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ghostradiostoryhour · 5 years

Text

Slay

Once a month, every month, we go to the club and we slay. Let the smooth edges of the music slide across our exposed shoulders like silk, like Britney’s snake, like the arm of a lover we’vejust met. We come home with blood in our mouths, fur on our knuckles still receding. The thin cuts from breaking fresh and red down our hands and arms, our chests and faces. Our jaws and teeth sore, still a little swollen from the transformation. We throw on some fresh clothes, dump the bloodied ones in the outside trash. We text a time to meet for brunch and then we all sit together, pushing our eggs around our plates like it’s nothing, this monthly trauma, like we’ve just gotten our periods and oh my god are we all finally on the same cycle? We laugh because we are still coming back to our bodies, because at first humor is the only kind of consciousness that is tolerable. And it is quite the joke, isn’t it? Werewolf drag queens? The stuff of B-horror movies, sexploitation films. But here we were, real as the mimosas in our manicured hands. Last month, one of us joked that we felt long in the tooth, and we all threw our heads back to howl.

We never thought of ourselves as mutants, but I guess some people saw it like that. We were in constant transformation, but hadn’t we always been? Hadn’t everyone always been? To be human wasto change. We had reached a higher plane. We tucked, we stuffed our bras.If we had to, we filled our veins with hormones. Some of us cut away at ourselves, with the help of doctors or razors, whichever felt more like home, whatever homewas supposed to be. We broke ourselves to make the breaking a choice. We were family.

We are the best of the best, we are the house that dominates the drag scene. We kill as long as we have the stage and a murderous pair of heels and a damn good song. We spin, and we let the beaded fringe of our skirts rattle over our thighs. We throw the long hair of our wigs out over our shoulders and then pull our hands up our silk-smooth, shaven legs, careful not to let our fresh red nails snag the fishnets or the nylons we wear. We smile and the whole crowd melts. They look and they look and they look and we let them. We strut out to take the dollar bills from the bachelorette parties and the straight-but-curious and the oh-no-not-me-I-could-nevers and the liberal anthropologists and the best friends and the beards and the hags and the drunks and the allies and the whole entire spectrum. We are radiant, and this—killing—is how we can afford to stay radiant.

Slaying is our one night off, because who can work knowing that the bodies we love so dearly, the changeable bodies we maul and remold and fight against and show off with, are about to break open? So on nights when the full moon rises high in the sky, we slip on a sparkly red dress or a slick new suit, and contour and tuck and bind, or sometimes we slay simply as we are, unedited. So many of us feel out of place in our own skin, even when we change at night, even when we become something closer to who we really are. The one place we feel at home? That’s on the dance floor at our favorite bar, Tits Up, a drink in one hand and a new lover on the other.

Under the half-dome of the ceiling, the spinning disco ball threw multicolor lights across ourfaces. All around us, sharp-lined eyes flashed like pinpricks in the dark bar. Even in the dead of winter, skin was everywhere, moving in time with the music, and we were no exception. We liked to dance against the moon, until we could feel our milk teeth pushing out from the base of our gums. When we could take it no longer, we’d hand our heels to a friend, andshuffle out, discreet as we could.We’d run down the alley at the end of the block, to the parkon the water that closed after sundown. Then it was a quick dash under cover of the trees to the nearest abandoned construction site, far from the eyes of the bustling nightlife. Then we’d break open, tears in our eyes, the streaks from our mascara only more shadows in the light from the moon.

We knew our history. House LaBeija. DuPree. Xtravaganza. We were respectful to our elders. We were old school, or we wanted to be.Weall had different styles: femmes and kings and butch queens and comedy queens and then there were some of us that were just starting out. But of course we were all the same, so we made our own house.

We were the House of Breaking. The House of the moon. The House of blood and bite and bone. Nobody, not even the horror queens, wanted to be in our house, but that didn’t mean we didn’t command their respect. People in the drag community knew what we were, and they kept an open mind, or they kept their mouths shut, anyway.

One night, we were out at a show, one night. A Williamsburg show, in a newer place.

A lunatic had made the country his bitch.His white men in red hats wanted a fight, had the gall to shout slurs and declare themselves proud Nazis on camera, and still they cried that they were the oppressed. They needed protection. The look in their eyes frightened us. Us! Creatures of fur and tooth and claw, creatures of unknowable strength. But we were petrified. Because we knew the look well: bloodlust.

That night, we were leaning against the wall of the club, out for one lastsmokebefore moonrise.Aman, white as Florida beach sand, in a bright red baseball hat, turned on to the street. He was with a few friends of much the same ilk, though they did not have the hats to match. They laughed easily, telling a long-winded story about something basic. We tensed a little, armor on, and the youngest of us, the stunning Miss Maya Condios, bared her teeth.

The man approached, and as he walked we took all of him in: his look (middle-aged dad), his scent (sweat and cornchips and Aqua Velva), who he was wearing (nobody, maybe Massimo for Target), whether he could hurt us (yes). When he got close enough, Maya tilted up her chin and glared down at him imperiously. She blew him a kiss.

“Fucking faggots,” the hat man snarled, and launched a thick glob of spit at us. It landed on Ursa Major’s breasts, smearing the contour applied there. And that was it.

Maya leapt on him, sunk her teeth into hisshoulder, and drew blood. We knew, because it spread like an opening black bud on the white pique cotton of the polo he wore. And because of the unearthly shriek he let forth. His two friends fell on Maya, landing punches left and right, but she dug her teeth into that shoulder and growled, the dark curls of her wig swinging wildly as the man spun beneath her, trying to shake her off. We leapt into the fray, the largest of us prying the men apart from each other, the smallest of us pulling at Maya, begging her to stop. We liked this club, it was good money. We didn’t want to be banned, especially not on account of some homophobic asshole.

We broke apart, a clump of brawlers glistening with sequins and sweat, and glared at each other. Some of us held Miss Maya back. We could feel the breaking starting beneath her skin. Her arms were shaking with rage, with the coming change boiling in her blood.

“Get her out of here,” one of us said, and the others obliged, rushing Maya down the street and into a dark alley where she could break peaceably, a place away from the leering crowd that had gathered, a place free of reflective surfaces. Maya, always the high femme, hated to watch herself break. She couldn’t bear the masses of fur that sprouted from her knuckles and the way her petite fingers lengthened and gnarled into paws with dirty yellow claws. The stretch and distortion of her face, her nose. The contour would be all wrong, her perfect makeup suddenly a garish mistake on such a wolfish head. As we watched her duck into the alley from our places outside the bar, we could hear her cry, a low mongrel whine.

“What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

The indignant tone in the man’s voice brought us back. It wasn’t the man who’d been attacked, who was looking a little woozy. That was the way it was. He would break later tonight, guaranteed. He had caught it, and you always broke the night you were bitten. We exchanged nervous glances. It wasn’t our way to leave a fellow breaker unsupervised, but it also wasn’t our way to take in so called Proud Boys. Most often, we bit when in the throes of passion, not out of hate or righteous indignation. And there was no easy way to separate this man from his friends.

This was uncharted territory.

“Your friend fucking bitGarrett,” the one man kept saying. “Bit him.”

“What the fuck,” Garrett said, sounding a little weak. His other friend helped him sink to the bench outside of the club. He touched his shoulder and looked at the blood on his hand.

“You better not have given him AIDS.”

We had a few options. Killing him would be messy. A crowd was already gathering.

“Faggots,” said one of them.

That word again. We looked at each other. The oldest of us, Rhea Bilitation, stepped right up to the mouthy one, towering over him in her blue sequin leotard, her breastplate nearly touching his face.

“Honey, do you know where you are?” she said, allowing a little of the growl into her voice. “This is New York fucking City, not Fargo or Topeka or wherever the fuck little shit town you call home. You want to call the cops? Do you knowwhat drag queens like us do to cops?”

The man swallowed. Rhea was used to flexing her muscles in dangerous situations. She was the one of us with the most control over her breaking. The smell of the wolf—musk, woods, wet dog—pervaded the air. The man dropped his gaze and stepped back.

“Yeah,” Rhea said. “That’s what I thought.”

A twink across the street let out a cheer.

“Now get your girl,” Rhea flicked iridescent nails toward the bleeding man on the bench. “And get out of here.”

The men considered for a moment, but then thought better of it, probably because their friend looked so bad. They hoisted the bleeding man up off the bench and to his feet.

“Better go get that looked at, honey,” someone shouted.

We really hoped they didn’t get it looked at. Exposure would be the end of us. If anything was true of America these days, it was that only so much difference was permitted, and even then on very rocky terms. Now was not a good time to be outed.

Rhea touched her short blonde wig and curtseyed to the gathered crowd, then yelled, “Now who wants to see me reallyslay?”

Brunch the next day was tense.

Yes, we had slayed, thanks to Rhea’s recovery, but we did not consider it a victory. At least, most of us did not consider it a victory. Others, including Maya—who looked a little worse for wear after breaking, but still glamorous as ever—were alive with excitement. We were fighting back. Hate could go and fuck itself.

But some of us, the older ones, still felt danger crackling in the air. And more than that, we were less of a unit now. Less “we” more “me,” and that was how drag houses died.

Some of us felt that this was no display of force, nor was it a win for love. Maya biting that man put all of us into danger.

“We don’t have to take him in, do we?” Maya said, pulling the celery out of her Bloody. “I’m not babysitting that. Hell no.”

“You should have thought about that before you decided to bite him,” Lex said, her pencil mustache from last night’s Gomez drag still Spirit Glued to her upper lip. She took a bite of her cheeseburger.

Rhea sucked her teeth. “Hopefully the problem resolves itself.”

First, we had to get ready for our show. Same Williamsburg venue, with hopefully a different crowd. Tres LaVain squeezed into thigh high stiletto boots and a shocking white wig, and Lex prepped her Lady Gaga/Joe Calderone drag. Rhea went red this time, and Maya looked like a space princess from another dimension. Ursa opted to keep the Morticia drag from last night’s duo with Lex, but this time in irony. Williamsburg would eat that shit up.

$2 PBRs, $3 wells, and the packed-house crowd was revved, bristling with bills ripe for the taking. Lex did a backflip off of the shoddy piano and tips rained down. Ursa’s death drop was amazing, and Maya landed a full back handspring into a split. Tres did an original comedy number about Jerry Springer. Rhea broke a little onstage, letting her face elongate into a snout and then when she turned around again, she was her regular self, only a little bloody. The crowd roared.

We had all but forgotten about the fight.

And then, at three AM, we walked out of the club, and there he was, caked in rust-colored blood. He wore the same white polo shirt, or what was left of it. He looked like death.

“Please help me,” he said.

We took him home with us. We piled into the subway and climbed out at the Myrtle-Wyckoff stop. On the way, we learned a little more about our guest: Garrett, no last name, though he did tell us he had a wife upstate and three young kids—two girls and a boy.

We all agreed; his obvious fear—of himself, of us—made everything much less fun.

“Relax, doll,” Rhea said.

“You’re one of us now,” Lex said, and we weren’t sure how to feel.

“I… I killed someone, or something,” he said. “I think, anyway.”

“Alright, well, rule number one is discretion,” Rhea said sternly, as she unlocked the door to our apartment building. “Which means don’t talk about kills, or about breaking, while you’re still in the middle of a fucking street, especially not in motherfucking New York City, honey.”

“Breaking?” he asked. Somehow, Garrett had the gall to speak after this reprimand. We exchanged major side-eye. It was a bad idea to fuck with Rhea.

“Could you please shut up,” Maya said, under her breath. The door opened and we pushed him in front of us.

“You live here?” he said.

“Welcome,” Tres growled, and opened the door to the apartment.

We tried to make ourselves comfortable in the living room. Ursa put a kettle on, like she always did when she was stressed. Garrett did not sit. He paced the length of the apartment, which made the whole scene tight and dire. It was not a good look. None of us were sure whether we should start getting out of drag or not, if we should start counting our money. The breach of trust that this man had created by entering our sacred space was more and more damaging by the second, and our resentment toward him—and toward Maya—swelled.

“Okay, first off,” Rhea said. “Don’t fucking touch anything that doesn’t belong to you. This is not your home, and this is not your space. You are a visitor here, and you will act as such until we teach you how to handle the breaking. When we are confident that you have control of yourself, you will leave, and not come back.”

“You’re experiencing Breaking,” Ursa said, bringing a tray of teacups and a steaming hot pot into the room and setting it down on the coffee table. She served us each a cup as she spoke. “At least, that’s what we call it. You’re a werewolf, for lack of a better term. We don’t really like to use that word—it’s reductive and dehumanizing—but that’s essentially what’s happening to you. You will break—turn—every month at the full moon. More often until you get a handle on the wolf inside you.”

“How do I get better?” Garrett asked. We had clearly confirmed his worst fears.

“You don’t,” Tres said, and sipped her tea.

“What do you mean? There’s gotta be a cure, right?” he said, voice cracking.

Ursa poured him a cup of tea and pushed it into his hand.

“I know it’s tough,” Maya said. “But we can help you—”

“Fuck you,you’re the one who got me sick,” he spat.

“Language,” Ursa said, as calmly as she could. She sat on the couch next to Maya and held her hand. Maya was trembling, trying to keep herself under control.

“Rule number two: you treat us with respect, or we turn you out before you’re ready,” Rhea said with authority. “No more of this homophobic, toxic masculinity bullshit you’re serving. And trust me,” Rhea said. “You need our help.”

Garrett glared at her. “Fine.”

“Good,” Rhea said. “Managing this conditionis fully a matter of self-control. We will work with you—at our own expense, by the way, so you’re welcome—for the next few weeks to teach you how we handle the breaking, and what to do during a full moon.”

“What if—what if I killed someone already?” Garrett stammered, fear again in his voice.

Rhea leaned forward, pulled the man close to her, and sniffed. “This is deer blood. Lucky break. Now, call your family. Tell them your trip has been extended, that you’ll see them as soon as you can. And remember: discretion.”

The man nodded and got up to go into the kitchen, dialing a number on his cell.

“Don’t think we won’t kill you to keep ourselves safe,” Lex called after him.

“Please,” Ursa interrupted. “I think we’ve had enough violence for now.”

Lex crossed her arms.

Over the next few days, Garrett learned as best as he could how to control his emotions. Apparently, he had never felt like it was okay to even acknowledge his emotions at all, much less known how to control them. We would have pitied him for that, if it weren’t such a huge problem. He listened when he wanted to, which was more and more often. He and Maya became close. Terribly close. A little too close, we thought.

For a week, we ran Garrett through the gamut: how to control each break until he had found safe cover, where to stash extra clothes for the next day, how to gracefully back out of a conflict (some of us were still working on that one). The more he learned, the more optimistic and kind he became. The more human to us. We marveled when one night we came in to find him braiding Lex’s short hair in the living room, the two of them laughing at an old re-run of The Addams Family. We were even more shocked when the sound of glass shaking in the kitchen cupboards echoed through the apartment one night, and we peeked out of our doorways to find the blue light of the open fridge spilled out onto the kitchen floor, broken into long shadows by Maya’s bare legs lined up with Garrett’s. One of her broad hands pulling his bare ass back and back again against her body, the other buried in his sandy hair, his ear pressed hard against the freezer door, his face screwed up, small moans of pleasure from them both as they rocked against the appliance, Ursa’s many crystal vases clattering in the cabinets above. We exchanged looks as best as we could in the dark, then slipped back into bed.

When we got up the next morning, Miss Maya was sitting on the couch in the living room, a piece of scrap paper in her hand. She was smoking a cigarette, something she only ever did after someone dumped her.

“He left,” she said. She held up the piece of paper. Thanks for everything, three cold words in chicken scrawl. Tres scowled. Ursa climbed onto the couch with Maya, touched her knee. Lex was silent.

“Let’s hope he doesn’t do anything stupid,” Rhea said, and poured herself a shot of tequila. And that was that. There was no news of Garrett for days.

Until there was.

We were at brunch, after a particularly lucrative show the night before. We’d finished eating and gossip hung heavy in the air. It was almost time for the menu to change over to dinner, and all of us were feeling tipsy, loose and bright. All was right with the world, for the moment, at least.

