is.”

Quick as lightning, Uncle turned angry. “What did I say about keeping Cooter a secret?” He raised his chin and stared me down. “We don’t need strangers looking at him, bothering him.”

“Everyone in the county will be looking at him come fair-time,” I snapped, tired of guessing Uncle’s moods and doing his bidding. I turned and walked away.

The next evening I arrived at the pen with the slop bucket to find Cooter already feeding, the iridescent tail feathers of Auntie’s prize rooster disappearing under his shell. Uncle leaned on the fence and watched as random claws and tentacles popped in and out like a nightmare game of whack-a-mole. After a scant minute, no trace of the bird remained—not a bone, beak, or feather. Only a damp stain on the ground. I kept quiet the next morning when Auntie blamed coyotes for the rooster’s disappearance.

Uncle started scouting for roadkill, using a square-bladed shovel to scrape up the remains of varmints too dumb or slow to stay out of the two-lane highway that ran past the farm. Cooter eagerly consumed every mangled piece of fur and flesh no matter how rank, showing his pleasure with an exuberant display of claws, feelers, and tentacles.

---

By September all but one of Bella’s pups had sold. The runt remained, small but lively, with four white paws and a dark patch over one eye. I decided not to name her, not until my birthday in November when she would officially be mine.

Cooter was thriving. His shell reached to my hip and gleamed with a pearly luster. The rest of the farm was struggling. The pumpkin vines held more gourds than I ever thought possible, but they were small mean-looking fruits, knotted like clenched fists and pitted with rot. The steers battled a lung infection that left them gasping. Ropes of yellow-green snot dangled from their muzzles. I was walking among them, with Bella and her pup ranging nearby, when I heard the blare of the pickup truck’s horn and Uncle calling for me.

“Drive us upriver to Nate Sim’s place,” he said, tossing the keys to me. “Nate has an old livestock trailer he wants to get rid of. We can use it at the fair, for Cooter.” I was eager to drive on the highway and knew it galled Uncle to ask me. The wound in his belly had closed but the area was still tender and inflamed. Working the truck’s clutch pained him.

At Nate’s, a rutted driveway led through a scrim of Judas trees into a bare dirt yard. The ramshackle house and barn were near to collapse, held together by creeper vines and fervent prayer. Instead of cattle or horses, two RVs stood in the river pasture, connected to the house by a tangle of thick orange extension cords. Nate’s son and daughter-in-law lived there. Plastic jugs and blue 50-gallon drums littered the ground nearby.

“Stay away from that mess,” Uncle told me, though he needn’t. Everyone knew they were cooking meth. A raw chemical smell wafted from the pasture, a combination of ammonia and cat piss, and a trickle of brown sludge snaked from one trailer to the river—sewage or worse, I didn’t intend to find out. “Even lard-headed old Nate shouldn’t have to deal with that,” allowed my uncle.

Nate, beaming at the prospect of company, shouted from his porch swing as we climbed down from the truck. “Hey Darnell, Campbell, before we do business, I got something to show you. My son found it last week on the riverbank. Looks like a turtle crossed with a damn Swiss Army knife.”

Another Cooter. Uncle’s face went stony quiet. Nate didn’t notice, busy maneuvering down the porch ramp with the aid of two canes. He’d been on disability for years, after a tractor flipped on a muddy slope and crushed his pelvis. He had a legit scrip for oxy but lived in pain, selling his pills for extra money. We followed Nate into the barn, to a cobwebbed horse stall containing a dinner-plate-sized version of Cooter. It was motionless, the spider eyes dulled, claws and tentacles splayed out limply on the dirt.

“Damn,” Nate said, prodding the small corpse with his cane. “The kids promised to take care of it.” He sighed. “I sure wish you could’a seen him—he was special.”

“Yes,” Uncle agreed. “Rare and special. Not everyone appreciates such a wonder.”

His somber tone surprised me – he should have been happy the thing was dead. He wouldn’t have much of a freak show if Nate Sims had a little Cooter, if little Cooters started crawling into every barnyard in the valley. To my shock, Uncle appeared close to tears. He draped his arm around Nate’s shoulder. “Want us to bury the remains? Maybe down by the river?”

When we returned from the riverbank Uncle told me to get in the truck. He sat on the porch swing with Nate for a few minutes, then we left without the livestock trailer we came for. Uncle offered no explanation.

“You think there are other Cooters out there?” I asked as we drove home, trying to provoke conversation. Uncle remained silent, sucking on the draggled ends of his mustache.

At suppertime Uncle cleared his throat and said he had two announcements. First, he was giving Bella’s last pup to Nate Sims, to keep him company.

I gaped at him. “She’s mine, you promised.”

“Nate needs her more. End of discussion.” He picked up a drumstick and ripped off a hunk of meat, chewed and swallowed. “Second thing, we will not exhibit Cooter at the county fair – or anywhere else, not now, not ever.”

Auntie slapped her hand on the table, making silverware jump. She spoke in a clipped, tight voice. “We have planned for months to exhibit that monster. We have already paid for a place at the fair.”

“I’ve made a decision. Cooter is from our land. It’s not right to give him over to strangers, treat him like a freak.”

“It is a freak. And for the right price I’d sell it to any stranger who asked. I’d sell this entire godforsaken farm.”

Uncle shot to his feet and stomped outside. Auntie stared after him, then turned to me. “We can manage at the fair without him. Can’t we, Campbell, just the two of us?”

I didn’t know how to respond. I wanted to tell her how Uncle cried as I buried Nate’s little Cooter alongside the stinking river. That when we got home he went straight to Cooter’s pen, picking daisies along the way, then stood throwing flowers to the creature who caught the stems in his crawdad-claws and waved them about like a June bride.

“Cooter’s … dangerous,” is all I managed to say. Truth be told, I was afraid. The creature was not some frail malformed calf; its cocklebur tentacle did more than punch a hole in Uncle’s belly, it changed him. For better or worse, I didn’t yet know.

Auntie sat in silence for a full minute before she, too, exited the kitchen. Her bedroom door slammed. I cleared the table and headed out with the slop bucket. The gate to the pen hung open. Uncle sat inside, on the dirt next to Cooter, a thin green tentacle twined around his wrist.

“Come on over,” Uncle said, smiling. I put down the bucket and left.

---

The sun was well up by the time I stumbled into the kitchen. Auntie had not woken me and there was no breakfast, no coffee or frying eggs. On the table a ceramic rooster held down a note. “Gone to Allegheny,” it read in Auntie’s tiny, rounded handwriting. “Won’t be back. Take care of my chickens.”

A violent ache seized my throat. I crumpled the note and let it drop to the floor. Through the window I saw Uncle striding toward the highway in search of roadkill, whistling, the square-bladed shovel resting on his shoulder. I had been abandoned to monsters. In a rage I slammed out the door and went to the woodshed for the axe, to the chicken coop for eggs.

At the pen I threw the eggs down on the hard-packed earth, close to the fence. Cooter roused from his nest and scuttled over to investigate. I figured the hole at the top of the shell was the weakest spot. My first hit had to count. It didn’t have to be a killing blow, just enough to incapacitate it, to give me a chance.

I’ll do this, then head to Allegheny and search for my mother.

I raised the axe. Cooter stopped slurping and lifted himself up on his legs. We stared at each other. A thin green tendril spiraled out from under his shell, stretching toward me.

I’d never find her, I realized. I’d end up back in foster care. And killing Cooter, what would that do to Uncle? What would he do to me? I lowered the axe.

---

With Auntie gone, the farmhouse became smaller and dirtier. Sunlight fought to pierce grimy windowpanes. Grit and dead insects crunched underfoot. Outside, Cooter roamed free, trailing Uncle around the farm like a dog while Bella stuck close by me.

In a burst of energy one day, Uncle tore down the front steps and used the boards to build a ramp. It was sturdy and well made, easily supporting Cooter’s weight as he clambered up to settle next to the porch swing. That night I brought Bella inside. We curled together in my narrow bed. I held my mother’s heart-shaped pillow to my face, trying and failing to find any remaining trace of lavender.

The next morning I set out with Bella to go walking. We roamed along the river and through the empty cow pasture. In the pumpkin field, beside a mound of decaying vines, a gray mass lurched and swayed. It took a moment to puzzle out the image: Cooter, perched on the edge of a freshly dug hole. A leathery tube extended from underneath the shell, convulsing as it deposited pale yellow eggs into the nest. I watched a dozen, two dozen, tumble into the pit. Uncle appeared at my side. He laughed and draped his arm around my shoulder, pulling me close. “Just think,” he said. “So many little ones next spring. We’ll give a couple to Nate Sims.”

I pulled free and stumbled back toward the house, with no thought but to get away. The farm looked unfamiliar, unreal, the colors too bright, the angles askew. Uncle followed me, whistling, and in the front room he grabbed me in a bear hug. “Stay with us,” he said, as Cooter’s claws went tippy-tapping across the porch. The creature loomed in the open doorway, bumping against the frame, shell too wide to enter. Bella howled from somewhere outside.

