Antony walking down the street with his shirt off glowing even though it’s October and half the folk on the street have jackets and the crazy lady that lives in the burnt-out ruin of the package store wearing her hat with the earflaps, she shakes her head earflaps flying and mutters something about heathens but Antony don’t mean no disrespect, it’s just that the fire burns in him all the time and he’s got to let it out. Antony walking down the street with the fire burning in him like the sun itself is walking there and the folk on the street loosen their scarves and smile as he passes even if they don’t know exactly why, as if the fire has gone right past their eyes and into their hearts. Or into their gullets, that’s where the voice come from says Tia Marne, and sure as Antony passes the folk on the street think of that thing they were going to say, or hum a snatch of that song they heard that one night when, and even the crazy lady whistles something, might be “Catch a Falling Star” and she’s thinking about Perry Como and almost remembers that thing she’s been forgetting.
Catch U death walking about like that, Lori says, but Tia Marne says, the boy just can’t help it, he’s got the fire in him so, and Antony tries to explain how it feels, but his gullet’s too full of fire and the words come out crisped and crumbled. I’ll give him fire, Lori says, with a hand raised as witness or slap, either way don’t make much impression on Antony and his glow, not with the cool breeze on the street to brush him clean afterward, the lazy fall sun cutting through every cross street.
Shadow falling between those streets and that’s where Nalo’s standing, hand in pocket. Nalo under more layers than the crazy lady, just a stripe nose to eyebrows visible, eyes like ink and the rest as grey as Antony was glow.
Antony asked Tia Marne about that glow back when he and Lori came to her those years ago: “Where’s it from?” he asked.
“U R the monster from the melting pot,” Lori said, one year more wise-ass.
But Tia Marne said, “In the old day, when a church needed a new bell they’d set the metal firing and all the folk, they’d throw in something for luck, a ring without a mate or the chain for a lost locket or a tin soldier all worn out from their parent’s parent’s playing or just an old penny if they had nothing else, so when that bell cooled down it wasn’t one thing, brass or bronze or silver or gold, but a little of all that, and when it rang out for God it was like a bit of all those folk was ringing too. That’s where your beautiful glow comes from, Antony, not one thing, but a little of all that. Only you aren’t entirely cooled down yet.”
“I can still ring him,” Lori said, one hand up again, one hand always up. “So help me,” she said.
Nalo, though, she don’t need help.
“I don’t need help, thanks” she tells Antony, Nalo with her shoulder holding the door, hand in pocket, groceries under an arm, laundry over a shoulder.
“Go on, I got it,” Nalo says, meaning the door and the groceries and the laundry and the cool she carries with her you can feel even through all the layers she’s wrapped around herself. That cool is like the October street and it sets the fire in Antony’s gullet burning so hot his words burn down to ash and the best he can do is burp out a little puff of smoke. Here is every conversation they’ve had in the five years four months nine days Antony has lived upstairs:
Nalo: I don’t need help, thanks.
Antony:
Nalo: Mmmm.
That girl need help, Lori says, twirling her finger beside her ear. Tia Marne says well, she is quiet, and Lori echoes quiet with her eyebrows up like it’s some sort of curseword. Sitting in that basement half the day, Lori says. Volunteering on the suicide hotline, Tia Marne says, when she’s not volunteering at the school, which is both Good Works. Lori says, Hmmmph well Y she always bundled up like that? Y she always got one hand in her pocket? What she hiding? Nothing pretty I bet.
Antony would have taken that bet.
Now Nalo tilts her head toward the stairs that go up to Tia Marne’s apartment and down to hers and Antony squeezes past, with a glance into Nalo’s inkblot eyes that sets smoke swirling out his ears.
Nalo says, “Mmmm.”
But with Antony shining there like the sun itself and the two of them face to face, that “Mmmm” comes out like the start of a song she heard once, “MMMM-mm-MMMM”, and before he gets more than two steps up the stairs she says, “Antony?”
Antony stops on the third step, shirt half-pulled on before Lori catches him an earful, blinking at Nalo through the neckhole. Nalo might have bit her lip; who can tell with her wrapped up like that?
Nalo says, “Can you open my door?”
