Clara opened her eyes again, and in the pitch of the room she saw her. The woman’s hair rose and fell as though the wind had come inside along with her. Her skin blue as moonlight on snow. Her hospital gown shimmering. She looked cold, covered by a sheen of thin ice melting and pooling in a puddle at her feet.
“He left you, didn’t he? Left you out to die in the snow, so he could carry me back. And now you’re angry with me. That’s it, isn’t it? You would have been free and alive if it wasn’t for me?”
The woman carried something in her arms, a bundle in the shape of a child. A present for her daughter. The bundle squirmed.
Clara heard a thin screaming. A child lost somewhere and crying for help. Then the blanket her mother held out to her unwrapped. What spilled out at first looked like a baby but was white as a corpse. The child was no more than a round ball of maggots, seething and boiling. These maggots spread up the woman’s arms, burrowing into her blue skin or unfurling one by one before dropping to the floor. The crying turned to a shriek, full throated. Her mother was still coming toward her even as the maggots ate her alive, her icy skin peeling away in clumps until she was bone, a skeleton woman, a skull with livid dark hair. She reached for Clara, disintegrating as she came.
Then the light switched on, and Logan, above her, pressed a finger to her lips.
Her throat ached. She had been screaming. She had been the one making that awful sound.
He stroked her forehead. “You’re burning up,” he said.
He brought her Tylenol.
Clara took the pills and watched as he toweled up a spill of water on the floor—she had knocked over her glass in her sleep.
She and Logan were a young couple with too few belongings to fill a big parsonage echoing with a century’s worth of memories. When you walk in a place, she thought, spill blood, surely the echoes of your passing remain long after you were there.
A GOOD DAY’S WORK
His wife Jo’s last summer had been a scorching season like the one that just ended, nights so hot the two of them slept naked, an evening ritual. He would shut off the lamp, disrobe, and cross the room where she waited for him atop the marriage quilt her mother had sewn. As soon as he lay down she straddled him, her skin feverish. When she kissed him their mouths smacked together, and her breath was hot on his neck before she bit down. His shoulders were tattooed with these teeth marks, wounds that never quite healed. She had never been like this and would never be like it again. It didn’t matter how bone sore or sun sapped he might be from working in the fields because her hunger for him had no end, and sometimes he thought she wanted to swallow him, sate herself with his mineral and salt, take him inside her and make something new.
When he shuddered into her, he prayed that what was dark in him would not root in her womb and that what was light in her would instead bear fruit. He prayed that the sins of the father would not follow the son, and if some summer nights he hesitated at the foot of the bed, he could not be blamed any more than he could possibly resist her summons. Summer passed in this way, and her belly did not melon-swell, and some mornings he caught her kneading the flatness of her stomach, praying fervently over and over the way farmers pray for rain in the dry season. God heard her, eventually, and gave them Seth.
When Seth was a boy he threw the most terrible tantrums, and all Grizz could do was hold him while he thrashed and frothed at the mouth. In the firm cage of his arms he could rage for hours, it seemed, until the demon went out of him, and he sagged and was his frail self again.
He knew what they were saying about son in town, but they didn’t know him. Had Jo not died of systemic lupus shortly after the boy’s birth, how might Seth have turned out? Had he been born in another age, he might have done something great, and his name and Grizz’s name would have been remembered for different reasons now. Something of Jo had