Shanty Shanty Shanty

Organized religion can be a trap.

I’m mainly referring to Christianity, or Catholicism. Church-goers are consistent, and even though they don’t like the word “superstitious”, it isn’t so far from the word “devout”. Not in this case. If you were to blow a tsunami onto their shores and stop it when it spits on their front porch, they would call it a miracle and turn their thanks upward, instead of forward, to the sea that so benevolently did not steal their livelihood (or lives) from them.

I took control of this shantytown over three months ago, and I have hardly had to leave the beach since then. I’ve been admiring it from the shore for a few days now, with several fish flopping on the sand next to me. Or, they were flopping.

The shantytown was not a difficult place to liberate from its old owners (the residents). When I say shantytown, I mean there are several thousands of souls here, and hundreds more that tear through a part of it on the highway. There is almost no one tearing out of here, though. And despite the town’s small size, it took six days for news to reach from one end of the town to the other that I had seized it. And then there was not much for them to do.

There is a large house on the shore that belongs to a family that lives elsewhere. It was their summer home, and now it is my court. I believe in things like courts, the same way Christians believe in churches, but more political and less spiritual. There’s power in these walls, though there isn’t much else. It is more beautiful and daunting on the outside than on the inside, because the inside is saturated with the lived-in smell of old linens and pipe rust and carpets. I sit on the porch, facing the water, and rise when the humans come to speak to me, if only to make them believe that I have taken notice of their interruption, and I have no intention of this conversation interrupting me more than it must. Really, the interruption is somewhat welcome, because otherwise I walk indoors and then out the other side, and sit beneath the beech tree and inspect the changes in my legs (new freckles, new hairs, the way muscles shift around bones when I move them).

It isn’t a superpower, what I do. My colleagues (acquaintances, family, kin, etc.) all shoulder the burden of this same super power. They must see it as a burden, because there are hardly any recent story about our clever ways. Our charms, our glamours. There are ways to look human, one of my kin once told me, quietly and fervently, like it was a secret, something superior and forbidden and tantalizing. Then everyone was doing it, and suddenly it lost its appeal, apparently. We have charmed children to look like tree branches and tubers and large vegetables. Some of us- not my kind specifically- have traded them and made off with the children. My kind just decided to start leaving their skins about everywhere. It was all a planned sort of laziness. A trap that required nothing more than a shucking off of clothing. Then luring others to it. We did it so efficiently, so unthinkingly, that I imagine we were something like smart children in a boring environment. Learning to adapt, condensing into adulthood. But ability fades without use. If most of them were to try to stretch that muscle now, they would achieve nothing but snapping it.

The glamour is nothing more than a safety precaution. If humans were to see us with their children in hand often, there would be some problems. It is better by far to hand over a piece of driftwood made up to look like a drowned child than to offer up a drowned child. There are only so many children in this shantytown, anyway, and humans being sent to talk and negotiate would notice a sudden decline of the one generation keeping them going. So it is branches and sticks of wood and pieces of tarp that become a part of the ruse. A way to smooth the edges, and pave and sand the streets. A few days later, when the children (or beautiful wives or handsome husbands or sickly parents or lovers) are back to being bits of driftwood and nothing more, there must be some relieved exclamations. Yet I’ve never been called upon to explain myself.

I only know it has been enough to secure this shantytown, and it is the superstitious, religious folk that would build me an altar and sacrifice everything but their firstborn to keep me appeased.

Some of them put crosses on their doors too, to no effect. It was a fun couple of days, listening to them hammer away.

The first of the negotiators came within two weeks. Sent by some power of the United States. Homeland Security, of the FBI, or some other waste of taxes. Citizens of the United States had much better options, but this was what they gave me. A twitching, often young, member of the shantytown, stumbling over their words as they asked what it was I wanted or needed, to keep them and the town safe. I had a hell of a time telling them that there was nothing Homeland or the FBI or the President of the United States himself could offer that would appease me. I would disappear into the beachside house and come out the other side, steal a twig from the beech tree, and between the front door and the back door I would make it appear like the arm of a child. I screamed once, for good measure. And broke some glass once, just for the illusion. This is not something that my kin would do- this is not part of being clever. This is what comes, I suppose, of being the only one up here, the only one on the sand rather than in the waves. Eventually, the loneliness is enough to make you a little dramatic.

The negotiator would leave, and I would sit on the porch and look at the waves and think that this was a stupid shore to have washed up on, and if I could choose again, I’d go the long way round and do to the west coast, or I’d cross all the way back to my people’s first home. There was better music there, I heard, and even more superstition, of the old-but-not-Christian variety.

It’s been nearly five months now. The fish keep tumbling onto the sand and dying, which isn’t normal. Members of the shantytown bring me food I don’t care to eat, and wine I don’t care to drink. None of them bring the one thing that could stop me, because only one person has it. I don’t know who it is, and if they never return here, then I will never return to the waves. So it’s all on the humans, really. One human. Until that day, if it comes at all, I’ll remain here, and the humans will have as little choice as I do to deal with it.

There were other efforts made, before now, to evict me from the shantytown by force. But present a SWAT team with some glamoured pieces of flotsam and jetsam, some crosses charmed to look like the bodies of children or beautiful women (always women and children, they all want to save the vulnerable ones) and the SWAT team begins to sweat beneath their fatigues. If I’m stuck in a stalemate, waiting for one of their kind, then they can be stuck in a stalemate as well, waiting for me to leave or do whatever I will with this town.

Of course, eventually someone will realize that the bodies I send out are unidentifiable, and that I’ve exceeded the population of this town with my body count, or that the town has not actually decreased in size despite the growing body count, and then I might have to do some creative truth telling. But on that day, if things continue in this boring way, I might just be happy to face the challenge. My kin always said I wasn’t good at being idle. None of us are.

I’ve reached five months and the beach smells of rotting fish. I hear a car approach and watch it around the side of the house. The person standing on the asphalt is no one I know, but I don’t need to know her to recognize her. She is a negotiator, donning the neon vest that makes all negotiators look like perhaps they are planning to direct air traffic. She also carries something in her arms, and it looks like a sweater, which is odd on such a warm day.

“Fuck,” I say, when she comes closer, and I can see that in her arms it is no sweater. It makes me smile, and it makes me relieved, and it makes me feel that I’ve lost the game. I doubt They (They being the people behind these machinations, behind sending her, the FBI or Homeland Security or whoever it is) knew what they were doing when they sent her, or knew just how equipped she is to send me away.

Because she has my skin folded in her arms.

I wait on the sand, because I may as well be close to the waves, in case the unlikely does happen.

“Please wipe your feet on the mat before entering,” I say when she finds the back porch.

