Art by Michael Garlington. Design by Scott R. Jones.

Everyone knew our town was dying, long before we truly saw it. There’s a certain way a piece of fruit begins to wrinkle and soften, caves in on itself around the edges of a fast-appearing bruise, throwing off the sickly-sweet scent of decay and death that always attracts some creeping hungry thing. Some part of the town, an unused building sinking into its foundations, a forgotten alleyway erupting into a slow maelstrom of weeds and cracked stone, was succumbing, had festered, had succumbed: and now threw off the warning spores of its demise. Everywhere in the town we went about the ins and outs of our daily lives and business, telling ourselves everything was normal, everything was fine. And every now and then a spore drifted into our lungs, riding in on a faint thread of that rotting fruiting scent, and though we did not pause in our daily routines, we stumbled a bit, we slowed. It was the last days of summer, I had just turned thirteen, and the leaves were beginning to turn, people were gathering the final crops of their fine little backyard gardens, culling the lingering remains of the season’s foods and flowers, smoothing over the soil. My grandfather had placed a large red-rusted oil barrel off the side of the garage, and every evening he threw the gathering detritus of summer into the can, and set it on fire. Great plumes of black smoke rose into the warm air, feather-fine flakes of ash and hot red sparks. I stood on the gravel path, watching the bright red licks of fire crackle and leap from the barrel’s jagged edges as my grandfather poked the burning sticks and leaves further down. An evening wind carried the dark smoke up into the canopy of branches overhead, tall evergreens swaying and whispering as they swept and sifted the ash further into the sky. We watched in silence. The air smelled gritty and smoky and dark, in that way the air only ever smells at the end of a dying summer, the smell of the sinking sun and dark approaching fall. The trees shifted, the branches changed direction, and the sickly-sweet scent caught in our throats, driving the smoke away.

—What is that? I asked.

—I don’t know, my grandfather replied. He rubbed ash from his eyes, and stared out into a distance place neither of us could see. —Something’s wrong.

***

Summer officially ended, school began, and the town continued. It was easy for all of us to say that everything was fine. The dissonance in the air was the usual changing of the seasons, we told ourselves. Near the downtown area, on a small lonely street along the outskirts of the factories and warehouses that ringed the downtown district, that strange and troubling area where suburbia fizzled out to its bitter end and the so-called city proper began, a number of small businesses closed with no warning to their loyal long-time customers or to those who worked for them. I knew of this only because my mother drove down that particular street one early afternoon, having taken me out of school for a dentist appointment. My mother had frequented most of these stores in her childhood, and she loved driving down the street as an adult, pointing out to me all the various places she had been taken by my grandfather. A small confectioner’s store that supplied those queer square mint-tinged wafers that were both creamy and crunchy, the pastel sweets popular at weddings and wakes. A stationer’s store, where my mother’s family had bought boxes and boxes of thick cream paper and envelopes with the family crest, a horned griffin rampant over a field of night-blooming cereus, and where my grandfather bought business cards and memo pads with his name printed neatly in the middle, just above his title of supervisor for the town’s electric and water company. A dilapidated movie theater that showed films in languages no one had ever heard of, from countries no one could ever seem to recall having seen on our schools’ and library’s aging maps and globes. A haberdashery where my father once had his soft brown wool felt fedoras and thick lambskin winter gloves blocked and stitched to his exact measurements and specifications. It had been taken over just that spring by the son of the former owner, an earnest and intense young man with perfect pale skin and unruly black hair, and unfortunately large black eyes. All three of those stores and more sat dark and fallow all along the block, faded red CLOSED and OUT OF BUSINESS signs swinging against padlocked doors, display windows choked with cobwebs and dust, the now familiar odor of sickly sweetness lingering in the air.

—Why do I keep smelling that, I said, pinching my nose shut. —What is it?

—It smells like camphor, my mother said.

—What’s that?

—Like the mothballs in our closets, she said. —You know, what I use to keep your father’s and grandmother’s things from molding and rotting away. To preserve things.

—Preserve? Like jam?

—In a way. To protect things. So they’ll never grow old, and always stay the same.

That afternoon as my mother steered the car along the narrow meridian dividing the street in two, the pale young man stood outside the haberdashery’s doors, his long arms wrapped around a bolt of fabric as if he were carrying the body of a dead child. I started in shock to realize it was not a bolt of fabric, but a length of thick grey wool wrapped around the stiff body of a large bird with two beaks twisted into a hideous spiral and a spider-like cluster of lidless coal-colored eyes. My mother stopped the car, and we stepped onto the dry worn street sitting under a cool and cloudless sky crowned by telephone wires. No one else was here this time of the afternoon in this part of the town, a part of the town in the middle of everything yet nowhere in particular, where the buildings rose no more than two stories before flattening out in resignation and despair, where you could walk down the sidewalks for hours, see no strip mall or market or house that didn’t look like the one behind it and before, hear only the soft crinkle of your shoes against cracked cement and the occasional miserable distant bark of a dog. In hindsight, we should have been more vigilant, more aware that these were the places of a town where septicemia and putrification creep in first, those lonely and familiar sections we slipped into and through every day without concern or care—not the seedy crumbling but flashy edges where decay was expected, and, from a certain element of our small society, even accepted and encouraged. These quiet streets of lonely backwater districts, these were the places we never gave a single thought about, because we thought they would be here forever, unchanging in the antiseptic amber of our fixed memories. These quiet streets of lonely backwater districts were always the first to go.

—Don’t come any closer, said the pale young man to my mother as she stepped onto the sidewalk.

—What happened to all the stores? my mother asked. —When did everything close?

—Don’t go near the windows, said the pale young man. —It’s terrible, don’t look. He stepped forward as if to block her, his already too large eyes widening further, the rims and lids as purple-red as the leaves on the trees, as if he had been weeping for hours, for centuries. My mother, a woman who, like her father, my grandfather, did not pay much heed to the general spoken and unspoken rules of a town, brushed past him, and I followed in her wake, already at thirteen very much a similar stubborn member of my family. My mother stepped up to one of the display windows, and I to the other, cupping my hands around my eyes to block out the sun as I pressed my face against the glass. —Don’t look, the young man repeated, but he did nothing to stop us, only stood on the sidewalk cradling his many-eyed black-feathered bird wrapped in fabric, shivering in the afternoon sun. Inside the store, everything appeared covered in the light dust typical of such a place, but nothing appeared out of the ordinary. I had last been in the store five years ago, to help my mother pick out a fine linen handkerchief for my father for the holidays, before he had disappeared in the deep network of tunnels and passages owned by the town’s electric and water company. I kept staring through the glass. Bowlers and fedoras slumping over the resigned foreheads of cracked mannequin heads, weary trays of uneven chevron-covered ties, unpolished cufflinks depressed into velvet folds of faded burgundy. My breath fogged the glass, and I wiped it away with a pass of my hands. Everything was quiet, peaceful, still.

—I don’t see anything different, my mother said. —Everything looks the same as I remember. This is the way it should be.

—I know, the young man said. —It all looks the same on the outside. It always has. You have to look underneath.

—How can one look underneath? I asked.

—You just do. You just know.

