The Collected Short Fiction, page 29
“I don’t just come when you call. What makes you think you can even talk to me?”
“Whatever. Come or don’t. This is your only chance.”
You left him there. He spent the rest of his shift in a slow-burning rage, because although he was determined not to go, he knew that he would.
The Devil’s Willow grew like a gnarled temple on the far side of the lake. Its brilliant green foliage spilled over and trailed into the water, like a suspended fountain, hiding the bent, blackened wood of the trunk. It got its name from the fact that we believed your father practiced some of his infernal rites there. Some nights we’d see dozens of little candle flames arrayed beside it, or even suspended in the air around it, and there was that one whole week when the entire tree was engulfed in a cold, green-white fire. Julie lost her virginity to Thom there last year, and although she never admitted this to anyone, she was afraid that she’d gotten pregnant and that her baby would be born with a goat’s head. When she got her period she cried with relief and terror and her hands shook so badly at school that day, they sent her home early.
You went there after leaving Joey at the café. Were you planning the night ahead? Were you there for the silence, or were you trying to get closer to the dark energies of your father’s practice? We saw the shape of you as you sat lakeside, your feet dipped into the water, leaning back on your hands like some pale white orchid.
It seems that you were always just a shape to us, Allison. We knew you as the absence at the center of our impressions. We guessed at your motives, at your relationship with your father, and at your reactions to our taunts and provocations. Although we were content to imagine your interior life for all these years, now we want to know the truth of it. We don’t want to guess at you anymore, Allison.
We want to know if you feel what we do.
I know a story of the lake.
There are no stories in the Love Mills. There is no one to tell them, and there is no one to listen; for an imp, there is nothing but the work of building and maintaining the mills. It was not until I came to this cold tomb of a world that an idea like story was ever introduced to me.
I did not hear it from your father, who did not forgive me for not being his wife. He worked at his various errands in silence. It’s only since he died that I’ve come to hear from him. He sits up there in his study, reclining in his chair like a dead king, his head a volcano of dream ash, a ghostly plume of whatever made him a human being pouring out of him like a long sigh. It’s beautiful, Allison, and it’s a tragedy that you can’t see it.
The story of the lake was a shower of cinders that fell through me after you left. I don’t know if it’s based on something he read or if it’s something he made up. I don’t even know whether or not he believed it. The story goes that there was once an angel that roamed these hills, in the early days of your kind, long before you had dominion over the world. The angel was a giant to men, a gyre of eyes and wings and talons, stranger and more fearsome than they could withstand. They ran from it in terror. The belief is that it was one of the last of the angels to join Lucifer’s rebellion. It arrived too late, and the gates of Hell were sealed. An outcast from both kingdoms, it wandered here alone until it could no longer bear the isolation. The angel found a deep lake—this one, Allison—and went to sleep at its bottom, where it would remain for the rest of time.
I don’t know if the story is true. I don’t know whether your father believed it or just made it up himself, the way your kind seem to do. But I drew comfort from it. It made me less lonely. It’s about the Morningstar, and to hear him spoken of, even in this secondary way, opened a cascade of beauty inside me. I felt a terrible yearning for my home and my work. It was by that yearning that I knew the Morningstar’s grace was still upon me. The ache of need is a music in the Love Mills.
Your father wondered if this town and everyone in it was just a dream itself, a figment the angel had created to keep itself company. Once I would have laughed at that. I would have told you that if it wanted companionship, it would not have dreamt creatures such as you.
Now I’m not so sure.
You came down to talk to me that night. You cooked yourself a dinner in the microwave and brought it downstairs, where you ate quietly at your father’s desk. You left the lights off, sitting silently in the liquid green luminescence of the vat, listening to the quiet hiss of the radio. You did not acknowledge me, but your presence was a lovely surprise, and it went a great distance toward dispelling my loneliness. Though you didn’t know it, it was an extraordinary act of kindness.
“I like it down here,” you said. “It’s like being at the bottom of the sea. No wonder Dad spent all his time here.”
“I don’t know the sea,” I said.
“It’s basically just like the lake outside, only a lot bigger.”
“How much bigger?”
“It covers most of the world. Don’t you know these things in Hell?”
The notion of a lake large enough to cover the world inspired that sense of yearning again. I don’t know how I can ache for a place I’ve never been. My life had been defined by labor, by hard earth and turning bone and the pink blossoms of smoke rising from our industries, by striations of light across a sky obscured by a rosy curtain of ash. There was no sea. There was no lake. There was no wish for any other place.
Never did it occur to me to wonder what it was we labored to create.
“I don’t really know anything about Hell. I was in the Love Mills. That’s all I know.”
You shook your head and nearly smiled. “Trust me. If my dad brought you here? You’re from Hell. That was basically his thing.”
“If you say so.”
You pushed the plate away and took one of your father’s notebooks, leaning back in the chair and paging through it with apparent disinterest. “So did he talk to you about Mom?”
“He didn’t say anything to me.”