“That opener,” said Tres. “Do you think she knew her weave was all fucked?”

“Her? Please,” Ursa reached out to touch Tres’s elbow. “Honey I don’t even know if that wasa weave.”

“Girl needs some practice,” Maya agreed, smiling snidely. “And a mirror.”

“Such shade,” Lex said and tutted, then smiled. Maya flicked the umbrella from her drink at her.

Rhea didn’t say anything. She was staring at the TV above the bar.

Garrett’s face was on the news, along with the caption, SEARCH FOR SUSPECT CONTINUES.Our mouths dropped, and Tres gasped. Rhea waved and got the bartender’s attention. The screen cut to footage of helicopters circling a white clapboard house. Yellow police tape fenced off the crime scene. Police swarmed like ants on the yard.

“Could you turn it up for a second?” she asked, her voice flat. We held our breath.

The bartender nodded and turned up the TV.

…earlier this morning, when police responded to a 911 call from a neighbor after they heard screams coming from the house,a male news anchor was saying. When authorities entered the house, they found the suspect’s wife, Sandy Keller, and the Kellers’ three young children, Christine, Megan, and Johnathan, had been slashed open and left to die in what is seemingly one of the most brutal murders that Rochester has experienced in the last decade. We go live now to Patty, who is on the scene. Patty?

The report cut to a tearful interview with the neighbor, and we turned to each other. None of us knew what to say. Had we not trained him well enough? Did he not listen to anything we had taught?

The TV showed a cop with a serious expression, giving some kind of official statement.

Our main suspect, Garrett Keller, is still at large. We have a warrant for his arrest. Anyone with information should call Rochester PD. It is not clear whether the suspect is armed, but he is considered dangerous, the sheriff said.

Rhea thanked the bartender and passed him a ten dollar bill.

“This is not good,” she said, and the rest of us nodded, suddenly sober.

We took a car home together. We were anxious and tense, and we needed to be somewhere it was safe to discuss logistics. If he did get caught, and he would, what if he outed us? What if he didn’t plan to out us, but he got hurt in the scuffle, and needed to go to the hospital? We couldn’t have doctors finding out about what he was, even if he did keep his mouth shut, which we didn’t trust to begin with. Where there was one werewolf, odds are there was another. Or five others, in our case. We didn’t want to split up.

“Maybe he won’t get caught,” Ursa suggested as the car pulled up in front of our building. Tres snorted.

“Yeah,” Ursa said, in a resigned tone. “You’re right.”

We thanked the driver and got out, started to walk up the steps to the door.

“Wait,” Rhea said with such authority that we all froze in place, our breath caught. Fear vibrated off us.

A shadow moved in the darkness of the alcove where the door to our apartment building was.

“Who’s there?” Rhea said.

The shadow stepped out into the light. Garrett.

He was wearing a black hoodie with the hood up, khakis and penny loafers. His eyes were wild, and his face and hands were still bloody from the morning.

Rhea tucked one hand into the pocket of her jacket, where she kept her cell phone and a switchblade.

“Please help me,” he said. “I have nowhere else.”

“Why did you kill them?” Maya said, her voice cracking. When we looked, we could see that she had started to cry. “Why would you do that?”

Garrett stepped forward and we all stepped back instinctively. His face fell. He seemed hurt by our retreat. “I wasn’t trying to—I didn’t want to be alone,” he said. “I was trying to turn them.” He glanced at Maya. “Like how you did with me.”

He stepped toward us and we stepped back. “I don’t know who I am anymore. After all this and then that night—“

“Don’t you darefucking blame this on that,” Maya growled. Lex reached out a steadying hand. “You’re the one that wanted to hook up to begin with.”

“I was confused—”

“So you went home and slaughtered your family?” Tres said. “Confusion doesn’t justify murder, you asshole.”

We were all quiet for a moment. A siren wailed in the distance. The wail became louder.

“You didn’t,” Garrett said, and Rhea held up her cell phone.

“I’ve had this text drafted since I saw the news,” she said. “I knew you’d try to come back here.” “You’re my family,” Garrett said. “You said. We’re family.”

“No,” Rhea said. She turned and gestured to all of us. “Thisis my family. You are an unfortunate accident, one who only thinks about himself. You don’t know what it means to be in a family. You just murdered your own children, for fuck’s sake. How dare youtalk to me about family.”

He clenched and unclenched his fists, looked wildly at each of us. Then he settled on Maya.

“Baby,” he said.

Maya spat on the ground. “Don’t even fucking start with me.”

The cop car turned down the street and Garrett cursed, pushed past us to run, but it was no use. Soon the cop ran him down, threw his body to the concrete and read him his rights. We turned away. We never liked seeing anyone get arrested.

A few months passed. The news would not let up about the Rochester Ripper, the name they had given Garrett, thanks to the gruesome state he’d left his family in after he broke in front of them. His trial was widely publicized, and there was nationwide coverage of the grim affair. We had go bags ready, in case things took a turn for the worse, but even still, we weren’t sure where we could go that this nightmare wouldn’t follow. Europe, maybe. South America. But odds were good that if a werewolf craze broke out in the U.S., and there was even a little proof, we would never have a safe place to break in peace again. We would all end up like the Lady Twain, or worse. At best, we knew we would never see each other again. A whole pack, a drag house, is too easy to find. We watched the proceedings from our apartment, in a black mood.

Garrett took the stand. After he answered some basic logistical questions (where were you when it happened, why did you run), the information Garrett began to share made us tremble.

“Mr. Keller,” the prosecutor said with a voice like a knife. “Why were you in Brooklyn the night you were arrested? What were you doing there, a full five-hour drive from your home? Were you attempting to find shelter from the law?”

Garrett looked terrible. His months in jail had not treated him well. His beard was nearly full, and his blonde hair had become stringy and matted with sweat. He had scratches all over his face, arms, and hands. From breaking, we knew. According to the news reports, Garrett had been kept in solitary confinement out of safety for the other prisoners, and probably out of some cruel sense of retaliation. Some said he had even bene forced to wear a straightjacket, because of all the self-harming he was doing. We cringed at that. The idea of having to break inside of a straightjacket was more than horrible. We wondered how many bones he had broken in the process. From the looks of him, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

“I was there because,” Garrett started, then looked down at his hands for a moment. We prayed he didn’t sell us out. “I was there to see some friends. People I thought were my friends. People who were trying to help me.”

“So where to? Canada first, then Iceland?” Maya said, her voice flat. She sat on the couch with her arms crossed, uncrossing them every so often to take a drag from her cigarette.

Lex put a finger up to her lips and hissed. We all listened, hard.

“According to the arrest report, the person who called the police was named Ryan Bisby, a local drag queen better known as Rhea Bilitation,” the prosecutor said, pacing the floor.

“He butchered my name,” Rhea grumbled, and Tres put a hand on her shoulder. “RayBilitation? What the fuck is Ray Bilitation? There’s no pun there, it’s not even pretty!”

“Mr. Keller, are you homosexual?” the prosecutor asked, a cruel twist of the knife in his voice. Garrett blanched, and he continued, “Were you having an affair with this person?”

“Jesus Christ,” Maya said.

“Here it comes,” Ursa said, and squeezed Rhea’s hand.

“Objection!” cried the defense lawyer. “This is irrelevant to my client’s case.”

“Sustained,” the judge said, surprising us all. Maybe she was our ally in the courtroom.

The prosecutor did not look amused. “Then what were you doing there?” he said.

Garrett took a deep breath, pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Then he set his hands down and answered. “I just drove as far away from Rochester as I possibly could. I didn’t care where. I figured the city was as good a place to try to get lost as any, and so I went there. I picked the first house I got to and tried to break in. They came home too soon. I panicked when I saw the cops and I ran,” he said. “That’s it. That’s the whole story. I don’t know them. They seemed like good people.”

“Oh my god,” Rhea said. Maya shed a tear. Lex’s hand went to her mouth.

“He didn’t sell us out,” Ursa said. Tres narrowed her eyes at the screen.

The prosecutor looked skeptical. “Interesting,” he said. “So, you’d never seen them before you showed up on their particular doorstep that day looking for a place to hide?”

“Right.”

The prosecutor grinned.

“That is a truly remarkable answer, Mr. Keller,” he said, back to pacing, confident. “You see, the police received an anonymous tip from someone who mentioned they had seen you and some friends about three months before the attack. They saw you get into an altercation with a group of drag queens, including the aforementioned Rhea Bilitiation, outside of a Williamsburg gay bar.”

“Oh fuck,” Rhea said, and we were all thinking it, too.

The courtroom was silent, except for the sound of the prosecutor’s pacing steps. He stopped. “Well?”

Garrett came unraveled. He told it all, from the initial bite to the cohabitation to the training to the fucking to the killing. His eyes were wide, and the whole time, he clawed at himself, digging new red lines into the skin of his face. He did his best to explain the process of breaking—he was getting so worked up even talking about it that we thought maybe he would break right there, on camera, for all the world to see. But he kept it together, enough that he didn’t start to turn. When he was done, breathless and weeping, the court was silent once more.

Rhea turned the television off, her expression more tired than anything else. It was over for us, what we’d had here. We’d have to run. But not that day. We spent the rest of that day together, drinking and telling stories about our greatest shows. Smoking all of our cigarettes and draining what booze we had, music turned way up loud. We wanted to be together for one last day. We’d leave in the morning.

We rose before the sun came up, all of us dreadfully hungover, all of us packed and ready to go. Rhea fried up an egg for each of us. Ursa, tears in her eyes, poured cups of tea. One last meal. We were less ready to let go than we wanted to admit.

Tres clicked on the television.

“What’s the verdict?” Maya asked.

Tres flipped to a news channel covering the story.

ROCHESTER RIPPER PLEADS INSANITY,the screen read.

“Whoa, hey, turn it up,” Maya said, but Tres was already on it. Hope spiked in our hearts.

“And that’s the thing about these kinds of killers,” a dark-skinned woman in a smart suit was explaining. The description under her name read: FBI Agent, Criminal Profiler.“Sometimes they become so disconnected from reality, and the reality of what they’ve done to their victims, that they truly start to believe in an alternate reality, one in which they are the victim. One in which they have no control over their actions.”

The blonde news anchor nodded along. “It’s just terrible, what’s happened in Rochester,” she said. “But at least now the community is getting some justice.”

“And the killer is getting help from the good people at the Rochester Psychiatric Center,” the FBI agent agreed. “Rehabilitation is key in these cases. Perhaps by the end of his life, he will be able to come to terms with what he’s done.”

Rhea smiled. “You heard what they said: Rhea Bilitation is key in these cases.”

“So we’re not leaving?” Ursa asked, her joy evident in her tone.

“We’re staying right here!” Maya shouted. She unzipped her suitcase and dumped out the contents, spilling makeup and glitter everywhere. The rest of us did the same. We all felt so full of light, of justice. We looked around at each other, safe again in our home, with our family, in our House. We would go out and slay tonight, that was a given. But for now, we threw our heads back and we howled.

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ghostradiostoryhour · 5 years

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Wampus

After Momma died, Lacey and I snuck into the Wildcat Wonders room. We were going to bring her back from the dead.

Lightning forked in the floor-to-ceiling windows. Taxidermied panthers and lynxes snarled out of the corners of the room. Whenever it thundered outside, the whole room growled. The glass eyes of the newest addition, a cougar, sparked whenever the sky lit up. The Wildcat Wonders room was our favorite room in the house, and it was the first room that tourists and children on school field trips visited whenever they came to our place. Daddy built it himself, even before he had gotten the park license from the government.

On one wall stretched the dusty pelts of every kind of cat we had at the preserve, arranged from smallest to largest: wildcat, ocelot, serval, bobcat, lynx, Canadian lynx, Carolina black panther, cougar. The skulls of each cat sat in a plexiglass display case beneath the pelts, along with facts about each cat’s teeth, eyes, and ears. Beside each, blurbs explained how each of the predators that we protected were vital parts of the Texan and American ecosystems. On the other wall, a flatscreen TV played an educational video on loop when we were open for visitors. In the summertime, peak hours, our house echoed with the recorded cries of big cats, punctuated only by the shuffling steps of the visitors, an occasional gasp of awe.

Then Momma died, and we closed to the public. The Wildcat Wonders room fell silent. Until now.

Lacey shut the door behind us. She placed tall, thin white candles in the center of the room so that they made the shape of big star. Then she lit the candles one by one—first the inside of the star, then the outside.

I couldn’t stop seeing Momma die; I would close my eyes and the cougar would spring. The sleek ripple of tan fur in the high grass. The curl of the black lips. Red tongue. White teeth. Me, hiding deep in the grass as the cougar tore into Momma’s chest, dragged her body away. When they found her, all they had to give us was bits of the dress she was wearing. They had found some of her body, too, enough to cremate. I didn’t ever want to think about it. I just wanted her to be gone already, if she had to be dead.

Lacey liked to talk about Momma all the time. If she wasn’t talking about Momma, she was looking up ways to bring her back—hoodoo, black magic, anything even remotely possible, she was happy to try. She didn’t mind that she might get hurt, and she said she would protect me. She’d done a lot of research, she said, and this was the best way. A séance. Easy.

When all the candles were lit, Lacey blew out the match, and I watched the smoke curl and twist away from her hand to hang gray in the air.

“You stand here, Ada,” she said, pulling me into the middle of the star. Momma’s debutante picture lay on the ground next to me. It was the only one Lacey managed to nick before Daddy threw out the rest. Next to Momma in her fancy dress, my nightgown made me feel ragged and small.

“Why?” I asked. I squatted close to one of the candles and scrunched my toes against the wood floor. I watched the flame wink in the glass of the picture frame at my feet. It licked at Momma’s pretty face, made dark gaps and shadows in her eyes and cheeks. I decided to watch the candle instead.

Lacey flipped through the book she’d brought. A thin line of smoke rose from one of the inner candles’ flames. I held one hand out over it.

“Cut it out,” Lacey said, and rummaged in the sack again.

Lacey folded something open in her hand with a small snick: a glint of dull silver in the flickering candlelight. Daddy’s Boy Scout knife. Lacey held her palm open wide in front of her. Using the tip of the blade, she traced a dark line in her skin. She sucked air through her teeth and tucked into her palm a small piece of fabric I recognized as what was left of Momma’s dress. Then she made a fist.

“Don’t be such a baby,” Lacey said when she saw my face. “It’s just blood.”

Her eyes fell, their darkness sharp against her light hair and skin. Her teeth looked pointed in the light from the candles. Thunder rolled outside.

“You’re what they call the gateway,” Lacey said. “Momma can only re-enter the world of the living through your body.”

“Do I have to?” I shifted my weight, looked at my feet.

Lacey shot me a sharp glance. “You’re the last one who saw her,” she said. “It has to be you.” Her words settled in me slow, like small, smooth stones dropped into water.

“Okay,” I said.

Lacey nodded and paced a circle around the candles. She held her fist shut tight and a thin line of blood dripped after her. When the circle was complete, she stepped in closer, reached out to me with her bloody hand. I jerked away and she glared.

“Hold still,” she said. Then, in a softer tone, she added, “Close your eyes.”

She tied the bloody strip of fabric around my left hand, then slid her own wet palm down my face. I stood there as the blood dripped down my face in uneven lines. I watched her; she knelt just outside of the circle, and in a steady voice read words over and over again until I didn’t recognize their meaning anymore.

Nothing happened. I didn’t move. I thought about Momma. If we were going to talk to her, where was she? Lacey stopped reading. She stood and tucked her hurt hand into the skirt of her nightgown. A blackish red bloomed fast across the white fabric, the exact shade of the stains on the piece of Momma’s dress wrapped tight around my hand. I scratched my nose and my fingertips came away bloody.

Lacey bent and picked up the book with her good hand, and a library card fluttered out to the ground.

“I did everything right. I followed all the steps,” she said. The book flopped out of her hand and hit the ground with a smack. She looked up at me. “What did you do?” she said. Lightning cracked again. She crossed the room, fast, and

then her face was inches from mine. She dug her fingers into my shoulders, shook me hard. Some of the blood from my face splattered onto hers.