Antony blinks some more and nods, then pulls his shirt down and nods again in case she missed it the first time, afraid to open his mouth for fear the fire will spill out and set the both of them alight. He smiles instead and Nalo finds herself humming another few notes—“mmm-MMM-mmm” the song is “Unchained Melody”—and says, “It’s just I’ve got ice cream. I don’t want it to melt.”
Antony thinking this is unlikely; the cool pours off her through every gap in the scarves and shawls that spiral round her like a shell. That cool spilling down her into the hallway like Tia Marne’s four footed bathtub filling and Antony thinks about taking his shirt off again and laying himself flat to float in it. But Antony he don’t mean no disrespect so he wades back down the steps instead, the fire flaring up in him and Nalo’s eyes go wide. “Mmm-mmm-mmm-MMMM-mmm-I-don’t-need-help-thanks,” Nalo says, that last bit like a hiccup, and then when Antony stops confused she adds, “But if you want…”
She jingles the keys that hang on the little finger of the hand that’s not in her pocket.
Antony takes the keys and unlocks Nalo’s door, Antony thinking her black eyes are shade on a midsummer’s noon and Nalo that he glows like the first ray of sun over the rooftops on a too early morning and the both of them shy of passing close again so Antony, he opens her door and swings with it into her apartment with a bow and a flourish, so much like a magician that Nalo sings out, “Ta da!”
“You’re welcome,” Antony says and since that doesn’t seem quite the right response adds, “Come in.”
Nalo twisting and turning to fit her bags through the doorway flutters her eyes and says, “Now I can come and go as I please, if I’m a vampire.” Antony thinking she could be one with those black eyes those grey lids that cold pouring off her but he takes the bag of groceries and sets it on her table while she deals with the laundry.
Nalo’s room is divided down the middle by a paper folding screen printed with grey-fogged pines. The screen looks to Antony like the opening scene of one of those late-night black and white kung fu films, Nalo behind it humming the score.
On Antony’s side of the screen is: a small wooden chair at a small wooden table, a love seat covered with a black and white checked blanket, an overstuffed bookshelf, a coatrack so heavy with scarves and shawls it looks like a knit wool yeti, and two potted plants set on top of the bookshelf where they can peek out the street level windows that run along the top of the wall. The table holds three bookmarked books, seven rolls of grey masking tape, and two blue permanent markers.
Nalo says, “Antony, can I show you something?” Nalo standing now in front of the screen like she’s in the movie. “Something…strange?”
Antony guessing—
Vampire: 60%
Invisible: 15%
Ninja: 10%
No, I am your father: 5%
Undead, other: 5%
Escaped from movie, other: 5%
—nods and puts his hand over his gullet to warm fingers gone chill.
Nalo reaches up with the hand not in pocket and tugs the beanie from her head, her hair floofing out in a grey ball. Antony scratches Invisible and adds Dust Bunny: 15%.
Scarves and shawls spiraling down off of her, her eyes that ink blot black but everything else grey: eyebrows, nose, lips, neck, shoulders, arms, tank top, jeans, thick lace up boots. With grey teeth she pulls the grey glove off the hand not in pocket and wiggles grey fingers.
Not sick-grey, that grey, not tired-grey, old-grey, frightened-grey, scary-clown-makeup-grey. No, this grey is:
“Newsprint,” Antony says.
Nalo says, “Huh.”
Antony loves newsprint. Here’s what Antony loves about newsprint: the way it looks like a smoky winter sky speckled by birds, the way it feels cool and smooth and strangely soft, the way it sounds like wind in his hair as it swishes over itself to a new page, the way it smells like freshly opened cardboard boxes, the way it tastes like almost nothing, like taking a deep breath in Tia Marne’s kitchen after she’s scrubbed it to within an inch of godliness, the way it reminds him of sitting in that kitchen on his first morning with Tia Marne who pulled a pad of newsprint wider than the kitchen table out of thin air—Nalo would have sung out, “Ta da!”—and he and Lori had drawn from opposite ends of page after page after page.
Antony thinking that’s too much to fit into a sentence says, “Newsprint is cool.”
Nalo runs her hand not in pocket over her shoulder. There’s a lighter patch there traced with faint blue lines. The faint blue lines spiderweb down to her fingers and down her chest.
