Lloyd had just enough time to punch Frank in the face before other patrons tackled him and somebody called the police. By the time the cops got there, Lloyd couldn't remember anything. He was mad as hell, though, cursing Ellen at the top of his lungs.
The police drove Kaye and her mother to Lloyd's apartment and waited while Kaye packed their clothes and stuff into plastic garbage bags. Ellen was on the phone, trying to find a place for them to crash.
They hadn't so much as visited once in the six years that they'd been gone from New Jersey. Ellen barely even spoke to her mother on the holidays before passing the phone to Kaye. You can visit that friend of yours. She hoped that was who Ellen meant.
She hoped her mother wasn't teasing her about that faerie bullshit again. If she had to hear another story about Kaye and her cute imaginary friends… "The one you e-mail from the library.
Get me another cigarette, okay, hon? Kaye picked up a leather jacket of Lloyd's she'd always liked and lit a cigarette for her mother off the stove burner. No sense in wasting matches. Chapter 1 Contents - Prev Next "Coercive as coma, frail as bloom innuendoes of your inverse dawn suffuse the self; our every corpuscle become an elf.
The air was heavy and stank of drying mussels and the crust of salt on the jetties. Waves tossed themselves against the shore, dragging grit and sand between their nails as they were slowly pulled back out to sea.
The moon was high and pale in the sky, but the sun was just going down. It was so good to be able to breathe, Kaye thought. She loved the serene brutality of the ocean, loved the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air. She spun again, dizzily, not caring that her skirt was flying up over the tops of her black thigh-high stockings. She stepped over the overflowing, leaf-choked gutter along the street parallel to the boardwalk, wobbling slightly on fatheeled platform shoes.
Her glitter makeup sparkled under the street lamps. Janet exhaled ghosts of blue smoke and took another drag on her cigarette. Kaye was glad. She loved the big old house caked with dust and mothballs. She liked the sea being so close and the air not stinging in her throat. The cheap hotels they passed were long closed and boarded up, their pools drained and cracked.
Even the arcades were shut down, prizes in the claw machines still visible through the cloudy glass windows. Janet dug through her tiny purse and pulled out a wand of strawberry lipgloss. Kaye spun up to her, fake leopard coat flying open, a run already in her stocking. Her boots had sand stuck to them. She was giddy with night air, burning like the white-hot moon. Everything smelled wet and feral like it did before a thunderstorm, and she wanted to run, swift and eager, beyond the edge of what she could see.
Kaye, when we get there, you have to be cool. Don't seem so weird. Guys don't like weird. Let's find incubi. Like octopi. And we're much more likely to find them"—her voice dropped conspiratorially—"while swimming naked in the Atlantic a week before Halloween than practically anywhere else I can think of.
There was only a little more than a slice of red where the sea met the sky. She's just watching him die. She must have driven him to it. That's what I mean by weird. Remember the faeries you used to tell stories about? What was his name? Spike or Gristle? You made them up! Angelic lead faces, surrounded by rays of hair, divided the broken panes. The entire front of it was windowed, revealing the dirt floor, glass glittering against the refuse.
Inside, a crude plywood skateboarding ramp was the only remains of an attempt to use the building commercially in the last decade.
Kaye could hear voices echoing in the still air all the way out to the street. Janet dropped her cigarette into the gutter. It hissed and was quickly carried away, sitting on the water like a spider. Kaye hoisted herself up onto the outside ledge and swung her legs over. The window had been long gone, but her leg scraped against the residue as she slid in, fraying her stockings further.
Layers of paint thickly covered the once-intricate moldings inside the carousel building. The ramp in the center of the room was tagged by local spraypaint artists and covered with band stickers and ballpoint pen scrawlings.
And there were the boys. He was short and thin, despite his name. I forgot that. You're not still mad? Janet climbed on top of the skateboard ramp to where Kenny was sitting, a king in his silver flight jacket, watching the proceedings.
Handsome, with dark hair and darker eyes. He held up a nearly full bottle of tequila in greeting. Marcus handed Kaye the bottle he was drinking from, making a mock throwing motion as he did so. A little splashed on the sleeve of his flannel shirt. Expensive shit. Marcus resumed gutting a cigar. Even hunched over, he was a big guy.
The brown skin on his head gleamed, and she could see where he must have nicked himself shaving it. She had candy corn and peanut chews. Kaye walked around the round room.
It was magnificent, old and decayed and fine. The slow burn of bourbon in her throat was perfect for this place, the sort of thing a man in a summer suit who always wore a hat might drink. He had filled the cigar with weed and was chomping down on one end. The thick, sweet smell almost choked her. She took another swallow from the bottle and tried to ignore him. You hear me? It was the hair that baffled people. They have them little, little girls with these pigtails and shit in these short school uniforms.
We should have uniforms like that here, man. You ever wear one of those, huh? Come on. No, she wouldn't. Marcus and Doughboy started to play Hacky Sack with an empty beer bottle. It didn't break as they kicked it boot to boot, but it made a hollow sound. She took another long sip of bourbon. Her head was already buzzing pleasantly, humming in time with imagined merry-go-round music. She moved farther back into the dim room, to where old placards announced popcorn and peanuts for five cents apiece.