She looks at the grainy, wet sand on the beach, and the grainy, wet sand on the porch, and then the grainy, wet sand on her feet. She’s younger, but quite pretty. Could be worse. “What is really going on here?” she asks.

I say, “I’ve taken over the town.”

She hoists my skin up in her arms. She doesn’t even seem to realize it’s there, but she must. She says, “Why this town? What are you doing here? We’ve never had this kind of trouble before. Why didn’t you take it somewhere else, like, somewhere bigger or something? You’re afraid of being found out, aren’t you.”

Perhaps They had chosen her because of her intellect, and not because of extreme fortune in coming across my skin. I would never again just leave it out to dry on a rock, I decided. “I’m afraid of nothing. Haven’t you heard? I’m a killer and scoundrel. I’m here to stay, unless, the obvious were to happen.”

“Or unless I just take you away right now. What’s the stop me from just carting this away from the ocean and making you follow me?” She shakes the skin a little, to taunt me or to frighten me.

“My charm.” I flick my fingers and the wave behind me jumps. If she is so smart, she should know that it’s we that have stopped the sea from swallowing this town, on occasion. “My dashing good looks. My personality. Or the fact that you owe me. Don’t you?”

“I’ve never made a deal with you,” she says, because apparently she truly is that smart.

“I know that. But don’t you believe in having a little gratitude?” She doesn’t say a thing, or give up my skin. “If I were another thing, I could convince you to dance with me until your feet grind down to nubs and your bones turn to dust and everyone you love is dead.”

She grimaces, like I’ve just shown her a picture of the outcome. “I’m not really a dancer. I’d say no. And you can’t do that, so.”

I make the waves jump a little higher, and crash on the sand, over my feet and right up to hers. “I could take your firstborn and leave you with another and you wouldn’t notice until one day you had a child that couldn’t lie or travel across water or stand the smell of human blood.”

“That’s unoriginal,” she says. “Try again.”

I nudge a dead fish with my foot. There are fewer right now than there were a minute ago. The waves I called have taken some of them out. “I could make you a lady among my people. There are humans that would die for that opportunity, you know.”

She smiles into my skin. I could almost smile myself, which is when I realize that it will have been the first time I’ve smiled in over forty days. I can almost feel her smile pressed into my skin. It is right there, in front of my, and the ocean is right there, behind me.

“A lady,” she says. The waves crash behind me, through no work of my own. “As tempting as that sounds, I don’t want to see what your home is like, if this is what you’ve done to my town.”

“I’ve been bored,” I say. “My home is nothing like this. You’d be the only one to have seen it for dozens of years. What do you say to that?”

“What difference would that make? Would it stop you from doing this again?”

I smile. “What would stop me from doing this again is in your arms, but you don’t seem to want to give it up. If you come along with it, then we’ll both be happier. Or leave yourself behind, and I’ll make sure we remember your generosity.”

She looks down, where silvery fish bodies are being rolled by the froth and the brine into the waves. The beach looks like rippling, living metal. She says, “I know you can’t lie, but I’m sure you’re not telling the full truth.”

“I’d tell it if you asked for it,” I say. “You’re the human one here.”

More fish roll into the sea. One hits my ankle and stays there on the sand, staring up at me. The vitreous humour dried out a while ago, so it’s nothing but a dark socket and some scales. I can already tell where this is headed, because she’s human and I’ve been around them for months now, and for years before that. “You sound pretty human yourself,” she replies. “You look it too, without this on. I think you’re hardly something else anymore. There’s almost no point.”

I hope my kin push back and drown this town.

“I’m going to hold onto this for a while, just so you can’t do this again,” she says, turning away with my skin in her hands. Now that I’ve seen it again, I cannot easily let it out of my sight. “No more dead bodies. That’s the first rule.”

She leads me around to the front, past the beech tree, and if she hears the sea start to toss, she doesn’t say anything. I have no choice but to watch her keep the skin on her lap as she drives me into the police station, accompanied by applause from half the town.

Their clapping sounds almost like the tide coming in.

Art by Anna Dittmann

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Victims

One would think that there were something in my past, or my genetic make up, to indicate exactly what I’d do. But there was nothing. I was born a nobody, to a family that had no more respect for the Good Ones than most. Another white family that didn’t care about its Irish or Scottish roots, only that West Virginia voted right in the upcoming election. I lived hours away from city, and I use the term city loosely, because what city meant to us was that there was a movie theatre with more than two people working in it, and more than one Starbucks. Where I came from, people passed around stories about torrential rain blowing off roofs, or deer jumping tragically in front of bumpers, or having to chase goats away from the tractor innards on the lawn.

I came from dirt and I looked like it. My family is coloured like the land we live on, all brown and forgettable. I only thought West Virginia was beautiful when I got out of it. Up and took myself to Chicago, where the red brick buildings covered in so many fire escapes like parasites made me realize that you didn’t find that amount of green just anywhere outside of West Virginia. I didn’t regret it, and my family was proud to have me gone. I was always different, they started to tell me in letters and over the phone, only after I’d left. When I was in elementary school, bored waiting for the hot lunch program to fill me, I played games of checkers on a board made of salt and sugar packets, which I stuffed in my pockets for later. I never jumped at loud noises in the hedges, and whatever might have gotten caught in there, I gently hitched out of the brambles and set free. I was the only one to see what the crazy woman (Hilly- short for Hilda or Hillary, no one knew) saw, or to say I did, and steer her away from the strange creatures. I used to put out small ramekins of milk at night, for cats or ghosts I used to say. In return, mother said, nothing in the garden, and nothing in the fields, ever grew poorly or struggled, even through a particularly short season. I never lied, not even when a couple of short skirts in high school accused me of getting them drunk and figuring out for myself what was under those short skirts. I planted a mountain ash tree outside the house of a neighbour who had woken up with her hair in many knots, as deliberate as a sailor’s, as though someone had done it in the night. How grateful she was, my mother said, for the mountain ash, and how generous it was of her to gift me the money I used to buy my way to Chicago.

I bought the apartment, by the way. Not the ride. I rode in the back of the truck that came once a week to stock the convenience section of the gas station on the edge of our dust town.

Chicago wasn’t my first stop, actually. It was the last of many stops. I made stops in Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, down to Louisville, up to Milwaukee, and down again. I realized, over the trip, exactly how I related to people. It wasn’t something you always knew from living in a small town, but you got to know it fast when you moved around. Mostly, I got to know victims. I could pick them out in a crowd, whether I was trying to or not, and once I did, they flocked, like they sensed I could help them. It was like a buzzard’s love song, coming to me at once. I never wanted for a girlfriend.

I had a knack for picking them out, but they were really the ones that picked me.

