Tales From the Lake, page 13
“What did you do to her?” I yelled.
“Go see for yourself.” Duff disappeared through the rain. I followed, the climb slippery and more dangerous. Mom was right behind me.
“Kristen, where are you?”
The rain fell harder and the thunder continued to ripple loudly overhead.
“I know you’re here.”
Mom scanned the area with her flashlight. Abandoned at the edge of the cliff was one lavender shoe. “Over here!” I knelt to pick up the shoe and heard a faint cry.
“Kristen.”
“Here, I’m here.”
The voice came from the darkness, over the side. I panned the light and saw the top of her head. She was hanging onto a tree root.
“I can’t hang on much longer. My hands are slipping.”
Fear shot through me. “I’ve got you!” I leaned over, but couldn’t reach her. “Mom, help me!”
“Try again. I’ll hold your legs.”
I laid flat and spread out over the cliff, while Mom held my legs. It was just enough to reach Kristen. Just as I grabbed her, the thunder crashed overhead with a loud BOOM! I jumped, our hands splitting apart. She slipped further away. I reached further, slipping against the rock and gravel.
“I can’t hold you much longer,” my mom yelled.
And then, as if an invisible hand came with the wind, my arm stretched out, grabbing Kristen’s wrist, pulling her up, through the trees. Mom heave-hoed, until we were back on the cliff, and safe and sound.
Kristen hugged me; Mom hugged me. Then the lightening crashed, making everything bright, and I saw Daphne.
“Mom, she’s here.”
Mom turned and went to her. We watched, as the rain poured. Then she was gone.
I turned to Kristen. “Are you okay?”
“I am now.” She kissed me.
Even though I was cold and wet, that kiss warmed me up inside.
Mom called us.
Back at home, Mom called Kristen’s mother to have her picked up. They talked in the kitchen for a few moments, giving Kristen and me a few last moments together.
“See you in class Monday?” I asked.
“I was thinking we might see each other tomorrow.” She kissed me on the cheek and left with her mother.
I joined my mom on the porch, where we drank hot chocolate together. Her face was sad, like she’d been crying.
“Tell me, Mom.”
Mom said, “It was Daphne’s eighteenth birthday, and it was tradition back then, like it still is, to go to Pisgah to celebrate. We had all been drinking pretty heavily, and when the guys started fooling around, the next thing I knew, Daphne had gone over the side. But it doesn’t change things. Not really. When you see your sister fall to her death, and you were there to stop it. Plus, your Grandma Issy blamed me.”
“What did she say to you up there?”
“She told me to remember the way the wind blew.” Mom shook her head. “I’d forgotten about the storm until you’d said something. All these years she’s been trying to tell someone it wasn’t my fault. First, Grandma Issy, when she lived here. She could never get through to me. But when you showed up in the room, she found hope again, that someone would get the message.”
“I got it loud and clear.” I smiled, adding, “Do you think we could switch rooms again?”
Mom hugged me. “You can stay home from school tomorrow and we’ll make the switch then.”
The next night, we all went to the Dairy Serve for ice cream. A television crew came all the way from Hartford and interviewed Kristen and me about the storm, and my heroic rescue, as Kristen put it. We were stars for the whole week at school, but eventually life went on. A fence was put up across the path to Pisgah, but after a while, it was cut through and people climbed to the top, regardless of the danger.
Mom released Tad and me from being grounded, and I got my room back. It helped that I passed my history quiz. The best part of it all is that Kristen was not only my new study partner, but my new girlfriend too!
While I lie here in bed, I can see the clock nearing two o’clock. I wait for the sound of the window to open, and the footsteps on the floorboards above me. I can’t help wondering if she’ll ever visit me again.
SNOWMEN
David Dunwoody
Some people call suicide taking the easy way out, but there’s nothing easy about it—neither doing it, nor coming to the decision in the first place. E. Woodrow understands that and that’s what he tells the people. It’s not an act of cowardice either. Fear is a primal thing, a cold, driven needle with no measure of subtlety. Despair, the engine of suicide, is a degenerative toxin that erodes the soul.