“This is your home,” Uncle said. “You belong.” The words washed over me like a narcotic; Bella’s howling faded away. Uncle tightened his grasp and together we shuffled toward the door, where Cooter scrabbled at the threshold. Together, we watched the cocklebur tentacle rise into the air. A bolt of fire lanced through my belly. Uncle tightened his grip and whispered in my ear: “It will all stop hurting soon.”

---

The Grave of Angels

by Erica Ruppert

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Corra Martin, last child of her family line, insisted that I bring her home as a condition of our marriage.

And home, for Corra, would always be Holyoke where it stood on the high cliffs above the sea, exposed beneath the wide murky sky. The town had been all but deserted for years now, as all the coastal towns were. But she had been away for years, and longed for it. I had no deep roots, and wondered at her insistence.

Once we reached its crumbling outskirts I understood. Her family was woven into the fabric of this town. Streets were named for the Martins, and the businesses on them as well. Martin Hardware, Martin Dry Cleaners, Martin Street Market. All of them were shuttered, though, the influence of her family as diminished as the town itself.

No one went to the seaside, any more.

But we did. Corra was dying, and it was her wish. She wanted to be buried with her family. As we drove over the long, broken two-lane road that stretched across the lowland marshes toward the rising hills, Corra kept up a steady chatter of anecdotes and half-slipped memories.

Her mother had been the last living sibling of three, Corra rambled, and the only one to marry and have children. Her father was a mystery to her, unmentioned and unrecorded. Corra had had a brother, once, but she believed he had died in infancy. She never knew him. She thought he might be buried here. Her mother was, in the family crypt. Her uncles, dead before she was born, had left and never come home. How much of what she told me was objectively true, she couldn’t be certain. But she told me her history as she had learned it.

As we drove I watched her pinched, animated face. It was luck that I had even met her. But it was also luck that nurtured the disease in her lungs, stealing her breath and wasting her away. Sometimes she said it felt like something twisting inside her, coring her out. She had become almost Victorian under her illness’s weight, washed out and slender to the point of consumption. Yet her will to return to Holyoke was strong.

Corra stopped talking as we turned onto the long driveway to the house, her concentration at once and entirely on the property.

I wondered how what she remembered compared to what we saw. The family home was a large, plain two story affair, with faded blue vinyl siding and sagging gutters. Its lawn had become overgrown and brown, the driveway encroached by weeds and sand. Shaggy boxwood and yew shrubbery hid the lower parts of the wide front windows. The house breathed emptiness.

I pulled up in front of the garage. Corra got out of the car and jogged up the front steps. As I followed her I could see a light burning on the porch, dim in the daylight.

I was surprised the old house still had power. A note pinned to the front door read in wide block letters, “Generator on below. Cellar doors open for air. A.G.”

Corra pulled the paper free of its pin, crumpling it without thinking. She shoved it in her pocket as she reached for her keys.

“Who is A.G.?” I asked.

“Anna Gorney,” she said, distracted, as if she thought I should have known. As she struggled to turn the stiff lock she explained.

“Another old family in Holyoke, the Gorneys. They have always helped us.”

And then with a sudden click she unlocked the door and went in without me.

---

I carried our bags in while Corra wandered through the house. Her footsteps sounded from above me as she moved through the upstairs rooms. From the entrance way I could see into the living and dining rooms. They were clean but shrunken with oversized furniture. Family photos hung on most of the walls. I went into the living room to examine one of Corra, very young, with a woman who was probably her grandmother. The shape of their faces showed their kinship.

I turned away. There was nothing else of particular interest. This was a house much like I’d grown up in, comfortable but drab. I paused to consider the blank black window of the television screen. It had been years since anything had been broadcast. I didn’t really miss the content. I missed the community.

As I stood there reminiscing I heard the low thrum of the generator in the basement. Cutting across the steady sound, though, was a scraping noise like rocks sliding across each other. I found the cellar door in the kitchen and made my way down.

As I descended the painted wooden steps I expected to find a finished space, a playroom or a den. But Corra’s cellar was dug out of the cliff’s raw rock, rough, brown and layered. The floor had been leveled with painted cement. Part of one wall exposed a vein of black basalt in the native rock, honeycombed with what looked like burst air bubbles. The holes were full of shadows in the overhead light and glistened with damp. The grating sound seemed to come from the holes, but the noise faded as I leaned in to listen.

Then any subtler sound was drowned by a deep, hollow booming from far beneath me. I started, before I realized it was probably the sea clanging in some half-submerged cave. These cliffs were riddled with caves worn out of the rocks. I wondered how long it would take the sea to tear them down.

My mind was too busy. I went back upstairs to find my wife.

---

We settled in.

On the days she felt strong, Corra showed me the town as she remembered it. The first time, before we turned back home, she brought me to the edge of the overgrown cemetery where her family had built a small chapel over the family tomb. It was hardly larger than a garage, but its walls were black basalt and its shape suggested the gothic without indulging in it.

Like an archaic family joke, the Martin chapel was dedicated to that joyless ascetic, Saint Jerome. Corra didn’t know why her family had chosen him, though she suspected it was his bookish qualities that had drawn her ancestors.

Even though the chapel was abandoned, the engraving over the doorway remained intact: Quid futurum est esse iam coeperit.

“Begin now to be what you will be hereafter,” Corra said softly, as if it were a prayer itself. She turned to me with a history lesson. “Jerome favored the buried places, when he was young, to see the martyrs’ bodies and relics for himself. He felt that seeing those sacred bones would absolve him of his earthly sins.”

We went inside, and Corra showed me the door to the Martin tomb, and the stairs that led down to the graves. The stone walls leading down were as pocked as the walls of her basement. She asked if I knew of the Fosse Ardeatine, near Rome, near the catacombs Jerome haunted in his youth. I did not then, but I learned.

---

When Corra rested, which became more and more of each day, I went exploring.

I knew there were other people still in town, but I saw only fleeting evidence of them. Holyoke had contracted. I could not see the town as Corra did. I had no memory to fill the gaps.

The main street was a wide stretch of abandoned stores, windows intact, merchandise fading in the weak sun. The municipal building was empty in these strange times, as was the unlocked, partially stocked grocery store, and a church whose denomination escaped me. Here and there I could see the blue flicker of fluorescent lights where, somehow, electricity still flowed.

On the far side of an overgrown park I found the library. It was without power, abandoned as the rest of the town’s infrastructure. The doors had blown open in some storm and the vestibule was clotted with mud. But the books had been left mostly alone. The main rooms were bright with the grey light that poured through the large, streaked windows.

I searched through the stacks until I found the books I needed, thick with dampness but intact. I collected layperson’s science, paleontology and geology and archeology. I dug out books of folklore and myth. I grabbed a few science journals I thought I would understand.

I lugged my finds back home with me, where the light was constant. I had little else to do but read.

I read all the nonfiction first, answering the questions Corra had raised. And then I dug deeper into folklore and myth, back to the Greeks and their buried gods, and the gods they stole and renamed. It was all there, scattered like fossil bones, fragmentary, incomplete, but clear enough. Clear enough.

The urge to burrow deep into the belly of the earth has been with us as long as we have been human. The Neanderthals who buried their dead a thousand feet deep in the Bruniquel caves must have felt the tug, and the butchers who stumbled into the Fosse Ardeatine.

But our history is also haunted by the convergence of elemental forces, the earth and the sea. And so the Celts made sacrifices in the ocean-washed caves in the Moray Firth. And divers at the Eagle’s Nest drowned in the depths of the earth.

Those places are gone, now, lost. But something deep calls us, and always, always, we find a way to answer.

---

The days dragged on. One Gorney or another made sure the generator ran, and that some kind of food was left on the doorstep for us. I walked, and I read. Sometimes I spent time with Corra. I would help her down the stairs and we would walk as far as the chapel. But the damp air weighed her down. She had so little energy left. My company seemed to exhaust her.

As Corra grew weaker she grew less certain of her family’s ways. We stopped our trips to the chapel. She would no longer bear looking down that long stairway into the dark.

She became obsessed with her impending death. She grew demanding, pressing me to promise I would not bring her to her family tomb. She wanted her body burned, and the ashes taken to the high peaks above Holyoke and thrown to the wind. She did not fear dying, not the great swallowing void of not being, not even the relentless pain of the process. She dreaded the thought of being sunk into the earth. She feared what would become of her after.

I promised her anything, to keep her still. There was so little of her left.

---

Soon enough Corra passed beyond any comfort I could offer. Her skin had been golden, once, before fading to its present dull brass. The fever that rode her gave her sunken cheeks a lying flush, lent her eyes a false brightness. But she was wasted into a barely-fleshed scarecrow, her arms and legs sticks inside her clothes.

“It’s moving in me. Like worms. It hurts,” she told me, her voice a ghost. “Go find the Gorneys.”

I left her and stepped out into dusk. I took the car, glad the neglected battery still held a charge. I drove until I found the Gorney’s house by the electric light shining through its windows. The front screen door was propped open. I knocked on the doorframe.

Dishes clinked inside the house. Water ran. I heard low voices but could not catch the words. At last an older woman came to the door, trailed by a tall young man.

“Are you Mrs. Gorney?” I asked, suddenly uncertain.

“Anna,” she said. “And Anthony.”

She showed no surprise at my appearance.

“It’s Corra,” I said. “She’s dying.”