“Newsprint,” she says. “I never thought of it that way. I do, uh, rip sometimes. I tape myself up.” She points at the stack of tape on the table. “And draw in veins. It all goes grey again pretty fast, though, permanent ink or not.” She shrugs and grins. “I’m not flammable though.”
Antony feels his gullet flare under his fingers. He smiles back, a wide warm smile that spreads like a wildfire.
But then Nalo says, “So, you ready for the strange thing?”
Antony feeling the smile slow and stick to his face like it’s freezing in an icy breeze changes his guess to—
Vampire: 100%
—but not meaning any disrespect he just tilts his head a little to the side, an angle somewhere between curious and invitation, and shuts his eyes.
“You can open your eyes now,” Nalo says.
Antony thinking that was fast and painless opens his eyes. Nalo hasn’t moved but she’s taken her other hand from her pocket. Curled in her palm is a tiny creature with huge eyes under closed lids.
“Slow Loris,” Antony says.
He’d written a report on the Slow Loris in sixth grade, complete with a life-sized illustration, though since the newsprint was eighteen by twenty-four inches and the Slow Loris less than a foot tall, the drawing also included four tree frogs, a viper, and a leopard lurking in a ruined temple.
This creature, though, could be sketched on a Post-it.
“It’s my Death,” Nalo says. “I caught it.”
Nalo shakes her head at Antony’s outstretched finger.
“It’s asleep,” she explains. “I was reading on the sofa—five years ago now, right after you and Lori came to live with Tia Marne—half asleep and half inside the book and I saw this sort of swooosh coming up out of the floor so I reached out and caught it. I knew what it was as soon as I touched it.”
She strokes it with a finger, Antony realizing her nails are drawn on in Sharpie blue.
“It looked so surprised, eyes so big, I had to laugh, and then its eyes got even bigger, and I laughed harder. And then I thought well, Nalo, here we go and I held it to my heart and…”
Antony leaning over her hand takes a deep breath. Nalo smells like morning air spilling through a barely open window. The little Death’s huge eyes shift under twitchy lids.
“…it curled up and fell asleep. It’s been sleeping ever since, and nothing else has happened. Well, I mean, I turned grey and I’m always cold and my heart only beats once a minute, but I’m still here.”
Antony taking that breath in smells dust and permanent ink and under all of the faintest hint of stone, like the granite and flint of the steps that lead down to the cellar below Nalo’s apartment.
“If I set it down for more than a few seconds, it starts stirring, so I’ve been carrying it ever since. I guess it’s waiting for something.”
Antony finally breaths out, no smoke this time just a warmth like a spot of sun through a window.
The creature opens its eyes, stretches blinking up at Antony. Its eyes go wide in surprise, so like Nalo’s story that Antony laughs—another burst of warmth!—and the little Death goes still and its expression changes to one so unmistakable that Antony and Nalo gasp in unison.
The look on the little Death’s face is recognition.
It’s the sort of joyous recognition you get when you see an old lost friend unexpectedly on the street.
Nalo tries to clasp her free hand over the Death but too late, it’s leaping up to wraps arms gone suddenly long around Antony’s neck and the two of them Antony and his Death are falling backward toward a hazy hole that has opened in the floor. Nalo grabs Antony’s T-shirt instead, reaching back with her free hand to grab a roll of tape from the table. She slips the roll over her wrist, tugs loose the end of the tape—she’s gotten good working one handed over the years—and wraps it around Antony’s arm. Then the T-shirt tears loose and Antony and his Death fall into the hole and disappear.
The tape spools steadily from the roll with a sound like something ripping in two forever.
Nalo grabs the bag of groceries, sweeps the contents of the table into it, takes a step toward the fading hole, then stops, and sighs. She runs into the hallway instead tape trailing behind her and shouts, “TIA MARNE!”
Tia Marne looks down over the upstairs railing.
Tia Marne says, “Nalo? What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Lori leaning out beside Tia Marne says, “How can you tell she with her all wrapped O M G Y R U grey?”