In Columbus, Alina became sick to her stomach after drinking some sweet beer with a few boys in the park. She stuttered over her explanation, like I would be upset with her for spending time with other men. By the time she’d calmed down and had the tea I made for her from rose hips and salt, her stomach was right as rain, and she knew never to accept strange drinks from pretty boys again. She broke up with me two weeks later.

Gloria of Cincinnati loved to dance. She thought herself most beautiful when she was in the thrashing mass of people in a Latin club, and she had no reservations about who she danced with. We met and got together when she taught me how to meringue. We lasted as long as it took her to dance with someone else, which had happened before. She didn’t stop dancing, which hadn’t happened before. When I sprinkled some soil beneath her feet and took her one hand that wasn’t occupied by a man I refused to make eye contact with, and when I led her on a path of soil to the outdoors, and when I piggybacked her home because human legs aren’t meant to be used after four consecutive days of dancing, she learned that you can’t dance wherever you fancy. When I left Cincinnati, she was looking to open her own club on her family’s property. She had a steep learning curve.

There was one in every town, and not much variation: Elizabeth in Indianapolis who plucked an apple from a neighbour’s yard without asking dumped me three days after I plucked a poisoned splinter from the inside of her lip. Louisville Nuala jokingly traded her annoying baby sister for a face free from pimples, and found the crib empty and the window open when she went home that night. I gave her some SpectroGel, found her sister alive, unharmed, and only slightly dirty under a mound of soil in the ravine, and brought her back to her nursery, newly anointed at the windows and door with salt. The next weekend, Nuala and I were over. Milwaukee was no better. I didn’t mind teaching the lessons, though I could have done without the breakups. When I worked my way back up north, finally with a destination in mind, I swore off girlfriends, and swore instead on my talent.

Chicago is much better than it once was, but there are neighbourhoods still where it’s unwise to walk with earphones in, with your eyes down, with your head up, with your heels on and your brain still stewing in alcohol. Because those are the easiest to get, and mostly, it’s girls. The girls who aren’t in school, aren’t sober, aren’t at home every night, aren’t at home any nights, aren’t sure how to make a fist, aren’t above accepting a handout. It’s hard to turn some of them away, but I feel that, in the interest of keeping my life the way it is, I’d best skirt any police interference, or neighbourly interference, that comes with dating anyone below the age of consent. All the young ones just better wait a while before they make a hot and vulnerable mess of themselves.

We date. There are actual dates, with romance and everything. Then the work starts, because inevitably they all make Little Red Riding Hoods of themselves, talking to people and walking places they shouldn’t. Some of them are street smart, and even them, you can hardly imagine what stupid things they do. They accept strange gifts, strange invitations, take detours, hold hands, make promises. But they all come to me when they make a mistake. Unlike the maniac with the ax, I don’t command their eternal gratitude, or their loyalty. Once they’ve been freed of their own consequences and their lessons learned, they cast themselves off, hardly ever lasting more than a couple weeks. It isn’t the girls that are thankful, but I do get the occasional client that I haven’t dated, in need of a handful of salt, or to take a walk over running water, and they’re always pleased with my services.

I was visited by a police officer that had apparently seen two young women, and a young boy with his distraught mother and a black river tracing of veins in his neck, enter my apartment all in one week. The officer – a lethargic lump of a man with more hairs in his moustache than working neurons in his brain- asked to see the inside of my apartment, then asked some questions about what I was doing in Chicago (living), and where I worked (here, on my laptop) and who those girls were (friends), before he seemed to realize that there wasn’t much else to discover. He couldn’t see what I was doing in a day beside making lunch on the stove and listening to the radio quietly and being generally happy alone. He met my newest girlfriend on the way out, and because she hadn’t been victimized yet, and smiled, the officer didn’t come back.

Not yet, anyway. There’s always time for mistakes, the sort only I know how to fix.

That girlfriend lasted three more weeks. I haven’t dated anyone since, though there have been girls.

There have been girls and now there is Tate Shuter. In her face I can see that she has all kinds of street smarts. She has the accumulated street smarts of possibly every girl I’ve ever dated, and she’s never once considered putting any of that intellectual energy into school. She works at one of the bars I frequent, where Ava, who works with her, tells me she’s capricious and unfriendly. Tate walks home late, alone, and gets into shouting arguments with strangers on the street. She mouths off to anyone before she knows them. If someone leaves their wallet behind, there’s a good chance Tate will rummage through it before they’ve even had the chance to notice it’s missing and call the bar. She takes stupid risks, is what a lot of this amounts to, but I’ve known girls who take stupid risks smartly, and that’s Tate. It isn’t a problem, except that she’s now met me.

I knew the moment I first saw her that she would need my help eventually. Not for the fighting or the raising a fist, but when she finally ticks off the wrong person. They won’t get her with a backhand or a broken bottle, and she doesn’t know how to fix an argument she can’t fight her way out of. Ava keeps telling me what she knows about Tate, and I can see she thinks that I’ve chosen Tate, already. Tate never lies, because she never thinks she’s done anything wrong. That’s a cry for help, but she’s not really asking for it. Tate puts out milk for some cats she thinks lives in the alley, even though no one’s ever seen one. Tate climbed into the bushes beside the turnpike outside of the city proper because she heard a sound like an animal fighting, even though it could have been two hobos fighting or doing something else. Tate will get herself into trouble, I think, but I don’t quite want to help her. I want to prevent whatever it is I’ll treat her for, and we can live in my apartment with salt on the windowsills and we can buy an obnoxiously loud motorcycle, because I can tell that must be an aspiration for her. And we can put out milk at night and never try to figure out what drinks it, and watch the strawberries in our garden grow and blossom no matter the weather, because I can tell it’s something that would please both of us.

Tate catches me watching her stack glasses and says, “Don’t tell me it’s dangerous. I already know that.”

I say, “I wasn’t about to tell you that.” Though I want to say “here are all the other ways you can be careful, so I never have to help you.”

But I know I will, so I let it slide.

Art by Frederico Infante

Text by Lucie MacAulay

As Soon As You Can Walk In The Sun Again

I must, before we go any further, make it clear that I do not trust, or indeed like, night crawlers.

This is not a rule. There is no antecedent, though there is precedent. I have never had reason to like night crawlers, and they have given me much reason to believe them to be deceptive, deceitful, cruel, easily given to malice and mischief, and not much of a contribution to our world.

Seeing a night crawler within my workplace is not unnatural, and on this particular day, when I looked up at the ringing bell on the front door and was hit unkindly with a night crawler’s pleased smile, I did not feel any more kindly or generous than usual. He wore full sleeves and a jacket beside, though it was late spring and more than warm outdoors. That was one of the simplest ways to spot a night crawler. There was rarely someone so dressed up on a summer’s day as someone who was uncomfortable in the sun. I had been in a good mood until then, believing that perhaps the sun would have driven night crawlers away from the shop today.

