My potential was still intact, baby or no. But I knew she thought I was stupid enough to let one happen to me, which was the worst part of the scam. All Darren knew was that she walked around with cash. When she pressed the bills into my hands, I only smarted a little.
I was happy she was dead, I realized. I had been staring at her big, blue body with no particular care, and Johnny had seen. Embarrassed for myself, I looked away.
“You see her too, right?” Johnny asked.
I inched closer to him, to her. He was looking down at me with wild, excited eyes, like Darren sometimes got. I took a deep breath, letting her decay filter through my insides.
“Johnny,” I said slowly, slipping my hand inside his, pulling him down. “There’s nothing here. Where’s the body? Pick it up and show me, if there’s a body.” The need in my voice was unflattering, ugly. He recoiled at the sound.
But I, I could not help it. I leaned in to taste the body—just a lick of the neck. She went sweet on my tongue. Johnny laughed hard and endless, finally having a good time.
The Barrow Wight
JOSH COOK
The winter debilitated us.
We thought it was a glove.
The winter became subcutaneous.
Blizzards buried parking meters. Plows built roadside balustrades. Schools closed. We exhausted the energizing joy of dramatic snowstorms by January. Were drinking more by February. Catching up on classic movies.
You expect a glove in a melting snow mound. Three days later we realized it was a hand.
Authorities were called. Hospitals contacted. Missing-person reports cross-referenced. We reached out to people we hadn’t heard from recently. The authorities were, we assumed, scientific and thorough.
For a week, we saw hands instead of gloves.
Feet instead of boots.
We saw another hand.
The media invaded. We gave the ill-informed, poorly phrased, emotionally contradictory interviews expected from “the people on the street.” Got pretty good at them, eventually. Inside jokes and everything.
Another receding snow mound revealed a foot.
After the second hand, we constantly imagined feet. Idle moments at work. When yawns closed our eyes. Blinking away the colored shapes of too-long-stared-at screens. We thought we were prepared.
Maybe we would have been if someone else had found it, not the kind fifth grader who still believed the world is so people can be happy in it. What do they think about a fucking foot in a snow mound? We weren’t prepared.
Then a four-day problem with an idiom.
Then . . . (fuck it) the other foot dropped.
The media returned but their tone changed. Mocking derision replaced morbid curiosity, as if behind every question lurked a rhetorical “Can you believe these people? Limbs in their snow mounds? Who’s driving their plows, am I right?”
We shared a nightmare of being chased through a dark tunnel. The tunnel narrowed until we crawled. It terminated. An evil approached. We pushed with all our might against the terminus. We broke through, flopping onto slushy ground to a chorus of screams. Bottles dropped. The shattered glass assembled into a surface that reflected a severed hand with a face in its palm.
The use of “applause” radically increased.
Our alcohol drinkers felt their desire for it diminish in direct proportion to the increase in their need for it.
Parents couldn’t tell their children to play outside.
Horror movies were absented from sleepovers.
We packed high school basketball games like never before and cheered with unprecedented passion. The team went two and six.
We watched even more TV.
Next was a forearm.
A dog found it. A good dog.
The forearm was put in the morgue with the other limbs. Picture the visage of a freaked-out coroner.
Spring increased the pace of revelation. The rest of an arm up to the shoulder was found the next day, and its partner that afternoon.
A few people left. In public, we politely questioned their commitment. In private, we hated them as we hate elderly relatives lingering in nursing homes.
The high school drama club met after school; at least, we think it was the drama club, because none of the other groups of students would have this conversation; or maybe they would: teenagers are weird. It wasn’t even a conversation, just one kid talking. You know, how you just kinda talk yourself into the outside. What are we doing? We’re not afraid of this getting out, are we? That’d be stupid. Nobody got in a fight. Nobody drew a gun and accidentally shot someone else. Nobody had sex in the bathroom. Nobody even did drugs. Somebody said they were looking up stuff on the internet because they were bored and Dad was watching college basketball and you do not change the channel when Dad is watching college basketball, so they learned that many scholars theorize that the idea of “barrow wights” originated with Mongolian herdsmen who believed powerful spirits guarded improperly buried bodies and tormented travelers, and the belief in these malicious spirits accompanied them as they swept into Europe, where the spirits were associated with trolls guarding cemeteries in Poland and Hungary, making their way into one unattributed German fairy tale in which the cruelty of a tyrannical prince congealed into a gremlin that haunted his grave, a version of which was adapted into an Arthurian legend—originally composed in France, of course—in which a “burial wraith” tried to trick Sir Lucan the Butler into replacing the dead lord in a tomb, and once in France there was only a channel between these monsters and England, which actually had burial mounds or barrows, barrow coming from the Old German for “mountain,” and in England they developed a mischievousness that included using dead bodies and the parts thereof in pranks, which many scholars believe was an explanation for the occasional absences of bodies from graves, and it was from these folktales that Tolkein created the “Barrow-wights,” now so prevalent in fantasy and horror culture.
Somehow the term barrow wight manifested in everyone’s minds. If we lost focus, it ended up