“Join the club.” You shook your head, thinking about it. “She wanted to leave us, you know? She didn’t care.” You crossed your arms on the desk and rested your head there, turned away from me. “I guess he really loved her,” you said, and for a long while you said nothing else. I heard you sniff once, and I knew you were crying. I recognized this as another manifestation of love. I was coming to know all of its wonderful facets. The kind you felt was like mine: a wanting that cannot be satisfied. The kind your father felt for your mother was different. It was the kind with hooks.
After a moment, you lifted your head and looked at me. “Anyway, I came down here to see what I had to do to flush you out of there. It’s right here in the notebook. I’m not sure what that’ll do to you. Send you back home maybe, or kill you. So you might as well go ahead and enjoy your life for a little while longer because I’m going to go upstairs and get wasted then come down here and do it.”
I did not know how to receive this information, so I said nothing. The only example of death I had was your own father, whose death seemed to have done little to change him, other than fixing him in place. After all, he still sat in his chair on the floor above us, unfurling his unspent thoughts into the air. The other possibility—being sent back home—was too wonderful to contemplate.
“And then I’m going to do one of dad’s rituals.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been looking through his notebooks. It doesn’t look too hard. And since he just died, maybe I can get him back. Maybe it’s not too late.”
“I don’t understand. I thought you didn’t care.”
“I don’t.” The tears came back, but you made no move to hide them this time. “I don’t care. I don’t care.”
Even in its absence, love pulled at you with its terrible gravity. Your face was beautiful in its anguish. I could see the work of my life at play. The house was filled with it, Allison. Love in all its grandeur. What shapes it made of your lives. What shapes it makes still.
Your father’s thoughts had begun to cool, fluttering down to me now rarely, like leaves from an old tree, nearly spent. One drifted past, stately and blue. You were younger; you were on the couch watching TV with him. You’d had a good day; you were tired and warm. You leaned over and rested your head on your father’s shoulder. He pushed you away. You apologized and leaned in the other direction. Shame consumed him.
He wanted to be touched with another kind of love. What a daughter could offer him just wasn’t enough.
You flushed the vat as I considered that thought. The floor opened beneath me and I flowed through a narrow chute in a wild green torrent, sliding through darkness for several disorienting minutes until I splashed from the end of a culvert and flew through the clear air, landing finally in the warm lake and dissolving there.
It was like waking. It can only be like waking.
I saw the stars overhead. I felt the ripple of wind, the pull of the roots of the Devil’s Willow. I felt the bed of earth below me, and the great slow-beating heart of the thing buried under the cold mud.
I am a lake, Allison. You have made me anew.
Joey met you under the Devil’s Willow. He was angry and scared, but just proud enough to believe that you regretted your earlier rejection of him and wanted him after all. He didn’t come alone. He wanted to make you pay for the embarrassment you’d caused him, so he had two of his friends follow. They were meant to hide in the bushes several yards away and take pictures of you as you undressed, to pass around the school. Joey meant to have his revenge.
You were waiting for him beneath the willow. You had a picnic blanket spread out and half a dozen candles lit, their flames trembling in the cool night air. The sky was high and cold, icy with stars. You sat on the middle of the blanket, your legs curled beneath you, a glass of whiskey already in your hand. Joey paused when he saw all of this. He considered doubling back to call off his friends.
But his fear of you was too great, so he didn’t. He stopped at the edge of the blanket and stood frozen.
“Come on,” you said.
“Are you drunk?”
“Just a little.”
“Without me? That’s not fair.”
“Well, sit down and catch up with me, then.”
He dropped to his knees and moved closer to you. You handed him the bottle, and he took it. You let him take a good swig, his head tilted back, before you slipped the knife cleanly between his ribs. You held it there for a moment, your hand wrapped tightly around the handle.
“Ow!” He looked down at what you had done. He hardly believed it was real. It felt so small; like a wasp sting. “You bitch! You stabbed me!”
You slid the knife free, and it was like pulling the stopper from a bottle of wine: the blood gouted from the wound, and Joey fell forward, catching himself with one hand while holding the other to his side. The pain careened through him now, unbelievable in its ferocity. “What?” he said, and his voice sounded small, like the child he still was.
I watched your face for a reaction. You looked pale, but otherwise you betrayed no emotion.
“Help me,” he said.
There was a rustling from the bushes several feet away and you looked up, alarmed. His two friends, boys you must have seen at high school with Joey, crept uncertainly out of hiding. One held his camera phone at his side.
“Dude. Are you okay?”
You stood, the knife drooling in your hand.
“I think you better call an ambulance,” Joey said, his voice high-pitched with fear.
Because they were fools, the boys ignored him and ran forward. One dropped to Joey’s side, and the other screamed at you, calling you filthy names, his body rigid with shock. You ignored them all; you were watching the tree.
A cold tongue of fire crept up from the roots and coiled around the trunk. Several more followed, and in moments the Devil’s Willow was a pale green-white conflagration, shedding no heat but filling the little valley with its weird radiance. I felt the thing that slept beneath the mud stir beneath my waters. Every slow churn of its heart brightened the willow’s fire.
You spoke it. “Bring him back. Please just bring him back. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll kill them all. I’ll kill everyone.”
