The young spring grass was wet under her bare feet; it licked at her toes and tickled her soles. Leaves crackled beneath her tiny steps, slimy things squirmed, and a damp patch gave way to her weight like a cold, loose slipper. She paused and felt the earth wanting to keep her, bury her in its dark and muddy bosom. She skipped away, bowing and singing in a whisper, “Not now, my lady” while clutching her doll tighter in the crook of her elbow.

The wind blew across the cornstalks and then up and through her thin nightgown. The darkness surrounding her hinted at movement—the hushed cacophony of things she could not see being, building, hunting, dying. She smelled the oranges of the fruit trees, the cattle dung from the barn half a mile away. When she looked back, Grandmother’s house was only a deeper shadow amidst the night, scowling at her; the aluminum wind chimes scolded her from the front porch.

The drain rose out of the ditch at the far front corner of Grandmother’s yard just beneath the road. She had not yet seen a car pass along it since her arrival in her Grandmother’s sputtering green Buick, suffocating in her two sizes too small black dress, squeezed in the backseat with the bumpy-skinned suitcase and her other boxed up belongings.

She rested her palms on the concrete that reached up to her waist. Loose gravel dusted the rim. A large chunk was missing and she saw the rock monster that had come and taken a bite out of it—a very sloppy eater. She laid Angeline atop the rusted iron grating and peered inside, the half-moon’s light leaking down deep into the hole. Clumps of oak leaves and cornstalk debris, mud, and a paper-slim pool of water reflecting back the star-dazzled sky above her. She crinkled her nose at the sweet and sour stench of stagnant water. A frail tail of water flowed on to a darker hole beyond, hidden and mysterious, as black as her sleep or the other side of the moon, as black as she imagined death.

Abby came here in the deep end of night after her Grandmother had fallen asleep (her bear-like snores rattling the floorboards) because…well, because she could. And because if her dreams were real and her prayers were answered, and her mommy leave the ground into which she had been slowly lowered by crank and metallic poles, then Abby knew she would come through that black hole and up and out of this drain. And who else but Abby would be here to help her and greet her with the tightest, warmest hug that ever was given?

Her skin was cold; mud coated her legs. She was seven years old and knew that there was no Santa Claus, that people on TV were actors, that most adults were disappointed and sad, and that the dead did not come back to the living—ever.

But still…She sat down and hugged the concrete in her arms, felt its frozen, rough surface against her cheek like the softest, warmest flesh.

*

Veering across the road, she tried to light her sixth cigarette of the last half hour, one right after the other, never easing the pressure of her bare foot on the gas pedal.

“Screw you!” she cursed, as an old timer in a blue pick-up blared his horn and flailed hairy arms out the window at her.

She jerked the wheel back, exhaling a stream of smoke, and slammed her palm into the soft cushion of the steering wheel. Took another long drag.

She turned up the heavy metal on the radio, music she did not like but felt she needed in this wasteland of corn rows, insectile tractors, and bare, weed-strewn fields. That never-ending, gold-green horizon as empty as a void.

Underneath her sweat, her skin itched. She had panic attacks at the sight of week-old road kill shoved onto unmarked berm. Animal shit honored as incense, rotting grain silos nailed to the horizon.

She coughed and rubbed at her burning eyes. The road curved and wound back in persistent, sometimes sharp, arcs until you felt trapped in a circular maze, getting nowhere, like a pit bull nipping at its own tail. She looked in the rearview mirror as if for an exit, saw her own red, sleep-starved eyes and hollow face, the scabbed lips and dirty, brittle hair and reminded herself for the hundredth time that what the hell…there was nowhere else.

Besides, she came from scarier lands.

The road changed names again, finally into the familiar Lilly Chapel-Kiousville Run. She told herself she recognized the scattered farm houses, the condemned barns, the patterns of forest and field.

Then, so sudden it snatched her breath, there it was—Grandmother’s house. Colonial, white with green shutters, sharp gables, taller than it was wide, a wrap around porch its only garnishment. A reef within this sea of cornfields. Withered but still standing like some other-willed junkie.

She slammed on her brakes and spun into the gravel drive, knocking her head against the doorframe. Blood blackened her vision as she skidded to a stop halfway down the drive.

Silence buzzed both inside her head and out.