I’m not certain how long we stood on the quiet sidewalk of the lonely street in that empty part of town, staring through fingerprint-smeared windows into darkness. I now only remember how after a time had passed and as the afternoon sun hitched further down toward the town’s jagged horizon, everything in the store seemed to recede, sink into an interminable black fuzz not unlike mold spreading across fruit. Soft sweet mold and mannequin heads, and no life at all in the displays and counters and fixtures and heavy folds of fabric, only the amber-tinged cool approaching dark. My eyes adjusted to the fading light, and everything in the haberdashery blurred and shifted into a single indistinct mass: for one wild terrible second I felt like I was staring into the only place left in the world, that there was only my face pressed to the glass front of a dead forgotten store endlessly out of the reach of my immovable limbs, and everything and everyone behind me, including myself, was forever gone.

—Nothing’s changed except the sign, my mother said. —This is unacceptable. The stores must be reopened, so we can shop here, as we’ve always done. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

The young man replied, —Yes. And it will never end.

My mother looked at him, but did not reply.

I stepped back from the glass, and as I did, I caught a glimpse of the pale young man’s face, reflected beneath the faded gold letters of the haberdashery that bore his father’s name. I saw underneath him. I saw his wide unmoving mouth, his tiny painted teeth, his lidless lashless eyes, his cool matte porcelain skin. It was then I remembered I had crushed on him briefly, that last spring. I’d told my mother how handsome he looked, how comforting and familiar, and she’d laughed me into embarrassed silence, and so I’d driven it from my mind. The young man turned from us, and as he walked down the sidewalk back into suburbia, trailing oily iridescent feathers at his feet and the numbing sweet smell of camphor through the air, I caught a glimpse of his neck below his black, black hair, and the straight bloodless seam like a strange new road, slicing through every part of the town I’d ever known.

***

My mother drove us home in silence, and we never spoke of the incident to each other again. I believe I was afraid to ask my mother what she meant when she said she saw nothing underneath, whether she meant she saw nothing out of the ordinary, or if she meant that she had perceived that same black nothingness the pale young man claimed he saw welling beneath the surface of the haberdashery, the nothingness that had spread throughout that entire row of stores. I was afraid to ask my mother what she meant when she saw nothing underneath, nothing changed, and said that was the way it should always be. I believe I knew then what I was afraid of, or rather there was a confirmation within me of what I had always known that I was afraid of; and my mother knew that I knew, and together in silence we drove home.

We drove down the street several weeks later. All of the stores displayed their usual faded yet cheerful red and white OPEN signs, but my mother didn’t slow the car, nor did she spin her usual tales of how her family had frequented the various shops over the years and what items she bought that were still somewhere in our house, carefully packed in cedar boxes lined with tissue paper and small white mothballs. I slid down in the car seat until my eyes were level with the plastic button lock on the door, and stared out the window at the haberdashery. Sitting on the sidewalk beside the dusty glass door, still holding the stiff deformed bird bundled in wool felt, I saw the pale young man that for one brief second in my past I had crushed on like the soles of my feet against soft gray gravel, standing, staring out into the street, the look on his face not unlike that of my grandfather when he stood over the can of burning leaves and ash. I had never told my mother what I thought I’d seen that strange afternoon in the face of the pale young man, or at the back of his neck. I didn’t need to. My mother smiled, and stared ahead, and drove on.

Fall deepened and thickened and the air above and over our heads grew cold, but the gold and red leaves and the earth itself were still hot to the touch, as though the trees were drawing up and throwing off some unseen underground fire. I woke up early in the morning, having slept every night with the light at my desk never off and the small television always tuned to movies so old even my grandfather had never heard of them. I dressed for school to the snowy images of sleek, long-dead women and men, drifting through a world constructed solely of pixilated shades of black and grey. My grandfather seemed never to sleep, spending evenings after work in the kitchen, spreading maps and charts of the town’s systems and infrastructures over the table, scribbling indecipherable equations and geometric shapes in blue ball-point pen across the outlines of our streets and neighborhoods he’d traced onto wide sheets of translucent onionskin, the low light of the kitchen lamp falling over his thick white hair and worried face. I would tip-toe into the kitchen to make breakfast, expecting him to be fast asleep, slumped over the table, a pencil drifting out of his large hand. He was always awake, sitting straight in the chair, on his face the same indeterminable and unfathomable look as when we stood at the barrel while summer died all around us, watching the ash disappear into the thick grotto of whispering evergreens.

—What are you looking at? I asked, as I pulled up my chair and sat beside him. —What is happening? What do you see? I asked those questions every morning of him, never sure what I was really asking. Was I asking what he saw in the maps, or what he saw in the false autumn air? Every morning his answers were very different, and very much the same. Picking up a piece of onionskin paper covered in small diagrams and paragraphs thick with words, he would place it over the part of the town map to which it corresponded and point to a specific cluster of words or diagrams now floating over a specific building or street, I would ask the question, and he would speak.

—The B&I Circus Discount Emporium, along South Tacoma Way, where Mom used to buy my winter clothes?

—The woman found her children on the carousel, the one in the middle of the store. You remember it. Employees dressed as clowns, and a dying ape in a cage. She left the girl with the son, an older boy, while looking for a pair of boots that had a left and a right foot, and a pair of pants that had two legs instead of three. Popcorn crackling and calliope music filled the air of the low-ceilinged acre-wide room. Cash registers and conversations. No one could have heard the screams. Maybe there were none. They all left their children there. She returned, all the parents returned, to a circular wood platform wobbling unevenly. Circus animals taffy-warped, the bodies of their children spiraling in ropes of blood and bone around wooden saddles, wooden poles, wooden stars. Store mannequins, plastic boys and girls with bright-eyed smiles, inserted like obscene arrows into delicate flesh. Calliope music, warped and stretched, washing through the air with their howls. Across the store, across a forest of metal clothing racks and rotting sales signs under a flickering fluorescent sky, the woman saw a store clown, bloated and swaying around a cement pillar like a dying parade float, slowly tearing the ape apart like cotton candy and cramming the pieces into its peppermint-striped mouth.

—The Safeway Supermarket, in the Highland Hills district, where you used to take me shopping when I stayed overnight with you and Granny?

—A young boy on a shopping trip with the mother of his best friend, who was playing in the refrigerated food aisles. Opening the doors, letting the frost collect on the warming surface, then drawing pictures and writing his name on the glass, like you used to do. His friend and mother were gone only for a few moments, looking for ice cream in another aisle. When they returned to the aisle, the young boy had vanished. Everyone was gone. No traces—no half-filled shopping carts, no purses or wallets on the linoleum floor, no cash registers open in half-completed transactions. The woman saw the boy’s words behind glass, the last letter elongated as if the hand writing it had slid down and away. She opened the door. Behind the milk bottle shelves and the thick strips of plastic curtaining, the movements of something quiet and colossal. A thick stench of sweet decay blossomed out into the aisle, hitting the woman so hard that she turned as if slapped, vomiting on herself as she ran from the store, ran from displays molding and blackening on the shelves, ran from open bins of vegetables exploding in clouds of insects and spores, ran from meat that slithered and whispered as it burst from its packaging, dissolving and reforming into something greater than the sum of its blood and gristle and bone, something that might have vaguely resembled a monstrous, profane, and profoundly damaged reconstruction of the missing young boy.

—Point Defiance Park, at the northernmost end of Old Town, where Mom and Dad took me to see the old fort, and the animals at the zoo? Mom got sick there one time. She said it was the hot dogs. We never went back.