Anna Gorney shrugged. “That’s why she came home.”

I was jarred by her bluntness. “Please. You’ll help with the arrangements? She wants her ashes scattered over the sea. Are any funeral homes even still open?”

She looked at me with what might have been pity, or scorn.

“We’ll do what we have to,” she said. “Go home. We’ll come.”

“Thank you,” I said, and gladly left the Gorneys behind me as I drove back to the house.

I went upstairs, into the comfort of the light. Corra had curled up on her side, her face to the wall, whispering steadily of burning and flight. Her faded voice went on for hours. I sat with her and listened. Her words were a jumble, noise without sense. Eventually she stopped speaking at all, and very late that night she died, gasping from the pain.

---

The next morning, the Gorneys appeared on the doorstep. Their knocking broke the spell of silence that held the Martin house. I let them in.

“She’s dead,” I said by way of greeting.

“Yes. I know,” Anna said. She and her son brushed past me and went up to Corra. I stayed downstairs. They knew what they were doing. I didn’t question how they knew.

They came down after a short while, with the long bony length on Corra’s corpse carried over their shoulders. Her body was wrapped in a grey cloth as fine as spiderweb, and so clingy I could see the hollows of her eyes. Anna must have had the cloth in her bag. There was nothing like that in the house.

“She can’t go down, yet,” Anna said. “We have to make things ready for her.”

I roused. “She wanted to be cremated. She doesn’t want to be put in the ground.”

Anna stared at me, her eyes hard.

“They all say it. Her mother said the same thing, and her grandmother too. I’ve tended them all at the end.”

“Oh,” I said.

Anthony stood quietly behind his mother.

“People get scared when they’re dying. But she knew what she really wanted. It’s her responsibility. It’s why she came home.”

“Oh, but,” I said, and stopped. I wanted to follow Corra’s wishes, and I wanted her to be safe with her ancestors, away from this strange, decayed world. I wanted to not be caught here, without her. I didn’t yet understand. The machinery moved on without me.

“We’ll leave her in the parlor until it’s done,” Anna said.

I nodded, tired, not willing to argue. Corra was dead, and it didn’t matter. I did not think it through.

They lay Corra on the long couch facing the blank television. From another hidden pocket Anna unfurled another long length of fabric, this one spangled in silver, and draped it over my wife’s dead form. She bent to smooth it, and I saw her move her hands in a way that suggested the sign of the cross. But it was not a cross she drew there, over Corra’s quiet heart.

Anna straightened and looked at her work, then nodded to me. “Come, Anthony,” she said to her son. And they left me alone.

I spent the night in the parlor with Corra, glad of the electric lights that cast back the shadows. Nothing moved in the house. The only sound was the thrum of the generator below. Even so, I imagined my wife might still be breathing inside her shroud. I thought I heard a soft, wet motion. I thought I saw something slide beneath the wrappings, working them loose. But the faint exhalations were only the beginnings of decomposition, relentless even in the cool night. I moved my chair back from her, and eventually fell asleep. I dreamed of Corra, on a pyre that would not kindle.

---

Anna Gorney did not come back to the house for two days. She and her son had opened up the Martin tomb and cleared the neglected passageway to its end, and then dug a new niche into the soft, honeycombed stone for Corra’s swaddled remains.

By now Corra had begun to stink plainly of decay. A thin, vile liquid stained the fine cloth of her shroud. But Anna Gorney and her son did not flinch away from lifting her again to carry her to the chapel. They walked at a stately pace and let me trail behind them. I could hear them whispering roughly to each other. It might have been a conversation, it might have been a song. I did not listen closely enough to tell.

Instead I wandered along and gathered an armload of lilies from the untended gardens along the way, carrying the blooms instead of helping to bear my wife. When we reached the chapel I had to crush the lilies against my chest to open the door for the Gorneys. They passed me with their burden, and for a moment I was truly left outside of it, outside the chapel, outside the ritual, outside the cloistered history of my wife and the town.

Overwhelmed, I followed them in. They had already descended the steps to the tomb, and I hurried down to see them set my Corra in her place.

The heady smell of the lilies was cloying in the narrow confines of the grave, but not strong enough to mask the rot. I lay the bright flowers at Corra’s feet and tried not to breathe too deeply. I wondered how guilty I should be, that I hadn’t insisted on burning her. I looked for the Gorneys, but they had gone up, leaving me to whatever rites I would do. But I did nothing. I could not believe my Corra had been reduced to this.

And yet, I still suffered the niggling doubt that she was not truly gone. The words carved over the chapel’s door fed my imagination. Begin now to be what you will be hereafter—but when does now begin?

---

Every day I went to visit her, a lone pilgrim in an empty town. The Gorneys kept to themselves, their duties fulfilled. If anyone else still called this town home, they kept to themselves as well. I saw no-one. Just as well; I did not need the pressure of contact.

Every day I let myself into the chapel and descended to her. Every day the distance seemed a few yards longer, the slant of the floor steeper, the air warmer and strangely flavoured with salt. Every day I brought her fresh flowers from the gardens running to seed, lilies, roses, phlox, all sweet and suffocating in the close stone channel but never fragrant enough. Her silvery shroud grew dark with stains as she withered inside it. I marked how she changed, how the clinging wet fabric revealed a new form inside the old. She had been my wife. As long as she remained in the riddled stone crypt where her family was, she would be.

I entertained wild thoughts built on myths, of magically bringing her back. Of her wanting to come back. Of her loving me enough to make her way out of that consuming darkness.

Every day I walked slowly down the long spiral, to Corra, my Eurydice, to tempt her back into the air. But I am not Orpheus. I could not persuade her to follow me even a little way back.

---

Today, after two weeks of invariable routine, I needed to change. I left the house and gathered what weedy flowers still bloomed, but I did not turn immediately toward Corra’s familiar tomb. The day was cool and grey, with a wet breeze coming off the cooling ocean. Summer was reaching its inevitable end.

I walked into the wind, toward the edge of town where the land fell away into the sea below. Scrub grass gave way to bare pitted rock. The wind became a force on the cliff’s edge, blowing my hair back. I looked for gulls, but there were none to see.

The ocean below was as milky as jade, its shush and rumble masked by the wind streaming past my ears. I felt smothered in the sound of it, separated from what was left of the rest of the world.

I finally turned my head away from the wind’s direct path, and could finally hear the sea. But there was no human sound, no bird cry, no noise of something alive. The air moved. The sea churned. And the sky hung like dull silk above it all, rippled and weighted by something behind it.

I had never realized how alone I was, before that moment. Not just from Corra’s death. From the world’s.

Nothing, in the end, is sacrosanct. We die. Traditions are misremembered or forgotten. There is no way to stop it happening, with lives as brief as ours. There are gods we shall never see, because we no longer remember how.

I threw my handful of flowers into the sea. They scattered and drifted in the wind, tumbling down the cliff face before falling bruised upon the water. It didn’t matter. It meant nothing to me once it was done. I was no part of this town. I didn’t belong here, to this tradition. Not with Corra gone. I didn’t belong to her, either. Not any more. I watched the waves swallow the flowers down.

And then the sky ripped open, the grey fabric of it shredded by profound light, and in an instant the roar of thunder followed. The smooth clouds flexed into stormy masses, muscular as a cat.

I cringed. Mine is not the only memory.

With the first slap of rain an attention bore down on me, the attention of something that had no measure of its own strength and no concern for mine. I fled from the wind and the terrible sky, driven back into town by the storm.

---

The muddy streets of Holyoke were empty but for me. the rain stung like splinters and the wind was a lash. I should have run back up the hill to the house, but the sky knew where I was. The chapel was closer.

I wrestled open the door beneath the inscription and escaped the swarming rain. Saint Jerome’s words were no longer any comfort or hope. Even beneath the stone roof I felt exposed.

As I wiped water from my face I realized that someone sat on the step to the altar. My skin tingled as the hair on my arms lifted in fear. In the foggy grey light the person seemed misshapen and blurred, human only by suggestion. Then lightning flashed and the figure stood up, coalescing into Anthony Gorney.

“What are you doing here?” I said before I could stop myself.

He shrugged. I realized I had never heard him speak.

Then Gorney opened the door to the tomb for me, and gestured that I should go down. Lightning crackled, lighting the passage and first few steps with blue radiance. It seemed as if the light flowed down the worn stone, seeped into the cracks and was absorbed by the darkness.

Gorney gestured again.

“All right,” I said. “I’ve been here every day. Of course I’m going down.”

I reached into my pocket for the flashlight I carried, glad I had put in fresh batteries. Gorney did not move aside as I passed, forcing me closer to him than I ever wanted to be. He smelled of old, wet things, like mold on cloth. I didn’t look at him, but I heard his rough breathing in my ear as I stepped down.

I passed the first turn in the stairs when fear closed my throat. The long winding tunnel smelled of earth and salt. The myths I had read swarmed in my imagination.

Before I could turn back I heard the door slam shut, the key grind in the lock, the retreat of footsteps across the chapel floor.

“Gorney!” I yelled, but I was ignored. I heard the outer door to the chapel bang closed. Then I heard only the dim, distant rhythm of rain on the high chapel roof.

I was sealed in with my wife, and all her kin.