I realized then that you were talking to the Morningstar. Your unfilled want, Allison, the hollow in your heart and the love that goes unanswered, is a prayer to the Morningstar. Your whole life is a hymn to Hell.
I think that’s when I felt love, myself, for the first time.
“I don’t know what to do,” you said.
You couldn’t bring back your father, though; whatever sorcery your father practiced, you did not know it. You’d started something, but you did not know how to go further. In moments you would be brought down by these stupid boys, and what might happen after that I couldn’t even guess.
But if the Morningstar could not respond to you, I could.
I couldn’t speak to you without the radio. I would have to show you.
Joey made it easy. He lay gasping on the blanket, his friend’s hand pressed into his side. The heel of his left shoe resting in the water. So I pulled him in. It only took a moment; it was easy. I had become the lake, diffused into it like a breath into the atmosphere. I poured myself into his eyes, down his throat; I filled him like a vessel. Then I used him to pull in his friend, and I filled him too. In moments I had all three. I felt their life sparking in me. For the first time since being brought here, I knew a communal mind again. I was no longer alone. And so began the miracle you brought to our town.
We stood panting by the shore, feeling our new selves. We glanced at each other, ashamed at this new intimacy at first, at the torrents of knowledge that poured into us, all our shabby secrets and desires brought to sudden light. But the shame dissipated quickly; there can be no secrets if we all share the same mind.
The same love.
We looked at you, Allison. We spoke to you in a chorus of voices: “Come here, Allison.”
The look on your face—I didn’t know it. Was it another kind of love? Was there yet more to learn?
“Who are you?” you asked.
“You know,” we said.
You turned and fled. It was a shocking rejection. We didn’t understand. Isn’t this what you wanted? To be welcomed? To be loved?
The tree lit the night and soon drew other people from town. They joined us, reluctantly at first—many had to be forced into the water, where the imp could pour into them—but they were grateful soon enough. By the time morning approached, we had everyone.
We decided to work. It was what we knew. The memory of the mills drove us along. Many of us went into the lake to be consumed in the labor. Limbs were broken and reconfigured, bone grafted to bone, kites of skin stretched taut. It took two hundred people broken down and reassembled to make the skeleton of the mill’s first wheel; there is more to be done.
As the sun crests the hills, the mill begins to turn in the lake. We lift our voice in a chorus of groans. We bend to you like reeds to the light. Why don’t you respond, Allison? Why have you never responded to us, despite every provocation?
We used to know our monster. Now we know ourselves, but we still do not know you. We see you with ten thousand eyes, standing at the window of your house, your hollowed-out father still sitting behind you like a deposed king. His head has gone cold and quiet. You’re staring out at us. You press your hand to the glass. Can you feel the warmth of us, the way I once felt yours?
Your face makes a complicated movement, an expression we believe will tell us something about you. But before we can read it, the sunlight hits the glass and the glare of it reflects back to us, a tiny star in the morning light.
The Visible Filth
First published as the chapbook The Visible Filth, March 2015
The roaches were in high spirits. There were half a dozen of them, caught in the teeth of love. They capered across the liquor bottles, perched atop pour spouts like wooden ladies on the prows of sailing ships. They lifted their wings and delicately fluttered. They swung their antennae with a ripe sexual urgency, tracing love sonnets in the air.
Will, the bartender on duty, stood watching them, with his back to the rest of the bar. He couldn’t move. He was bound by a sense of obligation to remain where he was, but the roaches stirred a primordial revulsion in him, and the urge to flee was palpable. His flesh shivered in one convulsive movement.
He worked the six PM to two AM shift at Rosie’s Bar, a little hole-in-the-wall tucked back in the maze of streets of uptown New Orleans, surrounded by shotgun houses settling into their final repose, their porches bedazzled in old Mardi Gras beads and sprung couches. The bar’s interior reflected its environment: a few tables and chairs against the back wall, a jukebox, ranks of stools against the bar. He often had the misfortune of minding the place when the roaches started feeling passionate. It happened a few times a year, and each time it paralyzed him with horror.
At the moment, his only customers were Alicia: a twenty-eight year old server at an oyster bar in the French Quarter, a long-time regular, and his best friend; and Jeffrey: her boyfriend of the moment, soon to be hustled into the ranks of the exes, if Will knew her at all. Jeffrey was one of those pretty boys with the hair and the lashes she liked, but he was not on her wavelength at all. Will gave him another month, tops.
“This place is disgusting,” Alicia said, watching the show from a somewhat safer distance.
“Don’t slam the bar, babe,” said Jeffrey. “It’s just bugs.”
“Fucking gross bugs who want to get busy on my bottle of Jameson.”
Will just nodded. It was, indeed, disgusting.
“You should get an exterminator, brother,” said Jeffrey. “Seriously.”
The same conversation every time. Just different faces. “Yup. Talk to the boss.”
“You know they say when you see one, there’s thousands more in the walls.”
“Oh yeah? Is that what they say?”
Alicia said, “Shut up, Jeffrey.”
“Make me.”