—You were too young to understand. They took you along the road that winds through the old-growth forest, called Five Mile Drive, up to the abandoned logging camp. They took you to the small unpaved street of wood plank houses and shops, to the remnants of the railroad tracks where a single steam engine car sat for a century, its giant blackened pistons and wheels locked tight with rust and rain, the engine car your mother rested in while your father took you to the fort. Day and night, now, park rangers hear the thunder and roar of the engine, blasting and crushing and consuming its way through the woods, leaving behind two deep oily grooves of blistered burning earth that no normal plant or tree will grow in again. Other things are found in the self-made tracks, things the rangers have taken their axes to, then buried deeper in the ground. The desiccated remains of animals, lions and orcas, polar bears turned inside out, their bones splintered and shot through with iron splinters. Bubbling jellicular mounds of placenta, slick and hot with blood, the aborted machine-like creatures within them tearing feebly at the thick membrane with inverted limbs and jaws. The entire park has been shut down, but eventually, everything once alive within it will be eaten and rebirthed as something else. After that, who knows where it will go. There’s nothing to keep it from leaving.

—Narrows View, in the University Place School District.

Our district. My fingers traced wild ink spirals over to my old elementary school, just a block away from our house. My mother used to walk me up to the corner every day, then watch as I made my way halfway down the block then across the two-lane road, walking carefully within the thick white lines of the crosswalk. I used to imagine that if I stepped out of the lines and onto the worn black surface of the road, I would sink into a river of soft blacktop and tar, be pulled under even as my classmates continued across the wide parking lot and onto the breezeway that connected each of the ten low buildings that made up the school. They would run and dash through bright orange painted metal doors, disappear down linoleum-lined hallways into warm and humid classrooms, shedding coats and fluttering into chairs like autumn leaves. Bells would ring out, harsh and long clanging that echoed over the rooftops and trees, and the heavy yellow buses would belch smoke and squeal out of the parking lot and down the road; and then silence. And I, slowly sinking in the road, my school just yards away, my hands outstretched as if I could grasp it. I couldn’t. I never could. And my mother, standing at the crooked red stop sign at the top of our little street, hands at her side, the edges of her brown coat flapping in the cold morning air, watching expressionless as I screamed, then pleaded, then struggled, then gave up and stopped moving at all, just watched her watching me, watching the whole world around us grow dark and still, until we were both trapped in an endless moment in time, never to grow old, never to live, never to die. My hands, forever outstretched for her help. Her eyes, forever burrowing out hollows in mine.

I lifted my fingers from the map. The tips were so blue with ink, it looked like they were rotting away.

—They found a girl in the road, my grandfather began. His large hand covered mine, and placed it back down on the map. He looked so tired, so old. —The skeleton of a large girl, a colossal girl, a giantess. Rising up from the blacktop. Bones like deformed corkscrews, each bone fused from the skeletons of many smaller girls.

—Not different girls, I said, slipping my hand away. —The same girl, trapped in the same part of the road a hundred thousand times. Layers of the same girl, trapped over and over again from kindergarten to sixth grade. Seven years, ending only last spring.

—Yes. My grandfather rose from the table, and started to fold up the maps and diagrams before my mother came downstairs. He didn’t have to ask me how I knew.

***

My grandfather abandoned his maps not long after that. It wasn’t that he lost interest. So many incidents occurred, it became useless to record them all. All put together, the entire town became an incident, and the map drowned beneath the network of inky words and roads, until all that remained of white paper was the tiny dot we called home. I don’t think either one of us could bear to fill in that small, lonely white circle. We knew it would happen. My grandfather placed everything in the trash can barrel at the side of the yard one day, and we watched it curl into grey ash and float away in the sweet hot air. And after a while, no one remembered what day it was, or what week, or whether the season was fall or winter or spring. It was all the same season, the same day. I woke up to the same ghostly, lifeless images on the television as the day before, dressed for a school day I wouldn’t recall going to by evening’s end, when I sat at my desk, looking through books and papers for homework I never found.

And then one afternoon, although which afternoon of which month of what year it was, I would never know, my grandfather didn’t come home. He left early in the morning for his job at the electric and water company as he always had, his soft grey fedora over his white hair, a thermos of milky coffee tucked into his briefcase. He kissed me on the forehead and told me to be safe, then drove off in the large car he had bought years ago when he became supervisor. I got ready for school, but I can’t say if I went or not. The day passed, like all the days, in a soft haze of warmth and numbing sweetness that festered into early evening; and then the sun was pushing long bands of shadow and sun through the windows, over the dinner table. My grandfather would never abandon me. He wasn’t coming home, I realized, because he couldn’t; and the shock and sorrow of it sent something cold and hard trickling through my veins, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, I felt I was awakening from a terrible, suffocating dream.

—Are we going to wait for Puda? I asked my mother.

My mother set the casserole dish on the table, and stared at me. In her face, traces of what I might become, in another time, in another town. Her eyes, bright and furnace dark. Unbearable and all-consuming; and in her pupils I saw the small reflection of myself sink into the road a million times. I knew her answer then, before she said it.

—No.

She poured me a glass of lukewarm milk, and sat down. We ate in silence. The shadows lengthened until there was no more sun, and in my mind, I saw my gentle grandfather filling in that one remaining dot of white on his map with ink as blue as his eyes. And then he, too, was gone.

The next morning was not the same as all the other mornings. In the sleepy-sweet air, I dressed for classes I knew I had never attended, and never would, for friends and teachers I had never met or seen. Silvery thin men and women danced and fought in the snow of a television set that had long ago lost its cord. Images that did not exist. Everything in the world around me, a perverted misremembering, a suffocating lie. I put my schoolbooks under my bed, then changed my mind and stuffed them into the backpack. I had wanted to go, I had wanted to learn. I wanted to grow up. I had wanted the pale young man with the red-rimmed, pool-black eyes.

In the kitchen, my mother folded the top of my paper bag lunch as I drank my lukewarm milk. She licked the palm of her hand and ran it across my hair as I stared at the empty surface of the table, where my grandfather’s hands had drawn rivers of blue ink over the map of my life. Her breath was whisper-cloying, as though I had walked into a web. In the distance, a train sounded out, mournful and low and long. I stared up at the ceiling, watching small spores detach like faint candle sparks and float down through the thick amber air, wink out as they hit my face, my skin, the ground. Everyone had known that the town had been dying, long before I truly saw it. The ground trembled and buzzed beneath my feet. I thought of my grandfather and the pale young man, and my face grew porcelain-tight.

—I have to go to school, I whispered. Each word took a century to slip from my mouth, as slow as the dying spores.

—No, you don’t. My mother clasped my hand in hers, hard, and I felt our bones shift and crackle, our skin cake and fuse together like velvet and mold.

—Let me go, I said.

—No, she said. —I don’t have to.

—Yes, I said. —You do.

A century later or more, I pulled my hand from hers. Her fingers stretched like taffy, wriggled and dropped away. Centuries later, my other hand thrust my grandfather’s pen at the pulsing hollow of her throat. Droplets hung in the air, ruby and indigo comets catching the light as they orbited our wounds. Outside, the sun fell and rose as many times as the stars in the sky, and in that epoch my mother curled back her cracking lips wider, wider until there was only teeth and the volcanic black of her open mouth. With each step back from her and away, she bloated and burst, exponential in rot, pushing away the flimsy walls of our home, her veined translucent flesh pulsing with all the unborn variants of my life pushing outward to be free. In the molasses air, I turned, a millennium spent directing my terror and trembling legs away and up to the end of our street. If I cried, time looped back and ate the tears before they fell from my eyes. Only the pounding of my heart, a beat for every revolution of the galaxy, only the echo of a footfall with every dying star, only my mother always behind me, exploding, grasping, expanding, only everywhere the low dark roar of thunder and never rain.

