Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
By Cory Doctorow

Presented by

Public Domain Books

6

Bradley was born with the future in his eyes. He emerged from the belly of their mother with bright brown eyes that did not roll aimlessly in the manner of babies, but rather sought out the corners of the cave where interesting things were happening, where movement was about to occur, where life was being lived. Before he developed the muscle strength and coordination necessary to crawl, he mimed crawling, seeing how it was that he would someday move.

He was the easiest of all the babies to care for, easier even than Carlo, who had no needs other than water and soil and cooing reassurance. Toilet training: As soon as he understood what was expected of him – they used the downstream-most bend of one of the underground rivers – Benny could be relied upon to begin tottering toward the spot in sufficient time to drop trou and do his business in just the right spot.

(Alan learned to pay attention when Bruce was reluctant to leave home for a walk during those days – the same premonition that made him perfectly toilet-trained at home would have him in fretting sweats at the foreknowledge that he has destined to soil himself during the recreation.)

His nightmares ran twice: once just before bed, in clairvoyant preview, and again in the depths of REM sleep. Alan learned to talk him down from these crises, to soothe the worry, and in the end it worked to everyone’s advantage, defusing the nightmares themselves when they came.

He never forgot anything – never forgot to have Alan forge a signature on a permission form, never forgot to bring in the fossil he’d found for show-and-tell, never forgot his mittens in the cloakroom and came home with red, chapped hands. Once he started school, he started seeing to it that Alan never forgot anything, either.

He did very well on quizzes and tests, and he never let the pitcher fake him out when he was at bat.

After four years alone with the golems, Alan couldn’t have been more glad to have a brother to keep him company.

Billy got big enough to walk, then big enough to pick mushrooms, then big enough to chase squirrels. He was big enough to play hide-and-go-seek with, big enough to play twenty questions with, big enough to horse around in the middle of the lake at the center of the mountain with.

Alan left him alone during the days, in the company of their parents and the golems, went down the mountain to school, and when he got back, he’d take his kid brother out on the mountain face and teach him what he’d learned, even though he was only a little kid. They’d write letters together in the mud with a stick, and in the winter, they’d try to spell out their names with steaming pee in the snow, laughing.

“That’s a fraction,” Brad said, chalking “3/4” on a piece of slate by the side of one of the snowmelt streams that coursed down the springtime mountain.

“That’s right, three-over-four,” Alan said. He’d learned it that day in school, and had been about to show it to Billy, which meant that Brad had remembered him doing it and now knew it. He took the chalk and drew his own 3/4 – you had to do that, or Billy wouldn’t be able to remember it in advance.

Billy got down on his haunches. He was a dark kid, dark hair and eyes the color of chocolate, which he insatiably craved and begged for every morning when Alan left for school, “Bring me, bring me, bring me!”

He’d found something. Alan leaned in and saw that it was a milkweed pod. “It’s an egg,” Bobby said.

“No, it’s a weed,” Alan said. Bobby wasn’t usually given to flights of fancy, but the shape of the pod was reminiscent of an egg.

Billy clucked his tongue. “I know that. It’s also an egg for a bug. Living inside there. I can see it hatching. Next week.” He closed his eyes. “It’s orange! Pretty. We should come back and find it once it hatches.”

Alan hunkered down next to him. “There’s a bug in here?”

“Yeah. It’s like a white worm, but in a week it will turn into an orange bug and chew its way out.”

He was about three then, which made Alan seven. “What if I chopped down the plant?” he said. “Would the bug still hatch next week?”

“You won’t,” Billy said.

“I could, though.”

“Nope,” Brad said.

Alan reached for the plant. Took it in his hand. The warm skin of the plant and the woody bole of the pod would be so easy to uproot.

He didn’t do it.

That night, as he lay himself down to sleep, he couldn’t remember why he hadn’t. He couldn’t sleep. He got up and looked out the front of the cave, at the countryside unrolling in the moonlight and the far lights of the town.

He went back inside and looked in on Benji. He was sleeping, his face smooth and his lips pouted. He rolled over and opened his eyes, regarding Alan without surprise.

“Told you so,” he said.

 

Alan had an awkward relationship with the people in town. Unaccompanied little boys in the grocery store, at the Gap, in the library and in toy section of the Canadian Tire were suspect. Alan never “horsed around” – whatever that meant – but nevertheless, he got more than his share of the hairy eyeball from the shopkeepers, even though he had money in his pocket and had been known to spend it on occasion.

A lone boy of five or six or seven was suspicious, but let him show up with the tiny hand of his dark little brother clasped in his, quietly explaining each item on the shelf to the solemn child, and everyone got an immediate attitude adjustment. Shopkeepers smiled and nodded, shoppers mouthed, “So cute,” to each other. Moms with babies in snuglis bent to chuckle them under their chins. Store owners spontaneously gave them candy, and laughed aloud at Bryan’s cries of “Chocolate!”

When Brian started school, he foresaw and avoided all trouble, and delighted his teachers with his precociousness. Alan ate lunch with him once he reached the first grade and started eating in the cafeteria with the rest of the non-kindergartners.

Brad loved to play with Craig after he was born, patiently mounding soil and pebbles on his shore, watering him and patting him smooth, planting wild grasses on his slopes as he crept toward the mouth of the cave. Those days – before Darcy’s arrival – were a long idyll of good food and play in the hot sun or the white snow and brotherhood.

Danny couldn’t sneak up on Brad and kick him in the back of the head. He couldn’t hide a rat in his pillow or piss on his toothbrush. Billy was never one to stand pat and eat shit just because Davey was handing it out. Sometimes he’d just wind up and take a swing at Davey, seemingly out of the blue, knocking him down, then prying open his mouth to reveal the chocolate bar he’d nicked from under Brad’s pillow, or a comic book from under his shirt. He was only two years younger than Brad, but by the time they were both walking, he hulked over Brad and could lay him out with one wild haymaker of a punch.