“Stop it,” I said. “You’re hurting me.”

“You said you were ready!” Lacey yelled. She broke off, shuddered. She was looking right at me when her eyes changed. A thin amber ring formed around her pupils, which mooned outward quick, engulfed her eyes. Where there once was white now shone black in the darkness. The thick smell of rain and rotting hide filled my nose. The flames of the candles guttered once, twice, and Lacey’s eyes glowed green and red when they caught the light.

I stumbled back, away from her, and one of the candles in its glass jar fell onto Momma’s picture with a musical crack. The shattered glass of the picture frame fractured and distorted Momma’s face. Lacey gasped and rushed over, fell to her knees to clean it up. She glanced up at me, angry, and her pupils were back to normal. I watched Lacey’s face and didn’t breathe. She picked up the broken picture and stared at it. The water forming in her eyes caught the light of the candles.

Then all of the candles went out, every one, in a fast swish of air from somewhere unseen. I imagined demons moving catlike through the room.

I ran down the hall that led to the bedroom Lacey and I shared. Halfway down, there was a flash of light from the bathroom mirror. I stopped dead. The door stood half-open. Was it her? Was it something else?

Heartbeat thick in my ears, the soles of my bare feet tingling, I took one step toward the door, then another, until I was close enough to peer inside the bathroom.

Nothing.

The room was dark but for the lightning flashing in the one window, doubled in the mirror over the sink. New towels hung harmlessly next to the toilet. Lightning again and I caught my reflection in the mirror: my face was dark and streaky, my eyes wide. My hair hung on either side of my face in wet ropes. Embarrassment glowed hot in my palms. I looked like a mess.

Of course it was my fault the spell didn’t work. All of it was my fault, wasn’t it? Momma was gone because I hadn’t done anything to stop it, because I hadn’t been brave enough.

I started to cry. I lowered myself into the tub and curled into the corner, trying to push the rising heat of the tears down and out of my mouth, my throat. From the darkness of the tub, I watched the window, rain lashing the glass in streaks, and I felt myself starting to uncoil. The heat in my chest frayed and split like thread on an old rug. The lightning flashed again, and lit the room.

A woman. Outside, looking in. Face pressed up to the window.

I saw her, clear as day. Drowned-looking, ragged, a bone-smile. Eyes not empty and black but wide, alive, and blue. Like Momma’s eyes. But her skin.

Her skin was decayed, peeling off in places. Her eye sockets gaped a little too wide. I screamed, but no sound came out. The shock of seeing her here, like this. The room fell dark again and I held my breath. Would she come inside? Would she know me?

Lightning again, and this time nothing but rain and field and trees bending in the wind.

When I could breathe normally again, I climbed out of the tub, the porcelain cool on my fingers. I turned the faucet with its usual creak, washed my face in warm, clear water. There are no such things as ghosts, I told myself. There is nothing to be afraid of. But still my hands shook.

I lifted my chin and walked back to our room in the dark.

The room smelled strange when I got there, a little like leaves raked into a pile, but otherwise nothing had changed. Lacey was quiet, already under the covers. Her hands were still bleeding. They left red smudges on her white comforter and pillow. When she saw my face, she sat bolt upright in bed.

“Did you see Momma?” she said, the hope in her voice sharp.

I stared at my sister, sitting in the square of light that fell onto her bed from the window, her face dark, backlit by the floodlight outside. Long scratches that hadn’t been there before stretched down her forearms.

She saw me looking and she pulled her sleeves down and held them in her hands. “Well?”

I knew what she wanted to hear, but I didn’t want her to laugh at me. And some part of me wanted to keep Momma—or whoever that woman had been—to myself. Wanted to keep her special, mine.

I shook my head.

“Oh,” she said. “You were taking forever, so I thought...” She sniffed hard, pressed the end of her sleeve against one of her eyes, then the other. Then she straightened and said, “Forget it. Goodnight.”

I reached out to her, but she pulled the covers up over her head and turned out the light. I sat down on my bed and watched her. Every so often, her whole body twitched beneath the sheets, but she was silent. When her breathing slowed and evened, when I was sure she was asleep, I crept over and slipped into her bed beside her, molded my body to hers. She was shaking, I could feel, but she was warm and soft and serene. The smell of leaves was stronger and as I settled into my own sleep, I dreamed that my sister wasn’t shaking, but purring.

It had been a whole month since Momma died, but still the papers kept themselves busy making a big spectacle of us. For a town like Uvalde, any death was a welcome distraction from people’s own small problems. The reporters came, and the animal rights’ activists came, and the church people came, and the child welfare agencies came. Some tourists even came, not for the cats, which would have been normal, but to see where Momma had died. Daddy ran them off, but not before they had staked a sign that said MANEATER RANCH outside the front gate.

The next day, on our way to school, Daddy got out of the truck, ripped the sign out of the ground, and threw it into the dumpster. The sign didn’t really matter, though. Our pictures were everywhere, mine in particular. People started pointing at us, at school, in town.

Everybody was using Momma as a reason to wave their guns around. Uvalde was a big hunting area—there was so much camo at the Walmart that you’d think it was a war zone. In Uvalde, you hunted for hunting’s sake, for the kick of a rifle butt in your right shoulder, for the feeling of invincibility. We always had to run poachers off our land, but since we were nationally registered, everything on our property was protected by federal law. Some days, it felt like the whole city was sore at us for spoiling the fun.

The people in town who weren’t trying to shoot our cats were still raising eyebrows. Round, breathless city slickers who drove their fancy Escalades and Lincoln SUVs out here for the weekends tutted to themselves when they saw us restocking at the meat counter in Brookshire Brothers’ Grocery. They’d point to us and tell their kids about how stupid our Momma was for wandering around outside on a place with wild animals. Like the rest of the land was predator-free. Sometimes, they’d make jokes about that old Wampus Cat legend, the one about the Cherokee woman who could turn into a panther.

“Cool! Like Catwoman?” some of the younger kids would ask, excited.

“No, honey,” the parents would always say. “Bad, like a witch. Catwoman wasn’t an Indian.”

Their hate made me want to scratch at them, but Daddy always looked down at the floor. He wouldn’t ever meet their eyes.

He didn’t ever bring Momma up, which I was glad for at first. But then he never spoke at all, about anything. It was like he had decided that since she was gone, the only option was to disappear himself. Daddy had become a fragile thing, breakable and silent. Whatever happened, it was our job to keep him from cracking in half.

*** We all said goodbye to Momma about a week after it happened. We had the official

church funeral first, but then we came back to our place to do the real ceremony. Lacey and I stood next to Daddy on the bank of Momma’s favorite pond, that same one in the cougar enclosure, just a little ways down from where I watched her die.

All around us, the high grass had been mowed down by the search parties Daddy and the city police sent out, but the leaves on the trees still whispered, and little black crickets leapt and sang in the shallow mud at the pond’s edge. The cougar that had killed her was still in there, but Daddy didn’t seem to care. He was crying. I held Lacey’s cold hand tightly in my own. I couldn’t help but scan the trees along the fence for that big head, those two gold eyes. When she saw my face, Lacey squeezed my hand and pulled me a little closer. Daddy kissed the jar before he scattered Momma’s ashes in the pond’s murky water, and Lacey and I watched. Our matching black dresses snapped in the wind. Our faces were dry.

*** Not long after the séance, Lacey turned sixteen. She decided to move into the Wildcat

Wonders room. She didn’t ask Daddy, but Lacey packed up her things as though it were not up for debate. One by one, she packed her things into cardboard boxes and carried them down the hall. Ever since the night of the séance, I had stayed out of that room.

I hardly saw Lacey anymore, and when I did, she was always carting around old spell books and books of folklore. She started to dress differently, too—she paired her flowy white dresses with thick black combat boots, and streaked her blonde hair black. I don’t think she ever slept. Most nights, if I listened at her door, I could hear her chanting in a spitting language I didn’t understand. Once, I caught her standing in front of the bathroom sink at four in the morning, Daddy’s Boy Scout knife open in her hand, its blade dark, the same shade of the short cuts she had made on the outside of her left arm.

It got bad. I tried to tell Daddy about it.

The sun was just setting when I stepped out onto the porch, the sky over the road a dusty, burnt orange. Daddy was sitting in his metal rocking chair like always. He had gotten his shotgun down from its place above the mantle. The gun was unloaded, cracked in half across his knees. He was busily stuffing a rag into each of the barrels, rubbing hard with his thumb so that the rag came away blackened and grimy.

“How does that help?” I said. “Cleaning the gun, I mean. Does it make it shoot better?”

He looked over in my direction, through me instead of at me. Then he cracked his neck once and looked back out at the road. I knew he was waiting for Momma to come back, just like Lacey. Why are you sad? What are you doing out here? Why won’t you talk to me? Every question I thought to ask, Momma was the answer. So I just sat there watching him.

“Ada, what’s this about,” he said finally. He sounded tired. He still didn’t look at me.

I picked at a hangnail. “Lacey’s acting funny,” I said. “All she does is read these weird old books, and she won’t talk to me. I hardly see her anymore.”

He shrugged, spat on the ground. I watched him, trying to read his meaning. Daddy coughed and stood up.

“She’s just growing up,” he said, and this time, he looked right at me. “Things change as you get older. Mean different things. Weigh heavier, you understand?”

I did understand. I had started to watch the other girls in my class differently, in ways that made my heart pace and snarl the way our cats did before feedings, not entirely unpleasant, but feral, and dangerous. But what did any of that have to do with Lacey’s silence? Her strangeness?

He reached toward me, but then thought better of it and cocked the rifle instead. “Go to bed,” he said. Then, “Don’t you or Lacey wait up for me.” “Where are you going?” I asked. He turned and trudged down the porch steps out to the yard where his truck was parked.

“Gotta get something for the cats,” he called over his shoulder. “Y’all be good.” He turned the engine and I stayed there on the porch, alone, until his truck turned off onto the main road, and the smells of burned diesel and dirt had kicked high into the night. A cry from one of the cat enclosures started like a woman’s scream and cut abruptly into a howl. One of the bobcats. Though the cougars sounded similar. By the time I felt like I could move, the sun had set completely, and all around me, the sky was black, freckled by the far-off stars. The night echoed with the unearthly calls of big cats.

That night, I dreamed of Momma again. This time, Lacey was there, too, crouched low in the high grass next to me. Her dark eyes were glowing. In one hand, she held Daddy’s green Boy Scout knife, open. When the cougar tensed in the grass next to Momma, the way it always did, Lacey leapt forward with a scream of her own.

I opened my eyes. The ceiling fan in my room spun slowly in the dark. My sheets were drenched in sweat and my hair stuck in wet strands to my face and neck.

I got up, peered past my bedroom door and down the long, dark hallway. At the end of the hall, the door to the Wildcat Wonders room was outlined in a thin rectangle of light. If I held my breath for a moment, I could hear small noises of pain—air sucked in sharp through clenched teeth, stifled grunts, the shaky, measured release of breath.

I crept down the hall. Soon I was at the door. I inched my face close to the small crack of light and watched. I could see Lacey sitting shirtless on her bed, which she’d arranged to be across from the plexiglass cases full of skulls. Her back was to me, and she had headphones in.

Her right arm was raised, her fingers closed around something thin and hard to see. A tannish blanket was draped over her shoulders. I cracked the door open a little wider. It was a pelt, a cougar from the coloration. She pulled her right hand in toward her chest where the pelt was draped, winced, and when she pulled her hand back out again, I could see that it was a needle she was holding. The line of near-invisible fishing wire gleamed red in the light and when Lacey pulled it tight, a drop of blood fell from her bare collarbone onto the wood floor near the bed. I gasped and Lacey spun around.

Her eyes caught mine, and I stopped breathing. Where there should have been a deep nut- brown, her eyes were yellow, rimmed in black, her pupils diamond-shaped. She lunged at me with a yell, slammed the door in my face. Her teeth were long like fangs.

*** The next day, before school, Lacey looked the same as always. Only today she wore a black turtleneck sweater and jeans instead of a dress. I wondered whether, beneath her turtleneck, the pelt was stitched tight to her skin. I wondered whether she had chosen black so that the blood wouldn’t show when it pushed against the stitches, seeped into the sweater.

I tried to talk to her, but she grabbed her backpack and a Slim Jim and pushed past me out the door. Then Daddy came in, looking more tired than usual, and said he couldn’t pick me up after school because he had to go to a meeting. He was carrying the shotgun in a black vinyl carrying case I’d never seen before. He wore a new baseball hat that said NRA on it. He didn’t even look at me when he said goodbye.

*** That night, I made us box mac and cheese for dinner. Lacey was reading another one of her books, sitting at the dinner table.

When I came over to put out the place settings for us, she caught me by the wrist, hard enough to bruise, and slammed my hand down on the table. The silverware I was holding clattered to the floor. Her long nails dug into my skin.

“Don’t ever spy on me again,” she said. Her voice was almost a growl.

Lacey looked at me hard, then let go of my arm. With some difficulty, she leaned over, picked up the fallen silverware, and arranged it back neatly.

“You don’t have to be like this,” I said. I miss Momma too, I wanted to say. The water on the stove started to boil. “Do you think Dad’s acting weird?” she said. I shook the noodles from the box into the pot of water. “Why?” I thought of the gun, the new hat. She didn’t say anything else. I looked at her. She was reading her book. I squinted to read the title. The Legend of the Wampus Cat.

“This stuff is never gonna bring her back,” I said. Lacey looked over at me and shook her head.

“You wouldn’t understand,” she said.

I thought of the cat in my chest, of the girls in my class. I didn’t think she had the same animal living in her bones, but I knew what it was like, keeping something wild beneath your skin.

“You can talk to me,” I said. “It’s hard for all of us.”

“God, do you have to be so pathetic? This isn’t about Momma anymore,” she said. “She’s gone, Ada. There’s nothing you can do to change that.”

“Then why are you still trying,” I said. She looked at me, closed her book. “Everything is so fucking messed up,” Lacey said, her voice shaky. “You have no idea.”Yes, I do. “Then tell me,” I said. Lacey looked at me, her eyes weighing some truth. Deciding. Then her face hardened. “It should have been you out there,” Lacey said. “If Momma were still alive, she’d know what to do. But you’re just useless.”

I watched her face. Her eyes were like Momma’s, blue and wide and cruel when called for. I crossed my arms, rolled my shoulders back.

“I saw her, you know,” I said. “The other night. She appeared to me.” Lacey rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.” “In the bathroom,” I said. “After. She was at the window, outside.” I liked the feeling that the words brought, a blurring sting, then a rush of heat in the abdomen. More like a swarm of deer ticks than like butterflies. More like anger, a snarling joy. I stepped closer to my sister.

“Shut up,” Lacey said. “That’s so stupid. She wouldn’t do that.” But I could see the doubt flowering beneath her skin, the release of its dark seeds.

“I thought it was weird, but it was her,” I said, gaining confidence. “She called me by name. She knew me.” I stared at Lacey evenly. “It was her.”

Lacey didn’t say anything. I uncrossed my arms, went back to the noodles, as though the very wires that held me together weren’t all singing in unison. As though it were the most normal thing in the world, to have seen her, our dead mother.

“But how...” Lacey said, quiet, as though she had forgotten I was standing there across from her. The feeling, that I was nothing more than a ghost, was so familiar, I almost didn’t notice.

There were so many times I didn’t notice. That I wasn’t noticed. That I was nothing. “She’s out there every night, you know,” I said. Not nothing. Something. Someone. I was someone. “Out in the cougar enclosure. The big run,” I continued.

Before me, Lacey had shrunk. Her whole face gaped toward me, rapt, a flower seeking sun. It felt good, holding her here like this. Necessary.

“But why would she go there?” Lacey asked, her voice small. “Why not the house again?”

Sharp, the spike of worry in my chest. I overcompensated. “I don’t know. But she sings to me, when I see her.”