Had he not been a night crawler, I cannot think of a single thing that might have endeared me to him anyway. He did not enter my shop curiously so much as he did deign to step into it. His eyes as they scrutinized the shelves implied I should feel lucky they were doing so. He might have been admiring himself in the polished wood, or appreciating the number of books present. Night crawlers like their audiences large. He touched his fingers to one of the tables, as though to check for dust or to stake a claim to it and all furnishings and space around it. The closer he came to the counter, the clearer it was that he was a night crawler. There was a flower in one of the buttonholes of his shirt; his kind always wore flowers for luck or protection, as though they needed it. Sometimes they used their flowers to barter with the rest of us, like a flower might be adequate compensation for whatever they were about to put one through. My heart and head immediately distrusted him.

“Lea,” the night crawler said. He had the accent of a night crawler, the one that made my name, though pronounced correctly, sound incredulous to say. “How are you on this day? It is nearly summer. You must be happy about that.”

I did prefer summer to any other time. I preferred the solitude of those hot months; no one wanted to stay inside and peruse books when there was sun to be had, and those that were forced inside for whatever reason rarely interrupted my reading. The bookstore might have suffered, but I did not. I did not know how the night crawler had come to know this, but he had.      

“Is it a good day?” the night crawler said again.

I glanced down at his feet. They were bare. “It was,” I said to him. “How may I help you, sir?”

“You can help me in many ways, if you would like to,” the night crawler said, with a truly sinful amount of lasciviousness. “Standing there and listening to me talk is one way.”

“I have only so much time, sir,” I said. The minutes were ticking away as slowly as they ever had done. I sent a quick request to the man upstairs that he might hurry along their process. “To be completely honest with you,” I went on, “Within the day I can manage about an hour of conversation with any given person, possibly less for speaking with a night crawler. If you could gallop ahead to the point and your reason for being here, please?”

The night crawler let his hands relax in his pockets. He might have just fallen out of a yacht, and maybe expected to be falling into one. His complete lack of vexation made me more upset than his slow moving progress. If he had only looked as unhappy, I might have been buoyant on a cloud of agreeability. The night crawler crossed his feet at the ankles and leaned against my counter. I had never seen one so graceful. “I would like you to consider doing me a favour. The answer is entirely up to you, of course, but I would just like to emphasize that you stand to lose nearly nothing. I understand I must earn your trust, but at the end of today, I hope you will change your mind. I hope you will think me a good investment.”

I thanked our dear lord that he had provided no other trying customers for me on this day that I might have spent my patience on. “I am sure you care about my opinion only as much as I care about yours, if that.”

“I am sure that there is someone who cares equally for both our opinions, and whose opinion I care for and you might care for as well.” His smile was a strange thing to behold. I had seen many self-satisfied night crawlers, but never had their self-satisfaction been so directed at me. He looked as pleased as any rattlesnake or clever rodent.

“Oh? I can think of no one with whom we might both be acquainted,” I said, with as much icy civility as I could.

“Then good for you for having worked it out already. You are as smart as I’ve been told,” the night crawler said. He stood up a little more and squared his shoulders. “I still have a proposition to make. I understand you might know how to grant a new night crawler the ability to show themselves in the day sooner than nature allows. Is this true?”

I clamped my mouth shut quite quickly. There were always rumours of such things flying about. Someone was always hinting here or there that they knew a way to change the nature of night crawlers. Often times, these were people looking to scam night crawlers, or those people associated with them. Other times, they sympathized with night crawlers and were looking for a way to ingratiate themselves in the night crawler world. I thought it must have been hard for night crawlers to avoid the temptation to follow fraudulent or truthful leads. They were always looking for ways to be in our world, outside of the nighttime, faster than their physical make up allowed. I am sure that if God intended them to walk among us before their base impulses were ready to allow them, then he would have made them impenetrable to the conditions of our world more quickly. I said, “How many others have you heard have this ability, and how many have you already tried to coax into assisting you?”

“It is not for me, of course, but for a friend,” the night crawler said, as though I might be endeared by the power of friendship. He tapped his fingernail on the counter top. I was immediately sickened. It was a distinctly nighttime sound, like the tapping of claws on a window. I had not been able to hear it for a while without the feeling of fear descending upon me.

“I was not aware night crawlers fidgeted,” I said.

He smoothly ceased tapping the counter top- I did not let him see my relief, and tried surreptitiously to dab the sweat at my temple with my shirt sleeve -  and leaned once more against the wood.

“If it is for your friend that you require my services, perhaps your friend should come here instead,” I proposed, and I watched his face to see if that impossible proposition would perturb him.

He smiled as though we had created a private joke between the two of us just now. “For the moment, my friend might only travel at night, or with particular protection,” he said lowly, leaning forward, conspiratorially. “Though I did notice my umbrella was missing this afternoon, so my friend might be travelling the streets now. I might mention that it would be in your best interests to help and- oh, do not think that is a threat. I truly mean your best interests. We might have the same interests. What a beautiful piano, by the way.” This last bit was said with a nod to the keyboard wedged between two bookcases. There was a sign on it warning patrons that they need not act upon any impulse to play it. It had not been played for several months, and there was almost no one I would want to play on it ever again.

“I can’t imagine how any of our interests might overlap,” I replied. “So far, I am seeing no reason to trust you any more that I should trust any other night crawler that comes looking for a way to serve his own self interests. I have seen night crawlers serve their self-interests before, and I have been a victim of it. If only you were all petty thieves, I might still be inclined to help you. But you should take your business elsewhere.”

The night crawler took a step toward the piano. My feet itched to take me between him and the instrument. They were both cold and pale as the evening light began to drain from the shop. Night crawlers were most comfortable at night; I did not want him to make himself too comfortable in the bookshop. “I think you would not want that. I think you would want to be the one to help me,” he said. “I know you care for rare and beautiful books. I have done something similar, though not with a book, and she certainly came to me of her own volition.”

I put my hands down on the counter so firmly that the glass under it rattled. “Do not tell me whatever crimes you might have committed, or any deeds I would not approve of. Do not come into my workplace and involve me in your schemes. You are welcome to leave, now.”

The night crawler held a hand over the piano keys. “But I haven’t been helped yet, and you have not even seen her. She missed you while she was gone, and she misses you still, every day.”

I felt the cold descend on me and continue to descend, as though it were a current of water, pushing and pulling at me. “I can think of only one person who-“

The bell at the door rang, as it rarely did so late in the day. My daughter came in first, then the umbrella, which she closed immediately. She wore the same green coat I had last seen her in, and the same boots, though both looked darker now against her pale skin. She came and put her hand on the night crawler’s arm. A ring glittered on her finger and she smiled while my heart jerked erratically back to life.