 

Billy came down from his high perch when Alan returned from burying Marci, holding out his hands wordlessly. He hugged Alan hard, crushing the breath out of him.

The arms felt good around his neck, so he stopped letting himself feel them. He pulled back stiffly and looked at Brian.

“You could have told me,” he said.

Bram’s face went expressionless and hard and cold. Telling people wasn’t what he did, not for years. It hurt others – and it hurt him. It was the reason for his long, long silences. Alan knew that sometimes he couldn’t tell what it was that he knew that others didn’t. But he didn’t care, then.

“You should have told me,” he said.

Bob took a step back and squared up his shoulders and his feet, leaning forward a little as into a wind.

“You knew and you didn’t tell me and you didn’t do anything and as far as I’m concerned, you killed her and cut her up and buried her along with Darryl, you coward.” Adam knew he was crossing a line, and he didn’t care. Brian leaned forward and jutted his chin out.

Avram’s hands were clawed with cold and caked with mud and still echoing the feeling of frozen skin and frozen dirt, and balled up into fists, they felt like stones.

He didn’t hit Barry. Instead, he retreated to his niche and retrieved the triangular piece of flint that he’d been cherting into an arrowhead for school and a hammer stone and set to work on it in the light of a flashlight.

 

He sharpened a knife for Davey, there in his room in the cave, as the boys ran feral in the woods, as the mountain made its slow and ponderous protests.

He sharpened a knife, a hunting knife with a rusty blade and a cracked handle that he’d found on one of the woodland trails, beside a hunter’s snare, not lost but pitched away in disgust one winter and not discovered until the following spring.

But the nicked blade took an edge as he whetted it with the round stone, and the handle regained its grippiness as he wound a cord tight around it, making tiny, precise knots with each turn, until the handle no longer pinched his hand, until the blade caught the available light from the cave mouth and glinted dully.

The boys brought him roots and fruits they’d gathered, sweets and bread they’d stolen, small animals they’d caught. Ed-Fred-George were an unbeatable team when it came to catching and killing an animal, though they were only small, barely out of the second grade. They were fast, and they could coordinate their actions without speaking, so that the bunny or the squirrel could never duck or feint in any direction without encountering the thick, neck-wringing outstretched hands of the pudgy boys. Once, they brought him a cat. It went in the night’s stew.

Billy sat at his side and talked. The silence he’d folded himself in unwrapped and flapped in the wind of his beating gums. He talked about the lessons he’d had in school and the lessons he’d had from his big brother, when it was just the two of them on the hillside and Alan would teach him every thing he knew, the names of and salient facts regarding every thing in their father’s domain. He talked about the truths he’d gleaned from reading chocolate-bar wrappers. He talked about the things that he’d see Davey doing when no one else could see it.

One day, George came to him, the lima-bean baby grown to toddling about on two sturdy legs, fat and crispy red from his unaccustomed time out-of-doors and in the sun. “You know, he worships you,” Glenn said, gesturing at the spot in his straw bedding where Brad habitually sat and gazed at him and chattered.

Alan stared at his shoelaces. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. He’d dreamt that night of Davey stealing into the cave and squatting beside him, watching him the way that he had before, and of Alan knowing, knowing that Davey was there, ready to rend and tear, knowing that his knife with its coiled handle was just under his pillow, but not being able to move his arms or legs. Paralyzed, he’d watched Davey grin and reach behind him with agonizing slowness for a rock that he’d lifted high above his head and Andrew had seen that the rock had been cherted to a razor edge that hovered a few feet over his breastbone, Davey’s arms trembling with the effort of holding it aloft. A single drop of sweat had fallen off of Davey’s chin and landed on Alan’s nose, and then another, and finally he’d been able to open his eyes and wake himself, angry and scared. The spring rains had begun, and the condensation was thick on the cave walls, dripping onto his face and arms and legs as he slept, leaving behind chalky lime residue as it evaporated.

“He didn’t kill her,” Greg said.

Albert hadn’t told the younger brothers about the body buried in Craig, which meant that Brad had been talking to them, had told them what he’d seen. Alan felt an irrational streak of anger at Brad – he’d been blabbing Alan’s secrets. He’d been exposing the young ones to things they didn’t need to know. To the nightmares.

“He didn’t stop her from being killed,” Alan said. He had the knife in his hand and hunted through his pile of belongings for the whetstone to hone its edge.

Greg looked at the knife, and Andy followed his gaze to his own white knuckles on the hilt. Greg took a frightened step back, and Alan, who had often worried that the smallest brother was too delicate for the real world, felt ashamed of himself.

He set the knife down and stood, stretching his limbs and leaving the cave for the first time in weeks.

 

Brad found him standing on the slopes of the gentle, soggy hump of Charlie’s slope, a few feet closer to the seaway than it had been that winter when Alan had dug up and reburied Marci’s body there.

“You forgot this,” Brad said, handing him the knife.

Alan took it from him. It was sharp and dirty and the handle was grimed with sweat and lime.

“Thanks, kid,” he said. He reached down and took Billy’s hand, the way he’d done when it was just the two of them. The three eldest sons of the mountain stood there touching and watched the outside world rush and grind away in the distance, its humming engines and puffing chimneys.

Brendan tugged his hand free and kicked at the dirt with a toe, smoothing over the divot he’d made with the sole of his shoe. Andy noticed that the sneaker was worn out and had a hole in the toe, and that it was only laced up halfway.

“Got to get you new shoes,” he said, bending down to relace them. He had to stick the knife in the ground to free his hands while he worked. The handle vibrated.