Nalo talking right over Lori says, “I thought it was my Death I had caught but it was Antony’s and now it’s taken him so I am going after them to bring him back. Antony I mean. I don’t know how long it’ll take. I should go but I wanted to let you know so you wouldn’t worry.”
Tia Marne says, “Hmm.” And then, “What’ve you got in the bag?”
Nalo looks. “Two Sharpies six rolls of tape three books some carrots two apples peanut butter and a pint of rocky road.”
Tia Marne nods, and says, “Wait there a second.”
Nalo says, “Okay, but hurry. The tape is running out!”
Tia Marne disappears. Nalo looks up at Lori, who is leaning over the upstairs railing, jaw open wide. Nalo’s pretty sure she’s fainted like that. The masking tape has almost unreeled down to the cardboard, so she pulls another roll from the bag, slips it over her wrist, and tapes its free end to the last of the previous one.
Tia Marne’s head pops out again over the railing. “Sharp,” she warns. Nalo opens the bag, and something comes spinning past her with a swish to land in the carrots. It’s a pair of sewing scissors.
“Good to go,” Tia Marne says. “Keep your eyes open down there. Bring the both of you back.”
“I will,” Nalo says. And then she’s turning to follow the tape back through her door, the hazy hole just a tiny spot swallowing the tape now but Nalo takes a running jump not landing just falling right past the hole and the floor and the cellar and the subway and the dark. Nalo falling for what could have been forever.
Nalo halfway through her second book marking her place with a finger looks out the window of the bus, thinking she’s been on the bus a long time but the view out the window hasn’t changed, block after block of grey storefronts with grey signs reading “closed” in grey letters ignored by grey people passing by on their way nowhere, the view from every city bus everywhere of course but Nalo’s thinking she really doesn’t remember getting on this particular bus.
Her fingertips are a bit ragged—in the first few weeks of her half-after-life she’d learned that she was more prone than ever to papercuts—so she reaches for the roll of tape around her wrist but it’s empty and that’s when she remembers Antony.
Nalo stands up knees creaking cobwebs tearing dust billowing and looks around the bus, every seat filled by folk slumped over flat-folded crosswords or dog-eared paperbacks or reconnecting phones or their own folded hands and every one of those folk’s grey made more so by a layer of dust under a netting of web. And on every one of those folk’s shoulders sits a Death, their tiny hands clutching necks ears locks of hair, their huge half-asleep eyes watching their wards.
There’s a cord strung overhead, the sign says PULL FOR STOP so Nalo pulls, from the front of the bus a long low tolling like a single church bell on the far side of town but the bus doesn’t stop. Nalo pulls again—the sound of a bucket thunking against the stone of a deep dank well—and again—the sound of a coin rolling to a stop on the floor of a late night diner—but the bus trundles on, the other passengers sitting silent and still beyond the occasional swirl of dust and the spiders’ slow spinning.
Nalo sidles past the woman sitting next to her with a “sorry excuse me sorry” but the woman doesn’t look up from the magazine in her lap—“Nine Thousand Two Hundred and Fifty-Seven Things To Watch Before You Die” the headline says over a photo of a phone displaying a photo of a phone—nor do the other passengers look up as she staggers up the aisle legs half dead from sitting—or half alive from years of practice, Nalo thinks—up to the front of the bus where the driver leans over a wheel as wide as Nalo’s kitchen table, grasping it with pencil fingers in pale leather gloves, cap pulled low to shadow a face Nalo’s thinking she’d rather not see in the light.
“I’d like to get off please thanks,” Nalo says. The driver not looking up—“Thank goodness,” Nalo accidentally says out loud—reaches a hand out to point with a finger not just pencil-thin but pencil-sharpened to a point, the glove leather grey and crinkled and torn in a way that makes Nalo tuck her own newsprint fingers behind her back. The driver is pointing at a fare box on which in faded grey is inscribed “2¢”
“Ah,” Nalo says.