My flashlight cut the dark, drawing out the shadows. I did not bother to try the door behind me. I had opened it enough times to know its weight and its well-oiled machinery. I went down, as I was meant to.

The corridor ran on longer than I remembered from all my previous visits. As I went deeper it was not the reek of the grave but the rank stench of the sea that laded the air. I passed the dozens of niches I always counted on my way to Corra, each with its pile of dust. This time it struck me that the names over them, all the names I could read, were female.

The tomb spiraled down and down, screwed into the earth. I had a sense of the corridor turning on itself, like a Moebius ring, like Oroboros. At times it seemed as if I were climbing, but gravity pulled strangely at me and I had to fight against it to move on. At other times a step would bring a sickening lurch like the drop of an elevator, but the rock remained firm beneath my feet.

The sides of the corridor glistened, dank with seeping water, and the air grew increasingly hot.

When I finally reached the end of the corridor I expected to see the shadow of my Corra in her ragged shroud, as slumped and empty as I had left her yesterday. But she was gone, her niche vacant. I cast my light around, looking for signs of some terrible prank. Dropped in the dust was her dismembered hand, half-open, cupping nothing, the skin tight and pulling the bones together. The index finger extended in a weak curve to point further down the now-elongated corridor, deeper into the dark.

She was down there, moving in the earth. I knew it.

---

I followed her direction. The tunnel continued as far as my light would show it.

There were no more niches, just pitted, black rock walls. It is the same rock as the chapel, and the intrusion in her basement. It is the same rock that underlies the deep sea itself, born there at the rifts in great molten upwellings that flow slowly away to reshape the rest of the world in their time.

These black walls should have been smooth and solid, the roots of the world. But they were as pocked as limestone. The corridor rustled with the sound of sand on sand. I blamed my own footsteps. The smell of salt here made me choke. I cannot imagine how far down I have travelled.

---

And then I realized that my flashlight was not the only source of light in the depths. Ahead of me I could just discern a pale, bioluminescent glow spilling up from an even deeper place.

The floor sloped down gently. I stepped down into the light.

Corra sat in state in the grotto that opened before me, a damp velvet cushion beneath her, her shoulders draped in silver cloth. Fungal things bloomed around her in a strange bounty, waving delicate yellow filaments in the bloodwarm, still air.

Her bones had been stripped of all soft flesh, and polished until they shone like pearl. I saw with some surprise how narrow and shallow her jaw was, how wide set her eyes. Her bones had changed down here, or living flesh had hidden these deformities. Now they were bare, a truth revealed.

But her eyes—the sockets were not empty after all. Like a heavy tide a luminous jelly rolled up to fill them, shimmered and focused and saw me. For too long I could only meet that alien gaze, struck dumb by the spark and fade of those viscous depths. It was like looking into the night sky, or deep water. And then, she recognized me.

The tendons that held her bent jaw to her skull creaked and slithered as she opened her mouth. A hiss of a voice slipped out. The moist grating sound grew louder all around, and slippery vermin came from every crack that could hide them. One slithered over my shoe and clung to the leg of my pants before I shouted in gross fear and kicked it away. It was a pale grey thing, limber and slick and primitive, one of the things that scraped through the rock, making passage for what still would come.

The myths and folklore have lost so much in translation. The raw edges of our need for burial has been rubbed to dullness by time.

There are elemental places that demand to be opened and then appeased. Like other caves, like other catacombs, the Martin tomb was one. The Martins opened it willingly and answered the call with their own blood. There were benefits to their sacrifice.

Beside my Corra is an empty throne carved out of the grotto itself, black and ancient stone worn smooth by countless grey bodies sliding across it, decorated with a lattice of crumbling bones. The seat is too high for a human, too angled, too deep.

Even further beneath us I can hear a huge, even, booming sound, like an ancient bell, like waves against a hollow rock wall. The constant slithering of the grey things stops. They retreat into their many, many holes.

Corra is not my Eurydice. No. She is Persephone, queen in the dark. And I am not her king.

---

Report On The Flanking Action

by Larry Blamire

---

From the action report of Captain William Meecher:

“…the engagement ended with the capture of most of the hostiles and seven killed. Among our casualties, one killed and eight wounded. Still unknown as of this date is the fate of Hollis, lieutenant, B Company, and a detachment of the 4th Infantry, along with B Company’s scout, who, as part of a flanking action, were dispatched to the adjoining foothills in support of the cavalry, in hopes of setting up a line of fire above the enemy. All attempts to locate the missing patrol thus far have met with failure. At this late date it does not bode well for their return…”

Captain William Davis Meecher,

Company B, 8th Cavalry

Sept. 13th, 1873

The man’s face was so still he might have been carved from a tree. You really had to know where to look. And there was something of bark about him, some spirit akin to nature in this flinty wooden mallet with beard and slouch hat. When he finally did move it was like part of the forest taking leave, slipping out for a furtive stroll.

The ones following were more obvious; they lacked his unique talent and of course the uniforms didn’t help. Though dusty and dingy, they still smacked of dark blue, while the tree-man seemed cloaked in brush itself. But he was a scout—he could wear what he wanted. They were mere soldiers. And right now he outranked them in almost every way. Chief of which was the ability to find his way home. It had been three days now and Lieutenant Hollis’ detachment of ten were less hopeful by the minute.

So perhaps Bill Pride was feeling some power. Maybe the only power a half red-man can have over a batch of bluebellies like these. Good to feel something like that once before you retire. And even though he was in the shape of a man half his age, forty-four year old Bill Pride was ready to retire.

If they lived. Their foray into the foothills of the southern Callamo range was an embarrassment, though not an altogether surprising one perhaps since the area had never been mapped. There hadn’t been a commercial or military advantage in doing so till now. Capt. Meecher was the first to admit he wished someone had taken on that job—some intrepid team of army surveyors.

The likelihood of Utes—or any other tribe for that matter— hiding there had previously been dim. The Callamo mountains had a reputation for being inhospitable. Especially to Indians.

No one knew why exactly. Couldn’t be prettier thought Pride on Day One. By Day Three he wished he’d never seen the damn place. So many snaking gorges that seemed to track back on themselves, thick with impenetrable brush. He actually thought they might have circled a time or two—a truly humiliating notion—but he was pretty certain it was just a trick of the land; a slant of ground, a twist of branch, a confusion of light and shape, that made places seem similar when they really weren’t at all.

But try and explain the sun, that surefire wilderness guide, anchor to the sanity of daylight, mother of all lost souls. Something was not right with it, some bending in its movement—not quite from the east, not quite to the west, confused perhaps by this tangle of trees and meandering creeks and cathedrals of rock that dictated their own unnatural geography.

Pride was edgy, despite all the faith they had in him, despite all that power. He felt like the only man in on a private joke. Being that Bill Pride had never before set foot in the Callamos or their adjoining foothills. Scouts, of course, were just supposed to know these things. That’s why they’re scouts.

So Pride was reduced to sniffing along like a dog, all instinct, looking for a way back to their fort that wouldn’t trot them through the errant Utes like a line of ducklings.

Lt. Hollis and that taciturn giant Sergeant Kinneally knew their half-breed scout was having a tough go of it, but they tried to keep up morale. It was bad enough they’d never reached the flanking position, never even seen the enemy.

The party of Utes had strayed far from their reservation, provoked no doubt by encroachments of miners and settlers. There had been skirmishes here and there. It was B Company’s job to return them to their assigned land. Hollis would have liked nothing better than to get back and find out how successfully it went.

It was strange how they’d missed the convenient ledge Captain Meecher’s field glasses had spied, sitting oh so prettily above the Utes’ encampment. How could they lose track of it? Up the spine of a winding hill, through tall pine, across a bank, and they should have been practically sitting on the enemy’s head. That damn trail just didn’t lead where it should have led. And somehow they’d wound up at an elevation that felt far too high.

Bill Pride continued to move like a wraith. He wasn’t sure why he ventured with such caution, such heightened awareness of every stirring leaf and vine. No doubt Hollis and the others, inspired by his stealth, believed him to be in fear of the Utes. But he did not believe for a minute that any Utes had fled into these strange mountains.

Some other instinct was at play here.

---

Light was failing on their third day, painting the distant peaks hot crimson through the shadowed canopy of the trees above them. How such color could bring such cold was a puzzle. And so for the third night they would be forced to make camp and wait till morning. For the third night they would not leave this place.

Pride decided on a small basin overlooking a deep chasm, a natural shelf of stones and logs and bramble torn by high winds over time. There should be safety in its vantage; a natural ceiling of tall forest and a daunting crag below, while all around was steep and treacherous.

But he didn’t feel safe.

Hollis’ approval of the spot was perfunctory; he was not green this lieutenant, not so insecure as to question Bill Pride’s superior judgment in such matters.

Privates Hillhurst and Gent gathered wood for the fire while Private O’Connor prepared the dwindling rations. Private Thompson perched on a rim above, keeping lookout. And the camp settled in for the long hours of darkness.

Night seemed too active in these Callamos. No sounds really, no animals moving (an odd lack of game for a place of such abundance), but rather within that quiet, that innate stillness, that facade of innocence, there seemed a restless something, a sense of stirring. Though not necessarily anything tangible.