—They found a girl in the road, my grandfather had begun, in another universe. —Bones like deformed corkscrews, each bone fused from the skeletons of many smaller girls.

Down the street, past the crosswalk and the thick white lines, and after that each step was quicker, and the centuries burned away. I never looked back. I passed myself, stuck in the blacktop a hundred thousand times, the giantess made of a hundred thousand girls, each one falling apart and clattering to the ground. And I ran to the edges of my northern town and past it and slipped beyond into the world, as all the cold bright skeletons of who I could have been swarmed behind me, plunging into the quivering moist mountains of putrescent flesh that had birthed us all, sinking her into the road where she lost me, all of them dying within her desire like little miscarried dreams.

I never stopped running.

Neither did she.

***

I’ve lived in this southernmost town for many lifetimes now, having lived in many other towns, each further south than the last. But all of the towns of this world have succumbed, as I knew they would, and there are no more towns beyond this one. There is nothing beyond this one, except the vast southern ocean, fields of ice, cold skies, colder stars. Here, winter is a diamond-hard fist, and summer an impossible dream. Or so it used to be, when I first made my way here, centuries or eons ago. I feel her now, again, in the air, in my bones. The days have begun to blend into each other as they did in all the other towns, the minutes and months and years, and a numbing sweet languor warms and slows us down until we no longer know or care. Everyone has known that the town is dying, long before we could see it. But only I know the reason why. My mother is coming for her little girl, once again burning the world away until there is only us and the memories of us together, until there is only her memories of how it used to be, how it should have been. And there are no more towns left to hide in, no more versions or dreams of me left to fight.

So I sit at the window of my apartment in that southernmost town, watching leaves turn red and gold that had only for the first time yesterday been green, watching the sun wax fat and throw off the late summer sparks I knew so well when I lived in the northern town, feeling the air grow camphor-bloated warm and sickly sweet. I sit at my window, turning the pages of schoolbooks I’ll never learn from, watching the buildings do what I have never done. They age, morph, change. They bloat, fuzz over, and release soft spores from fat cankers sagging off their rotting faces, they malform and reform, they become more familiar with each calcifying day. The southernmost town is disappearing, and the northern town is rising, again. A steam engine howls in the distance as it gobbles up the miles, and so much more. The townspeople’s movements weaken, slow, stop. They fade and drift away like vapor. The face of the pale young man appears in the windows, sliding from the flickering edges of my sight into full view as the weeks pass: and then the day will come when he will stand in the street below, as he has stood in all the other dusty streets of all the other towns, his large black eyes fixed on me as the twin-beaked raven in his grasp grotesquely struggles to call out my name, all the names of the monsters of my mother’s memories. Behind and around him, behind and around me, the fully formed streets of my childhood soon will stand, birthed out of the ruins of the southernmost town like a still-born giantess, a puppet of calcified dreams and bone, pulled into unwanted existence by the strings of someone else’s desire. This, this is my mother’s endless suffocating desire, slowing time down around us, winding it back, back, until it becomes the amber-boned river in which I am always and only her little girl, eternal and alone.

I place the blue pen at the small pale circle of my throat.

I can stop time, too.

The post Furnace appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Livia Llewellyn

Fall, 2002

Megan pulls the empty wine glass from her husband’s limp hand. His fingers brush the shag of the living room floor, sway to the sleepy sigh of his breath. Clocks tick in the kitchen and hallways, and when she places the glass on the coffee table, the clink against the wood shoots like a falling star through the silent house. Outside, in the neighborhood, the engine throbs and waits.

Backing away step by quiet step, Megan creeps into the kitchen, where she pulls a sealed envelope from a hiding place in her mother’s old roll-top desk. She props the card against the empty bottle, so Gary will see it when the drugs wear off. He’ll read the letter, see his daughter, scream; but he’ll move on, eventually. And he won’t look for her, because he’ll believe. They both know he’s not the one Megan’s wanted, for what seems like eternity. Although, she has him to thank for helping her through these sixteen years, his rough skin and questioning cock to thank, the press and push of his body over and into her, sloughing the lies of her life away to reveal repulsion and the aching void. A lifetime of enduring misplaced love? No, not anymore. After so many years, desire has eaten her hollow, and now it flows from her like burning oil. Megan walks down the hallway, and into her daughter’s bedroom.

I met a girl in the cul-de-sac last week, Sophie had said. Such a simple phrase, yet all Megan needed to know that the time had come. She picks knives off the sheets as she kisses Sophie’s damp face–the same drugs in the wine found their way into Sophie’s glass of milk. Just, more of them. Sophie’s cooling body settles in time to the distant machine, Megan notices, skin still flush with lust that once rose from her like spring mist. Megan runs her nose over her daughter’s skin, breathes the scent in deep. She smells the girl on Sophie, that sharp undertone of fuel mixed with lemons and cigarettes. And under that, the smell of the engine. Hot burning blood and smoking bone, dismembered limbs whirling in a gasoline gyre. Megan locks the door behind her, even though she doesn’t have to, the knob slipping in her sticky hands. Her daughter isn’t for the taking, not tonight or ever; it’s Megan’s turn, and won’t the girl in the cul-de-sac be surprised. Maybe she’ll be pleased.

Brass bells chime as Megan opens the front door, same as they’ve done for as long as she’s been alive. This little suburban rambler saw her grow up, marry, give birth; it’s led her through life like the faithful lover she never had. Mom and Dad willed it to her years after that summer Lisa disappeared: with both of them gone five years now, it’s been hers alone, her rookery, her watchtower. She stands on the stone porch, staring out at the purple glow of the setting sun. Ravens cluster on wires and cables, glide from the tips of evergreens to cedar-gabled rooftops. Driveway lights wink on and off, and wild dogs chant at fast-appearing stars. All the signs of life are here, but this neighborhood has long been dead. They’re the only family left, and even they’ve fallen apart, like rotting meat from the suburban bone. She walks down the driveway, her low pumps clacking against the blacktop. As she steps into the street, her heart races; and now she catches the faint whine, a sonorous metallic song calling out in reply. After all these lonely years, it’s returned.

From the far end of the cul-de-sac, a sixteen-year-old girl emerges from the tangled overhang of rhododendrons framing a long-abandoned house. She saunters into the street, tanned hips curving back and forth in waves as she moves. Though autumn hovers in the air, she brings perpetual summer, shimmering all around her in rippling waves. One hand touches a lock of black hair, then tugs at her striped tube-top–for a single sublime moment, a caramel-colored areola peers into the rising dark. Megan feels the decades burn away like ash in the girl’s heat.

“Hey, spaz,” Kelly says. “Got a light?”

“You didn’t change,” Megan murmurs. “Thirty years, and you’re just the same.”

“Yeah, I never change.”

“But I have changed. Can’t you hear?” Megan presses her hand against her heart. “It’s like it’s inside me now, like I’m the engine, too.”

“Oh really? You’re the engine?” Kelly slips a cigarette into her mouth. “Are you sure?”