We’re all made of stars, they say. Some of us remember.
***
E. Woodrow finishes his shift at nine P.M. and spritzes his headset with an antiseptic spray, then wipes it down for the night-shift user. He normally works graves himself, but Carol Mussman asked him to trade shifts because she needs the extra night differential pay for the holidays. Her son wants a Speak-and-Spell or something like that. Woodrow doesn’t mind. He pats his hair until it settles flat in thin, waxy wheat-colored strands. He uses the same cloth to wipe his glasses as he did the headset. His cubicle is bare, save for the Dark-Ages computer that dominates most of the tiny desk, and the phone. Some of the other employees keep half their lives in their cubicles, trucking family photos and joke-a-day calendars in and out every shift. Woodrow travels light. He whisks his jacket off the back of the chair and is off.
It’s quite dark out, but it’s that weird winter darkness where the cloud cover is slate-gray and almost seems to possess a faint luminescence. Beneath the clouds, the borough Woodrow calls home is cast in orangish-reddish hues by cheap streetlamps and security lights. The snow on the ground looks like Martian dust. The air is still and it doesn’t even seem cold enough for even this smattering of precipitation. The world feels altogether alien, and Woodrow finds that he likes it. He strolls leisurely down the sidewalk through a light curtain of flakes.
There’s a snowman on the corner of 49th and 5 North. It’s a squat little fellow, only a few feet in height, made from three dingy, misshapen spheres and with only empty pits for eyes. Whoever made him must have shoved their gloved thumbs into his head to make the sockets, but lacked any rocks to place in them. A shallow slit drawn straight across the face is presumed to be a mouth. The snowman doesn’t look happy. Woodrow has paused to study the work, and he notices that there are neither footprints nor any other tracks in the thin layer of snow at his feet. Where did the kids scrounge up the matter to make this pitiful thing? Maybe it had snowed harder in the early day, and this is all the evidence that remains. The snowman is already sagging slightly to the left and what stability it appears to have is probably an illusion. Woodrow imagines he could topple it with a gentle nudge and watch the head explode on the curb. He doesn’t. Its eyeless eyes don’t speak to him the way that others do.
He turns off onto 5 North, where there is less light and the stoic brick buildings give way to walls of chain-link fences guarding shadowy heaps. Junked cars, a failed garden space, a disused playground. Better to leave in the dark what won’t grow.
Woodrow nearly plows right into the next snowman, but sees its outline at the last second. This one is a bit taller than the other, though as his eyes adjust Woodrow sees that it is similarly without detail, without sight. He runs his bare fingertips across the surface beneath the eye sockets and feels another thin, dispassionate mouth.
“Where they come from?”
Woodrow is startled and spins around, his right hand dipping into his jacket pocket. A scraggly man in three layers of threadbare clothing stands hunched there. The man’s foul Tenafly Viper breath blasts Woodrow’s face as the transient says, in a voice louder than necessary, “Who put ‘em here? They all around.”
“I don’t follow. The snowmen?” Woodrow’s hand is still in his pocket, closed tight around what is there. Though he can’t make out much of the homeless man’s features, he watches the man’s outline for the slightest wrong movement.
“Yeah, the damn snowmen,” the man coughs. “Ain’t enough snow for snowmen. Ain’t enough snow for snow. Hot as the devil to me. I’d shed this big coat if I had a place to put it.”
“What do you mean, all around?” Woodrow removes his right hand from his pocket. He fishes his left hand through his jeans for his keychain. It has a powerful little light on it, and he snaps it on. Immediately he sees them there, just on the fringe of that small but piercing halo of light, and he pans over the snowmen standing in the street.
Little ones, big ones. Fat ones and skinny ones. The observation reminds him of a jingle from his youth but he can’t quite place it. Snowmen—snowthings, really, sexless golems, and each missing its precious eyes of coal.
The old man had been right—it had felt unnaturally warm—but suddenly E. Woodrow feels chilled.