For two nights they had felt its unease, its melancholy curiosity at their motley intrusion. The jumpiness was catchy, like a cold towel passed from man to man. Thompson murmured to Jarvis who murmured to Stover. But never would the group acknowledge this. No one dared give credence to something so fleeting and fantastic. As though to speak directly of a thing were to bring it into being.

Then Hillhurst spoke.

“Anyone get a funny feeling in these hills?” asked he as the men sat around the fire mixing furtive glances with nibbles of hardtack and coarse bread. Apparently, that boneheaded country boy Hillhurst hadn’t received the imaginary orders to button up about such things.

“What’s your problem now, Hillhurst?” rumbled Sgt Kinneally.

“No problem, Sarge, no problem. Just this place is strange, strange it seems like places I know back home where folks don’t go, don’t talk about.”

Men stole glances at the darkening trees, nervous that such scattered whisperings had finally been let loose.

“Don’t you go gettin’ Lyons scared now, there are no clean uniforms till we get back to fort,” chided Kinneally to a smattering of laughter that had a nervous cut to it.

Lyons, the private everyone swore was underage wondered if he should laugh too, then joined in a bit too late.

Sergeant Kinneally then ordered Hillhurst to go relieve Thompson on the crest so the latter could come eat but everyone knew he just wanted to move that fat mouth away from camp.

By the time Thompson came down and was eating his supper the camp had resumed its mutually understood ignorance of things unknown, things perceived beyond the fire’s perimeter. But no sooner had Thompson finished scraping his plate clean than Hillhurst’s hushed warning electrified them.

“Lieutenant…There’s someone out there.”

The tense group listened. They heard nothing at first, the usual nothing that was the mountain’s nighttime speciality. Then the sounds reached them; a deliberate disturbance of vegetation, a push of branch, a crack of twig, the rhythmic crunch of crispy needles. It was rapid but not urgent. Someone was coming down from above, steadily closer through the pines.

The men grabbed their weapons and soon the entire camp was waiting and listening, staring up at the dark wall of mountain.

“Sarge, what do I do?” hissed the suddenly lonely Hillhurst.

“Pipe down.”

And just as they seemed close the sounds stopped. The detachment stood there waiting dumbly like jilted suitors. Finally, Lt. Hollis called out.

“Who’s out there? Show yourself.”

A faint shift of underbrush was followed by a voice.

“Hello the camp!” It sounded flat and hollow, beaten down by the roof of trees.

“Who’s out there? Who is that?”

“Mr. Cook. May I come in?”

Lieutenant Hollis paused only briefly at the absurd notion they should all know who Mr. Cook was. “Come on down.”

Gent looked at Stover who looked at Jarvis, as unease spread again like pox.

“Who’d be out there now?” asked Thompson reasonably.

“Shut up,” soothed the Sergeant.

The crunching steps resumed as the visitor descended from the high ground while hands squeezed rifles. Suddenly the firefight painted the pale head of a man as he passed intermittently through the shadows of trees. The flicker took form as he got closer, heading straight toward the center of the rim—a man clad in fur with a full beard and an old Springfield. He strolled over the bank and down into the basin like someone in a dream, never looking to his side, staring at the fire as though he recognized a friend.

He plopped right before it where the men parted, its glow giving them a good long study. He looked to be a trapper, this haggard mess with mangy coat, scratched up face and black beard strewn with brambles.

Mr. Cook sat there, cross-legged, staring at the fire a full minute before anyone could speak. “Mr. Cook, would you care for some coffee?” asked the Lieutenant.

“I would like some of that. Never felt a night so cold.”

Lyons, after a nod from Lt. Hollis, scrambled together a tin cup of their now ancient brew and held it out for the visitor. Mr. Cook took the cup and brought it to his pale lips.

“Never felt a night so cold,” he repeated.

“Mr. Cook, what are you doing out here, sir?”

Cook did not look at Hollis, did not tear his eyes from the fire, but something changed, some memory that twisted through him like worms.

“Me and my partner Jim Clum were trappin’ down on the Sly River. Game proved poor and we was thinkin’ of gettin’ out when one night Jim went out to check the traps and didn’t come back. I found him after a while in a gully with his neck broke. I was gonna come back come daylight and bury the poor bastard when a strange thing happen. As I set in camp havin’ my mornin’ coffee, just as I’m settin’ here now, in comes he walkin’ right as rain.

“I said, ‘Jim, I think your neck’s broke and also you was cold as a stream.’

“Well, he looks at me slowly, voice kinda faraway like. ‘That’s cause it ain’t me, Joe. I got a ha’nt in me now, ha’nt that lives on the mountain.’ Then he smiled.” Mr. Cook paused to sip his hot coffee. “I runned and I ain’t stopped since.”

Unnatural terror gripped the camp in a cold hand. Lt. Hollis felt a sudden desperate need to rein things in. “Mr. Cook, your friend was obviously not dead, merely injured, and having some jest with you.”

“No jest say I. Why, his neck were still bent.”

Bill Pride had been watching the trapper. Part of him was skeptical—though he wasn’t sure which part. The Pawnee side that had known small pox and cholera and the bleak reservation life of his mother was jaded, practical, yet also respectful of the spirit world. Maybe it was his damned white side that so feared the unknown. And that side was winning. He had to fight it.

“A man can live with a broken neck,” said Pride. “I saw it once at a botched hanging in Kansas.”

And with that bit of news Mr. Cook the trapper proceeded to slump forward at the waist as though giving in to a sudden urge to pray to a campfire.

“Mr. Cook? Mr. Cook, you alright?” Lt. Hollis looked at the man, who was very very still, then at the others. He shook the trapper’s arm. “Mr. Cook?”

Now their grizzled visitor rolled to the side, splayed out. Jarvis moved back. “What’s—what’s the matter with him?” Sgt. Kinneally was quickly down there, examining him. It was like the big sergeant had been bitten by a rattler, so fast was his recoil.

“He’s… son of a bitch is cold.”

“Hell, we’re all cold,” snapped Gent with forced bravado.

“Not like this. Man’s cold as rocks. Feel him yourself and tell me that’s not a dead man.”

“Just—just like that?” asked Thompson with a tremble.

“No,” replied Kinneally. “No, I’d say for quite a while.”

“What are you talking about, Sergeant?” Hollis was not pleased with his noncom’s careless assessment.

“Lieutenant… this man just ain’t newly departed.”

The Lieutenant rushed over to the body now and began to examine it. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, Private O’Connor, at the edge of the group, started gibbering. He just stood there gibbering nonsense, like his lips had a life of their own, until finally all the attention had transferred from the dead trapper to him.

Sgt. Kinneally was quickly over. “That’s enough O’Connor, get yourself a hold on.”

‘‘Sorry, where was I? Oh, yeah—no, Jim was dead for sure, I know that. Dead with a broke neck twist.”

“What? What are you babblin’ about, O’Connor?”

“Talkin’ about my partner Jim Clum. My dead friend talked to me so I run. Kept on runnin’ till I found your camp.”

All stared at the O’Connor that was no longer O’Connor. His vocal cords—someone else’s words. Or some thing.

“The ha’nt! That ha’nt Cook talked about! It’s got him now!” Thompson was near panic. “Glory, don’t you see? That wasn’t Cook in the first place—never was! Cook was already dead!”

Before Lt. Hollis could reprimand Thompson, O’Connor opened his mouth wide and started cackling; a shrill wide-eyed laugh like some hellish jackass. Kinneally looked dumbly at the Lieutenant.

“Restrain that man, Sergeant.”

The veteran Kinneally showed only the briefest hesitation before holding O’Connor fast by the arms. The much smaller private was no match for the big noncom.

“Tie him up, tie him fast!” barked Lt. Hollis. Gent and Bill Pride were quickly over with ropes, leaving the raving Thompson bound and helpless against a log.

“What—what’s the matter with him, Lieutenant?” asked young Lyons feebly.

“Well, not some… ha’nt, that’s for sure. Man’s just cracked is all, taken leave of his senses,” spoke Hollis like a man trying to convince himself.

And with that the babbling, gibbering Private O’Connor slumped forward, suddenly silent.

“Is he—is he dead?” ventured Jarvis.

“How can he be—?”

Hollis never finished his query. Mr. Cook suddenly sat back up into his sitting position at the fire. “So, anyways, yeah, there we were—Jim Clum and me—”

Lt. Hollis’ pistol was out—an army Colt .45—but Bill Pride had already leveled his repeating rifle.

“God have mercy,” murmured Stover as Mr. Cook continued to chatter away. “We’re on a mountain of devils.”

“Just one perhaps,” offered Pride as—to everyone’s shock—he aimed and fired into the babbling dead trapper. A hole blew clear through the other side, but no blood was in evidence. Unexpectedly, Mr. Cook looked down at his chest wound, turned and smiled at Bill Pride, and then slumped forward towards the fire. Dead again.

The men were still in shock when Hillhurst joined them, rushing back from sentry duty at the sound of the shot. Even Lt. Hollis and Sgt. Kinneally were hard-pressed to offer any words.

O’Connor sprang to life again. “That hurt, red man, you put a hole in me.”

Private Lyons snatched up his rifle, but Bill Pride stopped him. “Hold on, son, O’Connor ain’t dead yet.”