“Oh, papa,” she said, “I hope he hasn’t been too much of a nuisance. David talks and talks, but his ideas are a good investment, I think.”

“Like myself,” David said. Never had I seen a snake smile wider. “I was getting around to telling your father that you had already decided so, and we plan to make it official as soon as you can walk in the sun again.”

“Oh, papa.” My daughter held her umbrella against her chest. “Please. It’s summer, after all. You don’t want me to miss all of it, do you?”

Art by Rovina Cai

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Cortez

Nighttime in the desert is different from nighttime anywhere else. Darkness stretches form horizon to horizon as though it’s been pasted there. Any light beneath it is somewhat miraculous. If there weren’t other miracles in the desert, ones more influential than luminosity, people might make speculations about light in the desert. But the real miracles were loitering around an enormous box truck, looking up at the starts, or ahead at the mountains, or down at the thin layer of dust that the wind sometimes kicked up. The stars were interesting because they had been shifting for the last hour- shifting was not the right word. Showering sounded better, but it was not right either. They looked like raindrops running into each other on a pane of glass.

The mountains were interesting because they were high, alpine creations and somehow still radio waves and waves of other sorts strained over their peaks. They were formidable and unmovable and no match for the tiny antenna on the tiny radio they’d taken from the oldest girl’s mother’s kitchen.

The dust was not as interesting, but it wasn’t the dust that was being looked at. The girl with her eyes on the dust was truly looking at a narrative in her own mind, in which she climbed into the box truck and drew gratuitously large and circuitous lines all over the desert floor with its wheels, and then turned those wheels toward the mountains and together she and the truck gallivanted into the sunset, away. The narrative stopped there, because she has no use for anything that came after that. Away was the best outcome in this scenario, so away was the happy ending.

The box truck had once been more box truck than it was now. It had been decked out with parts of other cars that the girls had owned, fixed, scrapped, or just come across. Only one or two pieces had been liberated illegally for the express purpose of making the box truck look a little less like a box truck. This was Camila’s fault. The box truck currently resided on the flattest piece of desert Camila could find, surrounded by scrub, far from town. It was faded, though Camila would have liked to put another coat of paint on it. It was high off the ground, though Camila would have preferred there was only an inch of breath between it and the sand. The seats were not leather, though Camila would have preferred to burn herself sitting in them on a hot day.

The truck had a single fracture in the windshield, which was weathering it valiantly. A pair of miniature boxing gloves were strung up on the rearview mirror. The truck had license plates from California, but it had spent so much time in Colorado that no one remembered that it’s native state was not Colorado.

The radio was not broken, but the entire box truck was having issues constantly. It had a tempestuous relationship with the heat, with the sand, with its own rusting insides, and with its age, so the radio played intermittently and moodily. The radio that played was in the cargo area. It almost disappeared in the dark, because it was made of a dark red that matched the countertop it had been taken from. It played a radio station from town, one that was owned by Piper’s brother’s wife’s sister’s best friend. It broadcasted rock and roll. It broadcasted Piper’s brother’s wife’s sister’s best friend’s voice. It broadcasted songs that made Camila think that if the radio had muscles, they would all be straining at once to push these songs out.

The radio had been taken from Sofia’s mother’s kitchen, but the truck was Camila’s. Though this story belongs to every one of the Cortez sisters, it belongs more to Camila than either of the other two. Camila was not in love with the radio station, but it was her heart powering the truck, allowing the AM radio waves in. She and the box truck shared the same calculating expression. If someone were to slash one of the slightly deflated tires of the box truck, Camila would bleed.

“Here’s another one to soothe you into that lazy summer night feel,” the DJ said. “This song is made for the PM. No daylight songs now.”

Piper tilted her head toward the radio, as she always did when the DJ spoke, like an attentive animal hearing the call of its own. Piper was selectively attentive. She was the youngest of the Cortez sisters, and her name was not actually Cortez. But she did not care for her name. She cared for being left alone when she wanted to be alone, and approached and kept around when she wanted to hover. She had hair pulled strictly away from her face, and eyes downcast from the weight of her thinking brain behind them. The lantern in the bed of the box truck was behind her, which meant her freckles disappeared. She was wearing a thin blouse, which meant she was thinking hard; when so much of her thought was devoted to something specific, there was too little to inform her that she was cold. There were several beaded and tasseled bracelets around her right wrist, because she wrote and fiddled with her left hand.

In the daytime, she did not lean against the box truck and think. In the day, she learned how to drive in her father’s Dodge truck, and read and pondered the many places outside Colorado. She looked at pictures of places that bore no resemblance to the high alpine desert. This curiosity worried her mother and her father and her grandmother. It worried her a little. Only because she feared she might never see those places herself. She felt a thrill of danger in her father’s truck each time she put her hands on the wheel. She believed, superstitiously, that the truck might lead her where she was meant to go.

Because Piper believed this: she was meant to go elsewhere. Beyond Oro Vada. Outisde Colorado.

Piper flinched when Camila nudged her shoulder. She turned so Camila’s knee was pressed against her ear instead. She could see Camila’s raised eyebrow in her mind if not with her eyes.

Camila did not notice the flinch. No one noticed the flinching anymore. “Did you hear that?” she asked, knowing Piper had not. Piper’s hearing was as selective as her attention. “Your non-relative just said the station covers the entire desert. I don’t think he knows how large the desert actually is.”

Sofia raised both her brows, because she shared Camila’s skepticism. There was a lot of desert to cover, and the station was too small and insignificant to go much farther from Oro Vada than the box truck.

Camila sat up in the bed of the truck. Her feet dangled over the edges of the bed, the bottoms the colour of the desert. Because Sofia was in the truck with her, she got a rib full of knee. Together they jostled, together they upset one of the snake eggs that sat on top of a magazine and had never hatched. They watched it roll on the floor of the bed, as if escaping. Disaster flicked its eyes their way, briefly. Sofia reached for the egg and returned it to the magazine pile.

“It won’t hatch anyway,” Camila said.

“But we don’t want it to just break open on the bed,” Sofia said. “It’s still got that new car smell.”