“You’re not taking her. It’s my turn.”

Kelly runs a long tongue over wet lips. “She’s already taken–it’s what you made her for, right?”

Megan flinches, but the truth doesn’t stop her from sliding the lighter out of her pocket, the one she’s been carrying for years.

“Yeah, I guess,” Megan says. “But she’s gone.”

“Really.”

“It’s just us now. No one else.”

“No one else.” Kelly hooks a finger into the waistband of Megan’s skirt, drawing her near. Megan’s heart hitches as Kelly leans in. “If there’s no one else, you know what that means. I have to leave. I don’t come for nothing, you know.”

Megan raises the lighter, flicks it into life. The flame writhes in Kelly’s dark eyes. “Tonight you come for me.”

Kelly cups Megan’s hand she passes the cigarette tip through the flame, sucking her breath in as she coaxes it into life. Megan slides her other hand around Kelly’s warm waist, drawing her near. She drops the lighter, touches the cherry of Kelly’s smiling lips. Her fingers come away red.

“What did I do?” she asks one in particular. The crows, the evergreens, the stars.

“It’s not my blood, or yours. Who cares?”

“It’s ok,” Megan says. “It’ll burn away.” She clamps her fingers around Kelly’s neck, and the girl melts into her like water through parched ground. Their lips touch, dance in through hot gasps for air. Megan pulls at Kelly’s top, lowers her tongue. Soft warmth, and the hard press of trembling legs and jutting groins. Liquid fire rushes through her, and her bones bend like willows in a storm. She can bend Kelly as well, mold and rip through her like soft clay until nothing remains but desire, the exquisite pain of submission and defeat. She could feed off such things for eternity. Anyone could. Anything.

Kelly breaks off, flushed. “I have something to show you, in the empty house at the end of the street. Just the two of us.” Her long fingers cup Megan’s face. “Do you want to see?”

Reverberations bleed through the chilly air, relentless, exquisitely slow. Megan licks her lips, breaths deep. The air, her skin, all taste of Kelly, sea-salt sweet. What more will she taste of her, inside the engine of her desire–inside, under, below? Last time Kelly offered, she said no.

“Yes.” Megan breathes the word and Kelly inhales, as if catching it on her teeth. Megan kisses her again, to press the promise deep inside, so it will keep and never fade. Then, breaking away, she grabs Kelly’s hand and they run, run like they did when they were both just girls and her world was bright and new, run through the end of night into the house, into the endless arms of her burning soul, and down.

Spring, 1985

Megan stands in the center of the street, turning in a lazy circle under slate March skies. From here she sees one empty end of the street, then the other, and the ovarian rounds of the cul-de-sacs, dilapidated and worn after so many decades of pushing out their young. She sees the things she’s seen all her life–ranch homes and ramblers, cars and crows, and the thick stream of evergreens that seeps through suburbia like a leviathan’s blossoming bones. She sees Gary, her husband of five months, carrying boxes into the two-car garage. They met in the Food King up the road, as he rang up her groceries, pleasant and slow. She saw her future that day, and the way to get there.

She does not see her sister. She hasn’t seen her in fifteen years now: no one has. How many girls have been fished from the woods around Green River? And yet every time they show a new face on the news, her mother reaches for her heart medicine, and her father slips into the garden with his whiskey–as if Lisa had disappeared just yesterday, and the pain is still raw and new. They need to see her lifeless face, blue and speckled with gravel, to make it real. Without that, she wanders through their memories, a ship without moorings or berth, not dead or alive. If only they knew how very right they were…

Megan halts, dizzy, and looks at the house, that house, brooding under bushes and branches, still abandoned. All the kids in the neighborhood are gone now, grown up and off to college, other cities, other countries. The ones that escaped, that is. Most of them, like Lisa, went missing. The pretty ones, anyway, lush-lipped females all. She’s the last one. And she’s not a kid anymore.

It’s been years since she heard the engine’s rev. After Lisa, other girls disappeared–but soon there were none, and the engine faded. The neighborhood felt the loss, and soured. Families moved away, sometimes leaving overnight without a whisper. Her mom walked over to the Kerns, the Swensons, the Millers, for coffee or conversation–she came back every time, moving as if something wet and squalling had been ripped from her womb, and thrown far away. But still she won’t leave. Lisa might come home, she tells Megan, tells anyone left who still remembers that the Morgan’s had two girls, not one. She’s her mother, and she’ll never leave her daughter behind. Megan knows how that feels.

“Kelly.” Megan whispers the word, reverent. Kelly’s been missing, too, as long as the rest. Since that summer she and Megan snuck into the rambler–after that day, Megan never saw her again. There were moments, though. Out of the corner of her eye, as she walked home from school or sat reading in the backyard, as she opened or closed her bedroom curtains: a flash of girl-shaped movement, followed with a trace of lemon Jean Naté and cigarette-scented sweat. Sometimes she still wakes up at night, soaked in tears, Kelly’s smell dripping from her fingers. She’ll cry herself back to sleep, stifling the sobs so Gary won’t hear. But it’s not enough: her desire’s a drop in the cup. All the cream has been skimmed, youth and desire siphoned away, leaving only human husks. Not enough left for the engine to feed on, and so it’s gone, along with the mystery girl who charmed its prey and fed them bit by bit into its maw.

She can’t bear to live like this, feeding off the fumes of girlhood love, dying before her parent’s eyes while they mourn a better-loved daughter long gone. And yet, and yet…the engine sleeps, and this place is safe. No one to watch her do what she must do–a lengthy yet simple action, like the tick of a clock as it counts down the years before the alarm sounds out. Megan stares at the yellow and white eaves framing her old bedroom window as her fingers glide over her stomach, turgid and round. With her ailing father moving into the retirement home, and she and Gary moving in to take care of Mom, Megan can wipe her past clean, start over. Build a better web.

Gary waves at her as he heads back to the car for another load. She smiles and waves, a wan flap of her flesh. Megan goes through the motions with him, in all things. At night when he moves over her, she squeezes her eyes shut, pretends it’s Kelly transformed, spearing her into sticky oblivion. The things she does, the images she sees…Megan smiles as she walks back to the house, drumming her fingers over the mound of her unborn child–her third, though she took care of the other two before Gary and her parents ever knew. All the pain she endures will be worth it, in the end. They’ll turn Lisa’s old bedroom into the nursery, make a playground out of the weed-choked backyard. Maybe families will move into the houses again, the neighborhood will return to life once more, and the engine will return, Kelly swimming in its hot and fiery wake.

But if not, it doesn’t matter. Megan doesn’t need neighbors to do her work. She’ll make the engine and Kelly return. That’s why she’s having a girl.

Summer, 1972

Megan opens her lips, and a perfect ring of smoke floats out. It rises up, widens, disintegrates. Megan’s mouth stays open, her tongue slightly raised as if caught mid-question. She raises an eyebrow, knowing she’s being watched.

Across the street, Kelly flashes a cool smile: the Queen of the Cul-de-Sac has approved. Megan takes another puff, staring up at the telephone wires as she sits on the flat-topped rocks lining the yard. Inside, triumph clangs like church bells; and the distant engine pounds in time, sending sound rippling like heat waves through the August afternoon air. Megan has been nothing if not patient, knowing well the reward. Golden-haired Julie left not long after Lisa, to join a commune up in Okanogan County, it was whispered. A few girls disappeared the following summer, and a few more slipped away last year as well. Teenage growing pains, signs of our troubled times, wild youth and drugs–mothers and fathers gossiped the pain away as they filled prescriptions and drank to oblivion. Megan kept her head down and waited, always with Julie’s lighter in her pocket, resting low and hard on her hip. She’s sixteen now: and now her time has come.

