eyebrows grew straight and thick as quills. As she stared it moved its hands, huge clumsy hands like a clutch of rotting fruit. Beneath it she could glimpse a white face, and dark hair like a scarf fluttering above where her throat had been torn out.
“Linette!”
Haley heard her own voice screaming. Even much later after the ambulances came she could still hear her friend’s name; and another sound that drowned out the sirens: a man singing, wailing almost, crying for his daughter.
Haley started school several weeks late. Her parents decided not to send her to Fox Lane after all, but to a parochial school in Goldens Bridge. She didn’t know anyone there and at first didn’t care to, but her status as a sort-of celebrity was hard to shake. Her parents had refused to allow Haley to appear on television, but Aurora Dawn had shown up nightly for a good three weeks, pathetically eager to talk about her daughter’s murder and Lie Vagal’s apparent suicide. She mentioned Haley’s name every time.
The nuns and lay people who taught at the high school were gentle and understanding. Counselors had coached the other students in how to behave with someone who had undergone a trauma like that, seeing her best friend murdered and horribly mutilated by the man who turned out to be her father. There was the usual talk about satanic influences in rock music, and Lie Vagal’s posthumous career actually was quite promising. Haley herself gradually grew to like her new place in the adolescent scheme of things, half-martyr and half witch. She even tried out for the school play, and got a small part in it; but that wasn’t until spring.
Elizabeth Hand fell in love with rock and roll when she was six years old and first heard the Beatles’ “She Loves You” on a NYC AM radio station. As a teenager in the 1970s, she was a participant observer in the nascent punk scenes in New York and Washington, D.C. Her award-winning novels and short stories have featured characters and bands inspired by Syd Barrett, Joey Ramone, Richard Thompson, the Velvet Underground, Mayhem, Gorgoroth, Brian Wilson, Elvis Presley, and Amy Winehouse, among others. She divides her time between the Maine coast and North London, and still owns every vinyl single and LP she ever bought. Her most recent books are Available Dark, Radiant Days, a newly revised edition of her 1997 novel Glimmering, and the collection Errantry: Strange Stories, all published in 2012.
We Love Lydia Love
Bradley Denton
She knows me, and she’s happy, and she’s not asking how or why. She’s clutching me so tight that I can’t keep my balance, and my shoulder collides with the open door. The door is heavy, dark wood with a circular stained-glass eye set into it. The eye, as blue as the spring sky, is staring at me as if it knows I’m a fraud.
From down the hill comes the sound of the car that brought me, winding its way back through the live oaks and cedars to Texas 27. Daniels didn’t even stay long enough to say hello to his number-one recording artist. He said he’d leave the greetings up to me and the Christopher chip.
Stroke her neck. She likes that.
Yes. She’s burying her face in my shoulder, biting, crying. Her skin is warm, and she tastes salty. She says something, but her mouth is full of my shirt. Her hair smells of cinnamon.
“Lydia,” I say. My voice isn’t exactly like Christopher’s, but CCA has fixed me so that it’s close enough. She shouldn’t notice, but if she does, I’m to say that the plane crash injured my throat. “I tried to get a message to you, but the village was cut off, and I was burned, and my leg was broken—”
Not so much. We’re the stoic type.
The whisper sounds like it’s coming from my back teeth. I’ve been listening to it for two weeks, but that wasn’t long enough for me to get used to it. I still flinch. I told Daniels that I needed more time, but he said Lydia would be so glad to see me that she wouldn’t notice any tics or twitches. And by the time she settles back into a routine life with me—with Christopher—I’ll be so used to the chip that it’ll be as if it’s the voice of my own conscience. So says Daniels. I’m not convinced, but I’ll do my best. Not just for my sake, but for Lydia’s. She needs to finish