Lacey looked at me, eyes opaque. Would she cry? Would she hit me? In that moment, I wanted her to. I wanted the kick and scratch. I wanted a chance to take it back.

Nothing. Just silence.

Then she nodded at the stove. “Your water’s boiling over,” she said, and left.

The fluorescent bulb overhead blinked once and then steadied itself with a low hum. I held the edge of the counter to stop my hands from shaking. Then I leaned over the sink and spat.

Down the hall, I heard her bedroom door slam behind her. Next to me, the water rushed up and out of the pot, sizzling on the stovetop. I slid down the counter, put my face in my hands, and tried to cry, but no tears came. I was empty.

When I finally caught my breath, I got up, turned off the stove, and cleaned up the mess so that Daddy wouldn’t come home to find it. I didn’t want him to worry.

*** Later that night, I heard the thump and screech of a window sliding open. Lacey.

I knew she would take the bait. Momma was too important to Lacey for her not to. A small, hate-filled smile cracked within me, crawling with shined black beetles. I winced at my own sharp joy at tricking my sister. She could get hurt.

Would she care, I thought. If it were you out there, would she even flinch? That word from earlier, useless, flashed across my mind. No, I decided. But I wanted to see for myself what she would do. I crawled out of my bed and crept through the house to the back door. Outside, the sky was cloudy, streaked grey and black like murky water. The moon was just a sliver of God’s fingernail, as Daddy used to say. Lacey jogged across the yard toward the pond in the cougar enclosure. Her white nightgown flapped bright in the darkness.

Out of the darkness, a shape sauntered across the yard, passed beneath the floodlight in our backyard. Big sandy paws, square golden head, bunched chest muscles rippling beneath pale fur. Two rounded, black-tipped ears. Then it turned and disappeared into the trees.

I glanced back at the house where it sat dark on the hill. Daddy’s truck was still gone. As I raced after my sister, my hands shook. I half expected to find my sister deep in the bone-reed stalks, lying in the dirt on her back. I pictured her blank eyes pointed up at the moon, the dead, dry hay bent around her in a perfect imprint of her body.

When I got down to the pond, I saw Lacey, a catskin draped like a cloak around her shoulders, Daddy’s Boy Scout knife in her hand. Then she pulled the skin over her head. A shudder, then suddenly a cougar unfurled where my sister stood only a moment before.

From my hiding spot in the high grass, I gasped, and the cougar’s eyes snapped to mine.

Daddy called from the house, and two shots rang out, one after the other. The cougar flattened against the ground, then something heavy slammed into its side and a dark stain began to spread there.

The cougar’s body jerked in and out of cougar form. One second it was the cougar, panting and bleeding onto the grass, and the next Lacey was kneeling in its place, clutching her stomach and crying. Something was wrong. I heard Daddy’s calls coming closer, the snap of grass beneath his heavy step.

“It’s okay,” I said to Lacey. “You’re okay.” Lacey looked at me and nodded, her features shifting in and out of humanness. “I told you not to follow me,” she said softly. “I didn’t want you to see.” I tried to get to my feet, but my body kept slipping out from under me. Like I couldn’t

remember how to make my legs move. Lacey leaned against me, and together we stood steady. “Ada,” she said, her voice scratchier by the minute. “Yeah?” I said. “I didn’t mean it, what I said.”

“I know.” “I think I saw her,” Lacey said. “What?” “Momma. Like you said.” Pain flashed through me, snicking like Daddy’s green knife. This was my fault. I was the one hurting my family. I was killing them.

I thought of the darkness in me, wondering who else I’d kill. The girls in my class?

Daddy? The needle sinking in and out of Lacey’s skin, drawing blood, started to make a kind of sense.

“Thank you,” Lacey said. “No,” I said, my voice cracking. “It was worth it,” she said. “I got to see her.” And at last I knew what I could do to help. To heal my sister. I could keep this lie, bury it

deep, salvage something. “Good,” I said. “I’m glad.”

Lacey smiled at me.

As we breathed, she shifted shape less, until she was more cat than girl. Her face was gaunt and tanner than usual, her eyes were tired but golden, rimmed in black thicker than any eyeliner I’d ever seen her wear. The hairs on her upper lip shone white and stiff, like whiskers. Her teeth were pointed. There were scars all over her body, just like the ones on her chest, only shorter, less neatly healed. And something else hit me. This was what happened to you if you tried to keep the cat inside. I thought of the girls in my class, of their collarbones, of their lips and hands.

What would happen to me if I kept that buried?

Lacey should have talked to me. She should have told me what she was, beneath her skin. I could have pulled this cat from her chest, if I had known. She could have taught me how to cope with mine.

I started to cry, and Lacey hugged me tighter, silent beside me. “It’s okay,” she said. But it wasn’t okay. The sound of footsteps and grass cracking. Labored breathing between steps. “Daddy?” Lacey said. Her voice was so quiet I could hardly hear her. Claws out, she pushed aside a clump of grass next to us, trying to see through the stalks. I looked up at the spinning sky.

I heard the sound of a gun being cocked, and instinctively I stepped in front of my sister.

Daddy burst in gun first, fell to the ground next to us. He tossed aside the shotgun in his hands, and scooped Lacey into his arms. Her pale skin was still a little golden, her ears rounded and black, the pelt sewn roughly along her collarbones, caked in dried blood that the hole in her belly was starting to match in color.

“I’m here,” Daddy said, the tears welling in his eyes. “I’m so sorry. I promise you’ll be okay.” I thought of his gun, of everything he didn’t know. He could never keep us safe. We had kept each other safe. Badly, but we had. I thought about Momma, about how he never stood up for us in the store. Daddy didn’t know how to protect anyone but himself.

The world rang and slipped sideways. Lacey looked right at me, her nightgown soaked in red, then her chest stilled. Daddy dropped the gun, and somewhere in the high grass around us, or maybe just in the depths of me, a big cat screamed.

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ghostradiostoryhour · 5 years

Text

The Fig

I walked up to the bar where Lucas had said to meet him, double-checking the location on my phone. This place looked beat to hell, run down—hardly the luxe cocktail bar my editor had mentioned in our meeting earlier that day. Maybe the team was hazing me? I was still pretty new on the bar beat, and I wouldn’t put it past them—my company’s culture could get a little frat-like at times, and I was the first woman on their team of six reporters.

Maybe some of them were jealous of my “acceleration,” the somewhat inscrutable metric for success that our CEO had put into place last quarter. Whatever the magic formula was, though, I had cracked it with my first exclusive. My coverage of a new SoHo queer bar’s take on a Corpse Reviver #2 that was in its own right revolutionary—the secret ingredient was reduced rhum cotton candy stacked high atop the tiki mug the drink was served in—had gone viral only three hours after the piece had posted to the site. Lucky for me, I was dating the owner, a semi-famous mixologist renowned for her innovative drink presentation—Sasha had been kind enough to let me write about her.

We hadn’t been dating long, only about a week or so, but her pull was strong on me. Every moment spent gone from her was a dull ache in my chest, a burning, lower. So being here, at this bar, where I was certain I was about to get punked by my male coworkers—on a Monday, no less, the only day that Sasha’s bar was closed . . . I felt like a sucker. But, as I looked at the bar’s faded sign again—it was called The Fig—something crawled through me. Danger? No, it couldn’t be. I was a bad bitch. Tall, thick. Anybody with the idea that I might be easy pickin’s was quickly dispatched with a scowl and a straightening of my shoulders.

Whatever these boys had in store for me wasn’t enough to scare me. So then, what was this feeling? Interest? The place, as dilapidated as it seemed on first glance, was alluring in its way. It was situated at the crux of a weird intersection, bounded on either side by small streets that ran alongside three bigger, much busier thoroughfares, to create a chaotic clump of five streets. Music poured down from a small, empty rooftop that was overgrown with lush plants and flowers. Along one of these streets, the bar had no windows, just a solid concrete wall that had been decorated with a huge mural of some strange bug. It looked like a bee or a beetle, but with a thin, long head and translucent wings shaped like those of a butterfly. A thin, whip-like appendage that was almost twice the length of the bug itself extruded from its abdomen, right in the place where a stinger might be. The front of the bar looked out onto the corner of the intersection, at the meeting point of the two roads. The one window in the front of the bar held a single neon sign that read PSYCHIC in cursive yellow and red. Patterned lace curtains were draped behind it, making it hard to see into the bar.

I stepped up to the door, and the same strange feeling coursed through me again. Like when I had touched the bare outlet in my aunt’s guest bathroom as a child. Involuntarily, I stopped dead. Weird.

I had to push myself forward on the bar’s threshold. Lifting my hand to the door knob felt like moving my arm through thick molasses. My phone dinged. Sasha.

6:55 PM

bb have fun at the bar. hurry back to me. im waiting ;)

I smiled at the text, then shook my head. What was I doing? I just needed to get this over with so I could get over to Sasha’s.

Ignoring the feeling of wrongness prickling my skin, I put my hand on the doorknob, turned it, and stepped into the bar.

Inside, it was a garish, dingy pink, like the inside of a mouth, some mucous membrane. Baroque decor—a limp looking beige silk sofa sagged in one corner, in another a set of mismatched embroidered armchairs gathered around a spindly iron coffee table painted white and flaking. A long unused fireplace carved from gray marble and festooned with cherubs and angel faces displayed an iron rack full of half-lit, melted pillar candles.

It was an oddly feminine place for Lucas’s crew to choose for a drink with the bros. He and the rest of his cohort had already arrived. They were sitting at the bar, hunched over drinks, their black-suited backs to me. Even the bar itself was overly frilly, draped in beads and lace and glowing a pale peach, thanks to some recessed lighting within the bar itself. The color was nearly the same shade as the glittery highlighter Sasha brushed across her high cheekbones every morning. No doubt choosing this place in particular was meant as some joke about my gender.

I rolled my eyes and strode up to the bar, clapped Lucas on the back. He was easily distinguished by the premature gray in his dark undercut.

He spun around. “You made it!” He grinned stupidly. Looked like the group had cut out a bit early to make it here with enough time to fully cash in on the happy hour specials, which ran until 8.

“Yep,” I said. “How’s things? You wanted to meet?”

One of the others, Brad or something—we hadn’t really met yet, laughed aloud at a joke the bartender had made. The rest of the guys leered at me, in various states of drunk.

“Siddown!” Lucas crooned, and I took a seat at the empty stool next to him.

The unsettling feeling from before hadn’t faded, and I had already assessed the room—exits to the back right and the way I’d come a decrepit set of iron stairs that twirled up to the rooftop deck I’d seen from the street. Club mixes of 80s pop lilted from the speakers in the other corners. There were a few other patrons in the bar that I could see, coupled off by the front window, in a small clump by the sofa. The air smelled sickly, hung thick beneath the gaudy chandelier lighting. It tasted like fermented peaches—like farmhouse cider, or a funky saison. Sasha and I were both into craft beer and small batch brewing.

Before I could say anything, Lucas had motioned to the bartender, who was presenting me with an acid green up cocktail.

“Uh, thanks,” I said, immediately wary, but trying to be cool. Everyone was acting a little strange—I had been sure they’d have jumped on me right away, roasted me for my masculine look, or my success, or my general otherness, but they were all acting pretty chill, if a bit loopy. Maybe the invitation had been genuine after all, and this was just how they partied.

Lucas smiled, his features a little droopy—how long had they been here?—and patted me on the shoulder.

“Not always that we get a noob with acceleration!” he said loudly, and at this, the other guys turned and started to pay attention.

“Oh. Yeah,” I said, not wanting to play it down—though if I were with my girl friends, I would have. I straightened up. “Well, I know what I’m doing, so.”

The oldest guy in the group besides Lucas snorted. His name was Todd, and he’d been with the company for three years now—long for this business. Everyone knew that he was struggling with acceleration.

“You don’t know shit,” he said. His words were rude, but his tone was good-natured enough. “None of us do. Even the CEO, Roderick. No idea what the public wants. It’s all this PC culture, ruining everything. Can’t even have an opinion on something anymore.”

I frowned. Of course he was one of those. Todd downed his drink, signalled for another.

Arun shook his head. “Shut up, man. Don’t you realize that makes you sound like an asshole?” He looked at me, and I blinked. His face seemed blurry, or—no. It seemed to be sagging. I smiled, trying to not to stare. He kept talking. “The girl clearly knows what she’s doing,” he said. His lip somehow curling as the rest of his face wilted. “I mean, sleeping with your sources is bound to help you get deep inside of the story.”

Brad laughed again, a guffaw that sounded almost cartoonish. “Have you seen her girl?” he slurred. “Not really the marrying type, but damn she is fun to look at.”

Lucas waggled his eyebrows at me. “Yeah, thanks for the pictures, too.”

Damn Chai’s photography skills, I thought. Our publication was known for its amazing photos. Chai, our lead photographer, was truly gifted, which meant that she’d captured Sasha behind the bar at just the right moment—her cheeks flushed with heat, her golden eyes focused, perfectly lit, as she seared an orange rind with a newly struck match. Tiny beads of sweat like dew at her brow and collarbone. I guess for these guys it helped that she liked to wear low cut dresses while she worked. In the feature image for my piece, Sasha had looked like fucking Tessa Thompson. The thought of Sasha, of that picture, sent me back to the text she had sent not ten minutes ago—

hurry back to me. im waiting ;)

The guys were cheering and high fiving each other, practically drooling. This was nonsense. I took a sip of my drink and winced—the lime green cocktail tasted bitter and reeked of ethanol.

“What’s in this?” I asked the bartender, but they had their back to me and didn’t respond. I could barely make out their features in the mercury-stained mirror that hung above the dusty bottles of liquor behind the bar.

“Hey,” Lucas practically shouted into my ear. “How’d you end up with a babe like that, anyway? You’re just a dyke.”

I whipped around, ready to slap him, but then I saw his face.

His features were totally distorted, almost as though his flesh were melting, like the wax of the candles in the fireplace, like Arun’s face, but worse, far worse. The pink sockets of his eyes grew as his bottom eyelids sagged, his eyeballs, horrifyingly spherical, jostling as the space they occupied shifted.

I gasped and jumped back, toppled over. I thought I was going to fall off of the barstool, but it came with me, adhered to me by some beige, creeping slime. I yelped and pulled myself from the chair, slapped at the gunk on my pant seat. A faint hissing noise came from the caustic goop.

The guys were jeering, making fun of my start and cackling to themselves about the fall. I couldn’t bear to look closely at them. I couldn’t bear to see Lucas’s face again, not like that—all dripping and disfigured. He was a dick, but he was still a person. At least I hoped so.

I took my phone from my pocket, checked the time.

11:55 PM.

How could it be so late? I dimmed the screen, pushed the button to illuminate it again, and the time was the same, but now there was a series of messages from Sasha as well.

8:01 PM

how’s it going?

9:10 PM

do you think you’ll come over tonight?

9:15 PM

i hope they’re being nice to you

10:45 PM

Ro, are you okay? starting to worry…

11:32 PM

Ro seriously this isn’t funny

Fuck. How had so much time passed? Did Lucas fucking roofie me? No, I thought. No, I had been drugged at a club before. This wasn’t how it felt.

A moaning sound from the bar and I snapped my head up, looked dead on as the bartender, who had no discernable face, I could see now—just a blank oval of skin tone painted on like nail polish. I watched in horror as the face color melted away to reveal a perfectly polished, nearly opaline skull. Only the skull was no longer a skull at all, not really, but instead a shined white sphere, growing ever smaller as the flesh color drained from its surface. Beneath, the body writhed and jerked as the last spasms of life left the bartender and great hunks of muscle flopped down from their arms onto the floor, which, I noticed then, was crawling with the same slime that had stuck me to the chair. I wanted to run, but I was frozen in place by the spectacle before me.

The bartender had become more of a skeleton than anything, but a strange scream erupted from the body as its shined white limbs began to shorten and curl. I looked around at the other patrons of the bar, then—Lucas and his crew were all melting in a similar fashion—had they given me acid? But no, I could hear them all screaming, set to the overly positive backbeat of Tiffany and the B-52s. The bartender had become a kind of grotesque, ultra foo foo coat rack made of bone, and Lucas, Todd, Brad, and Arun seemed to be melding together, their flesh melting onto the barstools where they sat in such a way that they began to resemble an ornate, blood-red chaise lounge. They wailed together, and Lucas reached out to me. I screamed, and remembered myself.

