The night sky bears its lurid tongue. Below it, the white house with the white shutters stands in a sunken field. The field is circled by a dusky forest and, concentric to that, swollen hills, pregnant with tall grass, as if one day before anything had bloomed, God had dug his heel into the earth, and with that, pushed in. Despite this, the domesticated plot is not entirely isolated, but sometimes it becomes so quiet, the only reminder that there is, indeed, a world which thrives beyond this is a single dirt road, which runs tangent to the sloping field. Yet all this, the imagery compiled, would seem entirely uncompelling if it were not for the spruce tree, which stands apart from the forest and a ways beyond the white house, a tangible silhouette wrapped in a sheet of night. It is a curious tree; it leans into itself, as if years ago, as a sapling, it had been possessed with some vaulting ambition, one that drove its innards to climb so far it had witnessed something unseeable, and shocked, dove its head down in disappointment. But that night, if the spruce could lean its head upward again, it would’ve witnessed a figure in the window behind the white shutters, pressed against the glass like the palms of God barreling against the plate of sky.
The woman sits in the window, holding her elderly mother in her lap. The old woman is almost eighty and cannot think for herself, and her daughter hates her, but perhaps it is not her mother the woman hates, it is mainly just her stump; the right leg ends below the knee. It is a mottled granite mixture of pink and white, and sometimes festers, and needs to be cleaned. The woman forgets how this amputation occurred; most likely her mother had never told her in the first place.
Both women are frail and small-boned and wear white nightgowns that cover their throats. They are sitting in the guest room, which has been converted into the old woman's bedroom. It has been this way since the daughter's husband died. Henry was sane, but he had died violently and at his own hands. But preceding every death, of course, rolls a life as thick as one's own tongue. Before his explosive end, Henry had been a toxic man, and his smiles were laced with a mixture of pride and worth. Between twilight heaves, he had conveyed to the woman a promise, one, she knew, that lay not in the milk-white sheets stained with red and yellow, the smell of last night’s beer mixed with the promise of tomorrow morning’s coffee, the creak and sigh of bed and breath as they rose through plaster walls and stuck onto the ceiling like remnants of city smog. The promise itself was a Chinese puzzle-box, and it was one she can unlock only after she has grasped his madness.
She remembers, briefly, coming home to the letter. And Henry’s cold hands. And the nape of his neck, bruised and swollen in the wind.
She had loved him so much, but she did not love him enough.
After his death, she had had to suffer through her friends’ sympathies. How sad it must have been, were the whispers. Not just the years after, but also the months before, and thinking, years after, of the months before. How sad things must have been. That poor woman. That poor, poor soul. This is why she moved her mother in, to keep the rooms sunnier. But then her mother had lost her mind.
It occurs to her, suddenly, that perhaps she hates the stump because it signifies the end of
her marriage. And the end of her mother’s wits. Whenever she cleans the amputation, she is disgusted with herself and the air around her -- always liquidated, as clouded as the veil hanging before the old woman’s eyes.
The knock does not frighten her; it rolls in with the tide of every other twilight whisper: the gentle ticking of the bedroom clock, the incarnate buzzing heard when the sky, and the shadows under it, rest in complete silence.
She goes downstairs and answers the door. A young face, perhaps twenty-two, peers at her.
“Hello.”
There is another face, vaguely older and heavier-set, behind him. It hovers just over his shoulder, standing on the topmost step of the porch. Both have rifles strung over their shoulders and wear grey sweatshirts. The older one carries a duffel bag and wears a pair of rubber boots.
“Hunting season,” explains the younger man.
The woman’s face contorts into an expression of relief. She tells the men they can enter if they leave the guns on the porch.
In the fresh light of the atrium, she contemplates the face of the younger man more closely. The older one, who is thicker around the wrists and cheeks, does not interest her. Her gaze is directed, instead, toward the wiry adolescent, baby-blonde, smelling vaguely of crushed fruit. His eyes are as pale as moonrock. In fact, his entire complexion resembles the smooth curves of some astronomical goddess -- one untrampled by the snowboots of civilization, one removed and as yet vaguely beautiful. His hands are very small.
“I’m Jacob,” the adolescent explains. He points to his brother. “That’s Thaddeus.”