“May I?” Kelly motions, and Megan nods, trying to control her trembling legs. Kelly walks across the street, working the end of a bright pink popsicle in and out of her mouth. She stops in front of Megan, her shadow laying directly across Megan’s body, matching her limb for limb.

“You still smoke?”

“Sometimes,” Kelly says. “Not as well as you.”

Megan parts her legs, slow and steady, as she leans back, resting each hand on the warm surface of the low rock wall.

“So.” Kelly stares into the distance, as if concentrating. Listening, perhaps, to some unseen machine? “Lisa ever come back from her hippie trip?”

“Nope.” Megan shakes her head hard, trying to act casual and cool. “You know, I was gonna go with her, but–you know. Parents.” The last word shoots out of her mouth along with her cigarette, and she winces.

“Uh-huh. Parents.” Kelly looks down at her, amused. Megan blushes. Kelly’s eyes are brown, with little flecks of gold that dart and swim like trapped fish. When Megan stares into them, she thinks of when she locked herself in the garage one rainy afternoon years ago, when she was nine and her cat Sandy had just died. She sat in a corner, watching the shadows coalesce and creep, while in the opposite corner the house furnace rumbled, flames darting and swimming behind the metal like trapped fish. She wanted to scream and run, but she also wanted to open the door and watch the fire. She wanted to crawl inside.

“Do you think she’ll come back?”

“I don’t know. Probably,” Megan lies.

“Your parents must be treating you like a princess, now that you’re their only girl.” Kelly reaches out, tugs at the end of Megan’s neat ponytail draped over her shoulder. Her fingers linger, then slide away, brushing her breast in their wake. The sensation aches so much, Megan can barely breathe.

“Not really,” she finally says. “They’re still pretty broken up about it. My mom barely talks to me. My dad treats me like crap. Besides, I’m not a kid.”

“No. You’re not. You’re all grown up like me.”

A drop of pink falls from the edge of the popsicle and lands on Kelly’s chest. Megan watches, mesmerized. Kelly drops the melting remains to the ground, then pushes her breast up as she lowers her head. The tip of her crimson tongue laps at the sticky droplet, following it all the way down to the elastic edge of her tube-top.

“Sorry about that,” Kelly says.

“What?”

Kelly points, and Megan looks down. Between her legs, the popsicle pools on the driveway, little dots of pink decorating Megan’s pale legs where it splashed up. But that’s not where Kelly’s pointing. A single bright dot rests on the crotch of Megan’s white shorts, just below the zipper.

Kelly grins. “Want me to lick that off, too?”

Megan looks up, her face as hot as the sun.

“Come on.” Kelly’s accusing finger now becomes a hand, and Megan grasps it. With a quick tug, Megan’s on her feet. Kelly keeps pulling her, and Megan stumbles forward, her breast bumping against Kelly’s arm, her crotch against Kelly’s thigh. The older girl leans in, whispering. Megan catches a whiff of sugar and blood.

“I found something, in the empty house at the end of the street. It has to do with the missing girls, and your sister. I think I know where they are. Wanna see?”

This is the moment. This is it.

Mute with love, Megan nods.

They walk in unison down the road. Megan’s legs feel hot and heavy, and all the blood in her body sloshes around, spirals into a whirlpool of throbbing flesh and crackling nerves. Is the engine getting louder? No, just deeper, more intense, as though they are moving toward it. Overhead, birds wheel and cry in a contrail-laced sky of pure blue. Someone’s mowing their lawn, and radios crackle and sing. Yet, they are all alone. It’s just Megan and Kelly, and no other girl, the way it’s supposed to be. Megan sees none of their neighbors as they walk down the cracked driveway of the abandoned rambler, pine needles and dandelions carpeting their way to the faded green front door. Under eaves dripping with peeling paint and spider webs, Kelly grabs the brass handle and pulls. The door opens into cool darkness. Yet, further within the house, Megan sees light.

“Come on. It’s just us.” Kelly steps into the foyer, holding the door open. Megan stands outside, hesitant. Slight fear spikes her lust, dulling it.

“I don’t know. Is it safe? What’s inside?”

“You have to come in to find out.” Kelly reaches out again, and this time her fingers slide between Megan’s legs, cupping the space between. She squeezes, slow, and her thumb travels, presses down. “Come inside.”

Megan’s legs move, how she doesn’t know, as Kelly’s gentle hand leads her through the door. When it closes, she doesn’t know, she only knows that now they’re alone, and lips are pressed against hers, cold and bubblegum sweet. Her shaking hands move up, push the edges of the tube-top away. Kelly’s flesh pours into her hands, pliant as clay. Insects drone and thump against the windows. Megan’s fingers clutch at a diamond-hard nipple, and she moves her mouth down.

Kelly breaks away. “Not yet. I have to show you. Come on. Come on!” She smiles as she disappears into the living room and around the corner, almost dancing as she goes. Megan stands for a second, her body racked with blood-thick quakes. Underneath her feet, the engine purrs.

Megan finds Kelly in the room off the kitchen, a dusty den lined in fake wood and faded carpeting. She’s on her knees before the sliding glass door, legs parted and skirt gathered in folds around her waist. Megan hangs back, watching in awe as Kelly’s fingers dip and disappear into the thick black curls.

“Do you hear it,” she breathes, her body rocking back and forth in time to the metallic bass below. “Do you hear the machine?”

“I thought I was the only one,” Megan says.

“Help me up.” Kelly raises her hand, and Megan grabs it, pulling the girl to her feet. Kelly wraps one arm around her waist, and they stand, swaying slightly as her still warm finger crooks itself into Megan’s mouth and glides around her tongue, leaving behind a faint trace of salt.

“It’s here,” Kelly says, breaking away once more as she walks across the room and opens a door. Megan sighs in angry frustration.

“Why can’t we–can’t we stay here for a while? It’s nice in here.” Megan smiles, trying to look alluring as she fingers a button on her shirt, sliding it from its embroidered hole. What would her sister have done, or any of the other girls? At a loss, Megan unbuttons her blouse all the way to reveal small, freckled breasts, unsure if she’s doing any of this right at all. “Please?”

Kelly’s only reply is to reach down, and rip off the tube-top in one lightning-fast motion. Her breasts tumble out of the fabric and against her chest, tanned with wide areolas. Kelly drops the top onto the rug, then steps back: down. Megan starts. Kelly steps back down and down, until the darkness swallows her, and only her voice remains.

“It’s nicer down here.”

Megan rushes to the edge of the door, and peers down. A flight of rough wood stairs leads into a basement rec room. More shag carpeting and paneling. From one of the corners, pale red light pulses, casting strange shadows that undulate back and forth. Kelly’s skirt lays in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. Megan descends, one creaking step at a time.

At the bottom of the stairs, Megan sees the room in full, bunker-low concrete ceilings with thin windows looking onto the bushes surrounding the house. At the far end, Kelly leans, arms behind her back, against a set of folding utility closet doors that pulse and shake in time to the engine’s reverbs. Her tan skin glows almost white in the ruby light spilling from the wood slats, as if she’s melting into the house. She looks the same as the day Megan first saw her years and years ago, standing like sugar in the pouring rain, dripping smoke and secrets into her sister’s ears. The engine sounds so loud now, so heavy and hard that Megan can’t hear her own heart.