I looked down. My legs were throbbing with the beige slime, which stretched almost all the way over my knees. “Fuck!” I yelled.

No way in hell I was going to become part of some shitty Williamsburg dive bar. Fuck that.

I ran, or tried to run, for the door. I was moving, that was good, but the most I could manage was a determined kind of lurch. I trudged forward, my heart beating hard in my ears, as I focused on the George Michael lyrics pouring from the bar’s speakers. I willed myself to move, to keep moving, to never stop, even as I neared the door.

My phone rang in my hand. Sasha. But I couldn’t answer. I had to focus.

The couple at the table near the window was melting also, their shared skin flowing together like spilled shades of paint over the wire table and white wicker chairs. I looked away.

The floor of the bar bucked, then, as if it knew I was trying to escape, and I crumpled to the ground. The slime overtook me, moving much faster than it had before. With a yell, I pushed myself up to my feet and ripped my torso away from the hungry slime.

In the corner of my eye, the couple at the table—or the chrysalis-like shape they had morphed into—bubbled up once. I stared, transfixed, even as I worked toward the door. The chrysalis throbbed again, then shook violently. Then it cracked open with a sick noise of breaking bone.

But what emerged from the chrysalis was almost too monstrous to describe.

It was a giant wasp, or something like a wasp, black and shined and buzzing, still new and dripping with whatever amniotic fluid it had emerged from. Was it the couple’s blood? I gagged, but still I pushed toward the door.

It didn’t seem like it could fly yet, because it crawled on almost human arms up the wall of the bar, and onto the cieiling, hanging upside-down between me and the way out. I could barely make out the couple’s faces, stretched and distorted, in the wasp’s wings, mouths still working in distress even as they melded slowly into the wasp. A long, black, whip-like stinger grew out of its abdomen, a near-perfect echo of the mural I had seen earlier, outside.

I screamed again, this time more out of desperation than anything. I had more to do before I died. I had more stories to tell. I had Sasha, sure, but I wasn’t certain that we were meant to be anything real yet. I wasn’t done loving her and I wasn’t done meeting people. I had worked harder than this, dammit! I deserved better than to be yet another woman who had gone out for drinks with male colleagues and had never come back.

The wasp crawled closer to the door, and the beige slime crept over my arms and shoulders, nearing the tips of my fingers. I felt the structure of my face start to shift as I lunged for the door. My hand closed around the doorknob just as the wasp descended.

I closed my eyes and threw my whole weight forward into the door. A terrible buzzing filled my head, and I hit pavement.

The door slammed closed behind me.

For a moment, I thought I was dead, surely eaten by the bar, by the wasp, gone forever, just another queer casualty everyone would cry out for on Twitter and then promptly forget about. But I was still alive and whole, despite the state of my outfit, which was pocked with holes all over, as though I’d been living in a closet full of moths for the last five years. But the slime was gone. My phone was in my hand.

Breathing hard, I checked the time. 5:20 AM.

I laughed aloud at my luck, at my existence, and the few drunk stragglers on the street jumped, looked at me funny. I turned back to look at the bar. All of the lights were off, save for the neon PSYCHIC sign glinting yellow and red in the front window. The sky had started to lighten, and as I stared into the window, wondering if what I’d been through, if what had happened to Lucas and everyone else in the bar had been real, I saw the dark shape of a giant insect crawl across the window.

It paused there, as if regarding me, and then crawled back into the shadows of The Fig.

A shiver ran through me. I felt drunk and wobbly. I let out a huge breath, and then I took out my phone to text Sasha. She was never going to believe me.

As I typed, I noticed something strange. My thumb was changing. Little bumps appeared and then they grew into small, sharp points. It wasn’t painful, not really, but it was startling, and I pocketed my phone, looked closer at my hands. The bumps were all over my hands and forearms, bubbling up and then hardening into hair-thin points. If I didn’t look too closely, I could almost imagine that they were hair.

And then the growing stopped. I touched one of the prickles gingerly and pulled back. They were sharp, alright, and they covered my arms from the elbow to the backs of my knuckles and thumbs.

The door to the bar swung open, then, and a gust of the rank-smelling rotten air whooshed out toward me. I covered my face with my arms and closed my eyes. When I heard the door slam and the wind stopped, I looked up. The bar was closed. Nothing had changed.

But then I looked down at my arms. A fine beige dust coated the new spines on my forearms. I tried brushing it off, once, twice, and then frantically, but it didn’t budge. I looked at The Fig, at the wasp mural on the wall, and then I remembered something I’d learned back in elementary school science class. Mutualism. How some species depended on each other in particular ways. I hadn’t made it out, not really. I had, but not of my own volition.

This was how it spread. I wasn’t a survivor. I was a pollinator.

0 notes

ghostradiostoryhour · 5 years

Text

Dinosaur Vacation Shirt

[POWER ON]

[cmd login, access code ********]

[Security question: What is your mother’s maiden name?]

[******]

[!]

[Access code confirmed]

[Hello! What would you like to do?]

[cmd network sync]

[Syncing to Marley Corporation Interspace Wi-Fi . . .]

[!]

[Connection confirmed.]

[!]

[ONE! New video transmission, sender: test facility 2345xHju, NORTH BASTION]

[Access transmission? Y/N]

[Y]

[cmd apply timestamp]

[21:30:20 timestamp applied]

[21:30:23 transmission status: incoming]

[21:30:27 transmission status: confirmed]

[21:30:57 transmission status: buffering…]

[21:31:02 Start transmission? Y/N]

[Y]

[21:31:22 Starting transmission. 3… 2… 1…]

Fuckin’ camera, come ON.

Damn red dust clogging everything up.

Ok, there.

I think we’re rolling.

I’m about to bite the big one. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but I’ve already lost a shit ton of blood, and I’m shaky as fuck. And I have no clue where the fucking med bay is in this damn rePark. And I’m wearing a fucking dinosaur-themed vacation shirt. Whoever finds me is going to think I was a moron.

Not that that matters.

Anyway, my guess is I’m not long for this world.

And what a world it has turned out to be.

I guess I should give a little background, considering I have no way of knowing where or when in the multiverse this damn transmission is gonna end up. If it’s even gonna end up anywhere. Oh well, human folly, all that.

Yeah.

So I’m on Amarsica. 2079. That’s what we’ve made of that red ball of dust people used to call Mars. Terraforming, blah blah blah. The name sucks, doesn’t it? Most of us old enough to remember Earth still just call it Mars. Anyway, the good ol’ US of A somehow found oil beneath the rocky surface, so you know the rest. Soon as someone pulled together a prototype for the giant, gleaming shell cities we Amarsicans call home, the U.S. invested. Government spent the last of what it had to finance terraforming on Mars to create a remote colony that could drill for crude, barrel it up, and ship it back via shuttle. I guess there was life on mars, once—we just missed it by a couple hundred thousand years. Weird thing about Mars is, there’s plenty oil, but there’s not that much water up here, at least not naturally occurring water. Yeah, there’s the polar ice caps, but if we were only relying on that to sustain the shell cities, we would have run out in about a decade or two. That’s why they built the H2O factories, out on Far Planet. Giant enclosed warehouses without oxygenized atmosphere—better to fuse hydrogen and oxygen in a vacuum in order to avoid something like the Hindenburg. It’s a decent job, rainmaking, but not one I’d want. More dangerous than rigging, by far, even if it does pay a doctor’s salary. Plus the commute out to Far Planet can take a week or more on transpo. I stick to the rigs that’re enveloped in their own safe terraforming bubbles, thanks.

I don’t really know how well the whole system works—as a colony of the U.S., we don’t get much news in what goes on down Earthside. Guess having us up here makes life for Earthbound U.S. citizens better. Finally working on implementing free healthcare down there, last I heard. Not up here. And boy do I know it.

Dammit, Candi would know what to do in this situation. She always did have an answer.

Anyway.

A buddy of mine growing up used to call Amarsica the Florida of space, whatever that means. Rich half’s Miami, poor half’s I don’t know, the swamp, I guess, if the swamp were just a dry patch of dirt. It’s not a great metaphor, but you get the idea. Income gap’s out of control.

I was maybe four when we moved out here in 2033. My family—all doctors, except me—were part of the first colonization wave. This planet was supposed to be an outpost of sorts, a military base. You know, the whole China thing. But then old-ass, life-extending-nanobot-filled Elon Musk and his people jumped all over it, and started creating ultra-lux resorts for the uber rich in the 2040s, and, well. Amarsica became the premiere vacation destination, or at least lush, green East Planet did, anyway. Dusty, parched West Planet, where I grew up, is still all refineries and oilfields. West Planet is the servants’ quarters of Mars.

I live with my girlfriend Candi in a busted old Airstream, at least before she died. She had a kid, a teenage girl—blue hair, piercings, a black and grey hoodie with holes in the sleeves—and I got on the kid’s good side by building her a little A/C-capable shed of her own next to the trailer. The kid and I weren’t close, not really, but I loved her too, as an extension of Candi. Or maybe as an extension of myself. I’m not sure where the affection came from, but it was real, and it was there, and it was as awkward as a giant moving box in the tiny trailer with us anytime we interacted. Where was the boundary? Who was I to her? Who was she to me? All I knew was that I really, reallydidn’t want to mess up the kid’s life. So generally I kept my distance.

The kid was a total pro on the hover. Suited for math, like Candi was. Analytical. She was smart. Wary. Good at the things she wanted to be good at. The kid wasn’t a big fan of me, sure, and despite all her smarts, she was never interested in school. She carried a messenger bag with a neon green SLACKER patch everywhere she went, hover folded up and stashed away next to whatever book she was reading that week. She didn’t have many friends, but that didn’t seem to bother her much. She was totally focused on her plan to go on to be a hover champ. Candi was always taking her to far planet tourneys with the hope that some engineering firm would sponsor the kid—the X Games had surged in popularity on Earth since Amarsica’s far planet low-grav atmo sections provided bigger, sicker air than ever, and since the invention of hovers in general. It’s now or never, the kid always said. Hover scouts only want boarders in their teens. I understood the feeling. She knew who she was, what she wanted, and how to get it. She had to focus on that goal, didn’t want to miss her window.

But since Candi died, she’d lost that focus. That’s how I knew she was really hurting. The kid hadn’t even been back on the hover since the day Candi got sick.

That moment is etched in my memory, can’t shake it for shit.

Candi burst into the Airstream at five P.M., carrying bags of airsealed fresh grosh and enough printables for the next two weeks. Today was errand day, I knew; second Friday of the month. Candi was a nurse down at the off-rig hospital in New Pasadena, the one where I was usually stationed. The one with the most injuries. Keeps a nurse busy. Keeps us on our toes. Candi plopped a bag of Cheezballs on the counter, and the kid, trailing her, blue hair shagged down over her eyes like the latest popstar, hover in hand, grabbed the bag with her free hand and ripped it open with her teeth.

“Manners,” Candi scolded. The kid made eye contact with her and spat out the ripped top of the plastic bag. Then she headed back outside.

“Hover,” she offered as explanation, then let the door slam behind her.

“How was your day?” I asked Candi.

“Oh you know, the usual,” she beamed and popped a ChickenCaz cartridge into the kitchen printer. The machine whirred to life and started laying stripes of puff pastry crust down in a perfect rectangle in Candi’s old stoneware casserole dish with the ducks on it. “Lots of blood and guts. But that’s the best part about it.” She smiled and leaned in for a kiss.

“You’re disgusting,” I said and she smiled again. I sat down in the chair by the TV to watch the kid out the window.

“She just broke up with her girlfriend, by the way,” Candi said from the kitchen.

I watched the kid out the window. She was doing flips on the hover in the patch of dirt that served as our yard, tossing a cheeseball into the air and then zooming up and over to catch it in her mouth at the top of each flip. The red dust plains stretched endless behind her, the bluish meniscus of the East Planet terraforming bubble just visible as a glinting reflection of the sunset on the horizon.

“Girlfriend? Wasn’t she just dating a guy?”

Candi scoffed. “Carl, she’s not limited to just one kind of attraction.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “I just—she moves on fast, is all.”

“Yeah, well, she’s a teenager,” Candi said. I heard the sounds of her stacking the grosh in the fridge. “They do that.”

“You think we need to talk to her about it?” I asked. It was hard to tell when the kid was broken up over something, or at least it used to be. Now it was painfully clear.

“Nah,” Candi said. “You know Bryn. She’s resilient, and she—”

A clatter of grosh packets, the horrible sound of a body crumpling to the ground. The glass of water she’d been holding shattered on the faux tiles of the Airstream’s floor.

I jumped to my feet. Outside, the kid fell off her hover, sprinted inside.

“Mom!?” she yelled.

“Candi!”

She blinked, came to. A little fuzzy, unhurt, at least from what we could tell that day. But there it was. The beginning of the constant fatigue and the rapid weight loss, of the doctor’s office trips, of our knowledge of the badness in her bones.

The beginning of the end.

And it would end, only six months later, even though the doctors had given her five years, easy. Even untreated, she should have stayed longer. She shouldn’t have died.

[cmd pause footage]

[cmd fast forward]

[cmd stop action]

[cmd play footage]

[!]

[re-enter access code to continue]

[********]

[Thank you. Footage rolling in 3, 2, 1]

None of us had ever really been to East Planet. The hospital was over there, the one we took Candi to. And we’d make the annual trip to go vote at the ballots. But we hadn’t spent time there. Not long enough to really experience it. And it is an experience.

There are the hyper-developed suburbs for the uber wealthy, massive custom houses placed atop long stretching green lawns like crown jewels, glimmering white colonials, spired and gothic gray Victorians, the bright yellow of enormous, Spanish-style haciendas. There are trees, too: every kind, from massive, sprawling oaks to delicate cherry trees covered in blush pink blossoms. Pristine private lakes glisten with the freshest water available from Far Planet.

If you’re thinking Hollywood, you’re not wrong. A lot of big movie stars live in East Planet, now—well, all the aging movie stars, anyway. The retirees. Tons of former professional athletes. Tom Brady has a mansion that literally floats in the sky—some kind of specialized low-grav build. A lot of ex-football players (from back before it was banned) come up to Amarsica for the top notch brain damage treatments, if they can still afford the trip. I hear they’ve opened a few drug rehab facilities up here, too, for the ones who really need a change of scenery in order to recover. Like I said. East Planet has become a kind of wellness Mecca, for those who have the cash. You can get full-on skin replacements, be launched into orbit for a year as an anti-aging measure, dynamic gene editing, and more, if you have the money for it. You can also get state of the art cancer treatment for what Candi had. But not if you’re living on a rigger’s salary.

There are two main corporations who run the whole thing. The Marley Corporation and something called CorpSec, which also runs the refineries where people like me work. It’s not an official monopoly, but it’s pretty clear to anyone who looks twice that there’s no other competition, and that the Marley Corporation and CorpSec are at least copacetic, if not wholly owned by the same people. Whatever. I guess this is what happens at the far end of capitalism. Monopolies aren’t monopolies, but only because now they’re corporate oligarchies. Some fifty years ago, they say there was a move toward socialism, but once oil on Mars became a legitimate prospect, all the legislators swung back to the old standard, dollar signs in their eyes.

[cmd pause footage]

[cmd fast forward]

[cmd stop action]

[cmd play footage]

[!]

[re-enter access code to continue]

[********]

[Thank you. Footage rolling in 3, 2, 1]

I wasn’t always like this, bitter and pissed off at the East Planet elite. But after Candi, the extravagance felt more unfair than it ever had before. And I wanted to see it, in person. The kid and I deserved that much. If it were so important to keep these movie stars alive, when our Candi had to die without treatment, then hell. The kid and I were going to see them, at least once.