“But how—how can he—?”

Before any could ponder this unfinished question, O’Connor quickly slumped again and immediately Private Jarvis was beside him with his knife out.

“Jarvis!” barked Kinneally. “Get away from that man!”

Too late. Jarvis had already sliced O’Connor’s ropes, freeing him. Then Jarvis collapsed and O’Connor sprang to consciousness again, grabbed Jarvis’ knife and plunged it into him.

The others cried out, but Bill Pride fired into O’Connor twice and the man crumpled back against the log.

“Hoped I wouldn’t have to do that,” said Pride.

Suddenly the stabbed Jarvis popped up like Punch at a puppet show, pulled the knife from his chest, and with a howl like a scalded animal ran into the black of night.

There followed a pall of confusion and disbelief as wits struggled to return to the hapless soldiers.

“Where’s Jarvis goin’?” asked the sorry Lyons. Kinneally simply stared at him.

“That thing. That thing got Jarvis. It’s out there”, whimpered Thompson.

“Jarvis. Jarvis is dead now. That means we can shoot him. Cause he’s already dead. Right, Bill?” Hollis was desperate to apply some reason, some irrefutable laws, to this insanity.

Bill Pride only shrugged. “Lieutenant… I just don’t know as shootin’ does any good when ya look it.”

As if offering proof, Mr. Cook stood up calmly and proceeded to walk away from them. As the others watched numbly, the dead trapper then collapsed beside the dead O’Connor who—sporting two bullet holes—jumped up and trotted a ways up the rim. Then O’Connor collapsed and up sprung Cook who passed him, heading a little farther up the slope. Then he dropped again and O’Connor resumed.

The soldiers observed this nightmarish “leap frog” like something distanced, something they’d bought tickets for, as the lone jumping spirit continued this cumbersome exit into the woods, until only the cold white of the birches flickered back like teeth in the light of the dying campfire.

---

It was a full minute before anyone spoke. Faces were pasty and haggard with fear. Only Bill Pride seemed slightly more successful at masking the results of going toe-to-toe with a grim unknown. Troopers turned to him now like he was a damn medicine man, with all the answers to their sorry plight.

“Bill? Any idea what we should do?” timidly asked Thompson.

“Break our necks we try to get down this mountain in the dark. Stay put. Stay in camp.”

“I don’t—I don’t get it,” muttered Gent. “Thing gets you if you’re dead, gets you if you’re alive.”

Lt. Hollis, quickly feeding the dangerously dim fire as though it might keep anything away, grasped for some semblance of logic. “If it can take us while we’re living… why in God’s name does it want us all dead?”

“Maybe that way it gets to keep us.” Bill Pride’s words sat like cold marble on their graves.

“Hey!” came a voice from somewhere out there. “Hey, I wanna talk to ya!”

“That’s O’Connor,” exclaimed Lyons.

“That ain’t O’Connor,” said Sgt. Kinneally.

“Come on in!”

“Are you crazy, Lieutenant?” snapped Gent, way out of line.

“What choice do we have? Might as well listen to what it has to say,” defended the officer.

“Might give a clue to stopping it,” offered Pride.

All eyes were on the high woods above camp, waiting for that thing from the dark. Needles, twigs, and pinecones snickered softly as it approached the circle of light. The pallid figure came through the trees and down the slope like a man delivering a basket of apples at harvest time. Only this man bore two bleeding holes in the chest.

“That—that’s far enough,” said Hollis, and no sooner had he than the O’Connor thing dropped like its strings had been cut.

“What–? Now hold on, where’d it go?”

The troopers all looked at each other, suddenly suspicious, giving space to their neighbor.

Young Lyons raised his rifle. “I think it’s Thompson,” he said and quickly blew Thompson’s head off.

“Hell—!” Sgt. Kinneally jumped back, along with everyone else.

“Or Stover,” added Private Lyons as he shot Private Stover.

He would have shot more no doubt had not Bill Pride clubbed the young man’s skull in with his rifle butt. “No, I think it was you, Lyons,” offered the veteran scout. Just as Lyons was crumpling, Sgt. Kinneally flinched as though struck, and grabbed the half-breed from behind in a massive bear hug. By now Hollis and the others were in motion and all managed to pull the big sergeant off Pride.

Kinneally and the whole group tumbled to the ground. As Pride managed to snatch up his rifle again, the Sergeant blinked at them dumbfounded. “What happened?”

“That you? That really you, Sarge?” asked Hillhurst.

“Course it’s me.”

Pride whipped his rifle around at the four remaining soldiers, waiting for a hint, any clue they weren’t who they were.

“Now, hold on! Hold on there, Bill Pride!” snapped Gent. “You don’t know who’s who. Might even be you!”

“He’s right—none of us have a rifle right now, Bill. It jumps to you with that repeater of yours, we’re all dead,” said Hollis.

Pride looked at each man, the sheer animal desperation in their eyes matching his. Kinneally nodded. “He’s right, Bill, better toss it.”

Bill Pride realized they were right. If he got taken, he could easily kill all the others. He tossed the rifle into the bushes like it was suddenly burning steel, then grabbed the Springfields lying about and tossed them away too. Far enough out of reach that if anyone went for them the others would have time to stop him. Then Pride sat down, joining them in an impromptu circle, five survivors of a grotesque war of nerves.

---

Time must have passed, but how much? The night seemed infinite. Pride, Hollis, Kinneally, Gent and Hillhurst all sat silently, eyes moving from face to face, looking for the first sign of an inner intruder, a clue that their troop mate was not their troop mate. Every so often the gaze would go to the dead bodies—O’Connor and Lyons and Thompson and Stover—for even the smallest tick of imitation life.

After a while Lt. Hollis needed at least the illusion of order, the facade of a military unit. And fortunately his brainstorm was a good one. They would keep up chatter, constant chatter, about anything and everything that came to mind, going around the circle from man to man. And it worked too—the talk was irrefutable, specific to soldiers who’d served side by side for a long time.

At one point Hillhurst stumbled, just couldn’t talk—simply ran out of steam like a shy guest at a social. The others were quick to goad him; his life depended on proving that Hillhurst was Hillhurst. His nerves were shot. He was on the spot with nothing to add, no words to cement his identity of the moment.

It was a gal that saved him. The gal he’d left behind that married a shopkeeper. Being a clear memory, even a sour one, was probably the best thing that gal ever did for him.

As the talk continued, movement caught the corner of Bill Pride’s eye. Dead O’Connor had twitched.

Eventually the others caught Pride’s gaze and the ridiculous small talk trickled to an end. O’Connor twitched again. As they awaited the third twitch they were more than rewarded. O’Connor suddenly leaped through the air and flopped to the ground like a rejected rag doll beside the dead Stover. Now Stover leaped into the air and plopped to the ground in the direction of the woods. Then O’Connor again, hurtling into the air, thudding some feet ahead of Stover. Then Stover, and on and on.

The process sped up, like a massive pair of disconnected shoes heading away from the camp. All the troopers could do was stare as the grotesque “stride” continued, and the flailing damaged corpses were shuttled off into the dark of the night.

That was it for Hillhurst. He let out a holler and flew into the dark before the others could stop him. He tried to head downhill, away from the direction of the bodies. But his long plummeting cry told them he’d found that deep chasm instead.

The sound of the stolen corpses had diminished to nothing, and the four remaining men sat in a chill and sober silence. It was Kinneally who finally spoke.

“I’m here now. I’m here with you.”

It took a brief second to look at him and see that it was no longer Kinneally. But before anyone could react Gent spoke up.

“Yep, I’m right here.”

“Right here,” said Hollis.

“Now here,” said Pride.

Faster and faster, round the circle of four, jumping before any man could move, a dizzying blur of Here! Here! Here! Here! Here! Here! Here!…

Then it stopped. They sat there, drained and disoriented.

“It was in me! It was in me!” cried Gent, revolted at housing something unclean.

“Like going to sleep—to sleep for a few seconds,” marveled Lt. Hollis in a quiet daze.

“We’re goin’ down the mountain,” said Pride.

---

The others needed no convincing. The four men were quickly up following the determined scout into the brush—not the way Hillhurst had gone.

Bill Pride pressed on, willing his senses to find a path. The entire mountainside was a sheer black shadow with the moon behind it. He would literally have to feel his way. Torches would have been impossible, as each man would need both hands for the climb down.

Kinneally snarled as he lost footing behind them, stumbling into some brambles. There was no time to stop and that was understood. It was each man for himself, though the smart money was on following Pride.

Pride became no longer aware of who was behind him. At one point he heard a cry that sounded like Gent. But the noise of his own desperate flight seemed to drown out all else.

A short time later there came a loud crashing somewhere back there. Then Lt. Hollis’s voice. “Sergeant? Kinneally is that you? Kinn—?”

Now Bill Pride pitched forward with a recklessness that belied the unpredictable downward terrain. His eyes had long since adjusted from being spoiled by the campfire. He was tearing along, feeling the pull of the cursed mountain less and less. All sounds ceased behind him, and he was grateful to still feel the endurance of a man half his age. If he just got away from the mountain…

His exhilaration continued even as he launched into open space.