It had no such smell. This was a joke as the expense of all three Cortez sisters, who had rehabilitated the car to the best of their abilities after it had been brutally neglected. Before it belonged to Camila Cortez, it belonged to Nicolas Cortez, Camila’s cousin, who vanished to San Francisco and returned with a box truck that made his parents proud and a wife that did not. The truck stuck around longer than the wife, and when Nicolas swore never to bring home another woman, or himself, he abandoned the truck on the Cortez’s land. The truck was used briefly to carry feed between ranches, and to transport relatives from carpentry jobs to paint jobs to landscaping jobs to bars. When the truck grew weary and threw a tantrum, the Cortez’s developed suddenly great skill at walking. The truck was left to stew in its bitter feelings. Then the rain came and it stewed in the rain. Then the animals and the wind came and seeds stewed in it, and animals sewed in the crops that rose out of it. Sedges climbed over the hood and roof and absorbed noisy frogs and attracted sand hill cranes. When the trout moved in, delivered by storms or monsoon rain or their own desperation, coyotes followed. The cranes hardly stood a chance. The sounds of cranes being devoured messily in the middle of the night was enough to drive the Cortez’s to action.

Camila had volunteered her services, mostly because she felt that denuding the truck of sedges and swamp timothy would be like pulling the wrapping off a gift. She worked steadily and cruelly to evict the animals. The plants took less notice of her efforts, because she was more gentle and slow evicting sedge. She found plant life more charming than bloody-muzzled coyotes. The truck was slow to trust her, but eventually even it seemed to forget the trauma. The only reminder was the snake egg that had never hatched, found under the passenger’s seat when she was chasing a leopard frog toward the door. The egg was heavy enough to contain fetal snake, but still enough that it was unlikely the fetal snake was destined to emerge. It had stayed in a rolled up sock in the glove compartment for a while, and now it sat on top of a stack of magazines where Sofia occasionally glanced at it and suggested they paint it and make an ornament of it.

The radio crooned something new and dubious. The Cortez sisters held their breaths briefly to acknowledge this, and to pay it some attention. They were all enamored with pirate radio, which they collectively saw as an embodiment of American youth and its hunger for terrible music, revolution, and jail time. Only one of these things did not appeal to them, and as Camila has once pointed out, they would none of them go to jail for listening to pirate radio. Piper knew firsthand that the broadcasts were pre-taped, and that the DJ used a false name over the radio. Revolution was good; avoiding fine while revolutionizing was best.

“Maybe he’ll get caught this summer,” Sofia said. She did not want to see any relative, or friend, or friend of a relative of Piper’s go to jail, but she was curious to see what would happen, and she had a healthy amount of concern about the Federal Communications Commission that meant she assumed that it was inevitable.

“He won’t,” Camila answered, because when a question was open to any of the Cortez sisters, it was Camila that answered first. Camila seemed often as rapt in her own imagination as Piper, but Sofia thought some of that might be a lie. She was almost always ready to respond.

Art by Gabriele Crow

Text by Lucie MacAulay

A Frog Among Princes

I was never interested in kissing, and I had considered it a personal failure. Everyone seemed to want to kiss. Everyone seemed driven by a desire for physical intimacy. I desired something else, though I could not articulate it. All I could articulate was that I would not be fulfilled by a kiss. Depending on how you say it, people can take that different ways. They rarely took it the way I meant it, and the follow-up questions were predictable and easy to answer.

The ball was held late summer. I was born, unfortunately, during a heat wave, and therefore every subsequent birthday had to be celebrated during or on the edge of another heat wave. It was hard to evoke jubilation in a crowd of people that were melting. I immediately hated the day when I felt the uncomfortable trickle of sweat down my spine. Gogu was the only one to enjoy the heat.

I had mastered the art of entering my birthday party as inconspicuously as any guest. I wove through a crowd of Fiskers and Porches and Mustangs first. I was sure my parents didn’t know anyone who drove a Honda civic. The cars huddled together clannishly, like their owners. I could make out faces in the lantern-light. The garden was strewn with lanterns, and structures for the vine flowers to climb. Everything was wreathed with golden light and smelled like a flower shop had thrown up. Gogu had once told me that there was a way to assure roses would grow steadily and unhesitatingly in someone’s garden, and that was if they grew atop a body. It sounded very fairy tale to me at the time.

“How many people do you think have lived on this land?” Gogu had said to me. “Why do you think it’s so unlikely that one of them also died here? Beside, your garden is big enough for a morgue-full of people to have died and been buried.”

Just another way in which the upper class were privileged, though if someone had had the thought of planting roses in a warzone, I suppose those roses would outdo ours easily.

I let someone touch me on the elbow. This was normally forbidden, but this was not a normal night. I had to resign myself to others’ touch. Gogu was probably snickering from a potted plant somewhere, his ego inflating exponentially. But Gogu didn’t count as other; I didn’t think he had such a right to be as smug as he was that he was an exception to the rule.

“Lily!” Someone shouted. I couldn’t put a face to the voice, but someone saluted with three fingers, the gesture of the varsity swim team. I saluted and carried on.

He was here, and not too far away. I had to remind myself that I had submitted to this party more for Evan than because it appeased something nascent and empty in my parents. He looked very much like one of the Porsches in the front, which is to say shiny and untouchable and like he had nothing to do with me.

Gogu appeared on a day with rain. He appeared on a day with brilliant orange sun. I had just walked through my mother’s plot of garden, where nothing thrived beneath her un-green thumb, to the gardener’s herb garden. I preferred it to my mother’s flowers. The smells were richer, the plants more practical, and I did not have to hear about their difficulties or how much or little they needed to be watered.

I’d seen a frog leaping across the path and had decided to hurry it along, incase it was trying to make it across the entire garden, or in case someone else came along the same path and was not looking down for stray animals. The frog looked as unappealing as it could, in shades of green and brown that reminded me of the soggy bottom of a lake.

I shooed him away from the path and went inside. When I came to the door and found him sitting outside of it, I dropped a piece of cheese in front of him. I felt cruel only fifteen minutes later- I was fairly certain frogs could do nothing with cheese. The frog hadn’t left. There was an expression on his bumpy face that made me think of a child kicking their feet on a swing as they waited. I recall that after a full minute I had decided upon a name for part of his expression. He was decidedly smirking.

He jumped forward a little, close enough for me to hold, though I didn’t. “Thank you,” he said to me. His mouth moved strangely when he spoke, like it had to make awkward adjustments to the rest of his frog face to get words out.

“For what?” I said.

He shrugged a little, I’m sure. It was a movement like a cat shrug. Smooth and starting from the shoulders. But he finished with a shake of his rear. “Helping me off the path.”

“I didn’t really do anything. You hopped,” I said.

Gogu shrugged again. “The thought was there. Close calls do count, to me.”

Gogu stayed with me for weeks before he told me his age, before he told me his name and before he told me that he’d hidden under our abundant roses for a long time since hopping to the garden, and he had been speculating about who lay dead beneath them. I asked how long he had been under that rosebush, and how long he’d been wondering. Gogu had monumental patience, of the kind I would never have.