“Davey’s coming,” Benny said. “Coming now.”

Alan reached out as in his dream and felt for the knife, but it wasn’t there, as in his dream. He looked around as the skin on his face tightened and his heart began to pound in his ears, and he saw that it had merely fallen over in the dirt. He picked it up and saw that where it had fallen, it had knocked away the soil that had barely covered up a small, freckled hand, now gone black and curled into a fist like a monkey’s paw. Marci’s hand.

“He’s coming.” Benny took a step off the hill. “You won’t lose,” he said. “You’ve got the knife.”

The hand was small and fisted, there in the dirt. It had been just below the surface of where he’d been standing. It had been there, in Clarence’s soil, for months, decomposing, the last of Marci going. Somewhere just below that soil was her head, her face sloughing off and wormed. Her red hair fallen from her loosened scalp. He gagged and a gush of bile sprayed the hillside.

Danny hit him at the knees, knocking him into the dirt. He felt the little rotting fist digging into his ribs. His body bucked of its own accord, and he knocked Danny loose of his legs. His arm was hot and slippery, and when he looked at it he saw that it was coursing with blood. The knife in his other hand was bloodied and he saw that he’d drawn a long ragged cut along his bicep. A fountain of blood bubbled there with every beat of his heart, blub, blub, blub, and on the third blub, he felt the cut, like a long pin stuck in the nerve.

He climbed unsteadily to his feet and confronted Danny. Danny was naked and the color of the red golem clay. His ribs showed and his hair was matted and greasy.

“I’m coming home,” Danny said, baring his teeth. His breath reeked of corruption and uncooked meat, and his mouth was ringed with a crust of dried vomit. “And you’re not going to stop me.”

“You don’t have a home,” Alan said, pressing the hilt of the knife over the wound in his bicep, the feeling like biting down on a cracked tooth. “You’re not welcome.”

Davey was monkeyed over low, arms swinging like a chimp, teeth bared, knees splayed and ready to uncoil and pounce. “You think you’ll stab me with that?” he said, jerking his chin at the knife. “Or are you just going to bleed yourself out with it?”

Alan steadied his knife hand before him, unmindful of the sticky blood. He knew that the pounce was coming, but that didn’t help when it came. Davey leapt for him and he slashed once with the knife, Davey ducking beneath the arc, and then Davey had his forearm in his hands, his teeth fastened onto the meat of his knife thumb.

Andre rolled to one side and gripped down hard on the knife, tugging his arm ineffectually against the grip of the cruel teeth and the grasping bony fingers. Davey had lost his boyish charm, gone simian with filth and rage, and the sore and weak blows Alan was able to muster with his hurt arm didn’t seem to register with Danny at all as he bit down harder.

Arnold dragged his arm up higher, dragging the glinting knifetip toward Davey’s face. Drew kicked at his shins, planted a knee alongside his groin. Alan whipped his head back, then brought it forward as fast and hard as he could, hammering his forehead into the crown of Davey’s head so hard that his head rang like a bell.

He stunned Davey free of his hand and stunned himself onto his back. He felt small hands beneath each armpit, dragging him clear of the hill. Brian. And George. They helped him to his feet and Breton handed him the knife again. Darren got onto his knees, and then to his feet, holding the back of his head.

They both swayed slightly, standing to either side of Chris’s rise. Alan’s knife-hand was red with blood streaming from the bite wounds and his other arm felt unaccountably heavy now.

Davey was staggering back and forth a little, eyes dropping to the earth. Suddenly, he dropped to one knee and scrabbled in the dirt, then scrambled back with something in his hand.

Marci’s fist.

He waggled it at Andrew mockingly, then charged, crossing the distance between them with long, loping strides, the fist held out before him like a lance. Alan forgot the knife in his hand and shrank back, and then Davey was on him again, dropping the fist to the mud and taking hold of Alan’s knife-wrist, digging his ragged nails into the bleeding bites there.

Now Alan released the knife, so that it, too, fell to the mud, and the sound it made woke him from his reverie. He pulled his hand free of Davey’s grip and punched him in the ear as hard as he could, simultaneously kneeing him in the groin. Davey hissed and punched him in the eye, a feeling like his eyeball was going to break open, a feeling like he’d been stabbed in the back of his eye socket.

He planted a foot in the mud for leverage, then flipped Danny over so that Alan was on top, knees on his skinny chest. The knife was there beside Davey’s head, and Alan snatched it up, holding it ready for stabbing.

Danny’s eyes narrowed.

Alan could do it. Kill him altogether dead finished yeah. Stab him in the face or the heart or the lung, somewhere fatal. He could kill Davey and make him go away forever.

Davey caught his eye and held it. And Alan knew he couldn’t do it, and an instant later, Davey knew it, too. He smiled a crusty smile and went limp.

“Oh, don’t hurt me, please,” he said mockingly. “Please, big brother, don’t stab me with your big bad knife!”

Alan hurt all over, but especially on his bicep and his thumb. His head sang with pain and blood loss.

“Don’t hurt me, please!” Davey said.

Billy was standing before him, suddenly.

“That’s what Marci said when he took her, ’Don’t hurt me, please,’” he said. “She said it over and over again. While he dragged her here. While he choked her to death.”

Alan held the knife tighter.

“He said it over and over again as he cut her up and buried her. He laughed.

Danny suddenly bucked hard, almost throwing him, and before he had time to think, Alan had slashed down with the knife, aiming for the face, the throat, the lung. The tip landed in the middle of his bony chest and skated over each rib, going tink, tink, tink through the handle, like a xylophone. It scored along the emaciated and distended belly, then sank in just to one side of the smooth patch where a real person – where Marci – would have a navel.