She digs through her pockets but there’s nothing there but odd ends of masking tape. In her wallet is a crumpled five dollar bill and a receipt from the stationery store and some business cards for the suicide hotline. “Change?” seems like the wrong question for either the shadowed driver or the static passengers. Nalo checks her bag, checks her back pockets again, looks back down the length of the bus hoping for a friendly face but the other passengers are still slump-eyed though their Deaths are all now staring at her. She ducks down under their gaze to check the floor of the bus though the chance of two loose pennies here seems least likely, glances sideways down the steps at the exit so close and even though she’s looking the other way Nalo can feel the driver start to turn its head, all hope abandoning her as she kneels there head turned like she’s on the chopping block sight gone grey and fingers gone cold and…
There stuck to the bottom of the bus’s folding door is a hand’s width strip of grey masking tape.
“Antony,” Nalo says, remembering the fire in his gullet remembering the song she’d hummed remembering that her sight’s been grey her fingers cold for five years and that’s never stopped her before, not as long as she’s had tape and pens and…
“Scissors!” she says. She digs through her bags, back turned to the driver—whose dreadful gaze Nalo knows is still turning toward her—and pulls out Tia Marne’s scissors. And a carrot.
Snip. Snip. Snip.
“Two pennies,” Nalo says, standing up with the carrot slices shaking in what she hopes looks like jubilation, with one hand dropping the slices one two into the fare box and with the other reaching up to tug the signal cord twice: plunk under the sound of a carnival high striker, plunk under the sound of cymbals clashing.
One minute-long beat of her heart as Nalo stands there eyes squeezed shut to hold in hope.
And then the bus pulls to a stop with a squeal of brakes and a gentle rain of dust and startled spiders, Nalo already halfway down the steps before the door opens shouts, “Thanks have a nice day,” and maybe for a second before the door shuts hears a low rattling laugh.
Standing on the sidewalk Nalo feels off: unbalanced and unencumbered. Unwrapped is what I am, she’s thinking, unveiled and unpocketed. She raises her hands and spins laughing with the dust and scraps the departing bus swirls up in its wake. Some of those scraps are bits of grey masking tape and Nalo plucks one from the air and smooths it over a ragged fingertip. Still undead, though, she’s thinking, if surrounded now by the dead instead of the living, and somewhere in this dead city is Antony.
Nalo tries following the scraps of tape but they’ve gone scattered among the bodies, those bodies plodding in their pedestrian path, their goals as lost as the tape’s trail. As lost as Antony. She stands in the intersection at the end of the block and spins again, each direction so like the others—an endless grid of grey on grey—that afterward she can’t tell if she’s turned full circle or not.
There’s no two ways about it, Nalo thinks, or maybe there’s too many ways. She’s simply going to have to say, after a long slow breath in of stale city air and a long slow sigh out again,
“I need help, thanks.”
That to the first passerby, a sagging figure so veiled with cobweb that it resembles Nalo’s coatrack of scarves. But the figure shambles on, heedless. As does the next Nalo asks—a woman so thin that her bones cut sharp creases in her paper skin—and the next—a portly man whose shuffling steps shake his belly with a sound like newspaper pages turning—and the next—a small girl whose dry grey arms embrace an emptiness the size and shape of a kitten.
Another dozen of the passed pass by, oblivious to Nalo’s plea. Nalo finally steps smack in the way of one, a woman in a caftan and beads who doesn’t stop until she actual runs into Nalo who stares right past Nalo to some distant unknown goal who smells like last year’s potpourri over just the slightest hint of dank decay.
Eureka! Nalo thinks—a joke from Ms. Morrey’s Lit Hiss class in high school—and then, “Eureka!” Nalo says out loud because that in same class they read The Odyssey from which Nalo has remembered a passage with A Practical Application which is of course what Ms. Morrey always said would happen though Nalo rummaging through her bag thinks Ms. Morrey probably did not mean the bit about summoning the dead. But hey the future is a
“Rocky Road,” Nalo announces, holding the soggy carton high.
She squats on the sidewalk—a corner by a crosswalk seems propitious—and pours out a puddle of melted ice cream.
One by one the passersby slow—eyes widening until the webs in their lashes tear, nostrils flaring to release little clouds of dust—and stop to lean over dipping fingers into the sticky chocolate snatching chunks of marshmallow from the goo. The crowd gathers so quickly that Nalo finds herself shoved out of the circle, tapping shoulders and tugging coat sleeves with, “Excuse me have you seen— Sorry but I’m looking for— Could you just— Is there anyone I can ask about—”
But the crowd crouching around the pool oblivious to her queries is grumbling instead to each other:
“Not as good as I remember it.”
