77 Shadow Street

lightest touch is a blow. She can’t tolerate being touched.

She doesn’t know why. At night, alone in her bed, she sometimes tries to think why she is this way. Thinking about it only makes her cry. When she’s alone in the dark, crying, she wishes that she lived in a book world, not this one.

She can love Bambi because he doesn’t live in this world. He lives in the book world. A world apart, she can love him desperately and never be too close.

Now her mother calls her to the Bambi way, and Iris steels herself to leave the apartment. There’s the boy, Winny, and the boy’s mother, Twyla, and that’s already bad enough, too many people. But now the four of them are going to leave the apartment, which means too many people and new places, change and more change.

Iris keeps her head down. Keeps her head down and pretends that she is Bambi. To live the Bambi way, it is better to try to be Bambi, to think like he would think.

Iris follows her mother into the hallway because Bambi follows his mother whenever she tells him that he must. They go around the corner to the back door of Twyla’s apartment. Iris has been in the hallway before, but never in these people’s apartment. So now all this is new. Everything is new. New is dangerous, hostile. Now everything is hostile. Everything, everything.

She must make it all familiar and friendly. She must be Bambi, and this must be the forest, for only then will she be both brave and safe. She tries to look directly only at her mother’s back. She sees things from the corners of her eyes, of course, or when she inadvertently glances left or right, but she imagines those things to be what they are not, to be a part of her beloved forest.

Words come to Iris, memorized from so many readings of the precious book: Round about grew hazel bushes, dogwoods, black-thorns and young elders. Tall maples, beeches and oaks wove a green roof over the thicket and from the firm dark-brown earth sprung fern fronds, wood-vetch and sage.…

Her mother and Twyla talk to each other, and the boy talks to both of them, but Iris can’t bear the weight of what they are saying to one another. What they are saying to one another is going to crush her if she listens to it. Crush, crush, crush her. Exterminate, they say. Exterminate means to kill.

Instead, Iris listens to the melody of the woods: The whole forest resounded with myriad voices, was penetrated by them in a joyous agitation. The woodthrush rejoiced incessantly, the doves cooed without stopping, the blackbirds whistled, the tit-mice chirped.…

They go out through the front door of the strange apartment, into another hallway, where Twyla rings a doorbell. There is a man they call Bailey and another man they call Dr. Ignis. There is yet another new place.

This is too much, the new just coming at her and coming at her, constant change, unbearable.

Desperate, Iris gives herself to the forest, which rises in her mind to embrace her as it always embraces Bambi: Out of the earth came whole troops of flowers, like motley stars, so that the soil of the twilit forest floor shone with a silent, ardent, colorful gladness.…

Martha Cupp

She wasn’t sure which was worse: the unearthly thing that burst out of the sofa and then disappeared, leaving the fabric torn and the horsehair billowing—or Edna’s I-told-you-so expression and her satisfaction that her belief in an invading demonic force seemed to have been substantiated by the bizarre incident. Well, on reflection, Edna’s smug expression was by far the worse of the two, because if the beast in the chesterfield showed up again, Martha could always club it mercilessly, but she couldn’t very well take a fireplace poker to her sister.

Still holding the train of her dinner gown off the floor, Edna said, “I’m sure that if Father Murphy had seen that nasty critter, he wouldn’t care one whit if I believe in Bigfoot or ancient astronauts. He would break out the exorcised water, oil, salt—and begin the Prayer against Malefice immediately and at the top of his voice.”

Martha knew that by continuing to hold the poker at the ready, she would appear to be conceding the point to her sister, but she was damn well not going to put it down, have a glass of warm milk, and go to bed. Even if Edna asked Father Murphy to perform an exorcism of place instead of an exorcism of person, and even if he agreed to do it, Martha would stand ready throughout the ritual to start swinging with that pleasingly heavy length of brass.

“What next?” Edna asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Besides calling Father Murphy,” Edna said, “what should we do, what should we expect to happen, how should we prepare?”

“Maybe nothing more is going to happen.”

“Something will happen,” Edna said confidently, almost happily, as if an infestation of demons would be just the thing to combat the doldrums of a rainy December night.

Before Martha could reply, a bright flood of shimmering, crackling blue light washed across the floor. She seemed to be standing in an intensely luminous fog.

The poker reacted as if it were a divining rod and she were a dowser searching for underground water, almost tearing out of her grip. She held fast to it, but the poker jerked her arm down, and the tip of it pierced the eerie luminosity.

Simultaneously, the remaining fireplace tools and the rack that held them overturned on the hearth, didn’t just topple into the light but slammed into it as if drawn by a tremendous power. The blueness receded from around Martha, shuddered across the room, seemed to suck the ornate fireplace screen into the firebox, and crackled away up the chimney, gone.

Sally Hollander

Lying on the kitchen floor, Sally felt the last of her bones succumb to the spreading cold. Now a skeleton of ice defined itself clearly in the warmth of her flesh. She had never previously been so consciously aware of her physiology. Although at the moment she remained paralyzed, she knew the position of each of her 206 bones, the precise shape of the various plates that were fused together to form her skull. She was conscious of the status of every joint: the ball-and-socket joints in shoulders and hips, the pivot joint in her neck between the second and third vertebrae, the elegant ellipsoidals in her wrists, the wonderfully functional hinges in her fingers and elbows and knees. Sally was able to feel the synovial membranes encapsulating her mobile joints and was vividly aware of