Davey howled and twisted free of the seeking edge, skipping back three steps while holding in the loop of gut that was trailing free of the incision.

“She said, ’Don’t hurt me.’ She said, ’Please.’ Over and over. He said it, too, and he laughed at her.” Benny chanted it at him, standing just behind him, and the sound of his voice filled Alan’s ears.

Suddenly Davey reeled back as a stone rebounded off of his shoulder. They both looked in the direction it had come from, and saw George, with the tail of his shirt aproned before him, filled with small, jagged stones from the edge of the hot spring in their father’s depths. They took turns throwing those stones, skimming them over the water, and Ed and Fred and George had a vicious arm.

Davey turned and snarled and started upslope toward George, and a stone took him in the back of the neck, thrown by Freddie, who had sought cover behind a thick pine that couldn’t disguise the red of his windbreaker, red as the inside of his lip, which pouted out as he considered his next toss.

He was downslope, and so Drew was able to bridge the distance between them very quickly – he was almost upon Felix when a third stone, bigger and faster than the others, took him in the back of the head with terrible speed, making a sound like a hammer missing the nail and hitting solid wood instead.

It was Ernie, of course, standing on Craig’s highest point, winding up for another toss.

The threesome’s second volley hit him all at once, from three sides, high, low, and medium.

“Killed her, cut her up, buried her,” Benny chanted. “Sliced her open and cut her up,” he called.

“SHUT UP!” Davey screamed. He was bleeding from the back of his head, the blood trickling down the knobs of his spine, and he was crying, sobbing.

“KILLED HER, CUT HER UP, SLICED HER OPEN,” Ed-Fred-George chanted in unison.

Alan tightened his grip on the cords wound around the handle of his knife, and his knife hand bled from the puncture wounds left by Davey’s teeth.

Davey saw him coming and dropped to his knees, crying. Sobbing.

“Please,” he said, holding his hands out before him, palms together, begging.

“Please,” he said, as the loop of intestine he’d been holding in trailed free.

“Please,” he said, as Alan seized him by the hair, jerked his head back, and swiftly brought the knife across his throat.

Benny took his knife, and Ed-Fred-George coaxed Clarence into a slow, deep fissuring. They dragged the body into the earthy crack and Clarence swallowed up their brother.

Benny led Alan to the cave, where they’d changed his bedding and laid out a half-eaten candy bar, a shopping bag filled with bramble-berries, and a lock of Marci’s hair, tied into a knot.

 

Alan dragged all of his suitcases up from the basement to the living room, from the tiny tin valise plastered with genuine vintage deco railway stickers to the steamer trunk that he’d always intended to refurbish as a bathroom cabinet. He hadn’t been home in fifteen years. Nearly half his life. What should he bring?

Clothes were the easiest. It was coming up on the cusp of July and August, and he remembered boyhood summers on the mountain’s slopes abuzz with blackflies and syrupy heat. White T-shirts, lightweight trousers, high-tech hiking boots that breathed, a thin jacket for the mosquitoes at dusk.

He decided to pack four changes of clothes, which made a very small pile on the sofa. Small suitcase. The little rolling carry-on? The wheels would be useless on the rough cave floor.

He paced and looked at the spines of his books, and paced more, into the kitchen. It was a beautiful summer day and the tall grasses in the back yard nodded in the soft breeze. He stepped through the screen door and out into the garden and let the wild grasses scrape over his thighs. Ivy and wild sunflowers climbed the fence that separated his yard from his neighbors, and through the chinks in the green armor, he saw someone moving.

Mimi.

Pacing her garden, neatly tended vegetable beds, some flowering bulbs. Skirt and a cream linen blazer that rucked up over her shoulders, moving restlessly. Powerfully.

Alan’s breath caught in his throat. Her pale, round calves flashed in the sun. He felt himself harden, painfully. He must have gasped, or given some sign, or perhaps she heard his skin tighten over his body into a great goosepimply mass. Her head turned.

Their eyes met and he jolted. He was frozen in his footsteps by her gaze. One cheek was livid with a purple bruise, the eye above it slitted and puffed. She took a step toward him, her jacket opening to reveal a shapeless grey sweatshirt stained with food and – blood?

“Mimi?” he breathed.

She squeezed her eyes shut, her face turning into a fright mask.

“Abel,” she said. “Nice day.”

“Are you all right?” he said. He’d had his girls, his employees, show up for work in this state before. He knew the signs. “Is he in the house now?”

She pulled up a corner of her lip into a sneer and he saw that it was split, and a trickle of blood wet her teeth and stained them pink.

“Sleeping,” she said.

He swallowed. “I can call the cops, or a shelter, or both.”

She laughed. “I gave as good as I got,” she said. “We’re more than even.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “’Even’ is irrelevant. Are you safe?”

“Safe as houses,” she said. “Thanks for your concern.” She turned back toward her back door.

“Wait,” he said. She shrugged and the wings under her jacket strained against the fabric. She reached for the door. He jammed his fingers into the chain-link near the top and hauled himself, scrambling, over the fence, landing on all fours in a splintering of tomato plants and sticks.

He got to his feet and bridged the distance between them.

“I don’t believe you, Mimi,” he said. “I don’t believe you. Come over to my place and let me get you a cup of coffee and an ice pack and we’ll talk about it, please?”

“Fuck off,” she said tugging at the door. He wedged his toe in it, took her wrist gently.

“Please,” she said. “We’ll wake him.”

“Come over,” he said. “We won’t wake him.”

She cracked her arm like a whip, shaking his hand off her wrist. She stared at him out of her swollen eye and he felt the jolt again. Some recognition. Some shock. Some mirror, his face tiny and distorted in her eye.

She shivered.