“Cecilia,” says the woman. Her name tastes like a foreign coin between her teeth -- bloody and untraceable. “C-can I get you something to drink?”
Jacob shakes his head. “I’m not thirsty. Remind us again how it should be done.”
Cecilia swallows. “Like no daughter ever would,” she says.
“Let’s go upstairs.”
Cecilia looks at Thaddeus’ duffel bag. She had not asked them to leave it with the rifles.
“I-I --”
“Let’s go.”
She leads the way. The oak railing curses her fingertips. She thinks of her mother sitting in her bedroom, alone. They reach the landing.
“Who’s in there?” Thaddeus points to the mother’s room, a dim light that seems to eclipse the darkened hallway. Cecilia says nothing. Thaddeus begins to trod toward it; she reaches her hand out, but the heat has climbed up her throat and enveloped her tongue. Jacob takes the outstretched hand and leads her into another bedroom. He closes the door.
“Sit down,” he tells her, nodding toward the bed. His flicks on the light and the room saturates, the shadows of his face become harsher. He turns and looks at the top of her dresser. She watches as his fingers dance through a selection of tubes and jars. He knocks a glass of lotion onto the floor; it shatters. He picks up a bottle of perfume and spritzes some onto his wrist. The smell of crushed fruit grows stronger. Her heart contorts so suddenly she wants to cry out, but can only emit a cough. From down the hall, the old woman screams. Jacob looks at her and she begins to cry.
“I’m trying to distract you.” His voice is almost sweet.
Cecilia watches him. He is lean, but thin. He is blocking the door, but she could fight him and she would win. She looks at his small hands.
Another scream, this one bloodier and more prolonged than the first. Jacob sits down on the bed next to Cecilia. She is shaking so hard he thinks she could crack open, right in front of him, if he just touches the top of her skull.
Suddenly, she slips the white nightgown from her body. A swath of goosebumps rushes down her arms. Jacob watches them spread. The screaming continues. Cecilia leans closer to Jacob. His eyes parallel to hers. They are foreign moons and she wishes she could traverse their territories.
A knock at the door. She realizes that the screaming has ended long ago. Jacob rises and she watches the moons, in their parallel orbits, sink into the tide of night.
“Thaddeus?”
“I want her to see this.”
Jacob gives her the nightgown, and she wraps it around her shoulders. The three adults walk down the hallway toward the eclipse still spilling into the hallway.
The two brothers stand back as Cecilia looks inside. The old woman is strewn all over her room.
“Can I use your bathroom?”
She can barely hear Thaddeus. The night has whisked away all her senses; she stands, instead, on an island set high above the world.
“Did she hear me?” “Use it anyway.”
Thaddeus comes back in a pair of new jeans and a black collared shirt. The rubber boots are nowhere to be seen. He sets down the duffel bag, puts on a pair of gloves, and goes into the mother’s room, where he lowers her head and shoulders into a plastic bag.
“Let’s go outside.”
They walk down the stairs and open the door. The cold air hits Cecilia like a dull knife, socked between her ribs. Jacob wraps his arm around her and they descend the staircase regally.
It is brighter outside than it is inside the house. The cold glare of the moon makes Cecilia hide her face in her nightgown. Ahead of them, Thaddeus walks, the severed bust of the old woman bumping, in the plastic bag, against his right thigh.
They walk across the stretch of dark-blue grass until they reach the nape of the hills, sloping outward from the sunken house, the forest waiting breathlessly behind the corners of their eyes.
“Hold this.”
Thaddeus hands Jacob the plastic bag. As if curious, Jacob opens peeks inside. Cecilia watches him. With his head drooping, curls hanging like a curtain over his forehead, he could almost be a small boy, sitting in the corner of some great field, beheading daisies.
Thaddeus takes a length of rope out of the duffel bag. He tosses one end over the arm of the spruce tree. He takes the plastic bag from Jacob and retrieves the bust of the old woman, and knots the other end of the rope around her neck. He pulls the untied end and the old woman is raised up, as if an ornament for some ghastly Christmas tree. Thaddeus ties the clean end of the rope around the trunk of the tree. The mother’s bust hangs still.
Jacob begins to sing. “Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright.”
Cecilia wants to laugh, or cry, she doesn’t know which.