He knows that now. Just like I know what his face looks like when he’s just been smirking and is trying not to get caught at it.

Most of the guests looked like they had just fallen into the part of a yacht, and like the only problems they’d ever had were the kind that someone encountered on a yacht. There were men watch tans on their shapely wrists, and women with hair shined like the carapaces of iridescent, dark beetles. They looked at me when I appeared, took in my dress that was so white it was nearly blue, and nothing like the sort of dress I would have chosen for myself. Someone plucked a rose for me; I smelled it in front of them, which seemed the thing to do. They looked charmed as I played two narratives in my head, one was the rose in front of me, smelling sweet and summery, the other was a body in front of me, smelling acrid and dissolved. I smiled through it and moved on.

There were guests that I would never have invited, had I been consulted on the guest list at all. Neither of us liked to look at one another so we glared at one another from different spaces in the garden. We were all adept at being where our enemies were not. Unfortunately, because Evan was also where I was not, one of my enemies was stationed next to him. She looked unmovable and testy, as I imagined Cerberus looked stationed outside the gates of hell.

It somehow did not matter that Evan was on the other side of so much hairspray and hatred. He spoke to me anyway. “Lily. There you are. I was going to come looking for you.” He looked particularly devastating then, in that way that people can in a ring of lantern light and handmade Italian silk shirts.

“Well, you don’t have to now. Here I am.” This seemed self-evident, but people in my generation seemed t say self-evident things all the time. Evan looked satisfied with it. The stony quality of Cerberus’ face had increased by degrees. There were other, smaller and less relevant Cerberuses around her that also seemed to sense a disturbance in their night. They looked furious, and like they were furiously trying not to be. “Unfortunately. I mean, it’s not been that great, so far.”

“It could be better,” Evan said, diplomatically. “If you like dancing. Or if you want to go for a walk. I’ll have you back before the clock strikes midnight.”

I could feel my mouth grimacing and I tried to turn it into a smile. Evan’s expression said he’d seen the transformation, so I made as hasty a recovery as I ever have. “I like walks. I’m great at walking. You can watch. Come on.”

There was a stumbling moment in which he came to stand beside me and I pointed him the right direction and we walked and gathered gazes and focused on not returning them. He stared at my shoulders in the dress. I stared at the roses in the dark.

Gogu had a low opinion or balls and parties, and that this one was thrown in honour of my birthday did not change that. He had, for a few years, been disgusted by the fair offered, and how little control I had over it. It was an opportunity for my parents to flaunt their own popularity, he’d insisted, and subsequently insisted that I need not actually attend, because who would notice until it was time to blow out the candles on the cake? He’d been furious on my behalf when my mother had presented me with a dress that I wouldn’t have chosen for myself. He was confused when I told him I would go, and shrugged when I tried to explain that obligation was a perfectly legitimate reason to attend an event, even if I lost hours of my life to it and aged prematurely before the end of the night.

“You’ll hardly eat because you’ll be nervous and tired,” Gogu predicted. “You’ll be bored by all the conversation, because you’ll have heard it or you won’t have because you already didn’t want to, and you won’t dance.”

“I won’t be bored by Evan’s conversation,” I said. I’d spoken to Evan enough times to know this to be the truth. “He’s the only one I’m really going to talk to.”

“Unless you faint, because you’ll hardly eat, because you’ll be nervous and tired.” Gogu’s tongue leapt and caught a gnat out of the thick summer air. He looked dissatisfied with its flavour, or my argument or both. “You’ll get bored of his conversation and you won’t dance.”

“It’s my own party. I have to go. Cerberus will be there.”

Gogu didn’t smile, but frogs can look incredibly self-satisfied. He looked as wickedly pleased as any sort of viper I had ever seen. “She doesn’t have to be.”

I shook my head at him. “Don’t say that. I don’t care if she comes, as long as she keeps away from me. I just want to choose what I wear and not have to make a grand entrance. And not to talk to everyone.”

Gogu snatched another insect from the air, this one of the stinging variety. I hadn’t even noticed it hovering near my cheek until it was between Gogu’s amphibian lips instead. He caught me staring. “Well, you already know that’s not going to happen, Lily. I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

“Nothing. I wasn’t asking you to tell me anything.”

Gogu considered me as he swallowed the angry insect. It might have been rattling in his throat but if it did, he didn’t show it. “I know. Just thought I’d say it anyway.”

Walking with Evan was almost exactly as I’d imagined. I smelled roses and felt heat jump between our shoulders. He was polite, only touching me to steer me, and keeping a polite distance between us. Our hands brushed. The wind shivered. The music was faint and then loud and then faint again. When I did see Cerberus’ face, it was violent as war.

We were living out a scene that would make anyone’s heart swell, and their hand flutter above their chest.

I knew Gogu was watching, though he wouldn’t reveal himself. He was only a shadow amongst other shadows.

“You look beautiful,” Evan said to me.

In the end, Gogu made my dress tolerable. Sometimes he disappeared and reappeared with trinkets. Shiny things he plucked off the street, as though he were a magpie rather than a frog. It was impressive that he managed to carry them from without to within the house and past my mother and the maid, who would have both tried to throw him in a French soup. I sometimes fantasized that they would see him, and each have a conniption. But those fantasies all ended poorly for Gogu.

This time it was not earrings or a necklace or a sewage-crusted ring he’d found all the way at the end of the drive that he brought back for me. It was one of the roses from the garden, which was perfect for securing to the front of my dress. It looked less unreal than it should have.

“If you’re going to act like a useless damsel, you should dress like it,” Gogu said, squatting on top of my chest of drawers as I fiddled with the petals. He watched me put on the shoes my mother had brought for me from some factory that did not pay their employees well enough.  “And this way, no one will smell you if you sweat.”

“Kind of you,” I said. “Don’t look.”

Gogu shut his eyes, though sometimes it was hard to tell. I also didn’t know if it made much of a difference, asking a frog to close his eyes. I kicked off the shoes, reached under the skirt of my dress, pulled off my jeans, and put the shoes on again. The cold fabric of the petticoat felt strange and sensual against my bare legs. Gogu’s eyes were open when I looked up again.

“Polka dots?” He looked at my skirt as though he could see my underpants through them.

I hissed, “Gogu!”

“I can’t see them now, calm down.”

It didn’t make a difference, really.

“The dress covers them up fine,” he said. “You just look uncomfortable in it. Too bad you can’t wear your jeans and boots. Not that I’m saying you should. I haven’t worn boots in a long time, so what do I know?”

This was one of the things I found interesting about Gogu. He had never told me exactly, but I was sure he hadn’t always been a frog.