She picked up a dirty T-shirt from the floor and pressed it against the cut above her eye, adding it to her list of well-won wounds. She cleared off the passenger seat and lay back, lit another cigarette as her hand quivered.

From somewhere a tractor rumbled, sparrows chirped in the oaks above her. The air hung heavy and fetid inside this junked up Volvo bought three days ago with her last couple grams of meth from some slumming New York University student.

She saw the catch basin at the far corner of the front yard as unremarkable as a drain could be on this unremarkable strip of land in this sickeningly unremarkable town amidst this vastly unremarkable, shitty life.

Yet her iron stomach soured and stirred, and she turned on her side and leaned her head over the ash-thickened carpet afraid she would vomit.

She pressed the T-shirt deeper into the cut until it sang and kept her eyes shut.

*

The cool kiss of a sudden burst of wind woke her. Abby yawned and dug her feet deeper into the grass, imagined the hundreds of insects she traumatized in the midst of their secret, busy lives. Angeline smiled at her as always.

Somewhere far away a wild dog howled. The cornstalks trembled. Why did she feel so safe when during the day, in the smells of her Grandmother’s potatoes and puddings, she felt so deadly alone?

Below her the water softly echoed. If she carried love seeds in her fists she could crush them into the ground with her heels and teach them how to grow and never trim them until they became as wild
and tangled as her own will.

She stood and looked into the drain. Nothing moved. She closed her eyes and furrowed her brow. Waited. Opened them again to see that nothing had stirred. Watched her spit ripple through the scum.

She lit upon an idea. A sudden white glare like when Mommy had come in and flipped on the bedroom lights after a nightmare had chased the screams from her mouth. What Mommy would have called “a moment of complete clarity.”

Angeline was long-haired and pale with dark eyes and a warm, close-mouthed smile. Mommy had made her and given her to Abby one day not long before her death when she was too sick to get out of bed. “Look how pretty she is, Abby,” she had said in her scarred voice and with wetness in her eyes. Abby knew Mommy said this because she did not think she, herself, was so pretty anymore, and Abby was about to tell how pretty she still was when Mommy smiled and hugged them both, so tightly, and told her Angeline would be hers forever and never leave and how happy that was. “I put a part of me inside her,” she had said.

Abby strained and pulled until the iron grating scraped across the concrete just enough. She held Angeline a full arm’s length out over the drain. Angeline was filled with stuffing and love, she would be fine. Abby let her go.

Water splattered lightly, the mud hissed.

Mommy would have to come now and return Angeline to keep true what she had promised. And if she didn’t, perhaps Mommy needed Angeline more.

Abby waited. Listened to the groans of the oak trees, the rattles of the cornstalks.

Angeline lay face up in muck near the black hole; the shadows of the oaks leaves shuddered over her smile. Abby began to regret what she had done. Angeline had been the last thing Mommy had given her. It was mean, inconsiderate. Mommy might take it the wrong way.

A cloud passed over the moon and all Abby could see in the drain was a rising darkness.

She was about to run to the house and wake Grandmother when she heard something.

She lowered her face into the hole. Pointed her ear down until she heard it again.

A voice. Choked on mud and roots.

“Hello…”

*

“Hello? Abby? Abby Wells?”

The face that peered in at her through the open window was red and puffy; his eyes small and greedy. The man smiled a faceful of square, yellow teeth.

She made him for an asshole immediately.

“You alright?”

She sat up, rubbed her eyes.

“You the lawyer?”

“That’s me, Ronald Macklin at your service.”

He tipped his cowboy hat and stuck his hand into the car, fingernails stained by some recent meal.

“Most people call me Sparky.”

He laughed and stood up, the swell of his belly and sunken crotch thrust at her face. She threw the bloody T-shirt underneath the seat and rummaged for another pack of Marlboros.

He stroked his russet goatee.

“Because of this I suppose…and, well, I’m a bit of a piston.”

He cocked an imaginary gun and fired off a volley of chuckles. She stared at him, cigarette dangling from her mouth. Struck the flint with her thumb.

“Well, Ronald. If you’ll step back a few feet, I’ll get on out.”

His chuckled, grunt-like.

The sun stung her eyes. A soft breeze blew her short, stringy hair about her face. The house stood quiet and mediocre and a little unfriendly.

“I’m sorry you missed the funeral, but…”

He paused and stared at the bruises and needle tracks on her arms. She moved around him to the backdoor.