---

It seemed like a different world. Soft sunlight invited birdsong as the foot of the mountain bathed in its warm reassurance. At the bottom of a craggy wash, beside a gurgling creek, Bill Pride’s body lay in a sitting position, supported by the tangle of vine and thick shrubbery he’d landed on.

His eyes opened, taking in the glory of a new day, so far removed from the desperate night. He smiled.

This body felt good.

---

Ba’alat Ov

by Brenda Tolian

---

In the night, the spirits spoke with hisses and gurgles like serpents wrapped around my head. I awoke covered in sweat, barely able to breathe, so afraid of what they would ask me to do. They whispered things over and over, crying out for understanding. There was never a choice in my action, only the act itself or madness.

The gift of the Eshet Ba’alat Ov was taboo but if not sent by Elohim, then who? What other power could overtake a child in such a way? My grandmother said it was the power from Asherah, the Lady of the Serpent. She told me this, forbidding me from saying the name out loud. Women were killed for less, and for us, death came slow behind brick or below the soil.

We were not magicians or conjurers but unwitting necromancers with an ancient connection to the dead. They came pressing into our dreams at night with leathery bodies and wet tongues speaking terrible truths mixed with lies. Through learning and practice we understood discernment, but this took many years.

Sometimes the spirits of the dead kept us plunged deep in Sheol, neglecting our physical bodies. Eventually we would awake starved, crawling with insects, our mouths full of teeth and stone. It was always the same. When we reached for nourishment—a bit of bread, a mouth full of water—they might leave us to recover, sensing, I suppose, our uselessness in death. They did not leave us for long, descending once more, filling our mouths until we opened our bodies wide, allowing them to push into us. The visions and words flowed like a river of thought, disjointed and disturbing. Sometimes the meaning escaped us, and the spirits grew irritable and angry. Other times, they touched our minds like feathers.

If ignored, they filled our mouths with stones, teeth, or berries, symbolizing their intruding thoughts and displeasure. We could not deny them when they did this, or they would replicate the objects until we choked. I have only observed it once in a child who did not know her gift. She was found with her purple cheeks stuffed, bumpy with rocks and berries oozing down her chin mixed with blood. The child did not know how to open herself.

We had no choice but to obey. (Continue Reading…)

---

See That My Grave Is Kept Clean

by Josh Rountree

---

Dig a hole, climb in, cover yourself in grave dirt. Not your face. You aren’t ready to join the dead, not yet.

---

The bone men tend the graveyard, unaware they’re being watched. You’re crying because you’d lost hope of ever seeing them. They step so softly they appear to drift above the graves. Bones bright as blades in the moonlight. Tall as trees and just as slender. They clear away dead flowers and smooth out the fresh graves with white gloved hands. They straighten tombstones. They scatter leaves in artfully melancholy patterns across the steps of the stone mausoleum. On their knee bones in the muddy soil, they lean in close to the earth and whisper to the dead. This is their most important task, or so you’ve been told.

Someone must keep the dead company, after all.

Yellow lantern light guides your approach. The lanterns hang from posts stabbed into the earth, haphazard and crooked but always lit, no matter the hour. You suppose they have not heard of electricity in the graveyard. The night smells like thunderstorms, but so far, the rain is only a mist, and the moon still watches. Twigs snap and rocks scrape as you follow the path, but you aren’t trying to hide. The bone men don’t frighten you. What could you possibly have left to be afraid of? The cemetery gates are wrought iron, and they howl when you pass between them. The bone men cease their labors, turn to acknowledge your arrival. Their eye sockets are empty, but they have no trouble seeing you.

Okay, perhaps you’re a little frightened.

But you’re bold, too. Or maybe desperate. The bone men circle around; they tower like light posts, and their bones are chipped and scarred. You run your palm along one long femur and feel ice cold eternity against your skin. The bone men don’t mind your touch. They are ancient things, untroubled by human concerns. When the cold begins to burn your hand, you pull it away.

You’ve drawn them all in close, and this is when you open your mouth and tell them why you’ve come. This is when you beg them for their help. And the bone men are kind, solicitous even. They can’t speak but they can communicate, and they put you at ease. What you desire is not beyond their power, though it is certainly irregular. None among them can remember ever teaching a human to speak with the dead, but they’re sure it’s been done before. They have existed a very long time. They have forgotten more centuries than they remember.

They agree to help you.

And so, your lessons begin.

---

You’re not fond of the irony, but you must acknowledge it. Alicia was the one who told you about the bone men. Alicia collected stories of monsters and ghosts and trolls who lived under bridges the way some kids collect baseball cards. You’d heard her go on about the bone men a million times, but twelve-year-olds talk so much, you eventually tune them out or lose your sanity. And you were trying not to speed. Not to get caught. Trying to get home in one piece. Because when your mother tossed you the car keys and asked you to pick your sister up from dance class, it was either do what she asked, or confess that you’d stolen a six pack of beer from the fridge in the garage. And you hadn’t even felt that drunk, not at first.

Now grief grows like lesions in your mind, and though you can’t remember everything – thank God – the bits you can remember visit in high resolution. Streets slick with rain, and stoplights streaking the darkness. Alicia in her high chattering voice swearing to God that she really did see bone giants stalking the graveyard behind your house in the middle of the night, and she watched them whisper to the dead. Your head swimming and the air conditioner pumping and the rain slicing sideways. All you wanted was to rewind time and take the punishment, because you absolutely should not have been driving. Then brake lights, headlights? Screaming. An empty passenger’s seat with an unfastened seatbelt hanging in limp accusation, and a yawning hole in the windshield, rimmed with blood. Like a monstrous mouth that simply swallowed your sister whole.

---

Your lessons involve little more than the bone men placing words in your mind, and you whispering those words to the earth. Listening for a response. They caution that though you may learn to speak with the dead, you will not like what they have to say. The dead do not guard their thoughts. The dead are not polite. This doesn’t trouble you. You’ll listen to anything Alicia has to say. If only you can talk to her again, you’ll gladly drown in a sea of stories about chupacabras and fairies and witches dancing beneath full moons. Let her say she hates you. Let her blame you for her death. Because you deserve it. In a way, confronting this with her might ease your burden, though that’s not the end goal. You just want to tell her how sorry you are, and to hear her tiny voice again.

You haunt her tombstone like a ghoul every night, wallowing in the grave dirt, begging her to talk to you. But Alicia Laine, Beloved Daughter and Sister, Gone Home to God, never responds.

You can’t really blame her.

The bone men counsel you to have patience. You will be able to communicate with her, eventually. But what is patience to creatures like these?

What have they ever lost?

---

Nothing has ever broken you like the look in your father’s eyes when he fell to his knees beside your dead sister. Nothing will ever sound so horrible as the breaking glass shriek your mother made when she spotted Alicia splayed out in the street, covered in a blanket but leaking blood into the storm drain. This version of them is awash in red and blue police lights, and drenched in rain, and it’s the only version of them that remains. That moment washed your parents away and left strangers in their place, and even in your dreams, you can’t remember the people who used to love you.

---

The window in your bedroom upstairs framed a view of the graveyard like a painting in a museum. You studied every play of moonlight across the yellowed grass, every naked tree branch clawing at the sky, every shadowy brush stroke on that bleak canvas. And you considered the creatures who supposedly lived there. If Alicia was to be believed, they were servants of the graveyard. They were stewards of the dead. And every night when you retreated from the heavy silence of the dinner table, when you fled to the sorry sanctuary of your bedroom, you watched out the window for them. Even though you didn’t believe, you watched. Because you needed them to be real. You begged the universe to build such creatures into existence. And for so long, the universe ignored your desperation.

Your surrounded yourself with Alicia’s things. All her books on myths and monsters, every discarded doll that she’d once held dear. Unfinished homework assignments. Crayon drawings of unicorns and short stories about mermaids, written in neat block letters with a number two pencil. Hair ties and bubble gum wrappers and muddy tennis shoes. You collected all the ephemera of her life and did your best to absorb it. But she was still gone. There was no way to tell her you were sorry. There was no way to sit with her in the quiet gloom and listen to all the things she had to say.

Every night you studied that graveyard tableau, familiarized yourself with each graying stone bench, with every mound of fresh turned earth. And of course, with Alicia’s tombstone. Some nights, you imagined a tombstone for you, right alongside hers. A matched set. And maybe that would have been better for everyone. In your darkest moods, you allowed your guilt to wander elsewhere. If your father didn’t horde so much beer that he never missed a six pack, you wouldn’t have been tempted. If your mother had looked at you, actually paid attention to anything you ever did, instead of absently tossing you the keys on her way past your bedroom door, she might have noticed you were in no shape to drive. If Alicia had just been quiet for five seconds, you’d have been able to focus. To push through the drunken blur, and navigate those last few blocks unscathed. But this childish escape never lasted long. Responsibility might stray, but it always found its way home to you.

Then one night, when you’d finally convinced yourself that reality could not be reshaped to fit a dead girl’s imagination, you saw them. Tall and graceful and gray as storm clouds. There was not time to consider what you were seeing. You bundled up against the wet night and hurried out the back door, afraid they might disappear. Maybe they weren’t really there at all. Maybe it was just your mind working overtime to torture you.