Against the far wall was a black, weathered door. It opened jerkily when she pushed it. Moonlight from the windows in the main room revealed only an office with an old desk and a corkboard with yellowed menus still pinned to it. She stepped inside, even though the light switch didn't work.
Feeling in the blackness, she found a knob. This door led to a stairwell with only a little light drifting down from the top. She felt her way up the stairs. Dust covered the palms of her hand as she slid them along the railings. She sneezed loudly, then sneezed again. At the top was a small window lit brightly by the murderess moon, ripe and huge in the sky. Interesting boxes were stacked in the corners.
Then her eyes fell on the horse, and she forgot all the rest. He was magnificent—gleaming pearl white and covered with tiny pieces of glued-down mirror. His face was painted with red and purple and gold, and he even had a bar of white teeth and a painted pink tongue with enough space to tuck a sugar cube. It was obvious why he'd been left behind—his legs on all four sides and part of his tail had been shattered.
Splinters hung down from where his legs used to be. Gristle would have loved this. She had thought that many times since she had left the Shore, six years past. My imaginary friends would have loved this. She'd thought it the first time that she'd seen the city, lit up like never-ending Christmas. But they never came when she was in Philadelphia. And now she was sixteen and felt like she had no imagination left. She tried to set the horse up as if he were standing on his ruined stumps.
It wobbled unsteadily but didn't fall. Kaye pulled off her coat and dropped it on the dusty floor, setting the bourbon next to it. She swung one leg over the beast and dropped onto its saddle, using her feet to keep it from falling. She ran her hands down its mane, which was carved in golden ringlets. She touched the painted black eyes and the chipped ears. The white horse rose on unsteady legs in her mind.
The long curls of the gold mane were cool in her hands, and the great bulk of the animal was real and warm beneath her. She wove her hands in the mane and gripped hard, slightly aware of a prickling feeling all through her limbs. The horse whinnied softly beneath her, ready to leap out into the cold, black water.
She threw back her head. Kenny was standing near the stairs, regarding her blankly. For a moment, though, she was still fierce. Then she felt her cheeks burning. Caught in the half-light, she could see him better than she had downstairs. Two heavy silver hoops shone in the lobes of his ears.
His short, cinnamon hair was mussed and had a slight wave to it, matching the beginnings of a goatee on his chin. Under the flight jacket, his too-tight white T-shirt showed the easy muscles of someone who was born with them. He moved toward her, reaching his hand out and then looking at it oddly, as though he didn't remember deciding to do that. Instead he petted the head of the horse, slowly, almost hypnotically.
She would have thought he was teasing her except for his serious face, his slow way of speaking. He was stroking the animal's mane now. It seemed like he was tangling it in imaginary hair. There was no mocking or teasing in his face. He was watching her so intensely that he seemed drained of expression. His hand dropped to her thigh and slid upward to the cotton crotch of her panties. Even though she had seen the slow progression of his hand, the touch startled her.
She was paralyzed for a moment before she sprang up, letting the horse fall as she did. It crashed down, knocking the bottle of bourbon over, dark liquor pouring over her coat and soaking the bottoms of the dusty boxes like the tide coming in at night.
He grabbed for her before she could think, his hand catching hold of the neck of her shirt. She stepped back, off-balance, and fell, her shirt ripping open over her bra even as he let go of it. Shoes pounded up the stairs.
Kenny shook his head and looked around numbly while Kaye scrambled for her bourbon-soaked coat. The boys moved out of the way, and Janet was there, too, staring. Kaye pushed past her, shoving her hand through an armhole of the coat as she threw it over her back.
Kaye ignored her, taking the stairs two at a time in the dark. There was nothing she could say that would explain what had happened. She could hear Janet shouting.
What the fuck did you do? The glass she had carefully avoided earlier slashed a thin line on the outside of her thigh as she dropped among the sandy soil and weeds.
The cold wind felt good against her hot face. Cornelius Stone picked up the new box of computer crap and hauled it into his bedroom to drop next to the others. Each time his mother came home from the flea market with a cracked monitor, sticky keyboard, or just loads of wires, she had that hopeful look that made Corny want to hit her. She just couldn't comprehend the difference between a and a quantum computer. She couldn't understand that the age of guerilla engineering was at a close, that being a motherfucking genius wasn't enough.
You needed to be a rich motherfucking genius. He dropped the box, kicked it hard three times, picked up his denim jacket with the devil's head on the back, and made for the door.
She held up a T-shirt with rhinestone cats on it. The white cat was waddling along the countertop, its belly dragging with another pregnancy, screaming for canned food or pickles and ice cream or something. He petted its head grudgingly, but before it began rubbing against his hand in earnest, he opened the screen door and went out into the lot. The cool October air was a relief from the recirculated cigarette smoke. Corny loved his car. It was a primer-colored Chevy blooming with rust spots and an inner lining that hung like baggy skin from the roof.