“You were a tough one to locate, little lady.”

His sudden sour air of superiority and sweaty attraction was as strong as his Brut cologne.

She shrugged.

“Just as well. We didn’t know each other much.”

She grabbed the duffel bag from the backseat. Felt his eyes on her. They were all the same, city or sticks, animal or educated. Caught a whiff of feminine fragility and they were on the prowl, holding out their grubby, chubby paws with piles of sugar on them assuming no one could say no.

“Here, let me…”

He lunged for the bag. She stuck out her forearm and gave him a shove.

“No, I got it.”

He shrugged and grabbed his buckle, hitched up his pants.

“You stayed with her, right?”

“For a short time when I was a girl. After my mother died.”

“Well, she left you quite a piece here. Almost five acres. Not enough for farming but plenty to stroll about on.”

He held out his arm to take her in as they walked toward the house but she kept ahead just outside his reach. Bottles clanged together in the duffel bag at her side.

“Secluded but town’s only ten miles north. Get anything you should need there. The Freemans, that’s their corn, live up the road and are real nice folks. The house is agin’ but in decent shape. They made things to last out here, had to with the wind. Best of all, it’s paid off. She made her social security and the little she got out of your grandfather’s accident at the granary go a long way.”

He stopped her.

“Look, I don’t mean to influence you and I don’t know what your plans might be, but I know a lot of people who have their eye on this place and would give up quite a bit for it.”
The porch steps groaned under their weight. He lifted up a loose sheet of siding and pulled out a key. The scream door screamed as he swung it open.

“Well, let me show you—”

“I’m fine here, Macklin.”

He looked at her, mouth open and waiting for a treat. She took the key from his hand.

“Well, okay. But there’s some things about the house you should know. You won’t need it but there is a security system. The code is 0119—shouldn’t be hard for you to remember.” He winked at her.

It made her squirm. He probably knew everything about her. That was one thing the city and all the clustered, rat-trapped places she’d been had going for them over a place like this. There, you were always an unknown, part of an ever-mutable scenery; here, everyone knew you as intimately as the local mortician would at your death.

“The shingles need replaced. No washer or dryer. No dishwasher either. Mmmmmm. You understand about the bad stair that caused your Grandmother…well, it ain’t fixed, but I took the liberty of calling Jimmy Dulcet. He’ll be in maybe after the weekend.”

She squinted at him and nodded as she stood in between the front door and the screen.

“Listen,” he said, and stepped closer to her. “I know you’ve had some hard times and don’t know anybody around here.”

“I’ve been a stranger everywhere I’ve lived.”

“So you realize how nice it is to have a friend. Let me take you into town, get us fed, introduce you to some nice people, show you a good time.”

“Nope.”

She stared at him. He hovered, breathed deep.

“Okay, then, Abby Wells. I’ll leave you to it.”

He started down the steps as she turned and unlocked the door, stepped inside to the stale air.

“Maybe I’ll come back later on tonight and check on you. I could bring a fine bottle of spirits. Let me do something nice for you.”

He looked up at her, smiling full. A real thick, stubborn one like all the redheads she had encountered. Especially the older, well-fed, male ones.

“Not if this was my last night on earth, Sparky.” She flashed him her widest smile-sneer.

He laughed and whistled and tugged on his belt and continued on down the path. As his boots scuffed over the gravel his whistle continued, the first shrieked note calming into a chirpy melody.

*

Like the soft clackings of rodent feet, the voice echoed up the cold walls of the drain before fading in the air around Abby’s face, swept off by the wind.

“Hello, Princess.”

Stronger but still frail. Abby did not know if it was man or woman, adult or child. She dared not answer.

“I know you’re up there. I can see you. So pretty in the moonlight.”

Abby ducked down beneath the concrete, covered her mouth.

“Don’t be afraid. Come back, sweetie. I can’t hurt you.”

She looked back to the shadow-enveloped
house, so far away. The cornstalks breathed their dry breath.

“Please, don’t leave me alone.”

Abby slowly rose and peeked one eye over the edge. She thought she heard it sigh. A smell curled up into her nose—stale corn or her mother’s bed. Abby’s bellybutton had been infected once. It stunk like this in short, pungent bursts.

“Don’t you love the night? The feeling of being the only one awake amidst all this sleeping stuff? You know, if you close your eyes and listen you can hear all of their dreams.”