“Is this what you want?” Kelly thrusts her hips forward as she parts her legs. Red light spills from between them, as if whatever lies behind the doors cannot be contained.

“Yes,” says Megan, “but, what does this have to do with Lisa? What did you want to show me?”

Kelly steps away from the doors. Megan’s feet drag across the carpet, catching on nothing. Her fingertips touch the copper knobs, worn with age. Kelly presses against her from behind, pushing her blouse away as she cups Megan’s breasts, pulling at the skin as Megan pulls at the doors. They accordion to the side. Hot fumes hit her face, stinging her eyes as they rise in the cool air. Little bolts of pleasure run through her body as Kelly laps at her ear, her fingers still working, working. From within the closet, a writhing mass sounds out a painful howl.

“This is the engine,” Kelly whispers. “This is us.”

Megan sees nothing at first, only dark red glowing from smoke and shadows. Gradually, the malformed outlines of a squat black furnace appear, the largest she’s ever seen. Flames dart from crevices and tears, flick like tongues. Cables thick as her body pierce the furnace from below and erupt transformed from its pulsing sides, spiraling around the beast in ropes of liquid-boned flesh stripped of skin, like a bloody fist squeezing until the prey had squirted from its grip.

“What the–” Megan begins, but another blast of sound cuts her off, and the floor shakes. Bits of white spackle drift from the ceiling onto their hair and arms, stick in the crimson mist spraying the air as one of the cables suddenly splits down the middle. Kelly’s hands move faster, and down. Megan and the cables scream in unison–mouths open, tongues waggling in exquisite pain. The two halves of the cable crash together again, one thrusting inside of the other and fucking its way up until the faces appear together, two dismembered girls kissing themselves into one as they burrow back into the furnace, only to be eaten and extruded again. Another cable begins to split. Megan sees.

“Is it like looking in the mirror,” Kelly asks, “or falling into the sun?”

More faces appear in the coils, luscious-lipped, wide-eyed faces screaming in toothless ecstasy: neighborhood girls. Megan mimics them as she kicks back. Kelly holds her tight, pushes her forward. Her hand moves down, under Megan’s shorts, working the tender skin. Megan’s hands grasp for the doors, then grasp for nothing at all as the rising pleasure slows her down. All those girls, all those wet bone bits…a face stretches out from the mass, blistered tongue snaking along the naked length of Megan’s leg. Lisa. Her eyes are melted sockets, her nose pulp, her touch sublime.

“No–” Megan says, but the tongue lengthens, snakes up between fabric and flesh, taking over where Kelly’s touch recedes.

“Yes, that’s it” Kelly says. Megan grows limp in her arms, and she feels Kelly coaxing her forward, sliding her along the tongue into her place in the machine. “Just a few steps more, and we’ll be together, all of us, forever–”

“No, not all of us! Just us, JUST US!” Megan snaps her head back, hitting Kelly’s face with a sharp crack. Kelly cries out, a scream as full of pleasure as pain. Still, she loses her grip, and Megan falls free. Bits of shag come up in her hands, needle-hard like slivers of sawed-up bone. She sinks her hands into the putrid muck, clawing her way across the shifting carpet of rotting limbs and clothes back to the stairs.

“I waited for you,” she cries over the noise. “It’s only supposed to be us, no one else!”

Kelly looks puzzled. The tongue slithers around her leg, resting its tip in the soft black hair. Behind her, the engine of flesh and bone screams. “But it is only us, Megan. There’s no one else here, not really. It’s only ever been us.”

“Liar! They’re all here, all of them! Fucking cheater!”

“I can’t be here without them. Without them, I won’t come, and I won’t stay. You can’t have it both ways.”

“I want it my way!” Megan slaps a hand against her chest, leaving a print of dirty brown behind. “I waited for you, and now you have to stay!”

Kelly rolls her eyes. “God, Megan, Lisa was right. You’re such a spaz.”

Megan crawls up the stairs, back into the quiet den. She rushes through the house to the bathroom, and turns on the tap. She soaks her face and head in the water, picks dirt and flesh from her fingernails and fingernails from her knees. The water pours over her, and she closes her eyes, sleeps for a few peaceful minutes. The sounds of the engine recede. When she wakes up, Megan slicks back her hair and buttons her blouse. The girl in the mirror is clean. She’s calm. She’s good.

“It’s only supposed to be me,” she says. “Kelly and me, and no other girls at all.” Only after she leaves the house, though, does her reflection agree, nodding in time to the faint pulsing sounds of girls rotting under the house.

“She thinks she’s doing bad things,” the mirror whispers. The girl-shaped shadow in the basement wanders back and forth among the bits, smiling as it replies.

“That’s what I love about her.”

Summer, 1969

Megan hears the engine the night her older sister runs away from home, just a week after school was let out for the summer. She knows Lisa was angry because Mom and Dad wouldn’t let her ride with some hippie college boy in his Volkswagen camper all the way cross-country to the Woodstock concert, even though she’s seventeen and thinks she’s a woman. Lisa spent that whole week raging against the world, and every night Megan fell asleep to her sister crying in the next room. Like rain, Megan grew used to the sound, and it stopped bothering her. Lisa was mean to her, anyway, and still treated her like a stupid baby even though she’d be thirteen next month. Let her sob, Megan told her pillow. It was only fair–Lisa made her cry too many times to count.

And then, tonight: no crying at all. Megan wakes from a dead sleep, sits straight up, and listens. No rain, not even a wind rustling the trees in the yard. Megan reaches out in the dark, her fingers spreading as if gathering up the night–somehow she can feel her sister’s absence, as real and thick as the blanket against her legs. In the distance, the low rev of a car sounds out as it traverses the roads beyond their little Tacoma neighborhood. Megan waits for it to fade. She lays back on her bed and listens, one hand sliding under her t‑shirt and cupping a small breast.

“Lisa’s gone,” Megan whispers. “I’m the woman now.”

The engine’s soft hum washes over the house, filling the space that had belonged to Lisa, like a girl-shaped bass and pistoned song of love. It isn’t a car engine, but it isn’t one of the freight trains running down the coast to the sea. It’s closer, deeper, and it doesn’t stop. Megan thinks of Kelly, Lisa’s best friend, and how angry she’ll be that Lisa ran off to Woodstock without her. Kelly’s sixteen, but she’ll still cry, and Megan will take her into the wooded far corner of the backyard and slip her arms around her, rubbing her hands up and down her soft shivering back until Kelly realizes that Megan is her new best friend. Kelly knew how to French kiss, and had taught all the older girls on their street. Maybe now that Lisa’s gone, Kelly will teach Megan, too–out of gratitude, under the evergreens, after the tears are gone and replaced with stars. Megan’s other hand creeps into her panties; like the engine, she throbs. She falls asleep that way, to the sounds of her contented sighs and the vibrations of that far-off mystery machine.

