Thin Places
Kay Chronister
THIN PLACES
© 2020 Kay Chronister
Cover art © 2020 Stephen Mackey
Cover design © 2020 Vince Haig
Interior design, typesetting, and layout by CourtneyKelly.
Proof-reader: Carolyn Macdonell-Kelly
First Edition All Rights Reserved
TRADE ISBN: 978-1-988964-18-8
LIMITED HARDCOVER ISBN: 978-1-988964-19-5
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actualevents or persons—living, dead, or undead—is entirely coincidental.
Undertow Publications Pickering, ON Canada
undertowpublications.com
Publication History
“The Women Who Sing for Sklep” is original to thiscollection.
“Life Cycles” is original to this collection.
“White Throat Holler” is original to this collection.
“Your Clothes a Sepulcher, Your Body a Grave” originallyappeared in BlackStatic #62, 2018.
“The Mothers, The Warriors, The Drowned” originallyappeared in BeneathCeaseless Skies #174, 2015.
“Too Lonely, Too Wild” originally appeared in Shadows &Tall Trees, Vol. 8, Michael Kelly, ed., 2020.
“Roiling and Without Form” originally appeared in Black Static#68, 2019.
“The Fifth Gable” originally appeared in Shimmer#29, 2016.
“Russula’s Wake” originally appeared The Dark#43, 2018.
“The Lights We Carried Home” originally appeared in StrangeHorizons, 2018.
“Thin Places” originally appeared in The Dark#50, 2019.
For my siblings.
Contents
1. Your Clothes a Sepulcher, YourBody a Grave
2. The Women Who Sing for Sklep
3. The Warriors, the Mothers, theDrowned
4. Too Lonely, Too Wild
5. Roiling and Without Form
6. Life Cycles
7. The Fifth Gable
8. White Throat Holler
9. Russula’s Wake
10. The Lights We Carried Home
11. Thin Places
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Your Clothes a Sepulcher, YourBody a Grave
We should have livedthat summer in reverse. If not that summer, at least that afternoon. Thecarousel’s glistening brass, all the wooden horses open-mouthed with theirblood-colored tongues showing. The boardwalk sun-bleached. And us, standingunderneath, eating our spun sugar ankle-deep in seawater, listening to the manyfeet pass above. “There will never be another day like this one,” you said. “Iknow, I know,” I was saying; I hated the sound of those words from your mouth. Thespun sugar cobwebbing in my throat, drying me out. You threw your stick intothe shallows and I said, “Some seagull is going to eat that,” and you said, “Idon’t care, let it die, I don’t care.” And I knew you didn’t. The sunwas setting too early. In the brasseries, the chansons were mounting the patiosto sing about heartbreak. The clink of wine glasses reached us, the hum ofguitars being tuned, and I knew night was close, and I knew that in every waythat mattered, you were already gone for me.
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You were the niece of my mother’s first love’s spinstersister, and we met at a party thrown in your garden. The hyacinth was sochoking thick that no one could smell the tea cakes, no one could smell thetea. The cypress trees, the wild lavender, they made their overtures, but whatwe remember is that more sensuous odor. I was a little boy in a sailor suit,afraid to dirty my clothes, pale as the white brim of my sailor’s cap. I hadnever set sail. Probably I would have gotten seasick. But we were in Italy;isn’t that sufficient for a love story to begin? You were not eating theteacakes on the saucer that had been allotted you. I looked across the tableand thought: we are nearly the same age. I wanted, at once, to be your friend.You wouldn’t look at me. You were a fragile-looking girl whose skin had bluishundertones that seemed at the time perfectly natural to me. I could see allyour veins spiderwebbing across your body, carrying your blood from yourdelicately curled pinky to the hollow of your throat. You had been dressed likea nun: you even wore a miniature wimple fitted securely to your head. They werealways costuming us children then. I suppose I thought they were just dressingyou for company. To be an amusement. Years later, we would kneel in theraspberry thicket; you would whisper: “do you—know—the bleeding nun?”But for now, you would say nothing. The veins would leap and twitch in yourfingers as you grasped your teacup. Early days, those. You were almostentirely here. You could have been entirely mine. Let time untangle and maybethere in the center someone would find us: you in your dark cloak and me in mypale linens, old enough but not too old, straddling after and before, seeingthrough a haze of hyacinth, barely breathing.
◊
Perhaps that was the first indication that you had power:that you could make me yours, that you could make yourself mine. A stack ofrespectable men and women had to die, not least of all my own mother, so mysailor-suited young self could pass into the hands of a family friend who spenthis summers scouring the Orient for antiquities. “No place for a young boy,” hesaid, “all that dust in his lungs, all those tombs being opened. Nothing liesstill where you leave it.” Instead he brought me to you. Instead I was haunted.In the two years since the garden party, I had grown taller, less tow-headed; Ihad learned a handful of swear words at boarding school that I deployed invicious whispers. But otherwise I had not changed. Only you were different. Youwore white crinoline, diaphanous but high-collared. A violet ribbon tied aroundyour neck. A veil of crocheted lace let the light into your hair in gridworkfragments. I loved you then, or thought I did. You were kneeling in the gardennear the old stone wall, digging for something. Your knuckles were bloody. Iwithdrew a handkerchief from the pocket of my suit and cleaned the wound, andfelt quite the gentleman until your aunt called you to her side like a dog thathad misbehaved.
Your look was violent then. Your veins darkened; yourblue-toned skin made me think of ancient marbled stone, a mountainside, ajagged peak cutting into the clouds somewhere in the Pyrenees. I was not afraidof you. I wanted to climb. I wanted to feel the mist on my skin and look downand not fall. I was an orphan. My guardian was in Tunisia, battering the localswith a shovel and an advanced degree. How else do you occupy yourself? Youstand on a mountaintop. You feel the mist on your skin. You fall in love. Igrasped your hand. I felt the veins in each of your fingers pulse. Nausearocked me and I wanted to put a world between us, but instead I