As Thaddeus watches, Jacob presses her against him. Her lips touch his neck. The night cools her bare back and she wraps her arms around him. Half-conscious, Cecilia thinks of her dead husband, and his empty glasses, and how his faults were never truly his faults, just a collection of screams, tossed into an endless void. Henry had lived but had never truly died, she knew this because he was still here, in Jacob’s face and in Jacob himself. She thinks of Henry’s funeral, and the way those stunted whispers had dotted the sky. She and Henry, they had tried to make love without understanding love. They had called for ghosts when there were none. The sun had sunk and the waves had scattered from the shores. The rain had fallen and the earth had pushed it back into the sky.
She realizes that she is on the ground, and that Jacob is on top of her. She stares into the eyes of her mother, rippling like a flag for some macabre pirate ship.
When he is done, Jacob helps Cecilia up. There is lightning in her eyes. She begins to tremble. She did not realize how cold it was outside until now.
“Thank you,” she tells the brothers. “You-all will be fine?”
Thaddeus looks at Jacob. “They’ll never find us.”
Cecilia glances up. The moon is a rock she wants to sharpen between her fingers. The night is so raw she thinks she could carve it open. Half-conscious, she delights her fantasy: slicing the bare back of the sky until the clouds on both sides expand, pillowing outwards, then bursting like flesh. She imagines rain falling downward out of the crack in the sky. She imagines the fiery burst of stars, leaving welts on the cheeks of children who dare to look skyward.
She begins to hobble back toward the house, whose lights burn like empty eyes into the deep black bruise of the night. This was the plan. She had paid the brothers and her mother was dead. The stump was gone and so were her severed feelings. She would wait three hours and then she would call the police.
As they watch her endless walk, Thaddeus spits into the wet ground. “Like a daughter never would,” he says disdainfully. Jacob is silent. He, at least in part, understands Cecilia. Part of her reasoning was so that the authorities wouldn’t question her guilt, but part of it was also so that she, herself, would bear no guilt either. A shot in the night, and the thing would die with an echo; the act could be merciful, even. But who could imagine this fate, the one she had created, for their own mother? The unbelievability of the night rendered her immune. Jacob watches her retreat, shaking his head -- not in disapproval, but in awe. Cecilia, in all her frailty, was beautiful, and horrid, and sane. She was brilliant and bloody and she was fine.
Cecilia walks up the porch steps and holds the frame of the open door, as if she will vomit. She turns around. A crack of lightning splinters the throat of the sky. Between the porch of the white house and the tree where the brothers stand is a fine wet dew, heavy with the croak of fall.
Briefly, as Thaddeus raises his rifle, Jacob recalls a morning early in his sixteenth year, after his mother’s bones healed, when he and his brother left home to find work in the mines. He remembers her face at the window, the fear of their father hanging before her eyes like an opaque veil. He knew that she would stand by the window until the clouds turned a smoky pink, and that come evening, she would make dinner before retreating to her bedroom window, to smoke and to dwell on all the opportunities that had, like winter gloves, been lost and found in her life.
He blinks. The thought makes him want to kill. Thoughtlessly, he touches the spot near the nape of his neck, where Cecilia’s wet kiss still remains.
The gunshot ruptures like a scream through the black facade.
Cecilia falls gracefully, half of her in the house and half outside. Then a silence so explosive it compounds in Jacob’s ears. He stands, Thaddeus following. The brothers brush the night from their knees, then gingerly pick their way back to the house, through the yard, and up the porch steps.
Cecilia lies like a wedding veil, trampled, before them.
“Just like an angel,” Jacob murmurs, stroking her bare shoulder.
“She’s an animal,” says Thaddeus. He nudges Jacob away, and his boots shred her bare back. “Think about the old woman.”
They sling their rifles over their shoulders and traipse uphill to the car. Cecilia had paid them enough to last till Colorado, or further. Above them, the sky pulses, knifed open like a curse, and inside it hangs the moon, as if by a filament, its closed eye organic and judgmental. And perhaps if the moon could have seen, it would have witnessed Jacob pause, and blow a kiss toward the lifeless sky, as if wishing it farewell.
As the truck rumbles onward, the dawn, a crusty red, congeals at the edges of the horizon. Behind it, a swath of birds ascends into the ruby sky.
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