“Help me over the fence,” she said pulling her skirt between her knees – bruise on her thigh – and tucking it behind her into her waistband. She jammed her bare toes into the link and he gripped one hard, straining calf in one hand and put the other on her padded, soft bottom, helping her up onto a perch atop the fence. He scrambled over and then took one bare foot, one warm calf, and guided her down.

“Come inside,” he said.

She’d never been in his house. Natalie and Link went in and out to use his bathroom while they were enjoying the sunset on his porch, or to get a beer. But Mimi had never crossed his threshold. When she did, it felt like something he’d been missing there had been finally found.

She looked around with a hint of a smile on her puffed lips. She ran her fingers over the cast-iron gas range he’d restored, caressing the bakelite knobs. She peered at the titles of the books in the kitchen bookcases, over the honey wood of the mismatched chairs and the smoothed-over scars of the big, simple table.

“Come into the living room,” Alan said. “I’ll get you an ice pack.”

She let him guide her by the elbow, then crossed decisively to the windows and drew the curtains, bringing on twilight. He moved aside his piles of clothes and stacked up the suitcases in a corner.

“Going somewhere?”

“To see my family,” he said. She smiled and her lip cracked anew, dripping a single dark droplet of blood onto the gleaming wood of the floor, where it beaded like water on wax paper.

“Home again, home again, jiggety jig,” she said. Her nearly closed eye was bright and it darted around the room, taking in shelves, fireplace, chairs, clothes.

“I’ll get you that ice pack,” he said. As he went back into the kitchen, he heard her walking around in the living room, and he remembered the first time he’d met her, of walking around her living room and thinking about slipping a VCD into his pocket.

He found her halfway up the staircase with one of the shallow bric-a-brac cabinets open before her. She was holding a Made-in-Occupied-Japan tin robot, the paint crazed with age into craquelaire like a Dutch Master painting in a gallery.

“Turn it upside down,” he said.

She looked at him, then turned it over, revealing the insides of the tin, revealing the gaudily printed tuna-fish label from the original can that it had been fashioned from.

“Huh,” she said and peered down into it. He hit the light switch at the bottom of the stairs so that she could see better. “Beautiful,” she said.

“Have it,” he said surprising himself. He’d have to remove it from The Inventory. He restrained himself from going upstairs and doing it before he forgot.

For the first time he could remember, she looked flustered. Her unbruised cheek went crimson.

“I couldn’t,” she said.

“It’s yours,” he said. He went up the stairs and closed the cabinet, then folded her fingers around the robot and led her by the wrist back down to the sofa. “Ice pack,” he said handing it to her, releasing her wrist.

She sat stiff-spined in on the sofa, the hump of her wings behind her keeping her from reclining. She caught him staring.

“It’s time to trim them,” she said.

“Oh, yes?” he said, mind going back to the gridwork of old scars by her shoulders.

“When they get too big, I can’t sit properly or lie on my back. At least not while I’m wearing a shirt.”

“Couldn’t you, I don’t know, cut the back out of a shirt?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Or go topless. Or wear a halter. But not in public.”

“No, not in public. Secrets must be kept.”

“You’ve got a lot of secrets, huh?” she said.

“Some,” he said.

“Deep, dark ones?”

“All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That’s in the nature of secrets.”

She pressed the towel-wrapped bag of ice to her face and rolled her head back and forth on her neck. He heard pops and crackles as her muscles and vertebrae unlimbered.

“Hang on,” he said. He ran up to his room and dug through his T-shirt drawer until he found one that he didn’t mind parting with. He brought it back downstairs and held it up for her to see. “Steel Pole Bathtub,” he said. “Retro chic. I can cut the back out for you, at least while you’re here.”

She closed her eyes. “I’d like that,” she said in a small voice.

So he got his kitchen shears and went to work on the back of the shirt, cutting a sizable hole in the back of the fabric. He folded duct tape around the ragged edges to keep them from fraying. She watched bemusedly.

“Freakshow Martha Stewart,” she said.

He smiled and passed her the shirt. “I’ll give you some privacy,” he said, and went back into the kitchen and put away the shears and the tape. He tried not to listen to the soft rustle of clothing in the other room.

“Alan,” she said – Alan and not Asshole or Abel – “I could use some help.”

He stepped cautiously into the living room and saw there, in the curtained twilight, Mimi. She was topless, heavy breasts marked red with the outline of her bra straps and wires. They hung weightily, swaying, and stopped him in the doorway. She had her arms lifted over her head, tugging her round belly up, stretching her navel into a cat-eye slit. The T-shirt he’d given her was tangled in her arms and in her wings.

Her magnificent wings.

They were four feet long each, and they stretched, one through the neck hole and the other through the hole he’d cut in the T-shirt’s back. They were leathery as he remembered, covered in a downy fur that glowed where it was kissed by the few shafts of light piercing the gap in the drapes. He reached for the questing, almost prehensile tip of the one that was caught in the neck hole. It was muscular, like a strong finger, curling against his palm like a Masonic handshake.

When he touched her wing, she gasped and shivered, indeterminately between erotic and outraged. They was as he imagined them, these wings, strong and primal and dark and spicy-smelling like an armpit after sex.

He gently guided the tip down toward the neck hole and marveled at the intricate way that it folded in on itself, at the play of mysterious muscle and cartilage, the rustle of bristling hair, and the motility of the skin.

It accordioned down and he tugged the shirt around it so that it came free, and then he slid the front of the shirt down over her breasts, painfully aware of his erection as the fabric rustled down over her rounded belly.

