She Walks in Shadows(28)
You make a strange noise at the sight, gut-struck: “Oh, quel dommage! What a waste, a sinful waste ....”
“Damn, yeah. Not much to go on, huh?”
“Enough to begin with, certainment. I know experts, people who’d pay for the opportunity to restore something so unique, so precious. But why, why — ah, I will never understand. Stupid superstition!”
Which is when the box in your hands jumps, ever so slightly, as though something inside it’s woken up. Makes a little hollow rap, like knocking.
As I’ve said, little seeker, I don’t know you — barely know Tully, for all I might recognize his precedents. Though I suppose what I do know might be just enough to feel bad for what must happen to you and him, both, were I any way inclined to.
Frank’s painting is ruined, like everything else, but what’s inside the box is pristine, inviolable. When my father-in-law disinterred us days after the murders, too drunk to remember whether or not Denis had actually done what he feared, he found it wound ‘round Frank’s corpse, crushing him in its embrace, and threw burning lamp-oil on it, setting his own house afire. Then fled straight to Kaayakire’s shack, calling her slave-name like the madman he’d doubtless become: Damn you, Sophy, an’ that Marse Clooloo o’ yours ... damn you, you hellish ol’ nigger-woman! Damn you for knowin’ what she was, that Frog whore, an’ not warnin’ me ... ‘m I your Massa, or ain’t I? Ain’t I always treated you well ...?
Only to find the same thing waiting for him, longer still and far more many-armed, still smouldering and black as ever — less a snake now than an octopus, a hundred-handed net. The weight of every dead African whose blood went to grow the De Russys’ fortunes, falling on him at once.
My cousin’s father, my half-uncle, my mother’s brother: all of these and none of them, as she and I were nothing to them — to him. Him I killed by letting his son kill me and set me free.
I have let myself be dead far too long since then, however, it occurs to me. Indulged myself, who should’ve thought only to indulge them, the ancestors whose scalps anchor my skull, grow my crowning glory. Their blood, my blood — Tully Ferris’ blood, blood of the De Russys, of owners and owned alike — cries out from the ground. Your blood, too, now.
Inside the box, which you cannot keep yourself from opening, is my
Tanit-Isis wig, that awful relic: heavy and sweet-smelling, soft with oils, though kinked at root and tip. You lift it to your head, eyes dazed, and breathe its odor in, deeply; hear Tully cry out, but only faintly, as the hair of every other dead slave buried at Riverside begins to poke its way through floors-made-walls, displace rubble and clutter, twine ‘round cracked and half-mashed columnry like ivy, crawl up from the muck like sodden spiders. My wig feels their energies gather and plumps itself accordingly, bristling in every direction at once, even as these subsidiary creatures snare Tully like a rabbit and force their knotted follicles inside his veins, sucking De Russy blood the way the lamia once did, the astriyah, demons called up not by Solomon, but Sheba. While it runs its own roots down into your scalp and cracks your skull along its fused fontanelles to reach the gray-pink brain within, injecting everything which ever made me me like some strange drug, and wiping you away like dust.
I would feel bad for your sad demise, little seeker, I’m almost sure; Tully’s, even, his ancestry aside. But only if I were anyone but who I am.
Outside, the rain recedes, letting in daylight: bright morning, blazing gold-green through drooping leaves to call steam up from the sodden ground, raise cicatrice-blisters of moisture from Riverside’s walls. The fields glitter like spiderwebs. Emerging into it, I smile for the first time in so very long: lips, teeth, muscles flexing. Myself again, for all I wear another’s flesh.
Undefeated, Maman. Victory. I am your revenge and theirs. No one owns me, not anymore, never again. I am ... my own.
And so, my contract fulfilled, I walk away: into this fast, new, magical world, the future, trailing a thousand dark locks of history behind.
THE THING ON THE CHEERLEADING SQUAD
Molly Tanzer
“BIBLE CAMP WAS rad, Natalie! Coming together in God like that … at the end, we all made a pledge to live the Gospel after we went back into the world, where temptation and sin are everywhere. And you know what? I’m really going to try.” Veronica Waite tossed her mane of dark curls, revealing more of her new off-the-shoulder Esprit sweatshirt. “So, what did you do all summer?”
“I worked at the daycare at First Methodist,” mumbled Natalie, shoving her face into her faded Trapper Keeper. “I … wanted to earn some money.”
Veronica blushed. She should’ve remembered; her father had said something about Natalie working at the church.
Natalie’s family’s finances were often the subject of prayer meetings at First Methodist. Everyone talked about it. It was probably mortifying.
“How did that go?” Veronica asked, trying to sound encouraging. She and Natalie had been friends they were kids. True, they’d grown apart during their first two years of high school, but they’d still seen a lot of one another, both being flyers on the JV cheerleading squad. “I bet it was great, huh?”
Natalie shut her Trapper Keeper with more force than necessary. “The other aids were nice, but the kids were pretty rotten.”