There are some foot tracks weaving amongst these snowmen, but no trails indicating where modest snowballs had been rolled into thick orbs. A prank, perhaps, or some modern art piece? Now Woodrow is reminded of a Calvin and Hobbes strip where the titular boy creates a snowman installation in his yard with the express purpose of watching them melt and contemplating mortality.
They ought to be melting already. It’s really quite warm.
Warm outside, bones chilled within, Woodrow shivers and returns his attention, as well as his keychain light, to the transient.
The old man winces as the light strikes his watery eyes. “How ‘bout it?” he asks.
Woodrow feels he understands the question. Studying the man’s weary and pained countenance, he places his right hand back into the jacket pocket. This time, when he withdraws it, he has the object, and a light flick of the wrist brings the blade out and he cuts cleanly through the old man’s windpipe.
The man’s eyes widen. Woodrow is able to watch the misery flee from them, just as the last poisoned breath whistles and then sputters from the open throat. He helps the man to sit against the chain-link and tugs the collars of his many coats closed over the neck wound.
Woodrow turns to continue on his way, but keeps the light in his left hand trained on the snowmen. There are more ahead of him. He pauses by a particularly hefty specimen and slides the blade into its gut in order to clean it. Replacing the knife in his pocket, he quickens his pace.
***
The next time Woodrow looks at his watch he is startled to see that it’s after midnight. He has been walking for hours in mobs of snowmen. And he has come to several forks in the road—intersections painted in ruddy light where snowmen continue on in this direction and that. But no cars, not driving anyway, not on the road, and few people to be seen. Those he has passed on the sidewalks seem to shrink away against the buildings, not from him but from the other things. Many of the windows in those apartment buildings are occupied by silhouettes. They must be watching the snowmen. They must be watching E. Woodrow, too, muttering their theories as to why he walks fearless amongst the frozen and sightless.
I always have.
So many blinded in their own inexplicable grief, by cosmic ennui deep within that cannot be expressed as visions or sounds or even ideas. Just despair. These snowmen, speechless, eyeless—Woodrow can’t get a read on them, can’t say with certainty that they feel that despair. At first they struck him as static ghosts, more living dead, but maybe they’re not imprisoned within their featureless forms. Maybe they’re guarded. Immune. A lovely, lofty thought.
He’s worked at the suicide hotline for eight years, far longer than anyone else has ever managed. He can hear the pain in those crackly electronic voices just as sure as he sees it in the eyes of the downtrodden. He wants to know what’s inside the snowmen, because their blankness unnerves him in a way he can’t articulate.
He looks upward, past the gawkers in the tenements, to the sky. There are no stars, only slate-gray clouds.
St. Michael’s, in spite of its regal architecture, looks squat and sad between the apartment blocks. There is a dense cluster of snowmen at the base of the church’s steps. At first it looks to Woodrow as if they are standing vigil, perhaps hoping to gain entry, but as he draws closer he sees that their blind eyes are facing every which way. Of course they don’t know a church from a bodega. An odd thought, that they’d know anything—he’s been thinking a lot of odd thoughts tonight—disturbed again, Woodrow squeezes through the mob and ascends the steps.
The doors are unlocked. He enters and finds empty pews lit by a few small electric lamps set against the walls beneath the indifferent stained-glass martyrs.
A shadow disengages itself from the darkness behind the pulpit. A priest waves gently.
“The doors were open,” Woodrow says.
“I thought it might be a good idea.” The priest has a clutch of blond hair atop his head, but his face and walk betray his advanced age. He comes to Woodrow and offers his hand.
“You’ve seen them?” Woodrow asks. The hand feels like bones wrapped in crepe paper.
“Oh, they’re everywhere, son. I was watching them on the TV up until about an hour ago. That’s when the feed cut out. I don’t hear the news choppers anymore. Is there anyone else out there?”
“Just them,” Woodrow says, and the priest nods.
“Well,” he says, gesturing to a pew, “Why don’t you have a seat? I’m going to make some more tea.”