Abby closed her eyes. The thing in the drain hacked—flutter of dead leaves.

“Have you ever thought a dream real? More real than being awake? Have you ever wanted it to be so?”

It moved. A misshapen shudder in the darkness. The wet plop of mud; a scratch against the rock.

“Is this yours?”

Angeline’s face turned up into the moon’s full light, and with it, fingers as earthen and bony as winter tree limbs.

“Don’t you want her back?”

*

The face that met her in the living room mirror across from the front door was pale and sallow. The eyes heavy-lidded and colorless, blood smeared in their whites. Wrinkles like dried up riverbeds spread out from the corners of her eyes, dark sunken bruises like rotten fruit beneath. Skin thin and ungiving, lips dry and cracked. There were scars and ruptured capillaries. She was twenty-seven and twin to a corpse.

At age thirteen, after five years spent in and out of hospitals, she escaped from the psychiatric center and ran, hid, and hitchiked her way three hundred miles south to St. Louis. But she had never truly settled. Like a foot-bound shark, death if she ever stopped her manic movement. From curb to curb, city to city. Always in the heart of a metropolis with its chaotic conglomerates of brick and steel, traffic and smog, and most importantly, its thick, endless herd of others she could live amongst without memory.

For a long time she lived in the streets. She learned to sift through the scraps of trash bins and outdoor tables, to stay warm huddled in her own arms through frozen air and ice-slick streets. She slept on the loose gravel and blacktops of alleyways, grand church steps, the concrete slabs slanting down into foul rivers. She lay with rodents and dirty old men, within the piles of noisy, smelly strangers in sepulcher-like subways. She learned to be one of them, one of the countless many like a pebble in the pavement.

She learned the basic, stoic, human transaction of free trade—one favor for another. She sold whatever she had or could get; she offered blowjobs and gold-plated bracelets behind overflowing dumpsters. She learned to eat like a snake, drink like a camel. She knew the sounds of gunfire and sirens hot in her ears, of curses and screams, of shattered glass and the soft, meaty thuds of fists against flesh. Tastes in her mouth that could never be brushed away. She knew the constant, thus deadened, buzz-dread of being surrounded by violent men. She learned to cut herself often; it helped.

She knew of poverty; poverty in words, in feelings, of dreams. The jackhammer of hours surviving. She knew the claustrophobia of a jail cell and the empty expanse of men she loathed fondling and stabbing deep inside her. She learned how it was to be a rat: sniffing, searching with every clawed step; no corner unexamined, no hole condemned, until finding not food but a baggie of dust. She knew of marriage followed with divorce, and birth (the squirming, determined head splitting her open) followed by the sight of her son, small and stiff and blue in his crib. She knew reasonlessness and chaos, her overwhelmingly small insignificance within the crammed sea of indifference.

She knew of death, had known it as everyone did from the moment the umbilical cord was cut from around her throat. But she had come to learn of a life that was far worse than death.

*

“Who are you?”

Half her nose peeked over the concrete. She spoke softly and in spurts like rabbit hops.

“Just a voice.”

She lifted her face a little more.

“What are you doing down there?”

There was movement—a rustling, slithering. A cough full of pinecones and leaves and dandelion seeds.

“I’m hiding or I’m trapped. I can’t remember which. Maybe I’m crazy. I’m thinking of a curse. A once happy life undone by a horrific happenstance. Such things befall us sometimes. Perhaps I did something very bad. Maybe I’ve just been forgotten.”

“Isn’t it icky down there?”

“Oh, it’s not bad. You get used to it. Can be quite enjoyable if you don’t mind the bugs and the smells and the loneliness. And if you know what to watch and listen for. Sometimes special things find their way down here.”

“Like Angeline?”

“Just like Angeline. All sorts of special things. Pretty balls, strange creatures, sad poems. Coins and rings and old toys. Love letters and photographs and thumb-stained books. Drawings and wishes. Echoes and memories. Prayers. Just the other day I found this bent key. What could it open? And will it ever be opened again?”

Abby jumped up and leaned out over the drain.

“Do you collect them?”

“Oh, yes. I collect them all. I love them. You could say I feed on them in a way. They keep me alive.”