“Ugh, artificial flavoring. I always bought the organic.”
“The marshmallows are hard as rock.”
“Where are the almonds? There should be far more almonds.”
Nalo steps back sighing the dripping carton pinched between fingers and an elegant woman in a ballgown slows to sniff the dregs, looks up at Nalo with a frown and a shake of her head before walking on. Nalo is so surprised she squeaks and drops the carton, not so much because the woman actually noticed her but because the woman’s left eye was green not grey and a streak of her high-pinned hair was bright copper. The woman’s Death squeezing that lock of hair with tiny fingers as if trying to milk the color back out again meets Nalo’s gaze with a look of startled embarrassment.
The elegant woman is lost in the crowd before Nalo can say anything coherent, but one of the next passersby coming from the same direction has purple paisley spots on his tie, and another is actually humming. ‘Antony,’ Nalo thinks, licks chocolate from her fingers and heads upstream.
Three tiny old women in a row on a bench watching as Nalo walks toward them across the little park of bare grey trees, the first folk Nalo has seen down here without an embracing Death on their shoulder, one smiling and one frowning and one glaring shadowed eyes just peeking over the top of a much-refolded newspaper. The closer she gets to them, the more Nalo is reminded of the dolls her Grams made with her this time of year—if it was still Autumn up above and if that mattered down below—with ragged rag dresses and heads of dry wrinkled apples.
Nalo dubs them Itsy, Bitsy, and Spider.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for someone, his name is Antony and it’s my fault he’s here.”
“Oh, my,” says Itsy, her voice a surprising sweet swoop like an oboe solo.
“WHAT’S SHE SAYING I CAN’T UNDERSTAND A WORD OF THAT GIBBERISH,” shouts Spider.
“She says she killed some guy,” Bitsy says to Spider.
“Now, dear, you’re past all that now,” Itsy said. “Just let it fade away.”
“No, see, I caught his Death ages ago, I thought it was mine but it was really his, and if I could take it back I would, even if it was hard to live with. His Death, I mean.”
“MUMBLE MUMBLE WHAT’S THIS NOW?”
“She was planning it for years—” Bitsy says to Spider.
“PREMEDITATED!”
“—and now she’s trying to worm out of it.”
“I’LL SHOW HER WORMS.”
“That’s not what I—” Nalo rubbing her brow in frustration sees there’s a spot of color on her wrist. She tucks her hands behind her back and addresses Itsy.
“It just doesn’t seem fair. Since I messed up the whole thing, I thought maybe we could, you know, reschedule?”
Itsy is leaning to the side on the bench, eyes squinched into little wrinkled dots, like she’s trying to see Nalo’s hands. Nalo fumbles in the bag behind her back, tears off a bit a tape and sticks it over what she hopes is the spot.
“Well, dear, it’s those ‘thoughts’ that are the problem. There’s no need for them anymore. You just need to let your Death do its job and…” Itsy’s voice glissandos down to a stop, her squinch turning from one of Nalo’s shoulders to the other.
“Goodness, now, where is your Death, dear?”
Nalo looks about, makes a vague gesture toward the trees, hand a little shaky but she sees she did at least get the tape on successfully.
“Oh, it was just here maybe it had to—”
Spider interrupts, “I SMELL ICE CREAM.”
Itsy is still squinching so Nalo turns with relief to the others. “It’s all gone but I still have, let’s see, two apples…”
“AGAIN WITH THE BLAH BLAH.”
“She says she doesn’t have enough apples for you,” Bitsy relays.
“…and some peanut butter,” Nalo finishes proffering the jar. Spider snatches it and soon she and Bitsy are scooping peanut butter with their tiny fingers. Nalo is glad they didn’t go for the apples which given the wizened fruit forms of the three tiny ladies would have felt a bit cannibalistic.
Unfortunately, with those two occupied Nalo’s going to have to deal with Itsy who is standing on the bench shading her eyes from the flat grey sky staring into the flat grey trees. “Dear oh dear, your Death really shouldn’t be wandering off like that not with a monster loose on the streets.”
