Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,213

newspaper crumpled up, then put out his hand for Dewey’s.

Dewey shook her head. “Can I just hold mine?” She didn’t want it to get mixed up with Suze’s. After a glance at his wife, Dr. Gordon shrugged and tied the shoebox shut with string and put it in the trunk. They took off their shoes and socks and brushed all the dust off before they got into the car.

“Thanks, Daddy,” Suze said. She kissed him on the cheek and climbed into the backseat. “I bet this is the best birthday party I’ll ever, ever have.”

Dewey thought that was probably true. It was the most wonderful place she had ever been. As they drove east, she pressed her face to the window, smiling out at the desert. She closed her eyes and felt the comforting weight of the treasure held tight against her chest. One last present from Papa, a piece of the beautiful green glass sea.

The Kiss

Tia V. Travis

’Twas on the Isle of Capri that I found her

Beneath the shade of an old walnut tree

I can still see the flow’rs blooming round her

Where we met on the Isle of Capri

—“The Isle of Capri,”

Jimmy Kennedy, 1934

The angel’s heart was torn from its chest.

The stained-glass box that once held it was smashed; ruby tears scattered the fountain. The ruins of the valentine lay amidst splinters of red glass and oak leaves mottled with rot. Soaked through, it had been half-devoured by birds. I didn’t know whether it had been ripped away strip by ragged strip or swallowed mouthful by mouthful, a bloody delicacy fought over by many. Either way, it came as no shock that there was nothing left but a few anemic tatters. This was a cemetery, after all, and in the land of the dead the birds were reigning lords.

They perched everywhere: on the crypts, on the cypress and oak, on the eaves troughs where the rain ran rivers into the sodden earth. At the funeral forty years ago their ancestors screamed obscenities from the trees as the preacher droned on about love and eternity. Furious screeches and feathered rage. I clutched Sister Constance-Evangeline’s habit in a hailstorm of birds and terror, covering my ears until all I could hear was the rushing of blood…the beating of wings.

But the birds didn’t frighten me now as they did then. I slogged through the mud toward the fountain.

The heart was in ruins but a sinewy strand still twisted around the rusted wire frame. Bleached by sun and leeched by rain, the crepe was white as aged scar tissue. When I touched it, it collapsed into fibers. The last damp mouthful of air trapped within the empty chamber expired on a breath of wind. Gently, I replaced what was left of the heart in the fountain bowl. Stained amber with the sap of cypress needles it seemed more like a Canopic jar, and my heart, my heart lay dead within.

I tried to remember the day when they buried my mother, but I felt as empty as that paper husk. Forty years will do that to you. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the pain; I just couldn’t feel it anymore.

For stone angels and dead whores there is no pain, I reminded myself. A crepe heart does not beat. A lifeless body does not suffer the ravages of nature’s savage little ways, nor does it endure the gut wrenching of scavengers as they tear it to shreds. For the dead there are no haunting regrets, no aching remorse, no dreams to torment deep into the night. There is no laughter, no music, no dancing. No dream of an Isle of Capri…

Mixed blessings.

The blessings of heartless angels.

The workings of the human heart have always been a mystery to me.

The heart of my mother, Lana Lake, has been the greatest mystery of all. Nothing remains of that heart now but a dry chamber, a mummified fist wrapped around a hardened clot where once had been caged a wild and fiercely beating thing, scarlet and raw as ripped silk.

In the autumn of 1958 when I was eleven years old, my mother, Lana Lake, was bombed out of her mind in the back garden on a bed of crushed birds-of-paradise. She shouted to the sky that spun overhead like a top that I could mix an Angel’s Kiss so coo-coo crazy Frank Sinatra himself would have married me on the spot for one sip of that utterly endsville elixir.

He was between mistresses, Lana said with a wicked wink