But you followed the lantern lit path, and they were waiting for you. They were real.

Even now, you aren’t entirely sure you didn’t will them into existence yourself.

---

The bone men have instructed you well. Never, they are certain, has any human been more fluent in the language of the dead. But you still can’t hear them. And though you’ve spoken aloud every word the bone men taught you, no one seems to be listening. Certainly not Alicia. The bone men continue their tasks while you practice; they carry on conversions with every graveyard resident like they’re fast friends, and your envy boils. You ask if perhaps they can interpret for you, so you can speak with your sister that way. This suggestion is not well received. This is the only time the bone men have ever regarded you with anything but kindness. Their mood grows dark, and you understand you’ve broken protocol. A week passes before they will acknowledge you again, and you resign to step with more caution in the future.

After months of your nightly failure, the bone men convene to discuss among themselves what might be done to better assist you. They arrive at a consensus. It is suggested you would benefit from a closer communion with the dead. Perhaps a ritual would be beneficial. They often are in such situations. You arrive one night to find they’ve prepared a hole for you. A grave, next to your sister. Six feet deep, a perfect rectangle. Dirt piled up beside it. You have no desire to enter that hole, but the bone men assure you everything will be fine. This is certain to bring you closer to your sister. You hesitate. The bone men sense your unease, but they don’t fully understand it.

What could be more comfortable and welcoming than a freshly dug grave?

One of them lifts you in his arms and places you gently into the earth, like a newborn child into a crib. The bone men look over the edge of the grave like proud parents, unable to hide the fondness they feel. You writhe in the wet darkness. There is no comfort to be found amid the tangle of underground roots and jagged rocks. But comfort is not the goal. They reassure you as their hands begin shoveling dirt overtop your body. Not to worry, they won’t cover your face. Living in this world is hard, but they understand life is not a burden you are quite prepared to divest. Not yet. This will bring you close, though. Close enough to communicate, almost assuredly.

When they’ve finished, only your face remains uncovered. No moving your arms, no kicking out. Never did you expect the soil to sit so heavy on top of you. Panic flaps about in your chest like too many birds in a tiny cage. The bone men are delighted, and they still watch you from above, blanking out the stars and the lantern light, leaving nothing but black shadows across your resting place. Part of you wants to scream, but the soil is pressed so tight around your chin and cheeks that you can only whimper. The ground is cold. The air is wet and thin. And if it were not for the gentle soothing of the bone men, you’d never be able to settle down long enough to just listen. They pluck out the anxiety from your chest and replace it with resolve. They promise not to abandon you in your grave. You breathe deep. And you hear whispers, a rush of white noise, travelling through the hard packed earth.

The dead are talking to you.

Or rather, the dead are talking amongst themselves, and you’re eavesdropping on their conversations.

Having learned their language, you understand what’s being said. But the words come in such a rush, it’s hard to isolate any one speaker. You mouth a few sentences, trying to get a word in, but the dead won’t slow down for the living, and their chatter proceeds at a lightning pace. They worry about nothing and keep no secrets. They don’t yearn for life or pine for the living. There’s no concern about what came before, and some of them don’t seem to remember living at all. You try to speak, again and again. You mumble Alicia’s name and struggle to pick her voice out of the din, but it’s all so overwhelming. You imagine her cold body, buried just a few feet from yours. Why is it so hard to connect? You wonder if, perhaps, she’s already forgotten you entirely.

The bone men look down at you with pity.

Eventually they dig you up, set you on your feet.

They promise Alicia will talk to you someday, but you don’t hold out much hope.

---

The strangers who used to be your parents catch you sneaking in from your night in the graveyard, and they aren’t happy. Your mother’s voice is sharp as a sword and your father wields guilt like a truncheon. You stand muddy and wild-eyed in the kitchen as they remind you that you’re the only thing they have left in the world. They’ve hardly spoken to you in months, and they’ve forgotten that you’re someone they used to love. So, when you begin to argue, they let slip every accusation they’ve been holding inside. They remind you that this whole thing is your fault. They aren’t monsters. They’re just broken. But you wish they’d go back to being strangers. Better than revealing the people they’ve become.

---

Having spent time in the grave, your bed feels too soft. The mattress sinks in the middle, and you long for hard packed clay. Eventually you give up on sleep, stare out the window, and watch the bone men tend to their charges. Every tombstone straightened. Every grave swept clean of debris. There’s something beautiful and sad about the devotion they show to the dead. Tears well in your eyes when you consider that Alicia will never be alone.

The bone men will always be there for her.

Downstairs, your parents argue deep into the night. They poison one another with blame. Nothing beautiful remains for them in this world. They’re dead and rotting and don’t even know it yet. Maybe all of you are. Holding on to a life that has nothing left to offer. You consider going downstairs, entering the fray. Maybe you can figure out some way to reassemble what’s been broken. But nothing will bring Alicia back, and this whole thing is your fault. Instead, you stand at your window with your palms pressed against the cold glass, remembering the smell of wet earth and the taste of it in your mouth. You remember earthworms, burrowing in close, and your sister, cold company in the ground next to you. You watch the bone men, and consider

the ease with which they connect. Like the language of the dead is carved into their bones.

And finally, you understand.

The bone men can’t speak with the dead because they have some gift that you don’t.

It’s because they’ve lost something you still have.

---

You’ve made a decision that pleases the bone men.

They’d have suggested this course of action straight away, but people tend to value their lives more than their deaths. It’s a notion foreign to them, but one they’ve come to accept over the centuries. The bone men know the truth of things. They understand. Life is quick and loud, like snapping your fingers. Death is beautiful and serene. Death is a slow boat down a peaceful river. Existence is eternal. The bone men don’t understand why anyone would value a fleeting moment of sharp, bright pain over the endless repose of death.

Your grave beckons. The bone men hold your hand, help you down into the hole, all the while reassuring you that now everything will be okay. You’re so grateful for their gentle ministrations. This time you’re ready. The bone men cover you entirely. Fill the grave. Erect a tombstone. Leave orchids in a brass vase.

They swaddle you in the earth.

Your lungs grow still, and there’s nothing to distract you anymore. The dead invite you into the conversation.

Alicia is there. Alicia speaks.

This whole thing is your fault.

And, of course, she’s right.

But at least you have forever to make amends.

---

How to Win a Dance Contest During an Apocalypse (In Nine Easy Steps!)

by Gwendolyn Kiste

---

Step One: Find the perfect location. After all, you can’t win a dance contest if you don’t know where to go.

You see the dance floor for the first time when your parents are checking in at the hotel.

“They said on the radio that there were rooms left,” your father is arguing with the concierge who is staring back at you blank-faced from behind the desk.

“There are rooms,” the man says slowly, “for all the good it will do.” (Continue Reading…)

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The King in Yella

Kaaron Warren

---

I’m always returning to Rapptown in my thoughts. Unbidden, unwanted, I’m taken back there. A hint of yellow. The smell of smoke. These things blind me to the present. I haven’t lived there for sixteen years, since I was seven, and mostly what I remember is dreamlike and unreal. That’s what kid memories are like, right? Blurry and odd, not making much sense.

Sometimes I’m transported by these subtle things and other times the method is more concrete. The arrival of the brooch was as concrete as they come. Accompanied by a note from my mother (sorry, was supposed to be for your 21st but forgot! I am a dopey drawers. love mum.), such note stained with what I hoped was red wine and perhaps suntan lotion, envelope postmarked Brisbane.

I remembered this brooch, although no one I knew ever wore it. It sat on my father’s dressing table in a purple velvet box, and every now and then I would sneak in to spy on it, touch it. I thought then it must be worth a million dollars or more, because it was made of a dull, yellow metal that must be gold. My father said the King in Yella gave it to him and I remember the look on his face; of reverence and of fear at the same time. When my father died and we left Rapptown, it must have been packed away; only my mother could answer to that. (Continue Reading…)

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Resilience

by Christi Nogle

---

Jason gets home while I’m at the sink. He comes up behind me, holds me around the waist, and tickles the side of my face with his soft new beard. We watch the young squirrels shake a tree branch, listen to them chatter through the open window. They zoom across the front yard and across the street.

“How was it with Dr. Emory?” asks Jason. He already realizes his slip. “Watson, sorry.”

“Watson-Newcamp, actually. She’s wonderful, just as promised,” I say.

As soon as I say it, I wonder if I mean it. The new doctor, just thirty or thirty-five, struck me as someone I might do yoga or lunch with, but she spoke just as slowly and gently as Dr. Emory. Her round eyes were so dark you almost couldn’t make out the pupils.

“I’m glad he left you in good hands,” says Jason. I think he might stay and talk, but he has chores too. He takes the garbage and recycling bins out the back door, then our son Simon comes rumbling down the stairs. That’s all I see of either of them until dinner.

Simon’s ten now, but he still doesn’t know about my past, so we don’t speak about the new doctor over dinner or while we wind down in the living room. I’m thinking of her, though. When she asked what I’d like to talk about, I assumed that she wanted to hear my story, though doubtless she already knew a lot. When I was six, I was the sole survivor of an attack that left my entire immediate family dead. Watson-Newcamp didn’t let on that she knew anything in particular. She just let me speak. (Continue Reading…)