He knew what he looked like. Skinny and tall with bad hair and worse skin. He lived up to his name. But not in his car. Inside, he was anonymous. Every day for the last three weeks he had left a little earlier for work. He would go to the convenience store and buy some food. Then he would drive around, cruise past all the local rutting joints, imagining he had a semiautomatic rifle in the car and counting how many he could have gotten. He lingered over a paperback with an embossed metallic dragon on the cover, reading the first few sentences, hoping something would interest him.
The game was becoming boring. Worse than boring, it made him feel more pathetic than before. Nearly a week before Halloween and all, this was the point when a real maniac would go and get a gun. He sipped at the coffee and almost spat it out. Too sweet. He sipped at it some more, steeling himself to the taste. Corny got out of his car and chucked the full coffee into the parking lot.
It splashed satisfactorily on the asphalt. He went inside and poured himself another cup. From behind the counter, a matronly woman with frizzy red hair looked him over and pointed to his jacket. The droplets froze her hands, making her shiver as they slid down her wet hair and under the collar of her coat. She walked, head down, kicking the scattered trash that had eddied up on the grassy shores along the highway. A flattened soda can skittered into a sodden chrysanthemum-covered foam heart, staked there to mark the site of a car crash.
There were no houses on this side of the road, just a long stretch of wet woods leading up to a gas station. She was over halfway home. Cars hissed over the asphalt. The sound was comforting, like a long sigh. I saw you. I saw what you did. Awfulness twisted in her gut, awfulness and anger. She wanted to smash something, hit someone. How could she have done anything?
When she tried to make a magazine page turn on its own or a penny land on heads, it never worked. How could she have made Kenny see a broken-legged carousel horse move? Never mind that she might as well assume that Spike and Lutie and Gristle had been imaginary. She'd been home for two weeks, and there was no sign of them, no matter how many times she had called them, no matter how many bowls of milk she left out, no matter how many times she went down to the old creek.
She took a deep breath, snorting rain up her nose. It reminded her of crying. The trees seemed like flat lead panels missing the stained glass to fit between their branches.
She knew what her grandmother was going to say when she got back, stinking of liquor with a torn shirt. True things. The same things that Janet would say tomorrow. There was no way to explain what had happened without admitting to something. His hand on her leg was what Janet would really care about—that, and that she had let it rest there, even if only for a moment. And she could imagine what he was telling Janet now—flushed, angry, and drunk—but even a badly managed lie would sound better than the truth.
I saw it stand up. But even if he didn't go that far, who would believe that he touched her crotch on purpose, but ripped her shirt by accident? No, he must have told an entirely different story. So what was Kaye supposed to say when Janet asked what happened? Janet thought she was a liar already. She could still feel the heat of Kenny's hand, a stroke of fire along her thigh in contrast to her otherwise rain-soaked skin.
Another gust of rain stung her cheeks, this one bringing a shout with it from the direction of the woods. The noise was brief, but eloquent with pain.
Kaye stopped abruptly. There was no sound except the rain, hissing like radio static. Then, just as a truck sped past, kicking up a cloud of drizzle, she heard another sound. Softer, this one, maybe a moan bitten off at the end. It was just inside the copse of trees. Kaye moved down the slight slope, off the short grass and into the woods. She ducked under the dripping branches of an elm, stepping on tufts of short ferns and looping briars.
Weeds brushed across her calves, leaving strokes of rain. The storm-bright sky lit the woods with silver. An earthy, sweet odor of rot bloomed where she disturbed the carpet of leaves.
There was no one there. She half turned toward the highway. She could still see the road from where she was standing. What was she doing? The sound must have carried over from the houses beyond the thin river that ran along the back of the woods. No one else would be dumb enough to go trooping through wet, dripping woods in the middle of the night. Kaye walked back up to the road, picking her way through spots that looked somewhat drier than others.
Burrs had collected along her stockings, and she bent down to pull them off. The accent was rich and strange, though the words were pronounced precisely. A man was sprawled in the mud only a few steps from her, clutching a curved sword in one hand. It shone like a sliver of moonlight in the hazy dark. Long pewter hair, plastered wetly to his neck, framed a face that was long and full of sharp angles. Rivulets of rain ran over the jointed black armor he wore.
His other hand was at his heart, clutching a branch that jutted from his chest. The rain there was tinted pink with blood. Kaye wasn't sure what he meant, but she shook her head. He didn't look much older than she was. Certainly not old enough to call her "girl. He was long-limbed— he would be tall if he were standing. Taller than most people, taller than any faerie she had ever seen—still, she had no doubt that was what he was, if for no other reason than the pointed tops of his ears knifing through his wet hair—and that he was beautiful in a way that made her breath catch.
He licked his lips. There was blood on them. She took a step toward him, and he twisted into a defensive crouch. The Poison Eaters and Other Stories. Welcome to Bordertown Zombies vs. Unicorns Geektastic. Writing Advice Research Resources.
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