“Yeah, Norma. Completely.”
Norma shook her head. “They tell me that it’s progressive. Nonreversible. It can slow way down, but it’s always eating. They’re not really sure how long it takes in the absence of the vampire, but they suspect she’d go into a coma and die within five or six years.”
“And still head over heels for Ernesto?”
“Apparently so.”
George toyed absently with his food for several seconds, and then became aware he was doing so.
“Oh, sorry. It’s just a shame, though. Ya know?”
“It is,” said Norma. “She’s pretty much dead and doesn’t know it. We’ve either lost her already, or are going to lose her soon, regardless how you cut it. Not that I’m not compassionate, but look on the bright side. She’s going to be planting some false information in Ernesto’s head for us. At least we can get some use out of her this way. Before she crawls off and dies.” She looked at both men, who were silent. “There, that’s settled. Can you pass the rolls?”
Sympathy for the Bones
MARJORIE M. LIU
Marjorie M. Liu is an attorney and a
The funeral was in a bad place, but Martha Bromes never did much care about such things, and so she put her husband into a hole at Cutter’s, and we as her family had to march up the long stone track into the hills to find the damn spot, because the only decent bits of earth in all that place were far deep in the forest, high into the darkness. Rock, everywhere else, and cairns were no good for the dead. The animals were too smart. Might find a piece of human flesh in the yard by the pump with sloppiness like that. I’d seen it myself, years past. No good at all.
The leaves had gone yellow and the air bit cold, whining shrill like the brats left behind the dead, trudging slow beside their weeping mother. Little turds, little nothings. Just blood and bone, passed on from a father who was a cutter, a stone lover, mixing his juice inside a womb that was cold and sly. I did not like Martha. I did not like her husband, either. Edward Bromes was a hard man to enjoy, in any fashion. I cried no tears that he died.
Later that night, I burned the doll that killed him.
Next morning, frost; first kiss of winter. I added layers of wool, and laced my feet and legs into boots lined with rabbit; gathered my satchels, took up a tin can I hung from the hook at my belt, and marched from the rotten timber shack into a silver forest, glittering, spiked with light and a chill.
Persimmons had fallen overnight and the deer had not got to them. Quick business, but careful; those thin orange skins split open at the hint of a tense finger, and I ruined more than I cared to admit. Popped them in my mouth to hide the evidence. Spit out the seeds into my palm, and tucked them into the satchel where I kept the needle and thread. The rest, what was perfect and frostbit, I carried in the can for old Ruth.
She was knitting when I came upon her, sitting on her slanting porch as though the cold was nothing to withered flesh. Crooked broken teeth, crooked smile that might have been pretty but for the long scar pulling her bottom lip.
“Clora, you brought me sweets,” she cooed, setting aside her yarn. “Enough for pudding?”
I placed the tin can into her hands, which were scarred with needle pricks. “Not yet. Maybe tomorrow.”
She caught my wrist before I could pull away. “And the ashes?”
I knew better than to hesitate. No good to pretend I was happy, either. Obedience was enough. Obedience was the same as falling on knees, like the Sunday regulars the preacher took down to the river to pray at the cross and handle the Lucifer snake he kept in a pine box.
I dug into the satchel and pulled out a small packet of folded calico, sewn shut with my finest black thread stitches. Ruth’s smile widened, and she snatched it from my hand—holding it up to her nose and closing her eyes with pleasure.
“Good,” she said, finally. “Edward had it coming for what he did to you.”
I grunted, walking past Ruth into the cabin, unable to look into her eyes.
“Clean your needles,” Ruth called after me. “Time for lessons, Clora.”
I lit the fire, and while the flames leapt and scrambled within the stove, I relieved the burden of needle and thread: slender bone daggers punched with holes; and rough spools, collapsed with lichen-dyed browns and a rich burgundy soaked from sumac-bobs; thin as a strangler’s wire and finely made—by my own hands, hours spent at the fixing of such binding threads.
The needles still had blood on them. I sat down at the table, wet the bone with a dash of apple vinegar poured from a flask in my satchel, and scrubbed hard with the pad of my thumb. Skin to bone, trying to summon the proper devotion. I was still scrubbing, whispering, when Ruth limped into her home.
Her own needles gleamed white as snow, hung around her neck like a fan of quick fingers.
“Not saying their names right,” she said, leaning so close the great bulk of her breasts touched my back. “Need to show your kin the proper respect, Clora. All my teachings to no account, otherwise.”
And then her hand fell upon my hair, warm as the fire burning, sinking into my skull behind my eyes, and she said, “Try again tomorrow. Right now we got a poppet to make. Some Buck Creek girl set her eye on a cutter man from the quarry, and her mother wants him gone.”
I spread the needles over the table. “Maybe he loves her.”
Ruth snorted, and drew away. “Her mother brought a cutting of his hair.”
Nothing more needed saying.
The ground was still soft over Edward’s grave.
His brothers were too lazy to pack him down hard, or even lay stone on top, which was what he would have wanted, being a cutter at the quarry for most of his adult life. I took a stroll past Martha’s cabin on the way to the hill, making sure she was home.
Wives were odd sometimes. Over the years, I’d seen a few who couldn’t pull themselves from the graves of lost men, sitting up all through the day and night with Bibles, crosses, or nothing to hold but their skirts and faces, weeping and praying like God would give them a resurrection, like maybe their men were as good as Jesus and would be risen. Seemed to me that was arrogance bordering on sin, but not one that was any worse than murder.
Martha was home. I stood at the edge of the forest, staring at her lit windows, watching her make circles all around her kitchen. I could have gone closer, but the old coonhound was tied to the porch, and even though he knew me, there was no sense in sparking the possibility of him making an unattractive sound.
The forest sang at night, trills and clicks, and whispers of the wind in the naked rubbing branches. Coyotes yipped and somewhere close a fox screamed like a woman, making my skin crawl cold even though it was nothing to fear.
The shovel was heavy on my shoulder. So was the ax.
I found the grave before moonrise and started digging. Took hours. I didn’t focus as I should. Kept thinking about Edward Bromes, and my last view of his body before his brothers slid him into the pine box: pale, stiff, eyes sewn shut.
I thought about other men, too.
I had to jump down into the hole, standing waist-high in loose dirt as I used the ax to pry apart the soft, cheap wood. Martha had insisted on something finer than a muslin shroud, but each groan of those splitting planks made my heart beat harder until I was breathless, expecting to hear shouts, dogs barking. The night was all as it should be, though: empty, quiet, crisp with frost.
Edward smelled a little, but no worse than other corpses. I looked down at him with nothing but a small