*

Abby set the duffel bag on the round, sauce-stained oak table in the kitchen. In twenty years the house had not changed; it was smaller, less imposing, but that was due to changes in Abby and not in any evolutions in her Grandmother’s tastes. Same Rockwell and agricultural paintings on the walls, same white lace curtains, same hardwood floors and wheat-patterned wallpaper. The soft, pendulum sway of the wall clock was like the beat of her heart—rote, insignificant.

In the sink there was a plate dotted with cake crumbs and a coffee mug with a thick, black ring crusting at the bottom. Abby scrubbed and dried them and put them away. A half-eaten apple, all brown on the inside, sat on the counter. A fly flew up from it when she threw it away. The refrigerator was forlorn with tubs of butter and creamer, a few cheese singles, soured milk, a head of leaking lettuce, a couple of eggs and a yogurt. The freezer was full with popsicles and indistinguishable, freezer-burnt meat. No matter. Her appetite, if any, groaned for a different sort of satisfaction.

She pulled the bottles from the bag one by one and stacked them on the table. Jack Daniels, Jose Cuervo, Absolut, Jagermeister, and a Glenlivet 20, a last luxury. Couple cans of cola and Red Bull.

She poured a glass of the Glenlivet. Smooth. That was what money got you—made it easier to swallow shit. She lit a cigarette, breathed, kept drinking. The sun fell below the corn, cut a swath through the stalks and bled scarlet across the table. A thousand still and silent witnesses as faceless as any crowd.

Cigarette ash collected in little mounds on the floor. She held the thin sliver of razor in the last of the blood-red light. She did not know how to feel since, of course, she felt nothing at all.

*

“Do you want her back?”

Abby nodded.

“I know you do. But you’ll have to help me.”

“How?”

Abby thought of promises, of vials of blood and her soul or her first born son. Of obtaining a lock of witch’s hair or some long lost, powerful stone. Of taking its place down there in the cold, wet darkness.

“You’ll have to let me out.”

Abby sighed and turned her back to the drain, sat down on the lip.

“What is it, Princess?”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Of course you can.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I should. I’m scared.”

The thing in the drained moved. Abby could feel its eyes on her back.

“Look there above you. Do you know what that is?”

A light singed the blue-black sky for a brief, shuddering moment, a tail of sparks trailing behind, and then disappeared.

“A shooting star,” she answered. Abby made a wish but did not speak it.

“Yes, and do you know what a shooting star is?”

“A falling star.”

“Yes! Exactly! Falling. Falling from its high seat in the heavens. Falling because it is dying.”

Clouds covered the moon. The world made
no sound.

“Think of it. All that glorious, life-giving light so old and massive and brilliant—even it too must perish. The most grand, powerful, beautiful thing can’t escape. At that very moment, as we watched, it died and all that life it created and sustained died too. A thousand worlds a thousand times larger than this one you and I are on. And there it has happened again! Look! Another! Don’t you feel how sad it is?”

The sky was awash in falling stars, bursts of shuddering light slicing open the night, falling into each other, into blackness.

“But it’s beautiful too, isn’t it? What does the dying star do in its final moment? It gives a moment of unequaled brilliance. A brilliant, breath-taking glory of fire that whoever sees it can never forget.”

Abby could not take her eyes away from them. It was awesome. She felt good, safe. Like her body was more than able to hold her all in. Like being in her mother’s arms.

“Someday, somebody will tell you different. They will bring books and photographs and tell you a shooting star is not a dying one. That it is not falling. That it is not even a star. But remember what I’ve told you. It’s truer than whatever they’ll say.”

Abby turned and looked down into the drain.

“Okay. I’ll do it. I’ll help you out.”

*

She turned on the light and shielded her eyes from the brightness. Took a drink of Jack and gripped the bottle tight in her fist.

The bedroom was as she had left it. Dusted and swept consistently over the years but the contents untouched. Ponies on the nightstand, a pink quilt with her name and birth date nailed to the wall above the bed, a bookshelf full of picture books and fairy tales. Stuffed animals littered the bed, all furry limbs and stitched smiles. Thumb-tacked to the wall were drawings of little girl hopes and little girl fears: colorful forests and unicorns flying past the sun; sharp-clawed, teeth-baring beasts full of smoke and anger and unnamable intent.