The only semi-affordable trip to East Planet, these days, is a trip to one of the ReParks, specialized natural habitats for all of the rich people who opted to become ReAnimals. I mean, yeah, the reParks are mostly out of style now, but they were all the rage for a solid couple of decades. Anybody famous who’d died in, I don’t know, the ‘40s or ‘50s are still out there kickin,’ in some form or another, their consciousness implanted into a custom, lab-grown animal synthetic. If you believe the doctors who perform the implantation, your entire personality is preserved; it’s really you in there, only you’re a tiger or a bear now, or whatever. Apparently, there’s a full communication system in the synthetic too—you can’t actually speak, because you’re an animal now, but you can text back and forth with each other, with human family and friends. Pretty state of the art stuff.

I figured a trip to the newest of the parks, the biggest and most extravagant, would be a nice distraction. A way to try to get back to our lives. A bookmark. Or a kind of eraser, even better. We deserved it, after everything. We deserved a look at these East Planet riches, at the people who wouldn’t give Candi the medicine she needed. It would be cathartic, poetic.

At least that’s what I thought then. This shit—agh, sorry, still stings where fabric’s stretched across the skin—none of us deserved this shit.

Still, Candi would have liked coming here, damage be damned. She was obsessed with the weekly tabloids. The idea of stalking through an artificial, Jurassic rainforest in order to get a glimpse of Jason Momoa as a reStego was totally up her alley. But Candi was also an adrenaline junkie, loved an adventure, whatever it was. I guess the kid took after her in that way. I took a little vial of her ashes with me, for old times’ sake. Still got ‘em around my neck, see? Guess I won’t be going out alone after all.

It wasn’t just Candi, though. Everybody I know wants to get out here just to try and guess which of the ReRaptors housed Beyonce’s consciousness, see which of the ReBrontos Meryl Streep was lounging around in. They all could picture themselves laughing about how stupid Bill Gates would look as RePteradactyl, with those leathery wings and that awkward cone head. But deep down, each and every one of them wants to reincarnate as a dino.

Why? That’s easy. When it comes to reincarnations, the bigger and flashier the animal, the higher the price tag. Why do you think there are so goddamn many reRats around? Hell, if I decided to reincarnate, I’d probably only have enough for a reRat, and that’s being optimistic. Most people these days can’t afford much more than reLivestock, at the most. The rePredators are for hedge fund managers—nobody I know has planned for anything flashier than a reCat.

When it first came about, voluntary reincarnation, a lot of big wigs and celebs were still feeling weird about supplanting their conciousnesses into an animal’s body. Which, you know, makes sense, if you haven’t gotten used to the idea. I mean PETA had a conniption about the whole thing, of course, but technically, since all the reAnimals were grown from dead pig skin cells in Petri dishes out of Mars Settlement labs, they’re not really animals, and anyway in the end the Supreme Court dismissed the case. Who gives a fuck about the rights of labgrown animal shells that aren’t even born with consciousness? Not the governing body of the United States, that’s for damn sure. Especially if those living animal skins offer a shot at immortality for humans. Ain’t no human gives a damn once there’s something in it for them, and that’s the truth.

Anyway, things started off small, like they always do. The first reRat. The first reDog. Then after a few years more, the first reTiger, Siberian. All Instagram famous. More and more people decided to reincarnate before they passed. Before the whole process was made affordable, families bankrupted their savings to give grandma a new lease on life, this time as a reWolf or a reHorse or even a reDolphin, once reCorp opened up the controversial ocean-based conservancies on Earth. Damn, CorpSec had a hell of a time regulating the waters once global warming picked up, though. Not that defending the land-based conservancies for the reincarnated was any easier. I can’t even imagine the hell those Grandma reDolphins are in, now that the moon’s orbit’s been artificially slowed. I’m sure the oceans are all kinds of fucked. But I haven’t been back Earthside, not since I left in 2035.

Since last year, the news has been going on about an Everglades-themed reGator park—imagine that, wanting to go vacation at a place where a bunch of reGators running around with the brains of dead middle-class boomers behind the wheel. But yeah, the park is apparently real, complete with reGator wrestling and, some say, even reGator hunting, for the right price if you know a guy. Though if that were the case, CorpSec would have been on them like a bunch of reRats on a discarded bag of synthetic barbeque Taterlike wedges at the transpo. Say what you will about the reincarnation biz, the reRats have really become a problem for pre-Re—or OG, or whatever the fuck people are calling it now—human Amarsica colonists like yours truly. They’re everywhere, digging through the trash to suck the leftover fat ink out of ChickenCaz and TurkRoast cartridges, attacking family picnics at parks, the whole deal. At least Amarsica has no natural animal life, only synthetic reAnimals. Otherwise, we’d be overrun. There’d be fights, too, I imagine—animal vs reAnimal, and I think that kinda takes the whole point out of getting reincarnated at all. If there’s a chance something else will kill you why go to the trouble—and expense—of jumping your consciousness into a vulnerable animal skin on your deathbed?

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So the kid and I load up on the transpo, and zip off to East Planet. They tell us on Comm that we’re staying in a state of the art reResort, newly purchased from The Marley Corporation, the people who invented the reincarnation industry in the first place. The trip on transpo only took 30 minutes, and then we had arrived at the intersection of celebrity culture and the fear of death: the official reDinosaur habitat. They had each of us put on some shitty dinosaur printed vacation shirt—like a Hawaiian shirt, only filled with t-rex and triceratops instead of surfers and bikini babes. And then they snapped a picture.

The place was sprawling, and everything in it was huge, custom-grown in a lab somewhere to match various periods on Earth: Jurassic, Triassic, whatever. Neatly groomed gravel paths wound through enormous boulders and redwoods, and pristine signage listed both the kinds of reDinos you could see in each enclosure as well as a Who’s Who of the celebrities in each environment. The whole thing was at once totally surreal and less interesting than I had hoped, and I worried for the kid, who seemed to be barely tolerating the trip.

Later that day, the kid and I were leaning against the fence of the reBronto habitat, where Meryl Streep was calmly eating the leaves off of a patently accurate Jurassic era deciduous tree. The sun was getting low in the sky already, and we had only been there for a few hours. I was starting to think this whole trip was a bad idea, but then the kid said something.

“What do you think Mom would have picked?”

“What do you mean picked?” I asked. I was startled; it was the first unprompted thing the kid had said to me in months.

“You know,” the kid said, blowing her blue bangs out of her face. “What kind of dinosaur do you think she would have chosen, if she could be one?”

“Kid, I don’t think we could have afforded…” I started.

The kid rolled her eyes. “Forget it,” she said. “Heaven forbid you have a little imagination for once.”

Something sank in me. It sucked, because she was right. I kicked a stone on the ground and it skittered along the gravel sidewalk before hopping the curb and disappearing into the brush just beyond the enclosure fence. I looked over at the kid. She was leaning on the fence, stone still. The way she held herself now, like if she relaxed, even a little, her armor wouldn’t work, was so unnatural to the laid-back slouch she usually adopted.

I watched her for a minute. We stood maybe five feet apart, like we were strangers. Her eyes shone with sudden tears, and she set her jaw, willing them back. I thought I should move closer. I was technically her guardian now, not exactly a parent, but close enough, and I thought of her as some kind of relation—I had never had kids, before her, and she wasn’t even technically my kid. But still, I wanted to do right by her. I wanted to protect her, help her. But I also didn’t want to hurt. I reached out a hand, then thought better of it—the kid didn’t like physical contact, not unless it came from Candi. That might make things even worse.

“What about archaeopteryx?” I said, keeping my tone as casual as possible.

The kid glanced up at me, cracked a small smile. “Yeah, maybe.”

“It’s the only one that’s special enough,” I said. The kid stepped closer.

“You think they have any archaeopteryx here yet?” she asked after a moment. “We could, I don’t know, go look at them or whatever. If you want.”

“Yeah!” I said, and the kid scoffed at the enthusiasm in my voice.

When we walked away to go find a map, the kid quickened her step to keep pace with me, bumped my shoulder with her own.

“Hey, thanks,” she said. “For taking us here. It helps, weirdly.”

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[Thank you. Footage rolling in 3, 2, 1]

Of course Kanye was the first reDinosaur. Who else did you think it would be? I think he was also the first one that monster took down, too—the whole throng of starfuckers we were with freaked the hell out. I mean, Kanye’s also a raptor, or he’s a reRaptor, anyway, but it was no contest. When the real raptor appeared, park staff tried to set up a Comm with it; there are no portals in the rePark—that’s military grade tech—so that it materialized at all was a big issue. Clearly something went wrong somewhere. Also, the raptor’s coloration was all off and different. reDinos are all kinds of bright colors: pink, purple, electric blue… whatever their buyers want. This raptor was olive green and black, all-natural, with no excess additions, and there was none of the lag that happens with reAnimals. No slowed reflexes, nothing. Just slashed right through the Kanye reRaptor’s jugular. Sprayed blood everywhere. I mean, everywhere. And then, well, then it leapt onto us, shredded us. Everybody scattered. I mean, you can see the damage—sliced me clean open from my shoulder to my hip, right across my chest. Never been more scared in my life, man, I’ll tell ya.

[Transmission error. Buffering… high res will return in 5, 4, 3, 2…]

carl what the hell are you doing we need to get you to the med bay

Kid? I thought—that raptor had you cornered.

yeah well i thought the same about you

How did you get out of there?

i don’t want to talk about it

Kid, are you okay?

are you talking to a fucking video camera

Yeah. Hoping for Fox Intergalactic to pick me up for a new reality show about bleeding out with your family on vacation.

shut up carl

jesus you are really ripped up

Yeah I don’t think we’re gonna be able to salvage the shirt they gave us.

bummer. that thing’s probably worth like 4,000 dollars on eBay right now.

What?

yeah it’s got Kanye’s blood on it or whatever. people pay out the ass for that creepy shit.

Could have paid for my med bay bills, huh Kid?

dad, don’t try to make jokes, okay? you suck at it

what

why are you looking at me like that

stop

It’s just, you never call me Dad.

ugh. dad, can we not?

dad

DAD

come on, you asshole, stay with me

…

fuck

fuck, the raptor

HHHHSHHHSSSSSSSS REEEEET AWKHHHSSSS OOoOOOoO

…

crunch crunch slurp crunch draaaaaaaaaag REET OoooOOOOooO

oh my god

it took dad

how am i going to get out of here

how am i going to get home

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[What is the report?]

[Test 207 complete. Conclusion: Organically

grown dinosaurs distinguish synthetics as prey. Some

collateral damage. Alert CPS on-planet of orphan girl.

Description: short blue hair, medium build. Moderate force authorized.]

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[Report sent.]

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[cmd delete]

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[Y]

[Delete function will permanently delete transmission. Continue?]

[Y]

[enter access code to confirm delete]

[access code ********]

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ghostradiostoryhour · 5 years

Text

BREEDERS: excerpt

I’ve been working on finishing my novel about a teenage girl who conceives a harpy after her brother rapes her. The family is front-and-center in their little town, and Hayley, the main character, is just trying to maintain, all the while becoming monstrous herself. Click “Keep reading” to check it out!

The next time I wake up, I’m lying face-up in the middle of the kitchen floor, my arms and legs splayed wide.

My head is alive with pain, and it takes me a minute to get my bearings. I sit up slowly, propping myself up on my elbows. I rub my eyes–wetness—and look at my hands. There’s a dark, viscous liquid all over my fingertips. All around me, too, there are wide, reddish streaks on the white tile. I look up and blink. Above me, the ceiling spins, its square fluorescent light leaving harsh arcs of brightness in my too-sharp vision.

No, Mark, please, I almost cry out, thinking of being back in the Bronco with him again, of seeing, through the back window, the yellow light in our driveway bobbing in time with the jerks of my body. But this is different. I’m alone. A fleeting terror spikes within me; blood, that is blood on my hands—the baby. Is this what miscarriages look like? I wonder. But when I check, my stomach and legs are clean, my clothing intact. I put a palm to my stomach. I don’t know what I’m expecting—it’s not like I would be able to feel the baby moving yet–but the action calms me, makes me feel like I’m being responsible or something. I mean, it doesn’t matter, I still don’t want to keep the baby or anything. But I don’t know. I guess I just feel like I should be nice to it while it’s here. It has a lot shittier life than I do, after all. At least I’m not deformed. At least people actually got to know me before deciding to hate me.

The now familiar feeling of nausea bubbles up again, hot, insistent. I lean over, choke it out. But instead of bile, I spit up dust and feathers, and finally, a brown pellet, almost the size of my palm. The effort is excruciating. It makes no sense. Clearly this is a dream, a full and painful dream, yes, but a dream nonetheless. I wonder what Brooke is going to think when I tell her about it. I wonder what Brooke is going to think of all of this. I try to close my eyes, change the dream—sometimes I can do that—or at least wake myself up, but it’s no good. Looks like I’m stuck in the creepy B-level horror movie version of my life for now.

I turn onto my side and poke at the pellet with a fingernail. A small, avian skull comes loose and clatters on the floor.

I wait until I feel normal again—coughing up the pellet hurt like hell—and then I get up and clean up the mess with a dustpan and broom. I have to clean everything up so that Mom doesn’t freak out. I grab the Lysol from under the sink, some extra strength paper towels. I try to stay quiet—I don’t need Mom or Dad waking up to me cleaning up a bunch of dried blood in the middle of the night. When it’s done, I double-bag the trash and step outside to toss the mess into the garbage can.

It’s barely morning, and in the dim half-light of pre-dawn, I can just make out the outlines of the garage, the far-off fence, the swing set, and closer, the solid light grey of the paved patio. But then I notice that the patio is dotted with smallish, dark shapes. Then a terrible smell hits me. I do my best not to gag. I breathe through my mouth, but then it’s like I can taste the stench. It smells like the zoo. No. Worse than that. Like the bird cages at Petco. I lean against the back door, and flip on the light switch next to the grill. Light floods the pavement.

Scattered on the ground every few inches or so, are dead starlings. A whole flock of them, probably forty in all.

I cover my mouth and nose; my stomach roils. Breathing as shallowly as possible, I creep closer to the massacre, squat next to one of the dead birds. Some of the birds have been chewed in half, others are whole, their sleek, green bodies motionless, curled up on the concrete.

Again my head throbs. All this mess. I think about picking one of the birds up, examining it, but then I remember that small dead animals carry diseases. I remember the blood on my hands, the bird skull in the pellet I coughed up earlier. My stomach churns. I push the thought from my mind. I don’t have time to worry about that right now. Right now what I have to do is get rid of the birds.

I go into the garage and grab a shovel from its hook on the wall, and one of those giant black trash bags Dad uses for grass clippings when he’s done mowing the lawn. I stand the bag up against the side of the garage and get to work, scraping the birds’ bodies up off the concrete and dumping them unceremoniously in the bag. As I work, I wonder how they all got here. I’ve heard of birds killing themselves from flying into glass doors, but never a whole flock at once. And these birds look like they threw themselves directly at the concrete patio. I think of the skull, the pellet, the floor of the kitchen.

I scoop and dump, scoop and dump, and soon, the sun has risen. I throw myself into my work—no way I want to have to explain any of this to Mom or Dad. I wonder how much time I have until they’re awake, and scoop the last of the birds into the bag. I’m tying it off when I hear a crash from inside the house.

I drop to the ground, and strain my ears. I think the crash came from the kitchen; at any rate, I can hear people moving around in there now. There’s a low-pitched, muffled murmuring at the sink–Dad’s voice. He must be cleaning last night’s dishes, talking to Mom.

“Ian, I told you, I was with the lawyer, going over the stuff for the appeal,” Mom says, her voice a sudden sharpness in the early morning quiet. I notice that the back door isn’t entirely closed—I guess I forgot to pull it shut behind me when I came out here. I’m glad; I want to hear what they’re saying.

“You didn’t even come home until midnight,” Dad says.

“We were building Mark’s case for the appeal,” Mom says. “Which you could be helping out with, by the way.”

Dad clears his throat, says something so low I don’t hear it at first. A dish crashes into the sink.

“What?” Mom spits at him. “Why are you attacking me?”