Bitsy shudders and peers around the park peanut-buttery fingers still in mouth, Spider using the distraction to pull the jar into her lap.
Itsy says, “They are fascinated with it. The wee unclaimed Deaths, I mean. It’s causing no end of problems with the schedule. Fear not, love, I’m sure yours is fine. I’ll just give it a whistle.”
Spider eyes as wide as appleseed dots can go shaking her head says, “MMMMM MM MMMM MMM!”
“What?” Nalo says.
Bitsy swallows. “She says don’t do it you’ll just summon that damn thing.”
But too late, Itsy has stuck two tiny fingers into her tiny mouth and lets loose a clarinet cadenza, a clarion call that rattles the bare branches and echoes down the endless streets and fades to a flat grey
silence,
almost.
Nalo thinking it’s a breeze at first—pretty sure that whistling up a wind is a thing—or maybe it’s one of those two-penny buses—Tia Marne could whistle down a bus like nobody’s business—or maybe the footsteps like pages turning of the horde of papery dead still complaining about the Rocky Road, or maybe
“IT’S THE MONSTER,” Spider wails.
“It’s the monster,” Bitsy translates.
“Oh, my goodness, it is,” Itsy says.
From a side street out into the park a hundred Deaths pitter-pattering on their clever little hands and feet—it occurs to Nalo that Itsy Bitsy and Spider were not so far from a Death grown larger (somewhat) and wiser (possibly) and more vocal (certainly)—and then another hundred Deaths and then a thousand all shuffling backward staring upward great eyes glimmering in the growing glow.
“Antony,” Nalo says, and so it was. Antony strolling across the park shirt off humming something sounds like “Three Little Birds” a thousand Deaths backing up in front of him and thousand upon thousand behind eyes all aglow little hands clasped in wonder.
All but one. That one so familiar to Nalo clung to Antony eyes bulging and bloodshot little hands quivering with exhaustion. No sooner does it pat one glowing spot on Antony’s chest down to newsprint than another flickers into bloom. And when that one’s damped there’s another on Antony’s elbow, a perilous crawl for the Death given Antony’s loose-limbed stride, and from that vantage point it looks behind Antony’s back and with a tiny sob clambers out of sight.
Antony humming his song looking up at the bare branches sees neither Nalo nor the three on the bench.
“PLEASE STOP,” Spider moans.
“Please keep going,” Bitsy says.
“He doesn’t mean any disrespect,” Nalo says. “It’s just that he’s got the fire burning in him all the time.”
“She says she set him on fire,” Bitsy says.
“No, that’s not what—” Nalo turning starts to say but the three are looking up at her with identical expressions one brow (each) wryly raised and Nalo puffs a breath out and shrugs.
“Well, maybe a little,” she says.
“Hey, Nalo, is that you?”
Nalo turning back Antony suddenly so close she can feel the warmth coming off him flings up her arms and says, “Ta da!”
Antony almost throws his own arms around her but not meaning any disrespect taps out a backbeat on his own gullet instead.
“I was thinking maybe I had fallen into one of those kung fu movies but these guys won’t even do a backflip,” he whispers gesturing at the audience of awestruck Deaths, “or maybe the land of the dust bunnies,” gesturing at Nalo herself who just blinks in confusion a few times, “or the great bee-ee-why-oh-en-dee,” gesturing at the three on the bench.
“He says he’ll be our end,” Bitsy says.
“I’ve never been this lost before. Not even back before Tia Marne. But if you’re here it’s cool.”
“Oh, Antony,” Nalo says and kisses him on the cheek.
Smoke puffs out Antony’s ear. His Death climbs up from behind onto his shoulder to stick a finger into the ear…
…and sees Nalo.
Its eyes gone wide it reaches a tiny trembling hand out toward Nalo who raises her own in response. Antony’s Death steps across, circles thrice on her palm and curling up falls sound asleep.
“Oh dear, I don’t think that’s supposed to happen,” Itsy says.
“It’s about to get worse,” Bitsy says.