As her head emerged through the shirt, she shook her hair out and then unfolded her wings, slowly and exquisitely, like a cat stretching out, bending forward, spreading them like sails. He ducked beneath one, feeling its puff of spiced air on his face, and found himself staring at the hash of scars and the rigid ropes of hyperextended muscle and joints. Tentatively, he traced the scars with his thumbs, then, when she made no move to stop him, he dug his thumbs into the muscles, into their tension.

He kneaded at her flesh, grinding hard at the knots and feeling them give way, briskly rubbing the spots where they’d been to get the blood going. Her wings flapped gently around him as he worked, not caring that his body was pretzeled into a knot of its own to reach her back, since he didn’t want to break the spell to ask her to move over to give him a better angle.

He could smell her armpit and her wings and her hair and he closed his eyes and worked by touch, following scar to muscle, muscle to knot, working his way the length and breadth of her back, following the muscle up from the ridge of her iliac crest like a treasure trail to the muscle of her left wing, which was softly twitching with pleasure.

She went perfectly still again when he took the wing in his hands. It had its own geometry, hard to understand and irresistible. He followed the mysterious and powerful muscles and bones, the vast expanses of cartilage, finding knots and squeezing them, kneading her as he’d kneaded her back, and she groaned and went limp, leaning back against him so that his face was in her hair and smelling her scalp oil and stale shampoo and sweat. It was all he could do to keep himself from burying his face in her hair and gnawing at the muscles at the base of her skull.

He moved as slow as a seaweed and ran his hands over to her other wing, giving it the same treatment. He was rock-hard, pressed against her, her wings all around him. He traced the line of her jaw to her chin, and they were breathing in unison, and his fingers found the tense place at the hinge and worked there, too.

Then he brushed against her bruised cheek and she startled, and that shocked him back to reality. He dropped his hands to his sides and then stood, realized his erection was straining at his shorts, sat back down again in one of the club chairs, and crossed his legs.

“Well,” he said.

Mimi unfolded her wings over the sofa-back and let them spread out, then leaned back, eyes closed.

“You should try the ice-pack again,” he said weakly. She groped blindly for it and draped it over her face.

“Thank you,” she sighed.

He suppressed the urge to apologize. “You’re welcome,” he said.

“It started last week,” she said. “My wings had gotten longer. Too long. Krishna came home from the club and he was drunk and he wanted sex. Wanted me on the bottom. I couldn’t. My wings. He wanted to get the knife right away and cut them off. We do it about four times a year, using a big serrated hunting knife he bought at a sporting-goods store on Yonge Street, one of those places that sells dud grenades and camou pants and tasers.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him, then closed them. He shivered and a goose walked over his grave.

“We do it in the tub. I stand in the tub, naked, and he saws off the wings right to my shoulders. I don’t bleed much. He gives me a towel to bite on while he cuts. To scream into. And then we put them in garden trash bags and he puts them out just before the garbage men arrive, so the neighborhood dogs don’t get at them. For the meat.”

He noticed that he was gripping the arm rests so tightly that his hands were cramping. He pried them loose and tucked them under his thighs.

“He dragged me into the bathroom. One second, we were rolling around in bed, giggling like kids in love, and then he had me so hard by the wrist, dragging me naked to the bathroom, his knife in his other fist. I had to keep quiet, so that I wouldn’t wake Link and Natalie, but he was hurting me, and I was scared. I tried to say something to him, but I could only squeak. He hurled me into the tub and I cracked my head against the tile. I cried out and he crossed the bathroom and put his hand over my mouth and nose and then I couldn’t breathe, and my head was swimming.

“He was naked and hard, and he had the knife in his fist, not like for slicing, but for stabbing, and his eyes were red from the smoke at the club, and the bathroom filled with the booze-breath smell, and I sank down in the tub, shrinking away from him as he grabbed for me.

“He – growled. Saw that I was staring at the knife. Smiled. Horribly. There’s a piece of granite we use for a soap dish, balanced in the corner of the tub. Without thinking, I grabbed it and threw it as hard as I could at him. It broke his nose and he closed his eyes and reached for his face and I wrapped him up in the shower curtain and grabbed his arm and bit at the base of his thumb so hard I heard a bone break and he dropped the knife. I grabbed it and ran back to our room and threw it out the window and started to get dressed.”

She’d fallen into a monotone now, but her wingtips twitched and her knees bounced like her motor was idling on high. She jiggled.

“You don’t have to tell me this,” he said.

She took off the ice pack. “Yes, I do,” she said. Her eyes seemed to have sunk into her skull, vanishing into dark pits. He’d thought her eyes were blue, or green, but they looked black now.

“All right,” he said.

“All right,” she said. “He came through the door and I didn’t scream. I didn’t want to wake up Link and Natalie. Isn’t that stupid? But I couldn’t get my sweatshirt on, and they would have seen my wings. He looked like he was going to kill me. Really. Hands in claws. Teeth out. Crouched down low like a chimp, ready to grab, ready to swing. And I was back in a corner again, just wearing track pants. He didn’t have the knife this time, though.

“When he came for me, I went limp, like I was too scared to move, and squeezed my eyes shut. Listened to his footsteps approach. Felt the creak of the bed as he stepped up on it. Felt his breath as he reached for me.

“I exploded. I’ve read books on women’s self-defense, and they talk about doing that, about exploding. You gather in all your energy and squeeze it tight, and then blamo boom, you explode. I was aiming for his soft parts: Balls. Eyes. Nose. Sternum. Ears. I’d misjudged where he was, though, so I missed most of my targets.

“And then he was on me, kneeling on my tits, hands at my throat. I bucked him but I couldn’t get him off. My chest and throat were crushed, my wings splayed out behind me. I flapped them and saw his hair move in the breeze. He was sweating hard, off his forehead and off his nose and lips. It was all so detailed. And silent. Neither of us made a sound louder than a grunt. Quieter than our sex noises. Now I wanted to scream, wanted to wake up Link and Natalie, but I couldn’t get a breath.