“Do you . . . ” Woodrow shakes off the question and falls silent.
The priest leans into him and smiles a little. “I don’t know, son. I’m trying to work it out myself. May not be brimstone coming down out there, but it ain’t manna either.”
The priest’s eyes are kind. He has his faith, Woodrow muses, although it’s clear that The Man Upstairs has yet to return any of the preacher’s calls tonight.
He decides to leave before the man returns with the tea. He doesn’t belong here.
***
It’s three A.M. now and Woodrow is downtown. A five-way intersection sits quiet and dominated by snowmen. Woodrow looks from one to the next, from one nothing-face to another. His hands are trembling and he shoves them into his pockets. There his right hand finds the knife, and he stands toe-to-mound with a snowman precisely his own height. He looks directly into those empty pits.
“Say something.”
Do something. Give me something.
He flicks open the knife and cuts deep into the belly of the snowman. His fingers follow the blade and plunge into ice. He rips the knife out and slashes the snowman’s mouth. He swings his fist into the side of its head, but fails to knock it from its mooring. Woodrow growls and stabs at the eye sockets again and again until there are no discernable features left in the snowman’s face. He carves through the frozen flesh and retraces his own lines and intersects them and cuts star shapes into the snow. He does this with the next one, and the next, running to each snowman with a terrible cry, as if hoping to rouse fear from them. They do not react and he obliterates their faces one after another, his arm aching, then numb. His voice grows hoarse and is reduced to a grating wheeze. Woodrow hacks at the snowmen until his knees give and he collapses atop a sewer grate.
The snow is red in the streetlamps. His skin is red and beaded with sweat. The knife is wet and clean and it gleams. Woodrow can’t stop shivering. He draws himself into a ball and pinches his eyes shut.
***
The sun rises at 6:58 in the morning. Within the hour, the people begin to come out of their homes and gather on the sidewalks. Some wonder and laugh strange laughter while others weep. The night is over, but nothing is what it was.
The snowmen have melted. In their place, in stagnant pools, slouch oddly-shaped skeletons. They sag forward or to the side, uneven tangles of rib-like bone compressed against pelvic bowls which serve as their bases. Their big round skulls are cocked to and fro, all with the same false smile.
E. Woodrow is there, as well. He still lies atop the sewer grate. He is frozen solid.
PIECES OF ME
T.G. Arsenault
Please reconsider your decision!
For someone to listen, please call . . .
I could just make out the words on the sign and only three of the numbers. The bottom of each letter bled like an orange tear. One corner of the sign was curled into a comma, its edge jagged and flaking with rust. Long strands of dead grass partially hid a number of bullet holes unworthy of a grouping. Tilted at a severe angle, the signpost looked exhausted and ready to topple.
I sucked in a breath until my chest felt capable of pulling in the clouds above. I let it hiss between my lips with a slow and forceful exhale. My index finger scraped at the side of my right thumb, peeling away a dried piece of skin—a nervous habit I never outgrew.
I read the sign again. And again.
My eyebrows merged themselves into a modicum of concern, but the sign did nothing in tempting me to comply with its instructions. Like any child told exactly what to do, I jutted my chin, squared my shoulders, and did exactly the opposite.
Pushing through the long grass, I stepped past the sign and almost tripped over a moss-covered log. I continued into a forest so dense even my footsteps were silenced. With every step, the forest closed behind me. I left chirping birds, a cloudless blue sky, and a breezy field. Soon, my hair stuck to my forehead with a thick sheen of sweat. Two more steps and I stopped, cast a wary glance over my shoulder, and then at my surroundings.
Silence covered me like a thick shawl, yet not nearly as comfortable. My chest seemed to constrict under its pressure.
Sprawling branches replaced blue sky; they weaved through each other, blocking out the sun to create a thick and shadowed ceiling. My nose filled with the scent of moist earth, almost cloying. Cold drops fell onto my arm. I imagined the twisted branches above salivating in response to a new visitor.