From the crowd of Deaths comes one at a gallop and of all those thousands upon thousands captivated by Antony this one has eyes only for Nalo. The Death that slept in her hand the one she’d carried all those years thinking it was her own weighed no more than a snowball but this, this one rolled toward her like an avalanche but if she shakes a bit it is just from the force of its coming and not from fear. She’d been practicing for this for the last five years.
Nalo holding out her left hand careful not to wake Antony’s exhausted Death in her right watches her own Death tumbling toward her ten feet five feet three feet skittering to a stop with just inches to go. It stares at the Death in her other hand, then up at her brows almost crossed in consternation.
“I told you,” Bitsy says.
Nalo’s Death turns its befuddlement toward the bench.
“I’m sorry, love, there seems to be a bit of a mixup,” Itsy says.
“TAKE YOUR VENGEANCE OUT ON THE MONSTER,” Spider adds.
Nalo’s Death slowly turns to look up at Antony.
“Oooh,” the three tiny old women say in varying degrees of concern, delight, and volume.
Nalo’s Death leaps to Antony’s knee and up his thigh.
“That’s right, get him!” Bitsy says.
Nalo’s Death ascending to Antony’s waist struggles to get a grip on the smooth skin of his stomach.
“Need some help?” Antony asks. Nalo’s Death leaping into Antony’s offered hand looks across at Antony’s Death in Nalo’s, lets loose an exasperated sigh with a touch of raspberry that takes in Nalo, Antony’s Death, the three tiny old ladies, and the crowd of unclaimed Deaths, flops onto its back there in Antony’s hand and falls asleep.
Silence, almost, again, the only sound Spider’s fingers scraping the last of the peanut butter from the jar.
“Sooooo,” Nalo finally says. “What now?”
“HUH?”
“She wants us to straighten out her mess,” Bitsy says.
“BULL HOCKEY! I SAY WE SEND ‘EM BACK UP UNTIL THEY WORK THIS NONSENSE OUT.”
Nalo holding her breath looks at Itsy who taps her tiny fingers for a minute. “It might be for the best, love,” Itsy says, and leaning forward adds in a piccolo whisper, “These things happen more often than you might think. You go work it out, the two of you.” And in her usual oboe continues, “We’ll check in with you in, oh, twenty years or so.”
“Fifty,” Bitsy says.
“EIGHTY!” adds Spider.
Itsy nods. “Well, off you go now. Not you!” she says, Nalo thinking at first with a cold lump in her gullet that Itsy means Antony, but she’s shaking her finger at the surrounding crowd of unclaimed Deaths. “It’s just that way, now, dears, three blocks and then a left and three rights.”
“Watch out for the buses,” Bitsy says, just a bit like a threat.
Nalo takes Antony’s free hand with her own, her gullet thawing and then some, like it’s about to catch fire. And then one more thing from Ms. Morrey’s Lit Hiss class coming to mind she turns back to the three on the bench.
“Is this one of those things where we have to return here six months every—”
“Hell no,” says Spider.
Tia Marne climbing the stairs up from Nalo’s apartment where she’s been waiting to her own to get another cup of coffee hears a commotion, finds Lori already hanging out the front window looking down at the crazy lady that lives in the burnt-out ruin of the package store dancing in the middle of the street earflaps flying singing “I remember I remember that thing I’ve been forgetting!”
Tia Marne leaning out next to Lori calls, “What’s that, Laverne?”
“I remember I remember! My sisters sent me here to open the door to Spring!”
“R U Nuts?” Lori shouts. “It’s still October!”
But the folks down on the street are all loosing their scarves and looking around smiling one or two humming a harmony to the crazy lady’s song and there’s a light coming down the street that cuts straight through the cross shadows. Tia Marne leans a little farther, one hand to steady Lori who’s fainted again like that, and sees them there,
Nalo and Antony walking down the street the both of them glowing.
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Gregory Norman Bossert is an author and filmmaker based just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. He started writing in 2009 on a dare and has no intention of stopping anytime soon. His story “The Telling” won the 2013 World Fantasy Award, with other stories appearing everywhere from Asimov’s Science Fiction to the Saturday Evening Post to the Autumn 2014 issue of Kaleidotrope. When not writing, he wrangles spaceships and superheroes for Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic. More information is available on at GregoryNormanBossert.com. |