She felt nauseous, unbalanced. Had twenty years happened? But of course they had. God, she had lived them—she had the scars to prove it. Unreal were the years before she had escaped, in the moments she now looked at as she flipped through the photograph book her mother had made in a last desperate effort for immortality. She had no feelings for the bright-eyed, chubby-cheeked girl in the photographs. She could not remember these framed moments, the facts behind them or the emotions within. The only thing she felt looking at the pictures was how weird that the girl in them had ceased to exist, her reality as brief and burning as a candle flame, or if she did in a sense survive it was in a world and time from which she could never escape, that never ended or evolved, for there was no cord or sentiment connecting her to the present adult incarnation.

There was only one moment she could not forget no matter how far she ran or how numbed her mind. Abby turned off the light and went to the window. She could see it in the darkness—the cylindrical blackness rising from the weeds.

It was lifetimes ago, lifetimes, but this could be the morning after the way that night now seemed so omnipotent, omnipresent. She had become someone else, but here everything stood waiting and unchanged as if nothing had happened in the time between. She felt the cold stirrings of that old terror, the night that could not have been, that made no sense, but had certainly set her path. She had never thought of it until now, but here it was as clear as taking a cloth to a dirty mirror and cleaning its stains and water marks and casually surrendered bodily fluids. That night had brought her here to this moment.

She chuckled, took another swig, sucked her cigarette to the filter. Such realizations did not matter one fucking cent.

Her life was what it had been. It had happened. The past was not alive, nor were nightmares, and certainly not dreams. The only real thing was now.

She opened her hand to the razor blade resting in her palm. There was nothing so real as this. The simple straight edge, sharp and cold. Perfectly formed to its function.

She had not even noticed the cut it had already made, the thin line of blood in her hand, bright and vulnerable as a child’s mind.

*

“Good girl.”

Down in the darkness a flash of light like the ivory of eyes or of teeth.

“Now, wait for me.”

*

It was a short walk, not the journey she remembered.

The night was full, the road empty. The grass was dry and brittle against her feet, the earth hard and uneven. The last swallow of whisky sloshed around at the bottom of the bottle. She felt hollow as the wind licked at her skin, whistled in her ears.

The drain reached only to the middle of her thighs. Dead leaves scattered, the drip-drop of dirty water. Innocuous as a forgotten lie.

She put the bottle to her lips, staggered back on her heels. The alcohol trickled easily down her throat.

Of course what she remembered had not happened. All the doctors in all the white, windowless rooms had made that clear. Hallucination. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Adolescent Dementia. The Nightmarish Fancies Of An Overly Anxious, Sad Little Girl.

And they were right. Such things did not, could not happen. There were worse things, real things. Plenty had happened to her.

She lifted the grating and slid it with ease. Held the bottle out over it. She followed the moonlight down into the muck and saw, half buried in leaves and corn husks, two black eyes and a pale, plastic cheek.

And then a moist rustling like crows at war in the cornfields.

*

She did not know how it climbed the smooth, cylindrical walls, but she watched the shadow slowly rise and heard it too: the scraping against rock followed by a spongy slithering, the tumble of gravel beneath its steady progress. Her face held up into the moonlight, Angeline inched forward out of the darkness above the amorphous shadow.

“Abby…”

*

“Mommy.”

Like the wind through the corn. She fell to the ground her back against the drain. The bottle tumbled from her hand.

Of course there was nothing there. She was alone. The smell of oranges going bad in the scrub grass.

Silence. White fingertips pressing the edge of the razor into her palm. Nothing else was real.

She brought the razor down to the soft flesh of her wrist.

“Wait…I’m coming.”

The leaves fluttered. Reflected in the bottle, she watched the tiny hands emerge into the air above the drain, a curl of fine, blonde hair.

*

She stood above the grating, hands wrapped around the rusty metal. She trembled as the wind peeped under her nightgown. The moon was gone. Blackness filled the drain.

And then something cold, rough brushed her fingertips.

She let go, stumbled back.

A hand appeared from below, curled around the grating. A cloud of dirt and dust and flakes of rotten flesh puffed out into the silver air. The fingers were thin and black and gore-ridden.

“I’m here.”

The voice was familiar even choked as it was with gravel and mud. It drew her forward. Abby leaned over the drain.

Mommy’s face stared up at her, striped by the grating’s shadows. One-eyed, worm-eaten. Lice and maggots and plumper things crawled through her hair.

“Let me out, honey.”

