Their skin, a map bruised and scratched. Complimentary rivers of red and bays of black. She could see their blue veins under their skin. They looked like letters that she tried to read. Four hazel eyes between the two of them. She would make Jacob sit in the light, eyes wide so she could look into them. She wanted to see how the iris was made. A gray honeycomb in a glass dome. The black bands and the gray iris spiraling around the blackest holes. Light swallowed up. Their eyes looked like the surface of the lake. Eye lashes were bent bare branches. Tears were rain overrunning creek beds.
Constellations of freckles across nose and cheek and the back of necks. When she lay in bed, waning daylight slanting in, he would lean over her and draw his finger across the freckles, connecting them in figures and explaining to her their meaning. You could have been.
The woman said her father was an orthodontist with thick forearms and for her birthday he gave her a leather-bound notebook which she planned to use to write a fantasy story about a strange land of strange animals and strange people, but her parents were yelling and the house was dark and she was downstairs and a door was battering its frame and the moon was too loud in the room. One morning, while her parents were sleeping, she slipped out the door of the house in the gray light of an empty Sunday morning and floated along the street away from there.
The receptionist, a woman who had to kick out one young tenant because she found out that the young tenant had taken some of the receptionist’s pain killers, smiled and nodded.
When Leah came in, the receptionist, an older woman who moved through space as though she’d never not been beautiful, said, “I’m sorry if this is a personal question, but—” then the telephone rang and Leah went to her office and the receptionist, who’d once dated a doctor, decades ago, who never would leave his wife, never asked the question.
“This girl in my church, she had this demon that was in her and it would make her fall down during service and roll and the preacher would lay hands and after a bit she would open her eyes and start to cry. Then after church, we’d walk down to the movies and see whatever was on, or tell our parents that was what we was doing and just sneak out the backdoor and hang out behind the theater with some guys from the county school. The demon never touched her there, but from the start I knew it was a bad idea for her to go with that one guy to the haunted house and try and spend the night there. Like I say, it weren’t haunted, but that’s not the only bad that can happen.”
At some point after the suit to challenge the Last Will and Testament of the old woman was filed, after discovery had completed and the attorneys had deposed everyone they could think of, one of the beneficiaries of the old woman’s estate, the oldest son, contacted Leah Shepherd personally and proposed that they meet without their attorneys to discuss settling the case “without those lawyers eating up all our money.”
They met for lunch at a chain restaurant that had just opened up on the bypass around Crow Station. Leah felt nervous because she disliked confrontation, but the man was soft-spoken, up until the moment when he, with his fat fingers, began to rub Leah’s shoulders and suggested terms of the possible settlement which shocked Leah to silence. She stood and began to walk out, past a table of elderly women having a birthday party, and the man, a firmly built fifty-year-old with a shaved head who’d made a name for himself with a construction company in Indiana, called her a cunt and a whore, booming, his soft voice gone, across the mostly empty restaurant, and he swore to her that she would be sorry, for being a fucking tease and being a fucking dyke and for stealing from his sainted mother. His scalp flashed red. His floral print shirt was unbuttoned at the top and his white chest hair seemed to glow against the skin of his chest. It looked like cauliflower. He had spit on his lips and followed her out to the parking lot, barking, and he stared at her as she drove away. When she stopped at a stop light several blocks away, she looked in her rearview mirror at the chain restaurant in the distance and could see him still standing outside, a tiny speck, staring at her car.
When Jacob heard the boys on the playground making fun of Leah’s birthmark, Jacob told them that they shouldn’t make fun of it because she could make a creature with long claws that would come snatch them away. The boys laughed at him and ran off, jingling their change, eager for Mountain Dew and Mello Yello, for Jolt and Ale-8-One, but later, when they were at home alone, in bed, listening to the nothing of night, they sought silence through prayer and licked with their sugar sticky lips and jumped when the wind tried the windowpane.
Did Jacob ever wish that creature to come?
So each summer day when expelled from the house by their mother and father, they crept and snuck, cutting through yards and driveways, avoiding any spot that was too open, pretending they were space explorers. Once, cutting through a backyard they found a sundial in the middle of a garden. “What time is it?” Jacob asked.
“I don’t know. The arm thing is broke off. Stand on it.” He clambered up, tipping the time piece and squealing, they scrambled away, never to cut through that yard again.
While his sister slept, he listened to the backdoor open and someone come up the stairs. And then voices, soft, and he slept.
The History of Lycanthropy in Europe and Asia Minor. Occult Practices of the Nazis (with 12 New Illustrations). The older girls sunned themselves in bikinis by the diving board. They whispered to each other and yelled up to the shirtless boys in the lifeguard chairs. Chariot of the Gods. The Human Body (with 4 Color Fold-Out). Monsters You’ve Never Heard Of. The Encyclopedia of Monsters. Jacob wanted to dive off of the high dive, something Leah was sure he was too young to do, but their grandmother, Mr. Shepherd’s mother, was asleep under her umbrella and the lifeguards were watching the young girls saunter on hot cement, so Leah didn’t tell him not to. She didn’t like the pool, but enjoyed reading the books their grandmother brought her from the library where she worked. The True History of UFOs. Stone Circles of North America and Other Unexplained Wonders. Ghostly Tales of Love and Revenge. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The Severed Hand. The Girl With the Ribbon Around Her Neck and Other Folktales. He climbed, checking to make sure Leah was still watching. He walked to the end of the blue tongue suspended in the empty sky above the blue water. He waved at her. Curses, Hexes and Spells. He wanted her to put aside the books and watch him, Watch watch watch! She turned to look up at him standing, hands on knees, gazing over the edge at the faraway water.
“Leah! Leeaaah!”
A man she did not know walked up to her while she was waiting for her lunch to come and said, “Leah?” She looked up at him as he waited to be invited to sit.
“Why did your mother let them go all day at the pool with no sunscreen? Look at that burn on poor Jacob’s nose.” Mrs. Shepherd cooed over the burn which would eventually become covered with a scab that looked like a lost continent. Mr. Shepherd shrugged. The scab covered the burn and lasted for months and months. In Leah’s memories of her brother, he always had this scab, no matter the year or season.