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The marsh air is thick and heavy, like a wet invisible wallpushing Molly back. She moves with feverish eagerness, her worn-down flat-soledshoes slipping on rotted wood and wet moss. Scott and Janine go at a leisurelypace at first, but then they start to go faster, heedless of Molly’s diffidentcries that they slow down and wait for her to catch up. Sometimes she can onlyget glimpses of their backs through the marsh. They are always a unit movingtogether, their bodies nearly colliding and then pulling apart only to rejoinin their next strides. Molly cries weakly for them to stop and is almostsurprised when they comply, turning as one to face her. In her bleary-eyedconfusion, she almost thinks they are the same creature, four-eyed andfour-legged, Janine’s slim shoulders and Scott’s broader ones collapsingtogether like lopsided halves.
“How close are we?” Molly says.
Scott and Janine are looking at each other, but their eyesare so close together that they might as well just be looking at Molly. She feelsthe uneasy prickle of being seen without being able to see back. She backs awayslightly into the marsh, slips on a log, and falls. Scott leans down to helpher up and she thinks: they are only people. Don’t be silly.
When Scott hoists Molly to her feet, she feels—for a second,only a second—like the women on the covers of romance novels, prone anddelicate and teetering on a moment where ravishing and ravaging are the exactsame thing. She feels every nerve in her body; her mouth opens slightly and herheart hammers. Then she opens her eyes and sees, too-big and much too close,the blood-colored wide-open mouth of Scott-Janine, the tongue workinglasciviously, the teeth gleaming. Molly stumbles back, then breaks into a run.
Sometime later, the sound of the brush rustling at her backwill cease. Molly will stop; the moonlight will show that she is alone. Themarshes roil on unendingly in every direction, dark and formless. There is noone and nothing to be seen but the brilliant neon glow of the Flamingo’slong-dark electric sign, cutting through the miles, calling Molly home.
Life Cycles
The day my father gaveme to the Glaire woman, I dressed in his clothes, a threadbare jacket andspit-shined Oxfords, my hair slick with his pomade, his cologne burning theback of my throat. My father was not a handsome man anymore, but he used to be.My face was his face twenty years ago, everything I had was his once, andthat’s why I was to pay this debt for him.
The Glaire woman had a house in the hills that got a newroom every quarter-century. No one saw the inside of the house and no one sawher until my father did. He told me he was the grocer’s boy, twice a weekcondemned to drop paper sacks on the front porch of the Glaire house. He alwaysthought if he walked lightly she’d never know he was there, but she knew.
He told me the story like this:
She grabbed my chin in her hand and made me look at her.Dark eyes like you never saw. Dark eyes like tarnished bronze. She said, comeinside. I had to do it.
A house like that, she must have money or her ancestorsdid. Rooms crowded with old, fine things. I followed her into a parlor and shepoured wine for us. I didn’t want to have any, I had to go back to work, I toldher, but with her eyes on me I couldn’t not drink it.
You’re younger than I guessed, I told her, and she said,young, yes, but too late for you. She’s already here. Then she put her hand onher stomach.
I said, who is her father?
And she showed me a crate full of bones.
I said, you’ll be needing someone else then? I was mad,out of my head—but that house enchanted me.
She said in twenty years. Come here in twenty years.We’ll have you then. I felt her eyes on me. Her stare sinking into my bones.She would hold me to it. I ran from the house, but I knew she would hold me toit.
When he ended his story he never said the part thatmattered:
I wouldn’t be held, so I held my son to it instead.
But I knew that part already.
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I was anxious like a bridegroom, like a first date, like ahuman sacrifice. I asked if I should have flowers and my father laughed.“Nothing lives in that house,” he said. I went to the door like a schoolboy ona dare, fist shaking as I knocked.
Everyone knew who the Glaire woman was. Boys and menwhispered about her ferocious appetites, filling out rumors that I knew myfather was the first to feed. They wanted her, they hated her; they loved thefeel of fearing her. But when I thought of the Glaire woman, I thought tarnishedbronze, crowded with old things, I couldn’t not, crate of bones. She was adisease I knew I was going to die from someday. I couldn’t desire her.
The door was unlocked so I went in, hundred-year-old airthick in my lungs. I thought perhaps she was dead inside and I was saved, nomore debt to pay, but there has always been a Glaire woman. I said, “I’m here,”feeling how sharply my voice cut the silence. Please I was thinking, butplease what I didn’t know.
I stepped into the hallway, feeling my trespass with thehelpless shame of a dreamer who can’t wake, and when my eyes adjusted to thedarkness I could piece together the figure at the end of the hall into a woman,old and stooped, hair hanging like moss on her shoulders. Some voice like myfather’s in the back of my head said, that house enchanted me.
“Is your daughter here?” I said, wondering if she wasthe daughter, if Glaire women are born haggard, if I was husband to a creatureas old as the house where she hid.
“I have none,” she said.
Her parlor was wallpapered in a tangle of dahlias, yellowsand pinks painted sepia by dirt and time. A grand piano sulked in one corner.The reflections of costume masks