*

The little river of blood ran down past her elbow. She exhaled. Surprised to feel the tears.

Her eyes closed, she heard the grating clang to the ground beside her. Something wet and heavy slithered across the concrete and stood. The corn and the oak leaves stilled.

She got to her feet, turned, and opened her eyes.

Saw not her son nor her mother, but herself standing naked before her. Skeletal limbs bloodless and blue, breasts like deflated balloons, eyes black and wet. The thing that was her held its arms out toward her, the twin gashes that ran the length of its forearms quivering, gulping for air. Under the pale blue moon it walked forward.

This was what death was. This was dying.

She came and wrapped herself in an embrace.

*

Everything went black. She fell to the earth; her screams had no sound. Her mother’s voice calling, begging; her skinless hands held the grating, beating against it, struggling to open it.
Abby ran and ran and ran.

*

Everything was light.

Her touch was cold like the breath of the dead, like the rivers underneath the earth, like moonlight. But as she held herself there was the heat of blood, the warmth of dawn sprinkling over dew-tipped fields, of thawing.

She remembered lilacs—how her mother pressed them into books—and the smooth perfection of laminate. She remembered tea and old fancy clothes and the happiness in her mother’s laughing green eyes. She remembered graham cracker pudding, baths, kickballs, flashlights dancing in the dark. The smell of her mother’s silk nightgowns and the sound of popcorn popping in the microwave. She remembered the taste of cold pasta, the scent of leather, the feel of oil on her skin. The freedom of a city street at night, its earnest hope at dawn. Cinnamon-scented soap, pillows, coffee, a key unlocking a door. The satisfaction of cashing a check, the sweet spark of meeting a stranger’s eye. The absolution of tears and the angry tender submission ingestion exhaustion of sex. The way a train sounded from a midnight’s distance. Bra-less days and rotating fans and to say the words “I love you.” Listening to her baby’s nonsense babble in his crib, the dance of pacifiers in his hands. His still, contented clinging. Rubbing noses, fingering his fine hair, basking in his uncontaminated smile. Taking turns pressing buttons on a colored keyboard. The playful weight that remained inside her no matter how far away he went.

That and so much more stripped clean.

She felt each one succinctly and everything all at once like a bomb, like a slow immersion into white bright light.

There was a flash and then it was gone leaving flaming, falling remnants behind. Inside of her and all across the distant sky.

*

The red Cadillac rolled into the gravel drive and disappeared into the dirt clouds that puffed up around it. Abby sat on the porch steps in jean shorts and a tank top, cradling a coffee mug in her hands. Jimmy Dulcet’s hammerings inside the house punctuated the rumbling from the granary up the road. She took a sip then grinned as Ronald Macklin strode up the stone path. She squinted up at him.

“Mr. Macklin.”

“Sparky, remember?”

He chuckled and stooped down to shake her hand. Smacked his spearmint gum.

“I was happy to hear your message. Sensible decision. Lots of people with their eye on this place. Easy sale.”

“First I’m going to work on this place some. Clean it up. Get some new flooring, paint, maybe some a/c and appliances. I have some decorating ideas.”

“Well, let me get some people out here.”

“I can handle it, Sparky. Just give me some time. No rush is there?”

“Nope. Not at all. That’s one thing about us out here; we take our time getting to where we’re going.”

His eyes stopped at the bandages on her arms, then lingered over her legs.

“I’ll tell you, Miss Wells, you make quite a bit better sight than you did the other day. I was worried about you.”

“I feel good, Sparky.”

“Hey, that sure is pretty.”

He pointed to the doll lying beside her. Abby picked it up, wiped away a bit of dirt from its eye.

“You got any little daughters? Nieces? A grandbaby or two?”

He laughed.

“Maybe one or two.”

“Take it.”

She held Angeline up to him. Ronald Macklin took it into his thick hands, gently.

“Well, that’s mighty kind—”

He went on but her eyes were already drawn back to the horizon and the palettes of blue there and somewhere within, certain but invisible, the myriad of stars.

---

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About the Author

M. Palmer lives in West Jefferson, Ohio with his wife and two children. His work has appeared in such fabulous venues as Fantasy Magazine and the anthology Tattered Souls from Cutting Block Press. Check out the upcoming March issue of Aoife’s Kiss for another short story of his.

M. Palmer can be reached at palmer.239@osu.edu.