“I worked one hand free and I reached for the erection that I could feel just below my tits, reached as fast as a striking snake, grabbed it, grabbed his balls, and I yanked and I squeezed like I was trying to tear them off.

“I was.

“Now he was trying to get away and I had him cornered. I kept squeezing. That’s when he kicked me in the face. I was dazed. He kicked me twice more, and I ran downstairs and got a parka from the closet and ran out into the front yard and out to the park and hid in the bushes until morning.

“He was asleep when I came back in, after Natalie and Link had gone out. I found the knife beside the house and I went up to our room and I stood there, by the window, listening to you talk to them, holding the knife.”

She plumped herself on the cushions and flapped her wings once, softly, another puff of that warm air wafting over him. She picked up the tin robot he’d given her from the coffee table and turned it over in her hands, staring up its skirts at the tuna-fish illustration and the Japanese ideograms.

“I had the knife, and I felt like I had to use it. You know Chekhov? ’If a gun is on the mantle in the first act, it must go off in the third.’ I write one-act plays. Wrote. But it seemed to me that the knife had been in act one, when Krishna dragged me into the bathroom.

“Or maybe act one was when he brought it home, after I showed him my wings.

“And act two had been my night in the park. And act three was then, standing over him with the knife, cold and sore and tired, looking at the blood crusted on his face.”

Her face and her voice got very, very small, her expression distant. “I almost used it on myself. I almost opened my wrists onto his face. He liked it when I... rode... his face. Like the hot juices. Seemed mean-spirited to spill all that hot juice and deny him that pleasure. I thought about using it on him, too, but only for a second.

“Only for a second.

“And then he rolled over and his hands clenched into fists in his sleep and his expression changed, like he was dreaming about something that made him angry. So I left.

“Do you want to know about when I first showed him these?” she said, and flapped her wings lazily.

She took the ice pack from her face and he could see that the swelling had gone down, the discoloration faded to a dim shadow tinged with yellows and umbers.

He did, but he didn’t. The breeze of her great wings was strangely intimate, that smell more intimate than his touches or the moment in which he’d glimpsed her fine, weighty breasts with their texture of stretch marks and underwire grooves. He was awkward, foolish feeling.

“I don’t think I do,” he said at last. “I think that we should save some things to tell each other for later.”

She blinked, slow and lazy, and one tear rolled down and dripped off her nose, splashing on the red T-shirt and darkening it to wineish purple.

“Will you sit with me?” she said.

He crossed the room and sat on the other end of the sofa, his hand on the seam that joined the two halves together, crossing the border into her territory, an invitation that could be refused without awkwardness.

She covered his hand with hers, and hers was cold and smooth but not distant: immediate, scritching and twitching against his skin. Slowly, slowly, she leaned toward him, curling her wing round his far shoulder like a blanket or a lover’s arm, head coming to rest on his chest, breath hot on his nipple through the thin fabric of his T-shirt.

“Alan?” she murmured into his chest.

“Yes?”

“What are we?” she said.

“Huh?”

“Are we human? Where do we come from? How did we get here? Why do I have wings?”

He closed his eyes and found that they’d welled up with tears. Once the first tear slid down his cheek, the rest came, and he was crying, weeping silently at first and then braying like a donkey in sobs that started in his balls and emerged from his throat like vomit, gushing out with hot tears and hot snot.

Mimi enveloped him in her wings and kissed his tears away, working down his cheeks to his neck, his Adam’s apple.

He snuffled back a mouthful of mucus and salt and wailed, “I don’t know!”

She snugged her mouth up against his collarbone. “Krishna does,” she whispered into his skin. She tugged at the skin with her teeth. “What about your family?”

He swallowed a couple of times, painfully aware of her lips and breath on his skin, the enveloping coolth of her wings, and the smell in every breath he took. He wanted to blow his nose, but he couldn’t move without breaking the spell, so he hoarked his sinuses back into his throat and drank the oozing oyster of self-pity that slid down his throat.

“My family?”

“I don’t have a family, but you do,” she said. “Your family must know.”

“They don’t,” he said.

“Maybe you haven’t asked them properly. When are you leaving?”

“Today.”

“Driving?”

“Got a rental car,” he said.

“Room for one more?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then take me,” she said.

“All right,” he said. She raised her head and kissed him on the lips, and he could taste the smell now, and the blood roared in his ears as she straddled his lap, grinding her mons – hot through the thin cotton of her skirt – against him. They slid down on the sofa and they groaned into each others’ mouths, his voice box resonating with hers.

 

He parked the rental car in the driveway, finishing his cell phone conversation with Lyman and then popping the trunk before getting out. He glanced reflexively up at Mimi and Krishna’s windows, saw the blinds were still drawn.

When he got to the living room, Mimi was bent over a suitcase, forcing it closed. Two more were lined up beside the door, along with three shopping bags filled with tupperwares and ziplocs of food from his fridge.

“I’ve borrowed some of your clothes,” she said. “Didn’t want to have to go back for mine. Packed us a picnic, too.”

He planted his hands on his hips. “You thought of everything, huh?” he said.

She cast her eyes down. “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. “I couldn’t go home.” Her wings unfolded and folded down again nervously.

He went and stood next to her. He could still smell the sex on her, and on him. A livid hickey stood out on her soft skin on her throat. He twined her fingers in his and dropped his face down to her ear.

“It’s okay,” he said huskily. “I’m glad you did it.”

She turned her head and brushed her lips over his, brushed her hand over his groin. He groaned softly.

“We have to get driving,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Load the car, then bring it around the side. I’ll lie down on the back seat until we’re out of the neighborhood.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot, huh?”