Over the following days and weeks, the metallic thrumming never quite goes away, even though no one else seems to hear it. The neighborhood hums with summer life: mowers battling overgrown lawns, basketballs pinging against concrete and wood, stereo music drifting through backyard parties. And yet, Megan still hears it, threading into the low conversations between the adults in the neighborhood, sniffing at everything and everyone. Every early evening after putting dinner in the oven, her mother pours a large glass of whiskey and step out into the front yard for a smoke–Megan watches from the porch as the red dot of Mom’s cigarette bobs over to the fence, where Mrs. Crabtree waits with more gossip, a red flame of her own at her Avon-orange lips. Teenage girls are running away from all of the neighborhoods in University Place. Lisa isn’t the first, and she won’t be the last. They speak the words to each other, and Megan can almost see the vibrations of that distant engine hovering around their lips, licking away at her mother’s desire to find her oldest girl. Her mother is cream, Megan decides. They’re all warm summer cream in this blacktopped bowl, and something is skimming them away.

Megan has her own routine. Every early evening, she wanders into the front yard, casual and limpid-limbed, and stands at the grassy edge, one hip jutting out as she surveys the small suburban kingdom. From there she sees clusters of boys and girls playing games, wheeling about on bikes, flirting and fighting. They converge and part like swarms of fireflies, fast and hot. Usually she doesn’t see what she’s seeking. Tonight, though, at the end of this burning day in July, Megan sees the girl who fires her taboo fantasies, haunts her waking dreams.

Kelly, Queen Kelly of the Cul-de-Sac, leans against the mail box of the empty rambler at the far end of the street. It’s the only house on the street that no one lives in, ever since the old woman died a few years back. The FOR SALE sign still dangles from a moldy post, as ignored as the building behind it. Kelly doesn’t ignore it, though, and tonight, for once, she doesn’t ignore Megan. She raises a hand, beckoning. Come here, she mouths, as she balances a cigarette on her wide red mouth. Megan’s heart beats faster, and ozone fills the air. The engine’s sounds lap at her lips, and everything turns faster, brighter.

“Me?” Megan chokes out as she takes a few stumbling steps toward the slender-hipped girl. Most of the older girls in the neighborhood smoke, stealing Virginia Slims from their mother’s purses and lighting up in secret along the sides of houses. Kelly smokes in full view of all the parents and kids. But her light brown skin burns with a smoky sheen all its own, and short black hair frames her face in a thunderstorm of curls, curls that caress sharp features as she nods. Yes. Megan’s stomach cramps in nervous anticipation. Her dream moment, just like she imagined. Maybe they’ll sneak into the house. Maybe they’ll be alone. Images of naked flesh wash over her, bodies filling the rambler’s rooms with wet little sighs and sounds, and her legs buckle. Megan pushes the thought away, hard. No one can know, not even the girl of her dreams.

“You stand at the edge of your yard every day,” Kelly says as Megan draws near. “Looking for something?”

“Yeah.” Megan stares up at the trees, nonchalant. “Maybe.”

“Looking for Lisa.”

Megan shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Maybe. Hmm.” Kelly leans forward, and Megan catches scents of Jean Naté and sweat. “Got a light, kid?”

“No. I don’t smoke.”

Kelly steps away from the mail box, and raises her hand. “Didn’t you see me, you freak? I said come here!”

Megan turns: further up the street, Julie Miller stands, flicking a lighter on and off, a curious smile at her lips. An ice water anger sieves through Megan’s chest. Kelly hadn’t been calling out to her. Julie struts forward, flicking the light in time to the engine’s heated throb, as if she hears it, too.

“That’s ok, kid,” Kelly says, as gold-haired Julie moves in, pliant supplicant to all of Kelly’s needs. “Someday you will.”

“Will what?”

“Smoke. Hope I’m there to watch. Know what I mean?”

Julie raises the light, and Kelly breathes the flame in. She glances up at Megan, winks, and grins. Megan reels, sees: hot burning blood and smoking bone, dismembered limbs whirling in an oily gyre. Behind Kelly and Julie, the windows of the rambler catch the final burnt oranges of the day, throwing light across the tangled yard as though someone inside had set the rooms to flame. Blood pounds in Megan’s ears, and the engine reverberates in determined time. Under her naked feet, the pavement shivers. Not enough, Megan says to herself as she backs away. Watching Kelly, feeling what she feels–it isn’t enough. She will have this girl, somehow, someway, someday.

And for one wild moment, a delicious and horrible sense of déjà vu washes over Megan, heady as the scent of gasoline. She’s stood in front of this house, this girl, a million times before. No matter where she chases life to its lonely end, she’ll find this moment again, this fierce and glorious desire.

The post The Engine of Desire appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

***

I don’t remember when I started reading horror. I remember growing up surrounded by my parent’s archaeology and history books — I cut my teeth on mummies and lost cities and dead civilizations, and as I grew older my taste in fiction gravitated swiftly and surely to the dark. From Poe, Stoker, and Lovecraft, I moved on to Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub — the usual suspects. I remember most of their stories and novels. I remember the monsters in them only vaguely. Creatures with fangs and claws and horns, all ultimately indistinguishable in their creation and intentions and fates, all fading into the background of my childhood. The novels, the monsters, scared me. They didn’t change me.

Every Sunday my mother dutifully dragged us to a sprawling Lutheran church in a quiet suburb of Tacoma. There, school books depicted Jesus as a serene man with blue eyes, and everywhere angels stared down at us from posters and paintings: white skinned men (or round, rosy children) with golden hair and pillowy white wings, unfurling crimson banners and slender trumpets declaring God’s eternal power and love. Those images, those angels, were understandable — beautiful and powerful in a classifiably human way. And they were never, in image or word, confused for demons. There were demons and there were angels, just as there was good and evil, monstrosity and beauty; and in the church’s — and my — inexperienced imagination, never the twain could meet.

And then I read Clive Barker’s Weaveworld.

Uriel of the principalities, also known as the Scourge. Mouthless and multi-eyed, a body of wheels and wings, geometries and fire, “tall as the canopy; twenty-five feet or more, its long, bone-white head brushing the branches, sand-petals spiraling down.” A monster beyond comprehension in both conception and intent, beyond my comprehension — I was hooked. And I read those pages of the novel a hundred times in frustration and fascination, pouring over every scene Uriel appeared in, trying to decipher exactly what it was. Angel or demon? None of the characters knew, and more madding, the creature itself had long forgotten its origins and purpose — the mythology of the angel Uriel, guardian of the gates of Eden, was a story the being had taken from the minds of the humans who had roused it from millennia of sleep. Uriel was as great and luscious a mystery to me as the sepia photos of ruined Babylon and Ur in my parent’s dusty books.

During that unsettling summer when I threw myself into Weaveworld again and again, everything I had ever understood monsters to be and not to be was thrown out the window, and with it, my rigid construct of how much of the universe and the creatures moving within it humans might truly understand. We understood nothing. We were specks of ignorance, and our one-sided definitions of good and evil were meaningless in a world of infinite views and infinite wonders. In a few short, sharply-written scenes, Barker’s Uriel upended all of my rigid paradigms about horror, and taught me more about cosmic vastness more than all those previous years of reading Lovecraft had ever done.  Even to this day, I pour over the pages of Weaveworld, looking for that one sentence I missed, the one word or phrase that will tell me, definitively, whether Uriel is angel or demon or something more. But there is no such sentence, no such word, no illumination. There is only infinite mystery, and the horror that I love Uriel of the principalities above all other monsters, because I suspect that I am a greater monstrous aberration of this universe than it is, but I will never truly know.

The post Livia Llewellyn’s Favorite Monster appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.