“We’re supposed to be a family.” Dad’s voice trembles a little, but I can hear the anger in his tone. “You have two children, Cynthia. Two. Not one.”

“Oh, that’s rich.” Mom laughs once, a sharp sound. “This from the man who has done nothing to support his son.”

“I’m serious,” Dad says.

“So am I,” Mom snaps back. “And anyway, if you ever came to any of the meetings with the lawyer, you would know that I’m building a case against the city of Wayne, Pennslyvania, not against Haley.”

“Bullshit,” Dad says. “You think this is Haley’s fault. You know it, I know it, and she sure as hell knows it. You’re always jumping all over her, disappearing on her. You don’t have to take it out on her. It’s hard for all of us to accept what happened.”

“I don’t jump all over her,” Mom snarls. “I just don’t think it’s quite so simple as you’d like to believe. She’s not totally innocent in this.”

“She was raped, Cynthia,” Dad says. “That makes her pretty damn innocent in my book.”

“So it’s all Mark’s fault then. Tell me, Ian, how is that not choosing one child over the other? Explain that to me.”

I shift my weight a little. My elbows dig into the concrete, and my toes burn from crouching like this. But I have to hear.

“Look, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around, too. I can’t say I’m entirely sure it was Mark,” Dad says, his voice quiet.

“See? You said it yourself!” Mom’s voice swings up and thins out, the way it does when she’s about to cry.

“But we don’t know it wasn’t Mark either, okay!” Dad says. “Regardless, it’s certainly not Haley’s fault. Jesus.”

There’s a pause. No one’s moving.

“My son isn’t a rapist,” Mom says, her voice deliberately level.

“Well, that doesn’t change the fact that your daughter is a victim,” Dad says.

When Mom speaks again, she sounds tired. “Don’t call her that. She’s more than that,” she says. “You sound like the fucking reporters. She doesn’t need her own father calling her weak too.”

There’s a crash from the sink. “I didn’t say she was weak!” Dad yells. “At least I was there for her today. And don’t try to tell me you were at work, because we both know that’s a lie.”

“I was at work,” Mom says. “And anyway, who do you think took her to the doctor in the first place?”

I hear Dad let out a sigh. I can tell he’s sick of fighting. I wonder how long this has been going on. “Look, it’s terrible what happened. All I’m saying is that pretending it didn’t happen isn’t going to help her either. Haley needs her mother.”

“Mark needs his mother, too,” she says. “And his father.”

“It’s not like you’ve been the pinnacle of parenting lately,” Dad spits at her. “Tell me something—what kind of mother doesn’t go to her own daughter’s ultrasound with her?”

“Listen, Ian, I don’t care if you approve of my parenting tactics. I am still the mother of your children,” Mom snarls. “You will treat me with respect.”

“Respect,” Dad scoffs. “Yeah, I’ll treat you like a parent once you start acting like one.”

“You want to know why I didn’t go?” Mom says. “You want to know why I skipped the fucking ultrasound? Because I don’t want to support that kind of behavior. I want nothing to do with it.”

“What kind of behavior?” Dad laughs without humor. “Being responsible? Making informed decisions?”

“The informed decision to take a life,” Mom says darkly.

“She may not have a choice in the matter,” Dad says.

“Bullshit,” Mom says. “There’s always a choice, in everything we do on Earth. You choose to get pregnant. You choose to blame your brother. You choose to kill an unborn baby.”

“God dammit, Cynthia!” Dad says. I can hear him pacing back and forth. “How can you keep defending Mark like this? Your thirteen-year-old daughter is pregnant because of him, not because of some choice she made. We’re in this situation because he raped her. Rape, Cynthia. He raped her. There’s no choice in that.”

“No,” Mom says. I can hear her scrubbing down a pan. I blink back tears and do my best not to make any noise.

“No?” Dad’s voice cracks. “I can’t believe this. What do you think happened?”

Mom is silent.

“Answer me!” Dad yells. His tone makes the hair along my scalp prickle.

Mom shifts in her seat—I can hear the creak of the wicker breakfast room chairs.

“I just—I can’t accept that God would let something like this happen,” Mom says. Her voice is edged with tears. “Mark couldn’t have done anything like that. Rape is a sin.”

“Oh, so because it’s a sin, it’s suddenly impossible? I thought you said everything was a choice.”

“For someone truly walking in the path of the Lord, there is only one choice, and that is to glorify Him.”

“So what you’re saying to me is that if you believe in God, you’re suddenly perfect, just like Him,” Dad says. “I don’t know what religion you preach, but the Christianity that I introduced you to doesn’t believe that people are perfect in the eyes of God. God loves people because they are sinners. At least that’s how the God I worship works.”

“I didn’t say God was perfect,” Mom says.

There’s a pause. I can hear Mom start to cry, just a little.

“If Haley has to get another abortion, or if she decides to give birth to this baby,” Dad says. “Whatever she does, you’d better be there for it. Do you understand me?”

Mom scoffs.

Dad is silent for a moment, and then he says, “God, I can’t imagine how terrified she must feel right now.”

“Yes, I imagine so,” Mom says quietly. “Whatever choice she makes, she’ll have to deal with the consequences.”

Dad is quiet for a moment. “Do you really think Mark is innocent?” he says, his tone softer.

I hear Mom run the water, set the pan on the counter.

“I don’t know,” she says, and lets out a deep breath. “I don’t know. I don’t really think Haley would decide to sleep with anyone. She’s too young, and anyway, she’s smarter than that. I know she is, I raised her. But I can’t—I can’t bear the thought that Mark—that some man would have forced her—“ She breaks off, takes a few breaths. When Mom speaks again, her voice is wavery, choked up. “I wasn’t there to protect her, Ian. I thought that God would help with that, but He let me down. And because I trusted Him, I wasn’t there. The point of being a mother is to protect your children. It’s a kind of promise,” Mom says. “If she was—“

“Raped,” Dad says, his tone flat.

“Yes,” Mom says. “If she was, then I didn’t keep that promise.” For a moment nobody says anything. I take a shaky breath, and smell the sour blood on my hands. A bird chirps in a tree somewhere.

“I don’t want to be a bad mother,” Mom says. Her voice breaks on the word mother, and I can hear a low moan, then wet, heavy sobs. “I don’t want to hate God, but how can I love a god that lets my children suffer like this?”

“Come here,” Dad says. “Cyn, come on. Come here. Come pray with me.”

“Praying,” Mom scoffs, her mouth full of tears. “Where has praying ever gotten anyone? You’re right. No perfect God would let this happen. No God at all.” She trails off. Dad clears his throat, the way he does when he’s not sure how to comfort someone.

“I just want my babies to be safe,” Mom says. “I just want to protect them.”

“I know,” Dad says. “I know that. We just have to stay together on this, okay? Like you said in church last weekend, we have to have faith that things will turn out alright in the end.” He’s trying to flatter her, his go-to when Mom is upset. I can’t tell whether he actually believes what he’s saying.

“Don’t mock me,” Mom says. “You don’t know what I’m going through right now. You don’t know how I feel.” I hear the screech of chair legs on tile, a body being pushed into the wall or the fridge.

“How dare you assume that your feelings are somehow more complicated than mine?” Dad says. “I know exactly how you feel. We’re in the same boat here.”

Mom says nothing, but I hear her cross the kitchen. A cabinet opens, and there’s the sound of glass jostling against glass, the slosh of liquid. Another cabinet opens and shuts. I hear the trickle of liquid into a glass. A bottle set down. Mom winces audibly, breathes out.

“Whiskey at 7:30 in the morning. Beautiful,” Dad says with disgust.

“It’s a Saturday,” Mom says.

Then suddenly there’s a scuffle, the splash of spilled liquid. Mom lets out a cry.

“Let go of me!”

“Give me the glass, Cynthia.”

Then there’s a thump, and the unmistakable sound of glass shattering.

“Look what you did,” Mom says. “It’s everywhere. Broken.”

There’s a small pause, then Mom starts to cry. I hear the little tinkle that means someone has started to gather up the glass.

“No!” Mom yells. “No. Just leave it. Leave it broken, like everything else. I want it to look real.”

“Shut up,” Dad says, and keeps cleaning.

The slap of a palm against skin. Dad gasps.

“I said, leave it,” Mom says.

There’s a moment where no one speaks. I hold my breath. Then I hear the crack of Dad’s bad knee as he stands up.

“I can’t live like this,” he says. The sound of his receding footsteps tells me he’s left the room.

My breath catches in my throat and tears well up in my eyes. I listen for Mom, to hear if she’s crying, but I can’t tell. I don’t think she is. I sit there for a long time, waiting. The sun rises high enough in the sky that the skin on my arms starts to warm, then burn. Finally, I hear Mom gather up the glass in a plastic bag and get to her feet. Without a word, she places the bag in the trashcan and sets her cup in the sink. Then she retreats into the depths of the house. When I hear the creak of the stairs, I know she’s going to Mark’s room.

A strange emptiness opens up inside of me, and the guilt I’ve felt ever since that night with Mark, the guilt I felt for all of us, for allowing everything to get so fucked up, pours into the emptiness like lead. When I breathe in again, my breath is ragged and thick—my whole body feels weighed down, impossible to lift. I get to my feet, and drag this bag of dead birds to the garbage can.

I’m almost to the trash can—the bag is way heavier than I thought it would be—when I hear Dad’s footsteps getting louder. “How long has this been open?” he says. I hear the door squeak wide open on its hinges, and Dad coughs. “Ugh, what died out here? It reeks.” He spits, then starts to close the door.

I manage to heave the bag of bird carcasses into the garbage can with a heavy thump. Dad comes running outside. When he sees me standing in the driveway, I wave.

“Morning,” I say. My voice cracks a little, but I play it off as early morning dry mouth.

“Haley,” he says, rushing over. “Bear, what are you doing up? It’s 8 AM on a Saturday.”

I nod toward the garbage can. “Couldn’t sleep,” I say. “Thought I’d get a jump on some of my chores.”

Dad looks worried, probably that I heard him fighting with Mom. “Sorry I left the door open. I was jamming out.” I pat the pocket of my sweatpants like my phone’s in there or something. “New playlist from Brooke’s band,” I say, and smile. He seems to buy it.

“Well, you know, you don’t have to do chores today, in your condition,” he says.

“I know,” I say. “Where’s Mom?”

Dad raises an eyebrow. “Forget it,” I say, and head back into the house, exhausted. In the hallway in front of their bedroom, I stop, listen. I hear her humming. I hear the shower hiss to life, followed by the little creak of the clear plastic shower door closing. For a moment, I think I hear her crying, but then I realize where the pained sounds are coming from. Me. Mine are the only tears in the house.

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ghostradiostoryhour · 5 years

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Ghostwriter

When he figured it out, Drake McConn was on his third smoke break, leaning against the grey marble of the Dallas Morning News building. He stared at the front page of that day’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram. THE FARMER SLAYER STRIKES AGAIN, the headline read, stamped black above a graphic photo of a man in overalls lying dead in a pasture, glassy-eyed, a smear of dark blood across his temple. In the relatively plain background, behind the crime scene tape, McConn could just see the outline of a handsome man in a rain slicker and a felt fedora, a press card sticking up from the hatband. Himself.

Sensational though it was, this was Maude Drooby’s picture. McConn had last seen it curled and drying in Drooby’s dingy apartment, clipped next to her shots for the week on a metal wire she’d stretched across her bedroom. He’d seen the photo when he came out of her bathroom in his towel after his morning shower. That was last weekend. McConn frowned. Today was Tuesday.

He glanced at the article’s byline. Ace Maven. Of course. For a month and a half now, the bastard reporter had been stealing McConn’s articles for the Star-Telegram. The quotes were the same, as were the details Maven included. The articles printed practically his own words. He had to admit that Maven’s stories did use better vocabulary, but any decent journalist knew that kind of thing only bogged down the story, made it sound stilted. His Dallas readers didn’t take to such highbrow stuff. No way the shit-kickers in Fort Worth had the brains for it. Still, it was Maven’s work that made the front page, not McConn’s. Maybe those cowboys out in the sticks didn’t care about world events like the Communist threat, or pressing matters like Senator McCarthy’s views on the war. The fact remained that Maven continually beat McConn to the front page, and today’s article was no exception.

McConn folded the newspaper in one hand, then took a long drag off his cigarette. The wind flapped his trench coat around his knees. He grimaced. It was getting colder. He checked his watch. Five more minutes.

Over the last month, McConn had taken to buying a Star-Telegram every morning to check for stolen articles. On the rare day that McConn didn’t put a story out, Maven didn’t either. That Arlington murder story was his, just like his piece on the disappearance of the Dewitt girl, or the expose of the prostitution ring run by Red sympathizers in the upper echelons of the Dallas Country Club. All Maven seemed to write were the stories McConn had already written himself.

McConn looked out on the flat grey parking lot, on shined sedans and coupes that gleamed like jewels on the pavement. His own black Oldsmobile was parked next to a beat-up station wagon. Colin Grant, editor-in-chief. McConn leaned into another gust of wind and flicked the butt of his cigarette to the curb.

Whenever Grant emerged from his corner office, McConn expressed his concerns about Maven. He was a menace and a phony, andthe Star-Telegram had frankly no right to print Maven’s work; couldn’t Grant see that? They were being robbed, robbed! But Grant always seemed to be only listening halfway, his sharp black eyes floating over the most recent proofs, searching for any last-minute flaws before sending them down to the presses in time for deadline. That’s when McConn took matters into his own hands.

He called up the Star-Telegram. No dice. Apparently, they’d never even seen the elusive Maven. He always sent his secretary to drop off his articles, to pick up his checks. All they could tell McConn was that the secretary in question was attractive, in the dumb way most blondes were. She didn’t like to talk much, probably because there wasn’t much in her pretty little head to begin with, the man at the Star-Telegram joked. Then the paper dismissed McConn with a sharp warning: if he so much as thought about suing the Star-Telegram for copyright infringement, they’d have him over a barrel sooner than he could say Ace Maven.

He’d even spoken to Drooby about it. For a woman, she was surprisingly insightful when it came to reporting. McConn had noticed her for her looks, but over time, he came to realize that she was as ruthless with the red pencil as he was determined to get the best stories on his beat. They made a great team. Why wouldn’t he ask Drooby for her opinion? As his photographer and his typist, she was essentially a secretary, wasn’t she? It wasn’t crazy to assume that she might be able to help identify Maven’s woman. But the one time he’d brought it up, he was in bed with her, running his fingers along her bare spine. She’d only pressed her lips to his ear and said, “Shhhh,” before ducking beneath the sheets. He smiled a little, thinking of her body, the way she always smelled like rosewater and darkroom chemicals. Drooby was certainly useful for more than just clerical matters; unlike his timid wife at home, Drooby was fearless.

But how was Maven getting access to his work? The only other person who saw his writing before it went to press was Drooby. He walked a few steps, scuffed his shoes on the sidewalk. Then a creeping dread filled his veins. She would never—

He shoved the newspaper under his arm, pushed through the rotating door. His shined leather oxfords clacked satisfyingly as he crossed the polished marble floor to the elevators. A caustic feeling rose like steam in his chest. The elevator dinged to the fourth floor and the paneled wood doors opened into the newsroom. He made his way to Drooby’s desk, pushing past the men in rolled shirtsleeves and women in tweed pencil skirts rushing between desks with sheafs of paper in their arms. The clatter of typewriters at work filled the dusty air. McConn could see Grant pacing in his office, arguing with someone on the telephone and smoking a cigar. Drooby was at the water cooler, laughing at something one of the other secretaries had said, looking as vapid as ever. Quiet, McConn pulled open the drawer of her desk. Inside, along with some pencils and loose paperclips, was a little black book. He opened it. There, on the first page, the only entry: contact information for the editor-in-chief of the Fort Worth Star Telegram. From across the room, Drooby caught McConn’s eye, flashed a smile. He dropped the book, pushed the drawer shut, and stepped away from her desk. McConn decided to swallow his rage, for now. He would handle the problem later, in the cool blue of her little apartment downtown. In a feline motion, Drooby took a seat and looked hard at the fragmented poem in the spool of her typewriter, running a finger along the edge of the paper.