“It’s all I’ve thought of,” she said.

 

She climbed over the back seat once they cleared Queen Street, giggling as her wings, trapped under her jacket, brushed the roof of the big Crown Victoria he’d rented. She prodded at the radio and found a college station, staticky and amateurish, and nodded her head along with the mash-up mixes and concert bootlegs the DJ was spinning.

Alan watched her in the rearview and felt impossibly old and strange. She’d been an incredible and attentive lover, using her hands and mouth, her breasts and wings, her whole body to keep him quivering on the brink of orgasm for what felt like hours, before finally giving him release, and then had guided him around her body with explicit instructions and firm hands on his shoulders. When she came, she squeezed him between her thighs and screamed into his neck, twitching and shuddering for a long time afterward, holding him tight, murmuring nonsense and hot breath.

In the dark, she’d seemed older. His age, or some indeterminate age. Now, sitting next to him, privately spazzing out to the beat, she seemed, oh, 12 or so. A little girl. He felt dirty.

“Where are we going?” she said, rolling down the window and shouting over the wind as they bombed up the Don Valley Parkway. The traffic had let up at Sheppard, and now they were making good time, heading for the faceless surburbs of Richmond Hill and Thornhill, and beyond.

“North,” he said. “Past Kapuskasing.”

She whistled. “How long a drive is it?”

“Fifteen hours. Twenty, maybe. Depends on the roads – you can hit cottage traffic or a bad accident and get hung up for hours. There are good motels between Huntsville and North Bay if we get tired out. Nice neon signs, magic fingers beds. A place I like has ’Swiss Cabins’ and makes a nice rosti for dinner.”

“God, that’s a long trip,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, wondering if she wanted out. “I can pull off here and give you cab fare to the subway station if you wanna stay.”

“No!” she said quickly. “No. Want to go.”

 

She fed him as he drove, slicing cheese and putting it on crackers with bits of olive or pepper or salami. It appeared that she’d packed his entire fridge in the picnic bags.

After suppertime, she went to work on an apple, and he took a closer look at the knife she was using. It was a big, black hunting knife, with a compass built into the handle. The blade was black except right at the edge, where it gleamed sharp in the click-clack of the passing highway lights.

He was transfixed by it, and the car drifted a little, sprayed gravel from the shoulder, and he overcorrected and fishtailed a little. She looked up in alarm.

“You brought the knife,” he said, in response to her unasked question.

“Couldn’t leave it with him,” she said. “Besides, a sharp knife is handy.”

“Careful you don’t slice anything off, okay?”

“I never cut anything unintentionally,” she said in a silly-dramatic voice, and socked him in the shoulder.

He snorted and went back to the driving, putting the hammer down, eating up the kilometers toward Huntsville and beyond.

She fed him slices of apple and ate some herself, then rolls of ham with little pieces of pear in them, then sips of cherry juice from a glass bottle.

“Enough,” he said at last. “I’m stuffed, woman!”

She laughed. “Skinny little fucker – gotta put some meat on your bones.” She tidied the dinner detritus into an empty shopping bag and tossed it over her shoulder into the back seat.

“So,” she said. “How long since you’ve been home?”

He stared at the road for a while. “Twenty years,” he said. “Never been back since I left.”

She stared straight forward and worked her hand under his thigh, so he was sitting on it, then wriggled her knuckles.

“I’ve never been home,” she said.

He wrinkled his brow. “What’s that mean?” he said.

“It’s a long story,” she said.

“Well, let’s get off the highway and get a room and you can tell me, okay?”

“Sure,” she said.

 

They ended up at the Timberline Wilderness Lodge and Pancake House, and Mimi clapped her hands at the silk-flowers-and-waterbeds ambience of the room, fondled the grisly jackalope head on the wall, and started running a tub while Alan carried in the suitcases.

She dramatically tossed her clothes, one item at a time, out the bathroom door, through the clouds of steam, and he caught a glimpse of her round, full ass, bracketed by her restless wings, as she poured into the tub the bottle of cheap bubble-bath she’d bought in the lobby.

He dug a T-shirt and a fresh pair of boxers to sleep in out of his suitcase, feeling ridiculously modest as he donned them. His feet crunched over cigarette burns and tangles in the brown shag carpet and he wished he’d brought along some slippers. He flipped through both snowy TV channels and decided that he couldn’t stomach a televangelist or a thirty-year-old sitcom right then and flicked it off, sitting on the edge of the bed, listening to the splashing from the bathroom.

Mimi was in awfully good spirits, considering what she’d been through with Krishna. He tried to think about it, trying to make sense of the day and the girl, but the splashing from the tub kept intruding on his thoughts.

She began to sing, and after a second he recognized the tune. “White Rabbit,” by the Jefferson Airplane. Not the kind of thing he’d expect her to be giving voice to; nor she, apparently, for she kept breaking off to giggle. Finally, he poked his head through the door.

She was folded into the tub, knees and tits above the foamline, wings slick with water and dripping in the tile. Her hands were out of sight beneath the suds. She caught his eye and grinned crazily, then her hands shot out of the pool, clutching the hunting knife.

Put on the White Rabbit!” she howled, cackling fiendishly.

He leapt back and she continued to cackle. “Come back, come back,” she choked. “I’m doing the tub scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I thought you were into reading?”

He cautiously peeked around the doorjamb, playing it up for comic effect. “Give me the knife,” he said.

“Awww,” she said, handing it over, butt first. He set it down on the dresser, then hurried back to the bathroom.

“Haven’t you read all those books?”

Alan grinned. “What’s the point of a bunch of books you’ve already read?” He dropped his boxers and stripped off his T-shirt and climbed into the tub, sloshing gallons of water over the scummy tile floor.

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