Later, Gogu snickered at the lineup of cars in front of the house, like an automotive pageant. My own car wasn’t with them. It was up on blocks again, because it was always up on blocks, because giving up on the side of the road was how I knew it loved me.

“I like your Camaro better,” he said to me.

After I’d blown out the candles on my cake, and after Evan and I had both had a slice, some of which he’d tried to feed to me and I declined, he asked me for another walk. There was more intent in the shadows of his face now.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’ve done enough walking tonight.”

“It is pretty tiring to be walking around the whole time. Want to go sit somewhere?”

“I think I want to sit on my own for a while,” I said.

Evan looked at me as though he was beginning to realize something, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about this realization. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased to have figured out some sort of puzzle, or wishing he hadn’t known he was up against a puzzle at all. Eventually he said, “Maybe we could go out sometimes. After school or something?”

Because I could hardly believe it was my own voice saying it, I listened very closely when it said, “I just don’t think we should. Thanks for keeping me company.”

I left the ball and went inside, and maybe only Evan noticed, or maybe Cerberus did as well, or maybe my mother did and I was already in trouble. I didn’t watch to find out. There was a feeling in my throat that meant I was going to emote terribly, and it made me as uncomfortable as anything else that night.

In the garage, just in sight of the Fiskers and Porsches, my Camaro watched me dustily as I leaned against it, dirtying my skirt. The top half of my dress was a little sweaty. The only thing that really still looked lively and perfect was the rose on my bodice.

Gogu ate the last of the gnats as I joined him. He hunched down on the hood patiently. His eyes reflected the porch light, and then the rose, and then my face.

Gogu smiled, pleased as a viper.

Art by Ludovic Jacqz

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Nuclavees in America

I don’t believe in divinely-distributed responsibility. If something is my business, it’s because I’ve made it my business. Like my father’s business, before I killed him, was lousy first aid advice, consultation, and occasionally, practice. I had to wonder if he’d ever read the first aid books he had under the record-player in the den, because I had. I almost wished I hadn’t, sometimes, when I watched him search for the radial artery on a patient and wind up pressing his two fingers into the carotid. He could stitch up a cut just fine, and he knew all about disinfectant, but he’d been sewing up his own shirts and saddles for years, and he’d been drinking alcohol long enough to know that even though he was treating his insides with one kind, he could treat his outsides with another kind. He would offer the former to his patients before he doused their cuts or stab wounds or what have you with the latter.

There was nothing he could have done for himself, in the end. I remember that much about him. I could see his liver, his kidneys, his blackening heart and grey lungs, all through his skin, just before I cut out his spine. He’d once told me where to stab someone in the spine to cause a mobility-ending injury. It turns out, that if you dig hard enough into any part of the spine, that really does it, for mobility. “I made it easier,” I told him, while he twitched on the end of the kitchen knife. I pushed his hands away when he tried to grab me, but there wasn’t much power left in them. His skin was already collapsing around his organs, like a sped-up video of a deflating balloon.

There are quicker and cleaner ways to do it, I’ve learned. The papers covered and proposed several methods at first, to make it easier, and simpler, but only some of them have caught on. A kitchen knife was risky- close range. If my father were smart, he would have figured out that joints and angles didn’t mean so much in that state. I might have been behind him, but if he’d really tried, he could have reached behind himself and grabbed me. He would have looked truly monstrous. I don’t know what that would have done to Sonny. Golden-smiled Sonny, the only one of us to never have been called to the office for physical altercations, the only one to want to be a civil engineer and go to school after high school, already looked faint when I pulled the knife out of dad. Connor was just behind him, because it didn’t matter that we hadn’t wanted to drag Sonny through this dirt. He would be dragged through, and there was no way to clean him, so he might as well get comfortable with it. The couple months we’d spent trying to make sure the end of the world didn’t reach him seemed especially pointless then.

There was news that something similar had been seen before. Nuclavees was the name. It was all over the news. Every channel had an Irish or English or Scottish folk explaining the transparent skin, the monstrous deconstruction of the organs, and then positing a mythological explanation for the appearance of nuclavees all over the country. Across the pond, they were having a field day. Our epidemic was something they could peak. Have a look on the television, dear. They’ve got Nuclavees. I was looking into schools for Sonny when the news stopped being news and started being shadows in the back garden. Then we abandoned the notion of school altogether. Academia looks great on applications and resumes. It’s the lube of the future, my father once said. Creates opportunities for you to slide yourself in somewhere. What can lube do for a dying country, though?

Sonny was scared enough to give up right away. There was no waving a white flag, just cowering on the floor, behind the door, in the closet. Hands over ears. Eyes squeezed shut. And when courage pricked up its head, he watched through the window as I stood on the porch with the shotgun and Connor packed the Mustang. Every neighbour had either fled or had ceded to the Nuclavees. Wherever they’d fled to, hoping to hide, they’d still probably cede to the Nuclavees. In America, everyone cares about trends. And giving up seemed to be the largest trend since slavery. Whole families were becoming infected. They twitched and seized on the floor, turning prismatic, and rose up with skin like ghost flowers. They prowled. They stalked. They still bled and tore the stitches my father had given them.

Illness takes everyone, I’d told Sonny. It’s nothing worse than a deadly strain of influenza. You just have to deal with a few extra steps after the dying. It must have been our father’s eyes in the Nuclavee’s face that turned my brother’s brain into the twisted filament shape it was in now. The eyes were, for the most part, where eyes should be. The face around it had changed. It wasn’t what you expected to see around eyes like that. But eyes were just eyes, after all, I told myself. I’d read the first aid books: optic nerve, vitreous humor, schlera. Even looking straight into them, I knew those eyes weren’t my father. Everything in that face wanted to kill us.

We’ve taken the Mustang and the first aid kit and every tool in the house that could be made into a weapon. If we can’t take back our town, or our country, we can carve a path to another place. One where the eyes aren’t a problem. One where no one has a problem pulling the trigger or forcing the knife in. One where people knew to bandage their wounds so they didn’t pull and bleed and attract the attention of something that was human. There’s got to be a place like that somewhere in the world, and if there isn’t, then I’ll make one. And if a Nuclavee kills me first, then I reckon it isn’t a problem. How will I be able to care.

Connor drinks while I drive, and for now he’s treating his insides with the right kind of alcohol, because I don’t think he’s been driven to treat his insides with the other kind, yet. I might not be the best at patching people up, but I’m better than my father was. I can keep the blood where it’s meant to be, and that’s enough for now. And if it’s too late, if I’m looking at eyes that are only relatively where they should be, in a face that shows me much more of a person’s insides than it should, then it’s enough that I know that what’s supposed to be there, on the inside, isn’t. And I know how to treat that too.

Art by Arash Radkia

Text by Lucie MacAulay