“Have you been reading my diary, Mr. McConn?” she asked, then turned to arch an eyebrow at him.

McConn forced a smile back, did his best to keep his voice light. “Just looking for a piece of paper,” he said, and tapped the little spiral notebook in his shirt pocket. “I always forget.”

Drooby’s lips parted in a smile, but her brown eyes held the same cruel expression they did when she was working through a particularly difficult grammatical problem, or writing a new line of poetry.

“Silly of you,” she said, still watching him. McConn felt her betrayal sear into him. She was a liar. She had lied, stolen his work, and now here she was, mocking him in front of everyone. The photo in the paper under his arm seemed as though it would burn a hole in his jacket. Looking at her now, at her small, fox-shaped face, he wondered what else she had lied about. There was no way he could wait until the end of the workday. Drooby needed to be dealt with now. But not here. He cleared his throat.

“How’s the poetry coming?” he asked.

“Oh, you know. Slow, as usual,” Drooby said and shrugged. “Nothing like your articles, speedy and efficient.”

“I should think not,” McConn said. “I’ll leave the poetry to you.”

“Probably smart,” Drooby said. “Where journalism is a dead body surrounded by white chalk lines, poetry is a difficult phantom, ever racing away.” She laughed, placing her hand with its long white fingers on his forearm. “Listen to me. Ridiculous. How was your smoke break?”

“Insufficient,” McConn said. He grabbed her elbow, pulled her face close to his. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve been dying to get you alone.”

She batted her eyes, then stood and swung her coat around her shoulders. “Whatever you say, boss.” McConn winked at her andripped the sheet of poetry from the typewriter, folded it into a little rectangle, and stuck it in his hatband next to his matches. Drooby grabbed her purse and followed him out for the last time.

Back at her apartment, Drooby and McConn slammed into each other violently. Up against the bar in the kitchen, they rattled the spirits in their glass decanters. Down on the bedroom floor next to the radiator, their breath rose, spectral. McConn could see the name Ace Maven ghosting through Drooby’s eyes. When they were naked, McConn felt her tense beneath him. He lifted her fragilebody to the long desk, where her most recent photographs bobbed, bloated cadavers on the surface of three plastic tubs filled with developer, stop bath, and bleach. He dropped her on the table, sloshing chemicals. She brushed her nose along his shoulder, bit his collarbone. She dug her fingernails into his back. He pulled away, the metal wire where she hung her photos bumping against his fedora. Drooby tried to stand, but McConn grabbed her brittle wrists in one hand, pushed her back against the table.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Drooby yelled.

With his free hand, McConn reached for the metal wire and pulled until it ripped from the wall. Curled, drying photos scattered to the floor and fell into the tubs of liquid.

“You’ve been stealing from me, Mr. Maven,” he said.

He wrapped the wire twice around Drooby’s skinny neck.

“Drake, no—“ she said, and her voice came out fuzzed and weak.

“I’m only here to take what you stole, to collect on what you owe me,” he said, and let go of her wrists. In one swift motion, he yanked as hard as he could on both ends of the wire. The sharp metal slid through her frail skin and arteries like cheese. She coughed and the blood came haltingly at first and then in a steady pour, gurgling out of her throat onto her fallen photographs. His palms stung where the wire had cut them. He watched the pool of red around her body spread. Blood dripped from the table in thick streams.

He pulled her poem from his hat. Then he struck a match, lit it on fire over her dead body, and threw the burning sheet of paper at her makeshift darkroom. Flames grew and jumped along the legs of the table. The phantom forms of people bubbled and cracked in her photos. Drooby was slumped on the table, an unresponsive pile of flesh. McConn watched the flames climb over her spine, crackle in her hair. He felt nothing, only stared. Drooby’s skin blistered and smoked under the fire. Then a sudden shudder rocked her whole body, and she sat up with a sudden jerk, like a marionette pulled upright. She ran to the kitchen.

“Drake!” Drooby yelled, and McConn heard the sound of turned faucets, of water pouring into the metal sink. “Help me put it out!”

McConn looked down at his hands. Two matching horizontal cuts were still there from when he had pulled down the wire, when he had strangled Drooby. Only now when he looked, the metal wire stretched across the bedroom as though nothing had happened. The cuts were painful to the touch, but they had already started fading. He looked up at the burning darkroom before him. The photos clipped to the metal wire started to smoke and warp. The odor of spilled chemicals, sticky and dark like blood, rose from the soaked carpet where the tubs of stop bath and developer lay overturned. McConn breathed through his mouth.

Drooby ran into the room, carrying a pot filled with water. She heaved it toward the flames, and the water hissed into steam. Casting the pot aside, she rushed to her closet and pulled on a nightgown. McConn watched her, disbelieving. She looked almost blurry as she moved through the apartment, but maybe that was just the smoke. Drooby threw his slacks at him and he yanked them on. She picked up the phone on nightstand and dialed 9-1-1.

“Fire,” she was saying. “213 Elm. Yes. Please hurry.”

When she disappeared outside, McConn followed her, his hands stinging.

The next day, everyone in the office brought Drooby some kind of condolence: flowers, Bundt cakes, cards. Even Grant pitched in for a floral arrangement, though he was pretty miffed about losing the photos set to run that week. It seemed that Drooby was rattled, but by all appearances she was the same old Drooby, sweet and coy, quiet, hard-working.

Still, McConn felt something sinister lurking beneath her newly repentant demeanor.

“Afternoon, Drooby,” he said as he passed her desk to drop off a draft of his new story. The office clacked and rang around them, as it always did. But just beneath it all, McConn could hear a sound like flames crackling. It got stronger as he moved closer to Drooby’s desk.

“How’s everything at your mom’s place?” he asked politely, picking up one of the cards on her desk. His fingers smudged through the air, as though they were made not of solid flesh. He dropped the card in fear. Drooby frowned at the page stuck in her typewriter.Clearly the fire hadn’t affected her futile obsession with her idiotic little poems, anyhow.

“It’s fine,” she said. Then she lowered her voice. “You have every right to be angry with me, but you didn’t have to burn down my damn apartment just to make your point.”

McConn placed his hand on her shoulder and immediately regretted it. Her skin didn’t feel like skin but like ice water, more liquid than solid. He jumped when she turned to face him. Her features had been scrubbed down, erased. Two burned out holes had replaced her quick brown eyes. When she spoke, the twisted gash that was her mouth didn’t move, but a deep slit at her throat gushed blood as red as her editing marks.

“You destroyed my photos, my poem,” she said. “Your writing wasn’t worth that.”

McConn’s palms started to burn. The skin around his new scars was dissolving. It bubbled and cracked with the sick noise of popping grease.

The rest of the office went about business as usual. It was as though nothing were out of the ordinary, as though this—thing—wasn’t sitting in their midst, searing people’s hands off. He tried to walk away from her desk, but he found that he could not move from the spot.

“What are you doing to me?” he hissed.

Drooby just pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear. Small blue sparks snapped at her fingertips, and soon, her entire body crawled with fire. Flames singed the desk where she rested her elbows. The chair burned beneath her.

“What am I doing?” she laughed. “You of all people should understand the concept of editing.”

“Editing?” McConn asked. Brown burnt spots speckled her already face, and sheets of her skin flaked away to burn in the air like newsprint. “Editing what?”

“Reality,” she said. “You are a superfluous detail in this reality.”

His ears filled with the sound of flames, and he could not move. Grant approached the desk with brows furrowed.

“Excuse me, Ms. Maven,” Grant stopped and rapped on the edge of the desk by way of introduction. “You were saying?”

McConn felt his breath quicken.

“Just thinking aloud,” she said, with a smile. She glanced at McConn and curled her fingers into her ponytail.

“Well,” Grant said. “I just wanted to say nice work. He tugged on his sport coat. “That article you wrote about the apartment fire was gold, pure gold.”

“Writing is my life,” Drooby said. McConn could see a hint of fire in her lips.

Grant flicked the brown felt hat on her desk. He nodded toward a large brown spot on the floor next to her desk. “What’s this? It looks as if something burned.”

“Oh, that?” she said. “You’ve got me. I have no idea.”

As Grant walked back to his corner office, Drooby turned to McConn one last time, looked him hard in the face. Then she reached out and put a hand on his shoulder, but he couldn’t feel it. All he felt was flame.

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ghostradiostoryhour · 5 years

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Athena--the world collapsing

This is an excerpt from a collaborative novel I wrote a few years ago. A destructive AI is tearing apart the world she’s created. Enjoy! Chapter Five Lightning crashes outside the window, and my dread quickly springs into panic. The rain is coming down harder than ever, and even though the sun has risen, it’s hard to tell, thanks to the heavy cloud cover. I throw the blanket off of me and run around the house, searching for her, trying to calm the rattled feeling inside of me, like a dozen birds are trapped in my lungs, my stomach. “Athena!” I call, but the house is silent. By the looks of things, it’s deteriorated at an alarming rate—there are gaping holes in the walls as though some huge beast has ripped into the manor-house. Though I know that that’s impossible. The roof sags. The stairs are bent and climb feebly into an open chasm left where my room once was. Rain pours in through the holes in the ceiling, in the walls. The wind howled overhead, the sky now the rancid green of an impending cyclone. I thought once of the wolf, alone in the trees. The garden trellis groaned, and with a sickening snap, came away from its foundation, and tumbled across the grounds with the broken gait of a wounded deer.

“Athena!” I called again, but there was no answer. I climbed the crumbling stair to find that the furniture of my room remained, though the walls and roof had torn off in the wind. The walls gone, I could see all the way to the lake, a bright green splotch in the olivy darkness of the storm. My hair ripped away from my face with a sudden gust off the water. A dark shape streaked across the plain, a little ways away from the water, but I couldn’t immediately make it out—was that Athena?—but then a second dark shape followed after, close behind, a strangely loping thing, something lanky and matted and darker than any shadow yet. I gasped and when it heard my cry, it halted, turned to look at me. Two yellow eyes in the green haze of the storm. My wolf. And then, just as quickly, it’s disappearing into the weaving haze of the treeline, which sways like the image on a television with bad reception. The rain pelts my face hard as I descend back into the relative shelter of the shell of the house. The whole sky seems to be cracking open. I call out for Athena as I race through the kitchen, the library, the halls. I even search the servants’ quarters where Marion and Mantis and the rest of the staff bunk, but the room after room down the hall is completely empty--there is no one to be seen, not another living soul. My heart races and my hands shake. Where is everyone?I round the corner to the last room, Mantis’s room, and I throw the door open.

There, on the single bed, sits Mantis, my favorite teacher. He’s hunched over, and breathing hard. Is he crying? I go over and touch his shoulder, and when he looks up at me, I recoil. His eyes, once clear as a pond, are cloudy and white and full of cataracts, and his hands and body are feeble and frail, like a dessicated skeleton. It’s like he’s aged immeasurably overnight. “Mantis, what happened to you?” I ask. I’m hardly able to get the words out, I’m shaking so hard. But he doesn’t seem to hear me. He looks around, searching, his bad eyes straining.

“Who’s there?” he says, his voice a croak. Then he doubles over and his body racks with a sickening cough. I scream and back out of the room as quickly as I can, fear spiking through me like knives. I turn and run, down the hall, up the stairs, into the library, but there’s a note on the library door, written hastily in a left-leaning scrawl. Athena’s handwriting.

I’ve gone to save the queen, it says.

My heart twists, and I freeze. The breath is knocked from my lungs. The queen. The lake. She’s gone to find the Stone of Kings tile at the bottom of the lake. Athena’s not a good swimmer. Certainly not a good enough swimmer to handle the lash of water that would toss her around in a storm like this. Thunder booms overhead. I have to stop her.

I take off down the path and out through the woods, squinting as I run to see through the onslaught of rain that crashes down between the trees. I leap over gnarled roots and slog as best I can through the woods. My tree, the tree where we met, has been split in two by lighting. A black scorched fork runs right down the middle of its trunk. It steams in the damp dark of the forest. I keep running. A dark shape runs alongside me, and through the trees, I can see that it’s her lynx, eyes glowing blue, full out and sprinting next to me. I duck beneath a low hanging branch and its gone again, vanished into the mist of the rain and the forest shadows.

When I break through from the treeline, I see her, or a shape that I think is her, at the far edge of the green, roiling lake, standing motionless on the high, rocky ridge of the bank, her hands at her sides--in her pockets? Before her, the lake churns, yellow as a snake’s upward-looking eye, its surface spinning like a whirlpool.“Athena!” I call out, but she doesn’t hear me. Through the rain, I see her bend and collect something from the ground, then deposit it in her pockets. Are they stones? But why would Athena be collecting stones? I push my hair and the rain out of my eyes, and I see her step closer to the edge. Stones...water...and then, like a bolt of light, terrible light, it comes to me. Virginia Woolf. Last night, right before we went to sleep, Athena was talking about Virginia Woolf. How she killed herself by collecting enough stones in her pockets that when she walked into the river, she wouldn’t be able to keep herself from drowning. Athena is going to try to kill herself. It doesn’t make sense, but that’s what it has to be. Either that or she’s really trying to get the queen tile back. This is my fault.As I realize what’s happening, as if on cue, Athena takes another step closer to the edge of the lake, only this time she’s not hesitating. She’s going to do it.

I scream out her name and then bolt toward her, flying over the ground as fast as I can will my legs to move. There’s no way I’ll make it in time, but I have to try. If I can only reach the water soon enough, maybe I can pull her out before she sinks straight to the bottom. I try not to think of the huge waves that are forming on the water’s sick green surface, I only run, as fast as I can, willing my feet to fly faster than they ever have before, willing myself to cut through the air and the distance between us as though I am a knife thrown fast and sure, straight to my heart, straight to Athena. “Stop!” I scream, with everything I have. The word burns red in my throat. Athena does stop. For a moment. She stops, and I swear she looks right at me, cutting through the lavender grass toward her. Then she steps off the edge of the rock face. She seems to hover in the air for a moment, and I stop breathing, but I don’t stop running. And then she’s pluged beneath the waves. The lake has swallowed her whole.

It feels like I am also drowning, but I push the thought from my mind and I lean harder into my stride. I have to get there. I have to.

As I run, I see the wolf sitting just at the edge of the woods, watching. A surge of hope spikes in me.

“Help!” I yell to the wolf, not caring if I sound crazy. But the wolf flattens its ears and raises its hackles at me. Then it turns and vanishes into the woods. The panic returns, and I leap into the water at full speed. I open my eyes under water but I can’t see anything with all the water swirling and tossing like this. I kick hard and barely make it back up to the surface and I’m starting to feel like I’ll come undone. It’s nearly impossible, where is Athena? I can’t see anything, and I’m fighting the waves with everything I have. The water pushes me under and I claw my way back to the surface, doing my best to fight the current that’s pulling me down, down, and into the center of the lake. Overhead, the sky is swarming with the lunar moths, more than any I’ve ever seen before, almost like the moths themselves are chewing away the sky, though that can’t be right. Nearly the entire sky is full of the glowing blue insects, casting a faint and terrible light over the thrashing water.

Then I see her--the top of her head, her spiky brown hair. She’s gasping for air. I pull myself toward her, but then she’s vanished again, without a trace, and I dive down hard and fast after her, where I think she is. Under the water, everything is darkish, shadowy, and I can’t make her out, not even the top of her head, not even a shadow. I hold my breath, swimming down and down until I feel my chest is about to burst, the sound of the water rushing past, that echoey sterile thrum of being underwater.

A scream cuts through the noise. Athena.

But all of a sudden I’m feeling light-headed, my vision is tunneling into black, and I know that I’m drowning. The water rushes into my nose, my throat, my lungs. Maybe the scream wasn’t Athena at all, but my own voice. Maybe this is all a dream, but the water crushing the air from my lungs insists otherwise. Athena. I’m losing her. Everything is going black.

Then I break the surface, and the water disappears. I am completely dry. I am awake.

And I have no idea where I am.

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